Preventing Your Campaign From Failing - #SEOpodcast 256

My name is Chris Burris, owner of VWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 256. You can see it right there behind us if you're watching. So Rachlor, Rachlor, if I pronounce that right, who we know is watching, who is wishing we're talking about content today, which we're not. Well a little bit. There's some content in there. Oh, a little bit of content. Yeah. Well there's always content in our podcast, right? Yeah. Thank you guys for tuning in. Remember, we are broadcasting live here from Houston, Texas, and we're going to change it up just a little bit. We are your friendly local neighborhood Top Position Snatchers. And we have a tip from our previous- Don't be a deuce. Do not. That is our mantra. He was going to glaze right past that. Yeah. Extremely important. No way to get back to that after I do the tip, so thank you, sir. The tip from our previous podcast is be sure to fully optimize all images. Keyword being fully optimize all images, right? So when people think image optimization, they think basics, right? Alt tags and then I'm done. Yeah. No, you're not done. No. First, you should resize that image to the biggest possible resolution you could have with the least file size. Smaller size, right. Right. Smaller size image with the best clarity. That's what you're going for. Secondly, you want to rename that image. Like your file name should be, I don't know, maybe target keyword dot JPEG. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So rename your file images, control the file size, then Alt tag it, title tag it as well. Give that image a title. That's what shows when people hover and after you've done at least those four things, then you're pretty good with your image optimization. Excellent. We already did top position. It's hard when I throw things out of whack there, isn't it? Yeah. If you can, tweet now. If you have the device, tweet now and

this is what you should tweet. You should tweet what you see behind us if you happen to be watching, hashtag SEO podcast. This is number 256. Be sure to tag us in it, at eWebStyle, at bestSEOPodcast, that way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking. Yep. If this is the first time you've listened to this podcast, welcome. Welcome. Thank you. We're going to get through the potatoes shortly and we'll get to the meat. If you've listened to this podcast before, we're going to ask you to do one of four things, or you can do four of four, two of four, three of four, your choice. Or all four. All four, and they go like this, we would like you to write a G Plus local review for us. Yes. It's easy to get to that G Plus local page. All you need to do is go to e-webstyle.com slash Google Plus. Or slash Google Plus. Or slash G Plus. Or slash G Plus. Plus. Plus. And all of those will take you to our G Plus local page. Yes, they will. If you get there, we ask you to do three things, what are those things? Yes, that's a bit hard. First off, leave us that review. That's like most important when you get there. Make sure it's five stars. Five stars. Then after you do that, give us a plus one, we really appreciate it, and put us in your circle. So that way when we share stuff, you can get it, and vice versa. When you share stuff, we'll check it out too. Excellent. Also, you can write a review on iTunes. This only has three steps. Go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review. If you choose, hopefully it's a five star review. And if you choose to, you can send us an email, podcast at edayswiththow.com. And we'll make sure that we read that review on air. Facebook.com slash ewiththow. That will get you to our Facebook page, not surprisingly. And there is a

place to write a review. Hopefully that review is five stars. And finally, we could definitely use your review on Stitcher. It's running a little light. I think we got nine reviews on Stitcher. However, we need a couple more to counteract some one-star reviews that we got before. By the way, I just got to throw this in. Earlier, we were talking about this earlier today. We saw a review for one of our clients. It's actually a donut shop here in town. And it was a one-star review. But an awesome review. Yeah, it was in Spanish. It was like, it tasted great, and the service was excellent. And I'm like, okay. Anyway. Maybe he was confused. Like, he did, you know, one being the best of five being the worst. Yeah, number one, possibly. It is, it's possible. So, don't do that to us. Five star is the number of stars that we would like you to give us. And speaking of all of these kind of social media platforms, there are a number of ways you can haunt us, stalk us, harass us. Facebook.com slash ewiththow. YouTube.com slash ewiththow. Twitter.com slash ewiththow. Instagram.com slash ewiththow. And, yeah, make sure you stay connected. Follow us, link us, pictures, do all this. Especially on Instagram. Check it out. We do a lot of stuff around the office, podcast photos. Got a good selfie today. Oh, yeah. Got a good one. So, yeah, dig that. If you are a PHP expert or a WordPress developer extraordinaire, we're looking for you. Give us a turn in and audio resume. All you need to do is dial this number, 713-510-7846. I'm going to move that to the end. We do have a free website analysis on our website. Found a good move. On our website. All you need to do is go to our website, e-website.com. Yep. You will find that free website analysis. Fill that out. We will get one to you. If you're in a bit of a rush, just give us a call. And now for our favorite

segment of the entire podcast, the Algorithm Cataclysm. You got like zombified. Give my balance back a little bit. That was crazy. So, got two pieces of Algo Cat this week right here. Cat being Cataclysm, of course. So, this one's interesting. It's from Google. It's not really Cataclysm per se. Right. In regards to the algorithm, but it does affect search, which is why we included it in this segment. So, this is interesting. They released an update, right? Right. And the update specifies that for optimal rendering, and this is from the Webmaster blog, from optimal rendering and indexing, you should allow Googlebot to access your JavaScript and CSS files. Interesting. Because we would normally block that from robots because you don't want to give Google any reason to not be on your content. Right. Looking at code and other things. Don't get distracted by that other magic. By CSS. Exactly. But they went on to say that, yeah, give Googlebot access to JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your page. Google warns that using a robot's TST to disallow the crawling of JavaScript or CSS files says that it will directly harm how Google's algorithm will render and index your content, and could result in sub-optimal rankings. Huh. It kind of makes sense because you can do a lot of stuff. Exactly. You can hide a lot of stuff. You can mask a lot of stuff, and kind of what they're, it's interesting. You would think that they would visit, anyway. So, best practice would be to not only go and reconfigure your robots file so that stuff can be indexed, but prior to doing that, go down the process of consolidating. Yeah. Minifying. And so that way, when they do index, it is not seven, eight different style sheets. It's not jQuery here and a whole bunch of other things that they need to find. It's all simple, packaged, nice and neatly, going right in one place so they can get to it. Second one, Bing made a change. Okay. You know, ironically, right? So

it's a two. You can lose as well. It's a two algo cat. Yeah. So this being, this algo cat, Bing, and it's a first. Google hasn't done this. Right. Interesting. On Bing mobile search, they're allowing you to search with emojis. Emojis, the little symbols. Yeah, yeah. The little symbols. Mm-hmm. You search with them. You can search with them. I don't know what you would search with them, but I don't use emojis either. Right? Yeah. Like maybe every now and then, right? My kids use them frequently. Yeah. Like they hit me with a whole, you know, nine of them. And you're like, no text, just nine different emojis. That means something. And then you get out your decoder ring. Like, can I go to the store? Like an emoji of a store with a dollar sign and a guy running. Right? Yes. If you start typing. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. You know, I don't know what I would search with an emoji, but I thought that was pretty cool, though, the fact that they did it. And one thing that came to my mind is, well, maybe you want, like, you type news and you put a smiley face emoji. Maybe you want happy news. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe you type sports with a football emoji and a Rockets logo. Well, that wouldn't work. Rockets football. Or the basketball logo. Texas logo. Hey, you're sounding like me. I don't know, but I thought it was still interesting. So, yeah, that's how I go cat today, man. Very cool. All right, let me get back. I got a little distracted here. So, you'll notice there's a tear tattoo here. There is no review, so we're counting on you. I'll be able to remove this tear tattoo that I've added to my face only after we get another review. It's a sad day. We gave out several different ways to do it, so please. All right, let's get to a little bit of news. I thought this was interesting. A Virginia court said that

if you protect your phone with your thumbprint, they can actually use the thumbprint they have of you on file to access your phone. So, if you protect it with a PIN code, they can't. They can't force you to give the PIN code. But if you decide to use your thumbprint, then they can actually use your thumbprint on file. That is interesting. Yeah. I thought that was just interesting. This almost made our what news. Last week, some of our what news was Amazon fire and the disaster that that was. They did the fire phones, if you guys remember, and they did a lot of promo about it. They thought it was going to be the best thing, and it not only wasn't, they lost money. A good chunk. What do they have? They have $83 million of inventory left. I wonder if that's at the 99 cent price point. That would mean $83 million phones, right? That math is pretty easy. So, here's the almost what news. They should use drones they're talking about and just $83 million people get random phones. Yeah. So, here's the almost what news. They're actually already planning on a sequel to that Fire phone. Yeah. I thought this was cool. Microsoft Band is a smart fitness tracker. So, it's a fitness device, you know, that you wear on your wrist. It looks pretty cool. Like, it's kind of cool. And then, finally, video. We put this on our Facebook page, so make sure you go check this out. It's really interesting. I don't know if you had a chance to see it, Chuck. It was really interesting about running Facebook click, purchasing Facebook likes versus just running Facebook ads that accumulate likes. And they were equivalently detrimental to ongoing social media efforts. So, check out that article to figure out why. It's just really cool. Yeah, don't go buy those Facebook likes, dude. You just really don't want to do that. Yeah. And that's all I got for news. So, there's no review, as we mentioned. I got a couple

of tips as well. So, interesting news here. Facebook. Talking about Facebook. Right. Facebook surpassed $1 billion per month in ad revenue. $1 billion. Yeah, yeah, you have to do that. Yeah. And that's punching the face to you, Facebook, for selling that many ads. You know, I read something today. Is that like a punch in the Facebook? Just checking. So, have you heard of Elo? I, Elo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked about it about three or four podcasts ago. A new search engine. Yeah. So, I requested my name. Well, no, it's a new social media platform. That's what I meant to say. A new social media platform. So, when you sign up for it, they got an interesting thing about how social media is on their site. Okay. An interesting read. They basically said that we are the product users, right? Right. And they said, you know, most social platforms take what you do and learn how you do it so they can market to you more, so they can sell you more ads, so you can do more of it, so they can market to you more. Right, right. It's a constant circle. Right, right. Which inherently means you are the actual product. Yeah. That's being sold. And so, their whole focus was that, I thought that was interesting. Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, I am the product. You're right, because everything I'm doing and everything I'm interested in is why you keep showing me everything that I do and everything that I'm interested in. Yeah. And so, it makes sense. That's cool. So, I thought that was an interesting concept. So, check it out. I signed up for it. I'm waiting on my response, so we can see what Elo's all about. Last part of the news. Google released a statement. 50% of all traffic to YouTube comes from mobile and tablets. Not surprising. Right? Yeah. And like I said, it's probably Facebook when they added that feature to be able to scroll through and see the videos. A couple punches in the face. Dig

this one. Dude, Anthony Randall, at Tony X Randall. He says, at E-Web style, punch me in the face for no reason. Yeah! Boom! And I thought of a reason. Yeah. Thank you for tuning in. Yeah. Yep. There's your reason. There's your punch in the face. And this one here, David Critchison. Punch in the face to him. He's a long time listener. He tunes in for a while. He had several tweets, but I thought this one was one of the good ones. He says, hashtag SEO podcast 250. He says, at best SEO podcast, at E-Web style, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Solid content disguised as entertainment. Yes. Yes. I can dig that. Punch in the face to you, man. That's what's up. A spoonful of punches makes the information go into your head and your ranking go up. That's what's happening. All right. So that is the potatoes of our podcast. Time to get into the meat. Take it away, Chuck. Awesome. So let's get right into the meat of this, man. I was at Search Engine Watch today. Wanted to give a punch in the face to Jay Taylor. Jay Taylor posted an article called, Seven Reasons Your SEO Campaign Will Fail and What You Can Do About It. Seven Reasons Your SEO Campaign Will Fail and What You Can Do About It. And so I like the article. He's basically putting out some content and really giving you seven things you should not be doing or if you are doing them, what you can do to fix it. And so let's dive in. Number one, he says, have you set realistic goals? I think this is extremely important because the person I talked to the other day who called up here did not have realistic goals at all. Well, what did you say? You're trying to eat steak and caviar on a... No, I told him he was trying to buy the sun, the moon, and the stars, but he had a cloud budget. Yeah. Dwindling fast. And so I

think you have to set realistic goals when you're talking about your SEO campaign. You know, he goes on to say, setting unrealistic goals for your SEO campaign, such as dominating Google and Bing for every product you offer right out the gate, will always result in failure. Absolutely. Instead, set realistic objectives so you can achieve success incrementally. And I totally agree. You have to understand how SEO works and understand your business. I added this. Start with a couple products and services and then develop a strategy form. And then if it works, then you rinse and repeat, right? So maybe you offer several different services. Take your top one and put a campaign behind it. We're going to put out this kind of content. We're going to do this kind of social activity. We're going to build these kind of links. We're going to do this kind of promotion for this product and see if your ranking increases over maybe two or three months. And if that works and you get the results you want, then do that same process again for your next service or your next product. And that way, over time, you begin to rank. And what will happen, and we've actually learned and proved this, that once you begin doing that and you rank two or three terms, those other terms will be a lot easier to rank and they'll rank faster. So, yeah, set realistic goals. Number two, he says, do you have a realistic time frame and budget? He goes on to say, the more competitive your industry, the greater the time frame and the larger budget you should expect. And I totally agree. You have to understand, is your time frame realistic? You know, one of the things I wrote down was there's a difference. There's a difference between service providers and, like, professionals, right? If you're a service provider, let's say a plumber or an AC guy or a roofer or something like that, electrician maybe, if that's your service and you provide a local service, then you will

likely rank and have faster SEO success. Just tends to work that way. In comparison to, let's say, a more professional kind of white collar industry like an accountant or a lawyer or something like that, it's just going to take longer. You're a service provider, you can, with some solid, aggressive SEO, you could probably expect results in two, three, three to five months maybe. However, you're a lawyer, personal injury attorney or accountant, CPA, something like that. In LA. In Houston, LA, New York, any one of these, you know, top five cities. Yep. You expect eight months, 12 months, and that's 12 months of consistent blogging and content generation and social and, like, before you begin to finally see a couple phrases, actually cracked the first page of Google. So, set a realistic time frame and budget and understand that just because you don't necessarily see results doesn't mean that your money's going to waste. Yeah. It just takes some time. Number three, he says, have you chosen the right keywords? He goes on to say, if you selected your own keywords based on what you think, which is based on what you think, then your, based on what you think other than what your customers are searching without verifying real data, it's highly probable that your campaign is not using the right keywords. Yep. And that's key. I like to try to find a middle ground is what I wrote here. There's some middle space between. Logic. Optimum search volume. Yeah. Logic, what people are looking for, and then what actually converts, right? And then once you find that happy medium, unfortunately, that happy medium may only be a handful of key phrases. Right. But that's the handful you should go after. That's the handful you should target. So, get out your own way. Right. Sometimes we start, I know my customers are looking for this, they're looking for that. This is what I'm going to optimize for. No. No. Do some research. Look at, you know, what other people are optimizing for, what sites are

ranking. Look at successful competitors, what words are they converting for, and use that data for yourself. So, you can make sure you're choosing the right keywords. Number four. Four. He says, is your campaign delivering the right traffic? Which kind of follows up on number three, right? Because if you had the wrong keywords, then it's probably not delivering the right kind of traffic. But he goes on to say, a quick sniff test to determine if your campaign is delivering the right traffic is to look at your site's bounce rate from organic search traffic, right? So, what he's saying is organic search traffic. We're talking natural traffic from the search engines. Are they bouncing? Are they looking at multiple pages? Are they engaged? Are they converting? And he says, if that bounce rate is high, then they're likely not. And it could be the wrong type of traffic. I would challenge that because everybody who's watched us, our faithful, they know that we believe that the high bounce rate can be a great thing. Yep. And so, I would say take that one with a grain of salt. Depending on industry. Depending on your industry. Exactly. Conversion rate. You know, if you've got a great conversion rate and a high bounce rate, stop complaining. Exactly. That means they're coming and they're converting and they're leaving. Right. But I think it also depends, it's definitely on the industry and more importantly, it's on your sales process, right? If your process will allow for a quick close, right, where, you know, they don't need to do much research, they just need to find somebody who can come out and install this or whatever, then, yeah, they may land on your homepage or whatever page they come from from organic search and they may call you and then leave, which that's a bounce and a conversion. Or they may fill out a form, you know, and then leave. And so, take that with a grain of salt. Maybe if you're, now, if you provide a, you're in a situation where

your content is informational and it requires some research and your sales process is two months long and where they need to do several steps first. A business provider providing service to Fortune 500 companies, typically you're not going to be a one-time sale, right? Exactly. It's not going to happen in one visit. And then you have a high bounce rate, now that's a problem, right? These people aren't engaging with your content, they're not finding what they're looking for. Maybe it is the wrong type of traffic and so you need to revisit that. And a good way to do that is to look at your analytics, not only your bounce rate, but look at your exit pages. What pages are they leaving on, right? Yeah. And that way you can go and figure out what's wrong with that page, how we can improve it, what is it missing, maybe it's missing some video or some other resources to make them want to convert. Maybe it's just too lengthy, you need to add some bullet points and some content, break it up so it's easy to read. I'm giving this additional content for Rachel, since we're talking about content, that's specifically for you. Number five, do you have a professional website? This is key. You know, he goes on to say, a successful SEO campaign starts with a professional website that engages visitors upon arrival. You know, at the class Wednesday, I teach a, once a month I teach an internet marketing class at University of Houston Small Business Development Center, right? And so I taught my class for this month last Wednesday. Well, Wednesday this week, right? Yeah, which is last Wednesday. Yeah. And so I was telling them that it all starts with your website. At the end of the day, the goal is to drive traffic to your site, traffic from Facebook, traffic from Google, traffic from Bing, traffic from Twitter, traffic from LinkedIn, traffic from wherever, traffic from your business card, traffic from the web address that's on the side of your truck, traffic

from the QR code that you put on your receipt tape. That was my pro tip from a few podcasts ago. All of that traffic goes to the website. And so that website, professional website was the word he used, is extremely important. It should be engaging. It should be inviting. It should be a place where when people land on it, they're comfortable. Yeah. The branding should be consistent with what they're used to. So when they get there, especially if you've dealt with them offline or something, maybe you have a retail establishment, that it's the same kind of experience. Invest in a professional website, and it'll do your SEO good. Number six, he says, are you writing content that your customers care about? He goes on to say, that's extremely important. Yeah. Another content question for you. He goes on to say, have a content strategy in place that answers questions and addresses concerns your customers typically have. Prospective customers will appreciate this and are much more likely to become paying customers as a result. And I totally agree. At the end of the day, it's content, content, content. Like, especially in this day and age of SEO. You know, keywords, keywords, keywords probably was true and still is to a certain point. But now, it's about content. It's about the right type of content. Speaking to the pain of the customer. Yes. This conversational search was an algorithm, you know, we talked about a few podcasts ago. Like, they're changing how important content is. And so, I wrote, I added this. Make sure your content is original. Right? Don't go out there side-jacking and duplicating content. That's not a big no-no. Make sure it's relevant. You know, this is how you find that sweet spot in your content. And make sure it's timely. So, don't be posting no outdated duplicate content. Yeah. That's just not a good look. But if you're posting some real relevant, you know, related to this day and time right now content. It's relevant to your industry, to your site, to your

customers and what you do. And it's original. You actually came up with it or somebody on your team. Then that's the type of content that will engage. That's the type of content that people will read and feel value from. Especially if you include, you know, those features and advantages and benefits of using your service. And why it would benefit people. That's how people get engaged in your content. So, yeah. Make sure it's relevant. The last one. Number seven. He says, are you tracking data and making improvements? And I'm glad he did this last. Because I told my class this Wednesday. This was my last topic as well. Yeah. Analytics is important. Yeah. At the end of the day, it don't matter what type of marketing you're doing. If you're not tracking it and really seeing how effective it is, then you're only doing half the job. He goes on to say, it's a mistake to simply measure the results of an SEO strategy based on one data point. Like, you know, rankings of phone calls. You should look at all of the data collectively and understand how those rankings and traffic are contributing to the ranking and the phone calls. Right? And so, that's key. It's one thing to say, ooh, I've got a great placement and I get a ton of conversions. I'm good. No. You need to know why you got that great placement. You could be spending more money in one place and double it or, you know, at least half again. What's generating those conversions? Because, you know, you may be getting a ton of traffic, but it could be mainly traffic from one source that's generating all the conversions. And if you don't know that, right, then you just don't know that. You don't know you're throwing away money. You don't know you're throwing away money. It just looks like it's all working. When you could really be tripling or quadrupling your profits based off some data. So look at your analytics, man. If you need some help with that,

get someone who can interpret those for you. They're pretty friendly and easy to use, but analyze your site. Know where your traffic's coming from. Know how they got there. Know how long they were there. Know what they did when they left. Know how, you know, know what links they clicked. Know where they looked at. You know, know what page they converted on, right? Know which path they took to get there to convert. You start realizing several examples are coming home, products, you know, FAQ, and then contact, and then convert. That's five, six clicks. Determine that path. See how many people go down that path and which page they drop out on. Right. Right? And then you can make tweaks. You can make improvements. So I like that one. Are you tracking your data and making improvements? So punch in the face to you, Jay Taylor, man. You've got seven reasons your SEO campaign will fail and what you can do about it. Yeah. You follow those steps, it may not fail. It's interesting because we actually have a video that we put together, one of those whiteboard videos that's why internet marketing so often fails. So I'll go ahead and post that back up on our Facebook page because it kind of covers in a very succinct way, none of the details, just that whole kind of premise. Yeah, that whole concept. Cool. So I think we've got a little bit of, what do we got? I got some what news, got some word of the week. So we'll do word of the week first. This word of the week is interesting. NFC. NFC. And no, not the National Football Conference. No. Not talking about that. No. NFC stands for Near Field Communication. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah. So Google Wallet, Apple Pay, things like that. And maybe you're at the gas station and you use a speed pass deal. Easy tag. Easy tag. So your toll roads and stuff like that. NFC, it is what it is. And so I guarantee you it's included

in all these smart gear that's coming out. And so that's the word of the week. Take advantage of it. It's a new technology. It's growing. Get accustomed to it. Cool. Oh, and then my what news. Yeah. This is what goes to Microsoft, right? It is, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Dwayne Forrester, punch in the face to Dwayne Forrester, man. He's been in, he's like a guru. Like, you know, he's up there in the category with like Matt Cutts and those guys in regards to SEO. He's the product manager in charge of a webmaster outreach and Bing Webmaster Tools and SEO and things and all of that kind of SEO related stuff with Bing. They fired him. I don't know why Microsoft would fire him, especially when they're trying to grow Bing. They're trying to get more SEOs involved in it. They're trying to improve their results and this and that. And so then you fire the one person who made it as good as it is right now, who was making the incline. You term them. And I just didn't quite get it. Are you throwing in the towel? Are they throwing in the towel? That's my good. Like, we're going to just call back some search and we're going to do watches. We're going to start showing Google results. We're going to do watches. Google results. They already tried that. They got called on it. Yeah. So I don't know what's up with that. But punch in the face to Dwayne, I'm pretty sure he's good, right? He'll probably be somewhere. Next week. Or go or something and then they'll be regretting it. All right. So that is, we're wrapping up our podcast. Remember, if you got good information out of this and you're struggling with your own SEO efforts, we'd be happy to help you. Reach out to us. We'll help you. You can call us, 713-592-6724. And yeah, reach out and call us. If you have a customer who needs SEO and you don't want to deal with them, just because maybe

it's a little over your head, send them to us. If they pay their bill, we'll pay you. That's our referral program. Just contact us regarding that. We are filming live at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106 in Houston, Texas. This is the end of our podcast. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All of y'all that make us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Thank you. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Beres. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow, high brow.