SEO Vs. Yellow Pages and Video Submission on YouTube - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 6

Welcome to the eWebStyle podcast. Thanks for joining us. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition. What's up? My name is Chris Burris. I'm the owner of eWebStyle. That's right, and I'm Paul Hanson, the sales manager of eWebStyle. So as is typical, we like to cover what we covered last time, not in as much depth. Otherwise, it would be the same podcast. The exact same podcast. We're not going to do that, but we are going to cover. Last time we covered page rank. We covered that in depth. We talked about how the page doesn't come from web page. It comes from Larry Page, which is an interesting piece of trivia. So we're filling your mind with lots of trivia here. We covered the fact that the more web pages you have on your website, the more page rank your website can have, which is a pretty interesting fact. I think most people didn't know that. We also talked about people not reaching their page rank potential a little bit. Oh yeah, so it is possible to, with improper internal linking, to not reach your website's maximum potential page rank. It is not possible with linking to exceed your website's maximum page rank, which makes perfect sense. If it's a maximum, it's a maximum. You can't exceed it. So, the next thing we talked about was Alexa, which is a tool that we use to understand relative traffic to different websites. We kind of started talking about that because we had a client who was a little confused about hits and unique visitors. Because I get 20,000 hits a month. I'm sure everyone out there has heard that or wants it. Yeah, and the 20,000 hits was relevant to how many times does a server have to feed information back to somebody's browser. So, 20 images on a page, that's 20 hits. And clearly, that's not 20 unique visitors. And the count that you should be most interested in is visitors and or, actually, unique visitors, and probably, more specifically, new unique visitors. So, just be aware of

that when you're looking at statistics. And maybe when your good buddy is doing a little bit of bragging about how much traffic he gets, and you're wondering, how does he get so much traffic? Because the website's not so good. Exactly. He's probably talking about hits and not unique visitors. Yes. We also talked a little bit about SEO and started asking the question, you know, why should you do SEO? And one of the points we made last time was that SEO, the cost of SEO is actually, at least with our company, eWebStyle.com is how you find us on the web. But, at eWebStyle, the cost of your SEO campaigns is actually relatively insignificant compared to the cost of doing business, your employees, keeping your doors open, keeping your phones on, all of those things. So, really, it is something that you should be doing, should be investigating doing, should be doing on your own. You know, in some regard, there should be some SEO going on in your office. Yes. We also talked about, at the end, we left a little teaser. We've got a client of ours. This is a great example case of how valuable SEO can be. And I thought it was a great example of, kind of goes into, why do SEO versus doing maybe radio or TV newspaper or the yellow pages for her? Because she had considered doing that, right? Yes, absolutely. So, she approached, she'd been our client, she actually approached us, she sells Rattan furniture in the Houston area. She has one of the largest Rattan showcases, so rooms selling, showrooms, if that's the right term. One of the largest Rattan showrooms in not just Texas, but also Oklahoma, Louisiana. So, she actually does get clients from, we're in Houston, from Dallas, which is about four hours north from Houston, from cities like Beaumont, which is a couple hours to the east, as far as Louisiana over into, probably not Baton Rouge, but people drive four hours to visit her showroom, her Rattan showroom. So, she approached us

and she said, and initially we put together really a one-pager. That was just one page on the website. She just wanted, you know, if somebody typed it in or she could have it on her business cards, they could actually find her. And then she approached and said, okay, now I'm interested, I get these clients from as far as four hours or even more away. You know, Oklahoma is actually, I think, right at about five, five and a half hours from us. And people from Oklahoma will actually come all the way to her showroom. And so, she wanted to start marketing to those people to make it a little more obvious that she's available. And, you know, what ideas, what comparisons could we give her, what was the right way to do this? So, we sat down and the first thing we thought about is, okay, what would it take to run a newspaper ad in each of these cities? And she specifically gave us Oklahoma, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Beaumont, and Louisiana. Obviously, Oklahoma and Louisiana are states, not cities. She gave us those just to cover those states in general. And so, we started thinking, what would it cost to put a newspaper ad in each of those cities? And she'd have to contact every major city, every newspaper. You know, some cities may have more than one newspaper. And they would have, and each newspaper is going to charge her one price. She'd have to contact every major city and put an ad in every single paper. And do the same thing for if she was going to do the radio, if she was going to do Yellow Pages, if she was, whatever. She would have to individually set up advertising accounts in every single city with each organization, whether it was newspaper or radio or Yellow Pages. And you're starting from the perspective of effort. You haven't really talked about dollars yet. Not even. I mean, and if you've done any type of Yellow Pages advertising out there or radio or newspaper,

you know that these things are not cheap. It's not inexpensive to do. Especially, I have a Yellow Pages background. You know, if you want to cover a decent size ad, it's going to cost you a nice amount. People know these days Yellow Pages doesn't have the return that it used to. So, you're paying, you know, a higher price than you used to before. You're getting less results, less coverage. And you're going to have to do this for, she would have had to have done this for 20 different Yellow Pages directories. And that's just, I mean, that's where it becomes cost prohibitive. Or she could have chosen the newspaper, in which case it's the same thing, except significantly more expensive. We've run small little ads in, you know, computer or technical related publications in the city of Houston. And you can spend, you know, if you're lucky, you spend as little as $50. If, you know, if you're getting a bigger ad, you're spending $150. And times the 20 you're talking about, the dollars, it just doesn't make sense. You start comparing that to our campaign here at eWebStyle, the SEO campaign for those particular cities. And you realize that there's no comparison. Of course, I mean, it's just, if you compare the numbers, it's a no-brainer. I mean, you would spend, she would have spent thousands of dollars per month just to reach her target markets to get all the major cities in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. And one last point regarding this is, you look at, so how do you track the value of those ads? The beauty of search engine optimization and the fact that it's, you know, so technologically, it's related to technology and we can track all the hits. We can track whether they see your ad, whether they come all the way through and actually get on your website, what they do on your website. We can actually track that stuff. We can actually tell you the value that the search engine optimization campaign is having. By the way, she's

doing really well on a couple national terms. We went, we told her to go national for Rattan Cushion Repair. And certainly number one for each of the cities that we're targeting, give or take three positions, we'll say. So, needless to say, which I don't know why people say that, because then they're going to say it. Good point. Needless to say, she is incredibly happy with that analysis and with the decision to go with search engine optimization. Not only that decision, but the results that she's getting from us. And she's got great position nationally, locally. She's got incredible positioning for those terms. And the next thing, we will plan on having a conversation with her. The next thing, this is, again, the kind of thing that we do. Ultimately, our goal is ROI, return on investment. And she's got these great positions. She's only selling out of her showroom right now. Really, she needs to start considering selling online. Like, e-commerce. When we first met her, she had some hesitations about that. So, we're trying to convince her that she should do that. Not because it gives us more business, which it does, but because ultimately, she's got great placement. So, why not take advantage of it? Why not turn it into dollars? So, we always advise our clients, hey, here's how you can take your website and your search engine optimization campaign to the next level and bring in some more income. And so, part of our next note here, and I love that example, for the fact that comparing SEO to any sort of print media, and you mentioned radio and TV, there's just no comparison. So, keep that in mind as you're balancing your campaign. If you've got the dollars, I think you should be doing all of it. Yes. Absolutely, and you should not be neglecting. Do not neglect your SEO, your search engine optimization. The note that we have here is about national, regional, and local searches, and you can understand why the Rattan Showcase example is very relevant to national,

regional, and local searches. Because it was about the regions that she was particularly targeting. She wasn't that concerned about Houston, but she's doing really well on Rattan, Houston. That was one of the keywords we suggested for her. But the regional, okay, Oklahoma, Louisiana, the different cities around the city of Houston, you know, those types of campaigns are very well suited to search engine optimization, and they're very cost effective. You know, give me an example of the differences between, like, national, regional, and a local search term or a keyword phrase. Because that's something that I was not familiar with before I got into this industry. I didn't, I just searched for whatever I was looking for, but I didn't understand the difference between searching locally, searching nationally. I was looking for a dentist, I just typed in dentist. Right, and that would be national. In fact, that would actually, could potentially cover the world, depending on how the search engine is broken down. And we now understand, you now understand, that you can no longer type in dentist, because you can get a dentist in Albuquerque, a dentist in Washington, the state, and one in Washington, D.C., and that's just not going to be relevant to you. So, in general, the national campaigns are almost more generic. So, you type in Coca-Cola, in general, that's a national, you would call that a national term. You type Coca-Cola in the south, that could be a region, or you say Coca-Cola Texas. That's, you know, depending on your particular definition, that could be regional or local. Certainly, when you get to the point where you're typing in Coca-Cola, Houston, you're very local. And we work with our clients here in Houston. Some of the things that we do is say, okay, we want to get these general terms, and we also want to get the local terms. Because in and around Houston, people are aware, you know, we're a major city, fourth largest city in the Union, and we've got suburbs, and we've got small municipalities around, and

people, one of them is called Sugar Land, which is down south. And people in Sugar Land, if they're looking for a plumber, we're back to Joe the Plumber, they very probably will actually type in Plumbing Sugar Land, or Plumber Sugar Land. So, if we've got a company that we're working with that, you know, they may be on the opposite side of the town, but they're willing to service that area, we recommend to them a pretty extensive local campaign. So, we get cities around Houston like Baytown, Tomball, Humble, Sugar Land, Pear Land, Alvin, maybe a little far. That's about halfway to Galveston for you guys. Oh, what, used to be Galveston. Yeah. So, we recommend, you know, Plumbing, Baytown, Plumbing, Humble, Plumbing, Tomball, so that they're actually able to capture that. If they service those areas, they should be presenting themselves as a local company in those areas on their website and to the search engines. So, that's a great example of a local campaign, and I hope I answered your question. Yes. Excellent. Exactly the answer I was looking for. Excellent. So, we often use national, regional, local campaigns. Be aware of what you're actually targeting when you get into a local, regional, or national campaign when you're selling your product and or service. One last thing. Can you give me an example where the national campaign would be a good choice? A great example is if your product is, let's say, an online downloadable e-book, or if it's a downloadable MP3 player, because you can provide those to anybody. So, let's say you're marketing how to open your window washing business, and I've created a PDF file that enables people to, you know, follow the directions, and how do I quote the jobs, how do I do the jobs, how do I present myself, you know, everything you need to know to run a window washing business. Which, with this economy, we might have more people out there doing window washing. And we're not talking the car washing windows on the corner. That's enough.

The guys on the top of the building. Exactly. So, that document is clearly valid for anybody in the country. In fact, it's valid for anybody who speaks the language that the book is written in, or as many languages as it's been translated into. So, you can certainly do a national campaign on that. And we would recommend what we would call national terms for that. And we would probably also recommend that, okay, you know that somebody might be trying to open a business in New York, in the major cities, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Houston. So, let's choose some, you know, window washing business Houston, window washing business Chicago. Because anyone who types in those terms are highly likely to be interested in starting their own window washing business. Your e-book could be very valuable to them, and so you'd want your website to come up in that situation. And you also would just like it to come up when you type in window washing business. Okay. And that would be the national term for keyword. Basically, if they can provide that product or service anywhere to anyone, then they would probably target, they would have a national focus for their SEO campaign. I can give you an example of where you shouldn't do a national campaign and a client of ours, just through some relationships that they have with the local newspaper. Because they run so many ads, the local newspaper was actually running pay-per-click campaigns for them. Okay. Yeah, I remember them. And it's a jewelry company here in town, and you could type in some generic terms. We were, I was typing, it's funny, I was typing in terms in pursuit of another client, and we typed in natural wood watches. And this particular client of ours, who doesn't sell online, only sells in the Houston area, came up for the term National Wood Watches, on pay-per-click. So, it wasn't costing our client, we'll call it Jeweler X, it wasn't costing our client Jeweler X any money, because he was spending so

much money with the newspaper that the newspaper was actually running this campaign for free. It was just an ineffective use of the money that the newspaper was spending. Because natural wood watches, he doesn't sell natural wood watches, so they were probably targeting the term watches, and that just came up. And it wasn't regional. There's no reason for any type of watch to come up for Jeweler X unless it's in the city of Houston, because he doesn't service anybody other than people in the city of Houston. So, by the way, that's another client we're working on, because he's a great businessman, he's got the understanding of how to grow a business, and he's got the budget for search engine optimization. And so, we're working on him, hey, you need to really open up your search engine optimization campaign and start selling online. So, again, we're just advising our clients in a way that they can get the maximum ROI. Yes, tell me about it. Excellent. All right, so... What's next? I guess the next thing on our list is video submissions. Video submissions is... So, everybody knows the latest craze, not even the latest, it's been in place for a while now. The craze of YouTube and being able to go out and download videos, upload videos. You can now put the videos on YouTube and actually display them on your website, so you're not using your bandwidth for your hosting. You're actually using YouTube's bandwidth. And video is just becoming such a very powerful way to get messages out. Be they funny, be they product related, they're a great way to start up a campaign or a viral campaign. So, you make a really hilarious, you know, how many Mentos must be sold now because of the Mentos Diet COVID explosion. And, you know, that's a viral video. Now, we know it didn't start because they were trying to do advertising, but you can't tell me that Mentos isn't increasing sales because of that. Yes. At least just people trying it out. If not, just

going, oh, yeah, Mentos, these are the ones that explode in Diet Coke. I'm going to take those today. You can have some of those. And a Diet Coke. And, of course, and a Diet Coke. So, it can explode in my stomach. I think that happens to pigeons. I've heard that, too. I've definitely heard that. I'm sure there's some video out there somewhere that we don't need to see. Speaking of videos. So, video submission is a great way if you've got, again, the window washing business that we just used as an example. If he's put together some sort of video on, you know, maybe how he wants to present, how you should present yourself as somebody who's trying to wash windows for how you should actually wash the windows, what kind of supplies you need, all of that stuff. He can post those on YouTube. YouTube tends to get some good search engine placement just if you have the right keywords just because YouTube has such a high page rank. And so, you could potentially do better with the right terminology as the description of your video on YouTube than you could actually just having that video on your site. And, in fact, with YouTube, you have it on YouTube and you have a link to it, an embedded YouTube video on your website. So, you know, I'm going to jump in for a second. I love how you said that because I think how you said, you know, it'd probably do better on YouTube than being on your own site. And I know just for me myself, if I were going to create a video and I had my own website and I were doing some type of informational video, how to wash a window or do whatever, the first thing I would think of is let me put that on my site so if anyone goes and sees my site, they will definitely see my video. But I probably wouldn't think, let me put that, let me submit that video to a bunch of

other sites like YouTube, which I'm a big fan of and go to myself because YouTube gets, you know, millions and millions and millions of visitors every single day. And, you know, my website is probably not getting that kind of traffic. So, I love how you said that. It's a great way to just bring more traffic into your website from those video submissions. And you had a, you mentioned that submitting it to multiple video sites, you know, people automatically think of YouTube and there are a lot more out there. So, we're actually going to post a list of video submission sites that we will typically, that's part of our SEO campaign. If a particular client does have videos or if we persuade them, hey, you will have, you will get some ROI if you go ahead and make a video, then they can make the video, give it to us, and we'll actually put in, put it in different video submission sites. So, I'm going to put a list of video submission sites on our blog. You can get to our blog just by going to www.e-webstyle.com. And, and then across the top bar, you'll see the link to our blog and you should be able to find it pretty easily. Uh, if you have any challenges or if you want to add some more, uh, websites, we'd love some more submissions of, you know, places where you like to submit videos. Um, and if there, I know some of them have restrictions on the size and, uh, and content. Uh, if you could include that information, it'd be great. We'd love to add it to our list. Uh, you can forward that information to podcast at e-webstyle.com. Um, and if you've got any comments in general, you can send it to podcast at e-webstyle.com. So, um, the next thing that we have on our list is, uh, is outsourcing SEO. Wow. Is that a sensitive topic? Yes, it is. I was just thinking that. I'm glad you said that. What a sensitive topic. It's a,

it's a very sensitive topic. What is outsourcing SEO? So, outsourcing SEO typically refers, well, outsourcing can't actually mean anything. So, let's say, um, we'll give an example. If, here at e-webstyle, we decided, you know what, we don't enjoy doing search engine optimization. We're going to outsource it. So, the company next door happens to do search engine optimization. Then, we could do two kinds of arrangements. We could outsource it directly to them and bill our client, and then our client believes that we're doing the search engine optimization, or we could actually just get, potentially make a commission arrangement with them. So, as we send clients over to the next door neighbor, uh, we get a commission. Uh, that's kind of the, the literal definition. Typically, if you hear somebody say outsourcing SEO, they mean outsourcing it to India. And that's what I think. Exactly. In another country. And you would outsource India, uh, programming. You would outsource, um, anything, anything, anything that is a task, um, that, that can be time-consuming, uh, and need some certain expertise, uh, people will tend to outsource that to, to India. Now, there's a lot of things that you need to be careful of when you're doing outsourcing. And, um, we're going to leave you with that. And I'm sure we'll, I'll tell you what, we'll come back with a, a, a few ideas of things you need to watch for if you do decide to outsource your SEO to another company or just to a foreign country in general. Um, so stay tuned. Yeah. So we're going to end our podcast there. Remember to check back with us next time where we're going to talk about, I think we're going to talk about, uh, do's and don'ts of outsourcing SEO, uh, which great topic. Make sure you check in. And we're also going to talk a little about SEO sabotage. Sabotage. Someone can sabotage SEO? Absolutely. We've experienced it. It's changed our procedures and policies here at eWebStyle. So make sure you check in for that. Uh, thanks everybody

for checking in. Again, send questions and comments to podcast at e-web, e-webstyle.com. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And I'm Paul Hanson, the sales manager at eWebStyle. Bye bye for now. I think she's going to set me free.