The 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes by Alexander Kesler #350

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. I am Charles Lewis, your client results advocate. Welcome back to another... I was going to say, I am client results advocate, and then I was like, that ain't right. You are really taking on that role. No longer Charles Lewis. His name is client results advocate. I am just C-R-A. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 350. Yeah, like after 49 and before 351. It's a nice even number that has nothing to do with the number of weeks in a year, so that's why we're not... I just like the fact that it's 350. How many people do you know have 350 anythings? Anything, yeah. Anythings. Yeah, this may be the only thing that I have about 350. The only thing that has more than 350 episodes... Like, we up there with like The Simpsons and stuff. Like, for real, like, name another show that has more than 300 episodes. Yeah, you think about that. I'll wait. Stargate doesn't count. So, we have not authorized the nerd committee to speak yet. Yeah, exactly. All right. As usual, there is a tip from our previous podcast. And that tip is, analyze the device overview report to understand best performing devices. Look, you need to understand where your traffic is coming from. Is it desktop? Is it mobile? Is it tablet? And once you understand where that traffic is coming from, you can cater your marketing plan to be consistent with where your traffic is coming from. Boom. As always, please remember, we are filming live here in Houston, Texas. And Chuck and I, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is, do not be a douche. Don't be a douche. It is not a good look. Today, we have a really nice article for you. And that article is? Man, the 10 most common SEO mistakes. Oh, that's good. 10 most common SEO mistakes. This was posted

on Search Engine Journal by Alexander Kessler. So, we'll dig in a little bit later and see if these 10 common mistakes, are you making them? Are we making them? Do you think you missed any? Well, he didn't necessarily miss some. I added to some. We got some that could be a mistake. And maybe not, just depend on your industry. So, we'll get into all of that in a minute. Awesome. If you're in a position to, if you have some sort of electronic device, what could they do for us? I don't have my device, but if I had my device right now, I'd be tweeting. What would I be tweeting? I'd be tweeting hashtag bestSEOPodcast. I would tag us in it, at bestSEOPodcast, at eWebResults. That way, we could follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. Excellent. And let's see. So, if this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy. Welcome. Glad to have you. Thanks for joining us. If you've listened to this podcast before, welcome back. And you know what we're about to skip. We run a little contest each week. And if we get 10 or more Shikos. Shikos. That is an eWebResults branded term for social engagement. It stands for shares, likes, and follows. Shikos. If we get 10 Shikos or more on any one of the platforms and we get a review, then we skip the process where we tell you how you could leave us a review. Obviously, we're skipping it because we got a review and at least 10 Shikos. We got like a two. I followed a whole bunch of people back this morning. Yeah. Each of our Twitters was above 10. We got like three Twitter campaigns. So, that's excellent. We will tell you, though, how you can Shikos. Again, that's a share, like, or follow on any one of the platforms. All you need to do is go to something like facebook.com slash eWebResults. Twitter.com slash eWebResults. YouTube.com slash eWebResults. Instagram.com slash eWebResults. LinkedIn.com slash company slash eWebResults. All

of those will take you to our profile on those platforms and do the due diligence there, please. If you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we are probably looking for you. Please call, submit an audio resume, 713-510-7846. If you would like a free, comprehensive website profit analysis. Profit analysis. I think it's worth saying again. Yeah, profit analysis. A free, comprehensive website profit analysis. Just go to our website, eWebResults.com. Press the green button. You can't miss it. And we will reach out to you and contact you. There is no algorithm cataclysm today. No algorithm cat today. So, we're going to jump right into news. The title of this article, I thought it was good. It said, AT&T declares war on open internet. Yeah. Right? Did you read about that? I read some other headlines similar to that. So, basically, what they've done is they've got a plan on their cellular network where if it's rated, if it has a zero rated, then it doesn't use your data. Right? So, say you've got two gigs of data a month, and if they zero rate a service, then that data doesn't count against you. What do you mean zero rate a service? So, that's what they'll, and it's just their own terminology. Okay. Their way of kind of ranking where you're at and what you're doing online. Well, not you. It's about the service. So, for instance, they just zero rated direct TV. So, now if you're watching direct TV on your cellular device that is on an AT&T network, it doesn't count against your data. Okay. So, they're doing what T-Mobile's been doing. Yeah, exactly. And so, this sounds all wonderful, and this is exactly what net neutrality was all about, saying, hey, you can't charge people for database access. I mean, for access to, internet access to people. And this is just a roundabout way of doing exactly what net neutrality was trying to prevent. Because what it means is, is if Chuck and I decide to make a content factory, and we want to

generate, we want our podcast to go out 24-7, if you're on AT&T, our data counts against your rate. So, you're more likely to not listen to our show than you are to listen to direct TV shows. And it puts the big behemoths at a huge advantage. Yeah, and it puts the little guys at a huge disadvantage. And so, that's the whole thing. That's the whole purpose. Like, as an example, AT&T wants to not, and already are doing it. So, how does that work with, like, I know T-Mobile, for example, newest promo, is that all of you're streaming, whether it's Spotify or Pandora or even Netflix and Hulu. If you're streaming, you know, data, you're streaming content, then it doesn't count. From those platforms. Those specific platforms. So, they've already identified. Again, so you and I put together a, you know, gospel music platform. We got to go submit, hey, we need our stuff to be free. And then, that probably has a little fee associated with it. Of course it does. And that's exactly the opposite of what net neutrality was trying to solve. So, what I feel about Comcast, because it's interesting. Because Comcast is like, hey, I don't know if you, I use Comcast at home. I got ATU verse, but yeah. So, I got the package that in New Year's, my rate's going to go up. Because they're noticing there's people using actual channels and more people streaming. Yeah, yeah. More people streaming. So, they have to raise their data. So, you're streaming Netflix, right? Through Comcast. Right, through Comcast. So, if you're doing that all the time and you're not paying Comcast for their cable because you don't need it, then yeah. I mean, that kind of makes sense. As long as it's fair, right? Right. So, you and I start a channel and they don't give an advantage to Netflix over us. Hey, I'm cool with that. Right. But as soon as they start giving advantages to people, then it's a problem. Well, yeah. Because then at that point, whoever

got the deeper pockets wins. Yep. You get all the content. And from a fundamental freedom of speech, that's just. That sucks. Literally un-American. Literally. Literally. It's actually the quintessential American, make money where you can. And literally un-American, like, don't give people access to sound, right? And crap on the little people. Ironically. Small business still suffers. Yeah. There is a European case that actually went to court yesterday. They were going to make a decision yesterday about Uber and deciding if Uber was a technology business or a transportation business. Obviously, as a transportation business, they have a lot more hoops to jump through. Yeah. Just depending on what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. So, they, Uber, would very much like to be a technology company, not a transportation company. Yeah, because they got insurance and all kinds of issues that come with being a transportation company. Licensing. Well, and so you could imagine Metro and Yellow Cab and Square Deal Cab and all the other companies who got to deal with all those fines and fees and stuff that come with being a transportation company. We'd love for Uber to have to be on the same plan. Exactly. Amazon is limiting the number. So, we mentioned this in some news. We thought it could have been almost Agokat, right? Where Amazon was saying, no more reviews for, or maybe I mentioned it, no more reviews for free product. So, if I give you, if a seller gives you through the Amazon platform a discount price or a free product, I would, in exchange for a review, they put a stop to that. Now, they're saying you can only do five reviews per week for if you're not a confirmed purchaser on Amazon. A confirmed purchaser. Right. So, if I go and buy something, I can write, you know, if I'm a review. Up to five reviews about. Well, no. If I buy it, I can, it's probably unlimited. As long as you're buying the products, they want you to review them. You've got the

right review. Okay. But what they want to do is say, hey, I don't want you to go review stuff for me. And so, I limit you to five because you're not a, well, anyway. I'm not a purchaser. Yep. And then, at first, they were suing sellers who were actually paying for reviews. Reviews. Mm-hmm. And then they stopped the free or reduced product for reviews. And now they've gone this next step. Yeah, because that kind of sucks. You don't want to get in the habit of suing your sellers because at the end of the day, that's what makes Amazon run. Right. Everybody's selling stuff. Right. And if, yeah, you start suing me, you're going to open up areas for competition. Yep. Eventually. Yep. Lots of areas for competition. So, that's my news. You probably have a little bit of news. I got a little bit of news. I got a little bit of news. Let's talk internet marketing, specifically Twitter. All right. We were just talking shikos, shares, likes, and follows, right? So, what do you think is the biggest one? I gave you a clue. It's Twitter. Twitter is the most used social share button according to Search Engine Journal. A survey sent out to Search Engine Journal's audience, Twitter was the most used social share button with 55% of people, more than half, 55% of more SEOs use it to share content, followed by Facebook, which is 35%, email and text messaging was really, really low at 6%. I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah. The fact that, now ironically, Twitter does get much more shares. Right. But, ironically, less engagement. How can you get a share and that's in less engagement? Because people don't click links is what I've noticed with Twitter. People absorb content. They'll retweet it. You ever retweeted something without even clicking the link? Yeah. I have. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And so, people would not even look at the picture. That sounds interesting. Retweet. Not even that. Oh, that's my guy. Retweet. Retweet. Yeah. I mean,

he could have said the most absurd stuff in the world, but he's my guy and I retweeted him. Yeah. And so, Twitter gets a lot of shares from that perspective. Right. But, I would imagine the engagement is a lot lower compared to a Facebook share. Yep. More news. So, this almost could have been out of location. Okay. Almost. Borderline. Borderline. I'm just really confused on how Google intends to pull this off. So, Google Maps, right, they're going to start showing live views of locations during peak hours. Okay. I'll let you marinate on that for a minute. Live views of locations during peak hours. So, with this feature, you can see actually how busy the place is. Which can help you decide if you want to visit now or visit later. So, I don't know if this is going to come from a Google satellite that's actively working right now and giving me a live view. Or, do they have a truck? They're going to tap into somebody's camera. You know what I'm saying? Somebody gets... Or a truck parked out. No, because if it's inside, then it's... Well, I think it's going to be an external view. Okay. What's going on in the parking lot, how many cars are there, what's going on. But my... How is they going to know when, right? Is it only applicable if there's a Google vehicle in the area? Like, I just don't know how that's going to work. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be interesting to figure out. It's going to be very interesting. Because if y'all get into peak time live streaming through Google search results page, that's going to be pretty... That's going to fly. Yeah. That's going to fly. Do I want to go there? You don't want to go there. Look at that. There ain't no place to park over there. So, I can dig it. Quick. There's one up front. And lastly, we just got Cyber Monday was this week. Right. Right. So, dig this. Got the data. Cyber Monday sales total of $3.39 billion.

That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. Yeah. So, apparently, Cyber Monday 2015, it was $3.13 billion. So, not a big grump. Not a huge grump. But although point billion is probably huge. Yeah. Whatever that is. $100 to $200 million. Something like that. But anyway, busiest day of the year for internet shopping, which we kind of figured it would be. Now, a lot of people were concerned because there was a huge spike of people on Black Friday shopping online. So, they thought Cyber Monday would be in the lower. But, nope. Cyber Monday was actually higher. A little bit higher. Interesting. That's what's up. That's my news. I wonder what the combined Black Friday and Cyber Monday was last year versus this year. Because maybe a lot more people are like, screw going to Walmart and getting crampled. We heard all of the commercials this year. Black Friday. And it was like on Halloween. Yeah. It was like starting tomorrow. Starting tomorrow. You know. And by tomorrow, we mean it's already started. Yeah. You can go take advantage of it now. Yeah. So, you know. Like today is Cyber Wednesday. It keeps on going. All right. So, we do have a review. This review is, of course, five stars. And this is from Drone Shop. Had a great conversation with Todd. Drone Shop. Yeah. He sells drones. We need one, man. Just send it to the office. And we will definitely need it. Write you a good review. Yeah. On Amazon. Because we can do one. All right. This is from three days ago. It says, great content in the podcast. Helpful on the phone. Great content every week to help try to reach our goals. Patif. Put it in the face. Thank you. I had a chat with Chris to get a Civo analysis done. And he was very helpful to bounce some ideas off of. And gave some quick pointers on what we could change on our site. Very knowledgeable. And hope to do business with us in the future. Punch in

the face to you, Todd. Thank you so much. At Drone Shop. By the way, the website is droneshopcanada.ca. Go check it out. He's got some cool stuff. He's doing like industrial drones. So, you can use drones. And you can imagine you can put UV cameras on them. And you can survey your crops. That's awesome. Yeah. So, and there's a little bit of higher. I hadn't even thought about that. Of course, the amazing things you can do from an arrow on your view. Yep. You can see a lot more stuff pretty, pretty quickly. Now, we did have a question on Facebook. Okay, let's get to the question. Let's get to that question. Let's see where it was. It was right back here. No, a little bit further. Here we go. And it's from Marcus Fox. It says, hey, what's better? A fully responsive site or a separate M. site, mobile site? A mobile site. So, what's better? A fully responsive site or having a mobile version of your site? Marcus, great question. And I think it really depends on what your industry is. I will say this, though. Kind of moving forward, we've personally just done away with mobile sites. That was something that was kind of in practice three, four years ago. Right now, we're going fully responsive. And here's why. Here's why. One, because what happens is when you have a mobile separate site that's separate from your desktop site, you tend to cater that mobile site to your mobile audience and you lose content, right? And so, what we realized is with having a fully responsive site, that mobile visitor gets the benefits of all of the content, all of the navigation, all of the images. They get the benefit of the remarketing code and everything, all of the other marketing elements that we have in place on a site that's been just designed to work across, you know, tablets, phones, or desktop computers. And so, my recommendation, my recommendation would be to just go with a fully responsive site and just look

at it on mobile devices and make sure you cater that mobile experience to those visitors. So, that way, those right elements, those call to actions and things like that that you need people to do are actually prominent in work on a mobile device. The problem people tend to make is that they don't necessarily understand the CSS and the functionality behind responsive design and, therefore, the mobile experience usually sucks, right? And so, you'll want to just do a mobile version because it's easier. But I want to encourage you to just work with a responsive one and just spend some time looking at how it works on mobile and how it looks on desktop. And then, like the tip we said earlier, go check your analytics. See what your traffic looks like because if your traffic is, you know, over 70% desktop, then, you know, you definitely don't want to spend much time on the mobile version. Hope that helps. Let me know. Boom. Thank you, Marcus. All right. That is the potatoes of the podcast, although there's a little bit of meat there. Yeah, it was. It is time to get into the meat. Yeah, so I want to give a huge punch in the face to Alexander Kessler and the good folks over at Search Engine Journal. He posted this article, the 10 most common SEO mistakes. 10 most common. Yep. Like, most common. Most, most common. What's the worst one you think of right now? Most common SEO mistake. Give me one. Not doing a smart URL, and I'm thinking specifically WordPress, not changing to permalinks. Got you. Yeah, huge mistake. You know, you're using WordPress right now, and your URL will say yourdomain.com slash P question mark, blah, blah, blah. Then log into your settings, turn on permalinks, and get you some smart URLs. See what Alex says. Yep. All right, so he starts off this article by saying, And it's not that easy to stay on top of the most successful optimization techniques with many businesses falling into the trap of incorrectly

doing SEO. He's right. I mean, at the end of the day, we reviewed countless sites. Chris's review was about a site he just reviewed that have bad SEO from bad linking and bad on-page and bad off-page and just bad content, bad user experience, bad layout, slow site, you name it. There are all kinds of problems people have. And really, as a business owner, it really depends on how much resources you can invest. That's what this comes down to. Can you, do you have the time in your own schedule to sit and do all of the things necessary? Or do you have the budget to bring in someone who knows how to do these things? Or are you outsourcing it to some people who just may not be doing it correctly? All of those reasons are why business owners end up doing or having some of the most common SEO mistakes. Number one. Number one. He says, choosing the wrong keywords. Very common SEO mistake. Yeah, that would, yeah. He says, while you might define your products and services in a certain way, it's more important to understand what words your potential customers would use to refer to them. He's right. It's going to take some time, do some keyword research, talk to some competitors, talk to some clients, talk to some colleagues. Figure out what people are really searching and not what you think they're searching. Figure out what's actually driving traffic and conversions and not what you think people should be looking for when you look for it. Because what happens is, especially when you have this business owner who's doing their own SEO, then they tend to write content and come up with terms that are too much industry jargon or maybe too technical. And therefore, you're optimizing for really great content to paint you as an expert. However, the people who are looking for your service don't know what that means. It's the wrong target to advance. MEP. Right? That was one of our clients, mechanical, electrical. Yeah. I was still like,

okay, I don't know what that means. MEP, yes. Yeah, it's still like, it was a couple of years ago. I was going to say MEP. Is that MEP? So that's a perfect example. We had a client who did mechanical, electrical plumbing. And in that industry, technicians and engineers will use MEP. And no one else does. No one searches for that unless your target is those engineers or those people in that industry. Man, look, you got to, it's a, you got to, it's a fine mix. It's a, it's a fine mix between like high search and high traffic and low search and high quality. Right? And so you really want to take some time to do the right research. My tool of choice, Google Keyword Planner. It's extremely effective. We have a really sizable pay-per-click budget across all our accounts. And so when we use Keyword Planner, we tend to get better data than some who got a lower budget. You know, if we lower budget, I think under a certain threshold, they'll just give you estimated data. But if your spend is high enough, they'll give you real numbers. And so our spend is high enough and we get real numbers. And so our Keyword Planner is the kind of best source for me. Also use SEMrush, great tool. Moz, keyword tool, great tool that you can use for keyword research. The key is to find which terms you think you want to use. Search them. See who shows up for those terms. Are they competitors? Are they, are they just people who, who, who aren't relevant at all? Right? And then query some customers, some previous clients. See what they search to find you. Check your search log, right? Hopefully you have your site linked up with Webmaster Tools. You can go and see which queries have brought people to your site. The point is you must understand which keywords people are looking for that will actually convert. What you don't want to do is find some, some relevant term that's high traffic, low

conversion, and you see a ton of traffic coming to your site, but they're not engaging, they're bouncing, they're not converting. Probably not the right term. You may want to get a variation of that term that's a little bit more qualified. But the key is don't choose the wrong keywords because if you optimize for the wrong keywords, it's going to take some time to get you to page one. And you definitely don't want to spend months, you know, three months, 90 days, 120 days, 140 days getting to page one for the wrong terms. Yep. That's just a mistake that's going to take you another four or five months to fix. And having access to the keywords. So, one, we can use the Keyword Planner tool to know what kind of search volume there is, but to really know what keywords are generating value for you, pay-per-click. Exactly. Got to do it. Got to do pay-per-click. PPC is the easiest way to do keyword research. Put some budget behind it. Yeah. Choose those keywords. Create some ad text, which is, by the way, a way you can also kind of test your meta descriptions, and run a paid campaign. Yeah. Which ones get the most traffic? Which ones spend the most money? Which ones generated the best leads for you? Turn on and optimize for those. Boom. Number two. Number two. We're talking the 10 most common SEO mistakes. Number one was choosing the wrong keywords. Number two is using keyword stuffing. Okay. And as old as the tactic this is, it's amazing how much it still happens. Yeah. People still believe I can just flood my 500 words with, you know, 10 of the same phrase. 10%. Yeah. And it's going to rank. As a matter of fact, he says, going overboard while using keywords is registered as spammy by search engines, which means it actually hurts your SEO performance. He's right. At the end of the day, keyword stuffing is just bad practice in general. Not only that, it creates a horrible experience for the

Google user. Have you ever read content that's stuffed? Yeah. It's just not a good experience. More importantly, it is spammy. It can get you flagged. That is panda bait. This is different. Right? This can get you penalized. Having, having, you know, keyword stuffing. So, so. It's not just bad SEO. It's not just an SEO mistake. It's detrimental SEO. Yeah. Don't do it. Yeah. It's not going to work for you. Spend your resources on quality content. Number three. Number three. Creating content that's not about your keywords. I thought this one was interesting, right? Interesting. Yeah. He says the problem is that you want to rank for a certain keyword, but you fail to focus the text on your topic. So, then you just throw in a couple of keywords, hoping to place for it. Yeah. So, Alex, this is one of the ones I was on the fence with. From a one perspective, a spammy perspective, yeah, I get it. If you're just writing up, you know, you're trying to write, find a topic that's hot. Right. And so, you're writing about it, and then at the bottom, you're trying to include your CTA and some keywords that you're going to rank for your keywords in relation to a buzzing topic. No, it's not going to work. It's not going to work at all. But, however, you're in a situation like us, for example, where I have, we got a client, right? We got a client, and this client has a school, and often they do music lessons, drum lessons, guitar lessons, piano lessons, things like that. Should be easy for you to find them. But, the key is, if we're writing new blog posts every month, new page content every month, but we're only targeting a certain set of phrases, right, writing about drum lessons every week can be kind of repetitive. Right. According to Yoast SEO, for all my WordPress users, Yoast is going to give you a flag anyway to tell you, hey, you've already optimized for this term. Another page. Use another

term. Yeah. Right? And so, here we go, where you end up creating content that's not specifically about the key phrase. Right. But relevant. And that's the difference I want to highlight here. If your content is just nowhere relevant at all, that's a problem. Yeah, that's a mistake. Yeah. You shouldn't be making. But if you're coming up with relevant content, like I don't know why drum lessons in Austin can benefit your toddler, or how drum lessons in Austin can help with hand-eye coordination, or how, you know, these different types of topics that are still relevant to your key phrase, then you're safe. Yeah. Then you're good. As a matter of fact, you're even better than good, you're better, because now you have relevant content about a certain phrase that's totally original and unique. That you should be linking to your main page about drumming and lessons in Austin. Exactly. So, I'll say, don't just write content that has no relevancy whatsoever, and then try to sprinkle some keywords in there and think that it's going to work. It's not. Spend your time finding topics and subjects that are relevant to your phrase, but slightly different, and so that way you don't have the same type of content on your site, and you can still target the same key phrase. Yep. Makes sense. Number four. Number four. Publishing non-original content. Just talking about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he goes on. He says, instead of ripping off copy from other places or using software that spins the content into a new shape, it's worth investing in and creating original and meaningful content. He's right. It's the reason why we just celebrated a year today from our new content writer. Yeah. Got a degree, a master's degree in creative writing. And everyone at the table was very happy. Exactly. It's the reason why we just hired a new content writer to come in, because original content and quality content is that important. It's almost more important than links. I ain't found enough data to confirm that yet, but it's

almost more important than links, and you can tell them Chuck said that. And you can say, I would argue that links from a website that doesn't have relevant content or a particular page that isn't specifically relevant. Exactly. Exactly. So I'll say this, man, invest in quality content. Yeah. Just eat that cost. It's not cheap. It's not cheap, but then it's extremely necessary if you intend to rank online. Absolutely. And so keep in mind, they don't necessarily have to be blog articles. These could be videos. These could be newsletters. These could be infographics. These could be e-downloadable guides and free white papers. Content doesn't have to necessarily be on-page content. If you're smart, you'll take that on-page content and repurpose it across all those mediums, kind of like this podcast, where you can repurpose it and get content, original content, in all the right places. But yeah, if you're publishing, if you're still following that practice, like copying people's sites and spinning content and trying to halfway rewrite some stuff, just stop it. You're wasting your time and effort, and it's not going to work. Probably doing some damage. Probably doing more damage than good. Like, spend some time and hire a content writer, or set some time aside and write your own content. The key is to just do it and make it original. Number five. Hey, Manny, this is number five. Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you, Manny. Number five. Skipping title tags and meta descriptions. And we were just talking about this today. You know, when do you do this? It doesn't even feel like a mistake. It feels like an oversight, or like, and it's a mistake. It's a mistake. It's so important. He says, title tags and meta descriptions are essential elements of SEO that should not be forgotten. Skipping them means a huge missed potential for your content. At the end of the day, he's right. This is like SEO one-on-one. Make sure your title's right. Make sure your meta description's right. But I'll add this. While you're inside the

code and you're already doing titles and meta, go ahead and optimize those images. Get some image titles. Get some alt tags. Go ahead and optimize those links. Get some link titles. Go ahead and check that robots file. Get that sitemap going. Since you're in WordPress and you're already doing your behind-the-scenes kind of code stuff with your titles and meta, well, then do the other code stuff at the same time. That way you don't miss any steps. It is important that you get, at the very least, your titles and meta description right. Why is that? Well, because that's what shows in the search results page. There are two reasons, right? One is SEO placement perspective. And two is what they see on that search engine results page. So placement and conversion, right? What they see and what Google is going to recognize. So if you don't have a meta description there, then Google is smart enough to just truncate it and pull some data from your page and post it there. But why not control what the people see? Take advantage of this first, what did you say, the first opportunity to present our CTA? First opportunity for SEVO, search engine visitor optimization. What do you do with them on your website after they come from a search engine? And Charles mentioned it. He said that the ads and pay-per-click, that's a great way to be testing your meta descriptions, right? So which ones are more engaging? Which ones get good click-through rates and then good form submissions or phone calls because it's a two-step process. Yeah, it's more than just a click. You need that click to actually take an action when they get to your site. Whichever one is doing that, whichever ad is performing the best, take that 35 to 70 character meta description, I mean ad text, and use it as your meta description. Here's a pro tip. If you're in a service industry, go ahead and put your phone number in the description. They may not even have to click through

in order for you to get business. Take advantage. Awesome. Number six. Six. Missing quality links, right? And we're talking the top 10 common SEO mistakes. Yeah. He says missing quality links. I was like, what do you mean by that? Missing links. He says, grasp that the quality of external links included in content is more important than their quantity. So what he's saying is on your page, if you have external links, or in this case, the lack thereof, right? Because he says missing quality links, then you miss an opportunity for SEO. Yes. Oh, so what does that mean? Let's say you're an AC provider. Right. And you service Houston, Texas, and your biggest manufacturer is American Standard. Right. Then on your AC replacement page, you should have an outbound link to American Standard. American Standard. Preferably to your certified distributor of American Standard AC's page profile on their site. That's a great external link. And if you don't have that link, then you're missing a quality link. People always get confused thinking that they really need American Standard to link back to them. And they do. And you would love for them to do that. That's a difficult link to build if they don't have a profile that you could just go create. Right. It's going to be difficult to find a webmaster for American Standard and get him to link to you. Yeah. But what you can do is link out to them because Google sees that link. And more importantly, if they do have a webmaster or an agency or somebody like us, I will see that link and then reciprocate it. Yeah. And so you want to make sure you take advantage of opportunities to link out. Okay. Well, Chuck, who should we link out to then? Glad you asked. If you're a service provider, link out to your manufacturers. Yeah. Link out to your distributors. That's the first thing you do. You provide a B2B service, link out to your clients. Yep. It's a great way to generate referrals. You provide a,

you have a retail establishment and you have like these events and things like that. Link out to your local news station where you're posting these events at. You can probably get it posted for free. Local charities. Pro tip number two. Yeah. But the key is, don't be scared to link out. Right? A lot of people don't want to link out. Share the link, love link out. It will always come back and help you. We as SEOers used to think that, or used to believe, and it was actually true at the time, that if you linked out, your link juice was going out through that link. The reality is, remember, in this podcast, we say it all the time, give a good experience to the Google user and you will be rewarded. If you have no outbound links from your website, you have effectively created the end of the internet. Yeah. There's a dead end when people get to your site because there's nowhere else for them to go. Bad experience, so don't do it. Number seven. Seven. He says, going astray with your internal links. This is a good one. I see this problem frequently. So many ways. Yeah, exactly. He says, as with keyword stuffing, it's crucial to watch out and not overdo your internal linking. Yeah. If the content and the links seem unnatural, then the work will not be appreciated by your target customers. It will not be favorably treated by search engines either, as it can be seen as a fraudulent practice. Talking about link stuffing. Yeah. Yeah. So if you got, you know, 500 words of content and you got 15 links on this page and half of these links are using exact match anchor text and going to the same page or going to different pages on the same site, there's just not a good look. There would be a mistake. You know. Now, on the other hand, because this is a practice we actually do internally for not only our site but some of our other sites. It's

not a bad practice, especially on like a page like your homepage. Right. Where your homepage is not necessarily focused on one specific service but just more of a summary about your company that you list those services with corresponding links on the homepage. Right. That's okay. Right. But what you don't want to do is have 10 links on the homepage all going to the same internal page with various anchor text and link titles and things like that hoping that it's going to increase the rank of that page. Right. It's not. It's going to devalue the rank of the page all those links is on. So, yeah, be careful about, matter of fact, don't go astray with your internal linking. Good rule of thumb is you really don't need more than one link to a certain page on that page. Right. You don't need five links to contact us on our homepage. Yeah. You just really don't because Google's only going to wait the first one anyway. Number eight. Not investing in a fast and mobile friendly experience. Great one. We're talking about most common SEO mistakes and over the last three years this almost could have been number one. Yeah. You don't have a mobile friendly site? Nah. Man, shoot yourself in the foot then. He says, if you haven't considered a smooth mobile experience for your audience, your rating on search engines can be jeopardized. The same goes for load speed. And it should be a no-brainer. Yeah. At the end of the day, man, just a pleasant mobile experience is imperative to good ranking. Yeah. Period. There's no argument about that. If your mobile experience sucks, you will not rank well. Whether that's a mobile site, a responsive site, or even your desktop site. It's not going to happen. Yeah. We've had clients just from mobile traffic see 30% increase in phone calls and form submissions. Just because we took their kind of old static desktop site, built them a responsive site, and so now on a mobile device this content loads fast and

all the CTAs are accessible and they saw a huge spike in not only mobile conversions but overall mobile traffic. They just weren't ranking for mobile searches prior to our site launch. And your first, so once a month, Charles, client results advocate, is having a conversation and that first conversation with them when their campaign launches is like, could this be because of mobile? This can't be because of mobile. Yeah, it was like, yes, it is because of mobile. Yeah. That's how important it is. Yeah, make sure you have a mobile friendly experience. It's just that important. Number nine. Number nine. Not using the power of influencers for social media interactions. This is an area we actually struggle in. And I can admit that. Yeah. He says, it's important to create relationships with such power users and use their credibility to promote your content. Yeah, we're just not like, well, usually it's because we deal with more service providers. Right. And so we're not necessarily needing that kind of cosign from a, you know, bigger social personality. Right. But the key here is using those social resources to promote your content. So after you have written this excellent blog post with this original content that you wrote, you know, he's talking about getting it out there. Right. It's more than just posting it on your site and tweeting it a couple of times or posting it on Facebook. He's saying leverage influencers, people who have huge followings, people who, who, who the search engines recognize also have huge followings. Get those people to shiko your content. Get those people to post it, to share it, to comment on it because then you get more eyes on it. Your ranking goes up because of the influence you have. And so I would say this, and he actually mentioned it also because a lot of people just don't have those type of resources or, or had a bread to spend on somebody to make them do that. Submit your sites, take advantage of, of dig and Reddit and Quora

and things like that because these sites are other ways where people can see your content that may not have necessarily been searching for this post in the first place. But the fact that they're searching Reddit, right, they'll find your content. And if it resonates with them, they'll likely read it because that's what people do on Reddit. They absorb content. Take advantage, man. Last one. Number 10. Number one, my favorite. He says, forgetting about analytics. Right, the top 10 SEO mistakes people make. This is a huge mistake. People say, well, it's not really a mistake, Chuck, because analytics technically don't affect your ranking. Uh-huh. Which is true. Yeah. They don't, but, but understanding... The decisions you make because of your understanding affect it immensely. Exactly. Matter of fact, he goes on to say, setting up and regularly reviewing your analytics is essential for your optimization results. It is. Chris was just referring to a monthly call we have with every single client. How many hours are you in analytics per client? Probably three or four or five depending on the client. Per month. But minimum three, maximum five or six just looking at data, looking at analytics, looking at links, looking at conversions, looking at traffic, looking at strategies. So that way, I can meet with the client. We can review reports. We can figure out what worked, what didn't work, what we need to spend more time on, what we need to stop doing, and then rinse and repeat and do it again the following month. The key is understanding that data. If you don't have those analytics, if you don't have anyone to kind of extrapolate what this data means, right? We talked about the device overview report that he referred to. If you don't have anyone to pull that report and tell you what this means and how to interpret it, then that data is no use to you. So don't forget about your analytics. Don't put all this time on building a great mobile-friendly site and writing all this original content and

submitting it to these social influencers and doing all of these things and then not tracking what happens. That's not a good look. So add your analytics, man, so that way you can track how your site's actually performing. And if you're interested in really having that kind of analysis, so five hours on a website in Google Analytics to understand what opportunities there are for your website. So in our free comprehensive website profit analysis, I'll touch on a little bit of that. I actually don't go into analytics, but I get into SEO. We run an SEO report for that. But if you are interested, you can engage us. We can get Charles to look at your website analytics and then your website because that's part of it and some competition, give you some competitive analysis and give you some idea on the directions you should go. Some guidance on which direction you want to go. I talked to somebody Monday and they were a potential client and they just didn't know where their traffic was coming from or what referral sources they were getting. They were going to cancel an ad they were running on the radio station until I looked at their referral sources and told them that over the last 60 days that ad generated 20 clicks to their site and out of those 20 clicks they had three conversions. Yeah. All of a sudden they were like, oh, we should probably keep that ad. Yeah. Yes, you should. And so, and then that's the... Well, it depends. How much is the ad? How much is the customer? Exactly. But now they armed with enough information to make that decision. Yeah. Right? And so that's the key here. That's why he says don't forget about your analytics. That's why I spend three to five hours a month just looking at data. That's why I spend an hour and a half on a phone call with each client going over that data because that data is important. We're trying to help grow businesses and as a

business owner you need that data to make the right decisions. Absolutely. Man, punch in the face to you, man. Alexander Kessler, the good folks over at Search Engine Journal, he says the 10 most common SEO mistakes. I can dig it. Well done. Good stuff. All right. Do we have any what news? Uh, no what news. We do not have any what news. Hey, if you like this podcast we're going to ask you to do really three things and you can do them right now. Could you please share this podcast with three people? Uh, by the way if you're following us on Facebook you will get notifications when we do go live so you can watch us live. Uh, when we go live we also are live on our website ewebresults.com slash SEO podcast. Uh, that's another place that you can check us out. Uh, but if you could share our podcast three times let's, you know send a, uh hit the share button you know how the share button looks with the three little things on it hit that and then choose your favorite one Instagram, Facebook, Twitter tag three people that you know could benefit preferably business owners from trying to help people um, grow your business. Appreciate it. Exactly. Cool. Excellent. Thank you. If you are looking to grow your business with the largest simplest marketing tool on the planet the internet call ewebresults for increased revenue in your business our phone number is 713-592-6724 Uh, if you have a referral we have a referral uh, process in place you send a referral to us so what might you refer to us? You might refer somebody who's interested in website design and social media and search engine optimization or email marketing even remarketing when you see those ads for the thing you were shopping for and they irritate you to the point of wow, that's impressive I would like to hire that marketing firm we do that um, send those referrals to us when they sign up and pay their bills we pay

you um, we are going to set a world record so this is December 16th and December 17th from noon December 16th until noon December 17th go to upsocialnetwork.com uh, you will get a pop-up fill that out we're supposed to have scheduling already so, uh, to get yourself scheduled if you'd like a copy of the video reach out to me you can send me an email podcast at ewebrezults.com um, we are setting the world record is for the most number of interviews TV style interviews in a 24 hour period uh, that's why we're going from noon, uh, December 16th until noon December 17th please check that out again upsocialnetwork.com let me give you another reason to check that out let me give you another reason to check that out we have a new exclusive SEO rapper video it's called internet marketing only we're going to debut it live at our event December 16th uh, so y'all tune in just for that get the exclusive it's going to be awesome it's called internet marketing only new SEO rapper song love it look, I'm looking forward to that I've heard it I haven't seen the video and you have you yeah that's going to be cool um, also if you're in Houston, go to upsocialnetwork because we do networking in a different way it's pretty cool uh, remember we were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street Houston, Texas Houston, Texas 77092 uh, thank you guys for tuning in if you want a transcript or you want video or you want audio of this podcast you can get it at ewebresults.com those are repurposing of the podcast I was talking about earlier absolutely yeah, each one of those and they go to all sorts of different places it'd be interesting to know how you found us in fact if you're listening and have a moment send an email podcast at ewebresults.com and let us know how you found us originally um, and then why haven't you written a review or shared it with three people yet hey,

we are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes thank you that is because of you guys thank you for making us that most popular podcast we have a lot of fun doing this we have a lot of fun giving it back our mission is to help one million businesses grow by delivering wow marketing results this podcast is one of the ways that we achieve that mission and the other is obviously those people who hire us to do their internet marketing thank you thank you so much until the next by the way we've got the year end in review is coming soon coming up next week it's probably week after next so that's going to be fun rapid fire 52 podcast boom we're going to go over everything that happened in 2017 excuse me 2016 and we won't talk about 2017 at all until the next podcast my name is Chris Maristro Lewis bye bye for now balance check balance check 3-5-0 SEO podcast 350 I got the sport coat on and I'm feeling spiffy it's Chris and Chuck man dabbing ain't in no mistaking today we're talking what Alexander creating let's go SEO podcast 350 let's go boom I like how you threw that dabbing there really