What is more important than great search engine placement - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 17

Hi, welcome to the E-WebStyle podcast. The inside secrets of SEO podcast. I think it's unknown secrets, but we're going to go with it. That's awesome. I should know this by now. And I'm thinking I was about to redo it because I didn't say it right. My name's Chris Burris. I'm the owner of E-WebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, the sales manager at E-WebStyle. We're glad you joined us today. Today is going to be a great, fun-filled, and very informative podcast. Normally, at the beginning of each podcast, we cover what we did last time. And frankly, I have no idea. Yeah, and it was like a week, week and a half ago we recorded that. Yeah, well, Paul was actually supposed to be in Costa Rica last Friday. Chicago. Which turned into Chicago. Some people didn't realize Costa Rica was so close to Chicago. Don't miss your flight. But we'll call it a passport issue. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We'd like to cover a little bit of news just for some relevancy for what date, if you're listening to this in the, you know, a couple weeks or months or years from now. You know what? I gotta be honest. This is the first season. I don't even know what season it is. But this is American Idol season XYZ. I don't know. And I've watched almost every episode. Is it good? It's good. It's really good. There's this guy on there, Adam, who just rocks. He was like a rock star from day one. It's done great. We're down to the final two. It's Chris and Adam. I don't know Chris's last name. And it's Adam Lambert. And I've actually downloaded some of Adam's songs. You know, I'm not super huge into music. But I love, like, passionate music and passionate renditions. And, man, Adam just knows how to turn it on. So, go Adam Lambert. We're rooting for you. Other things in the news. This is going to be really important to about 1% of the country. I'd say really important to about 5 million

people out of however many million people live in the country. The Rockets. Yes. Yes. The Rockets whooped up on the Lakers. Go, Akeem. Oh, no. Oh, God. Yeah. Hey, what's the roof for Akeem? This is your department, Paul. The Rockets won game six of the Western Conference semifinals. They're playing game seven in L.A. against the Lakers this Sunday. This was supposed to be a sweep, a 4-0 series. The Lakers were supposed to kill the Rockets. And we won game six going to game seven. So, very exciting for Houston and everyone who likes Houston. And if you live in L.A. Ha! Yeah. You know, let's be honest. Houston is actually the fourth largest city in the country. And we get about 80th largest city credit. Tell me about it. Let's be honest. You know, people are like, you know, Houston, you've got Longhorns wandering around downtown. Tumble reeds. People ride horses. That's not so bad, you know. That's not so bad. It's all true. It grows on you. We're not saying it's not true. We're just saying that, you know, cut us some slack and give us some credit. We're a big city here and we've got a lot to offer. We're happy to offer it. So, come visit us. We're a little more friendly than the New Yorkers. Tell me a lot. And a little more grounded than the, you know, vegetarian, esoteric, meditative, although we were talking about meditation the other day. Tell me a lot. Californians. So, come visit Houston. There's lots to do here. We've got some interesting things we want to talk about. We're going to talk about real world SEO. You know, what happens in a real world SEO company and what we're experiencing here through this week. And Paul's got a great story and we put our heads together and we're still working on a particular client coming up with the exact right campaign for her. And so, we're going to talk about how important it is sometimes when they approach us for SEO. So, the bottom line is

ROI. The bottom line is increased web traffic. The bottom line to that is actually increasing business. And so, when somebody calls us up or I'm sure that this was a call that you made and they're interested in SEO, how do I get my website on the first page of Google? Well, sometimes that's not what they need to do first. So, we'll talk about that in just a minute. Another thing that I wanted to talk about is we just sent out a report today and I actually had a powwow with Paul. That's a meeting. I don't know. Powwow or whatever. Because there were a lot of our reports, we send out reports on a monthly basis. They're full color reports go to our clients with the invoice for SEO. We know that a lot of SEO companies out there don't do that. You know, they're trying to automate and send automated reports, etc. Two things happen when you actually send a report. First thing is, I look at it. If it's just an email and it goes out directly from some piece of software, I don't look at it. So, I don't have an exact feel unless I'm personally dealing with that case on a regular basis. I like to go in and highlight things that I think are important. The other thing that happens is, you look at it. If you're a client and you actually get, you know, an email is very easy to dismiss. Frankly, so is paper, but paper is a lot harder to dismiss. You get a lot more junk emails. You get a lot more information emails that you may or may not have time to handle. But you don't get that many pieces of paper across your desk that you need to deal with. Plus, at a minimum, they've got to pull out the invoice to pay it, so they're at least glancing at the report. Anyway, on that particular report, we're working on two separate campaigns. We work in 15 keyword campaigns. So, each campaign is 15 keywords.

We're doing two campaigns for this particular company, and they've got 30 keywords. And they have two domains, actually, two totally separate websites. And when you look at the first board, you know, I said, Paul, hey, look at this. And his reaction was like, whoa, wow, that doesn't, whoa, what's going on there? That's not looking so good. And out of those 30 pages, there were about 54 drops in position overall. And on our full color reports, a drop in position is red, and an increase in position is green. So, there's a lot of red in this particular column. And so, I just wanted to see, you know, what Paul's response was. I looked at it, and I immediately looked and pulled up previous reports. I looked and compared, you know, the current month to when they started, current month to two months ago, and all of those things just to kind of make sure that we're performing properly, right, in the grand scheme of things. Because I imagine if this customer actually looks at that report, we probably will get a call, and that's fine. We also sat down and made sure that our SEO team is aware, you know, that this is something that we need to stay focused on and make sure that we're working with this client, specifically working on this client, so that next month we're not seeing so much red. In fact, we're going to be seeing some green. And I wanted to talk about that because there is this, I think for people who understand the process of getting on the first page of Google, search engine optimization, they understand that, you know, there's a lot of other people who, a lot of them, most of them, aren't doing it intentionally, but they're actually changing their website on a regular basis, or there's new websites popping up. And so, there's always the information that Google is drawing on to determine page rank is in constant flux. Yes. It's constantly changing. And so, your position is actually going to change fairly

regularly. So, I know that's probably the first report that you saw. Definitely the first. With all the red. I've seen that before, and I know that that's just a one-off. And I wanted to kind of express to everybody out there that, you know, if you're dealing with another SEO company, or if you are doing your own SEO work, and you see this report out of 30 keywords, by the way, 24 of those keywords are on the first page. So, it's really not so bad. It's still a great report. 24 out of 30 is still a phenomenal ratio to be on the first page. Exactly. And, you know, it's got a lot of drops in one or two positions, but it's still on the first page. So, in fact, I think when I glanced at it, I don't think anything moved off of the first page. I don't think so either. So, we're actually really in good shape. And, like, if your position is going to go up, your position is going to go down. It's just, that's just how SEO works. It's going to change. If you work with another company and your position drops one month, well, it probably went up. Or at least if you work with us, then it went up months before that, and we had to bump someone out of their spot. So, you know, and there's other companies that are also doing SEO. I mean, there's more reasons than I can explain as to why you would go up or go down. But it will happen. It happens to everybody. Yeah. And, you know, that doesn't even count the fact that sometimes Google actually changes their algorithm. And so, you'll see massive jumps. Like, everybody on the first page goes to some other page or gets juxtaposed. Juxtaposed, juxtaposition. And so, then, you know, everyone's freaking out. And then that's when you get a lot of blogs and then the forums, the SEO forums, like, hey, what happened? Da-da-da, I was here yesterday, not here today, et cetera. So,

again, I just wanted to make that point. If you are doing your own SEO and you do see a drop, or maybe you were just naturally on the first page, you, you know, you've just got that kind of karma thing. So, you happen to write your first website the right way and you were on the first page and all of a sudden you're bumping down. Don't necessarily freak out about it, but make sure that you are still doing the fundamentals associated with the website. So, you know, make sure you're still tweaking your content. Make sure your meta tags are incorrectly. Make sure you're working on inbound links, maybe some article submissions. Make sure that the linking within your website is powerful, useful, and according to, you know, what we've discussed. So, if all of this is sounding foreign or you haven't listened, you know, make sure you go back to our previous podcast. They are available at iTunes. They're also available on our blog. And our blog is e-webstyle, and that's w-e-b-s-t-y-l-e dot com. And then you can click blog right there. And one of our categories is podcast. Actually, I have a couple categories over there. You can hit podcast raw. We have all of our podcasts transcribed, so those are available on our blog. But we break those podcasts into three. Anyway, when you get there, click podcast raw, and you'll only get one audio link to each of our podcasts. Or you can go to iTunes, also on our blog. You can click a button, and if you have iTunes software on your computer, it'll actually take you directly there and get you subscribed to us immediately. But you don't want to just subscribe. You actually want to go back to the previous episodes and make sure you download those as well and listen to those. And what is the keyword we put in for iTunes? Is it just SEO? So if you click iTunes, and then go podcast, and then go SEO, I'm not sure that we're on the first page

there yet. But if you click show all, then you'll see all of the SEO podcasts. We're a green logo. If you visit our website, you'll see kind of our coloring, and you'll see that our little icon is there. And I don't even remember what that icon says anymore. It should say, unknown secrets of SEO podcasts. But that's a lot of words to go on a really small image. So I don't know. I might just say first page or something along those lines. So that's a little bit about fluctuations. Make sure you're doing the consistent things. Maybe you were on the first page, and you were getting some calls, and now you're not. And you were so busy working on your business that you don't have time to do your own SEO anymore. Hey, give us a call. We'll take care of it. We're actually very affordable. We're very good at what we do. We're actually world-class experts at what we do. And make sure you give us a call. So that's a little bit about fluctuations. Expect them. Know that they're going to happen. Don't freak out about them. I really like these examples. And if you guys have any comments out there, do you want just more technical stuff? Do you want more examples? Because we tend to give examples the way that we do business here, which is we give examples of not just, and technical nuances, not just of how to do SEO, but actually kind of how to interface with a client. And from an entrepreneurial perspective, which everyone here at eWebStyle, we all have this entrepreneurial spirit. So we really dive into a business, try and understand it, and then do the right thing for the customer. So I love giving these examples. If you like the examples, don't like the examples, whatever, please send us an email. You can send us an email to podcast at e-webstyle.com. We'll get those. If you've got any questions, we'll be happy to answer. Thank you, people, for sending emails already. Great comments.

Yeah. Dude in Florida, you know, I just don't care. And don't email us trying to pitch us SEO because that happened. Like, dude, did you actually listen to this podcast? Come on. Like, yeah. But, yeah, and I love the real world examples of what we run into. I think this next one would probably be, we could title it, I guess, when not to do SEO. Or, you know, some people say jump first or look before you leave maybe. Yeah, this was definitely a look she needed to look first or she just was not quite ready. Change your look before you leave. Okay. There we go. That's what I would call it. Change your look before you leave. We ran across a client who was a laser tattoo removal or a potential client. She ran a laser tattoo removal business. And she was not very familiar with SEO, but she was familiar with Google and said, I want to be on the first page of Google. So, took a look at her website, talked to her about it. And when I got to the website. What was your first impression on her website? Like, what is this? Like, what? I don't know what to say. Like, what she had. Who did this? Yeah, exactly. Like, it looked kind of, it reminded me of, I think you said a dentist. Yeah, yeah. But she was a laser tattoo removal shop. And there was very little... It was very dry. It was nothing. It was just, it was some green color. A video of her. And, um... A bad, a bad video. Yeah, a bad video. Like a cell phone, a cell phone camera video. With zero, like, actually negative 20 production quality. Because, like, everybody in the room was talking at the set. Taco-ing. I don't know what that is. But everyone in the room was talking at the same time. And so, the room, you know, had no sound absorption. So, there was echoing. And then the laser thing. And the guy screamed. Well, he wasn't

screaming. He was actually, I think they were in the back. They were like, ooh. But it was... She had a good business. She had a lot of word of mouth. She was well-known in this business. And all the tattoo shops knew about her. And a generous lady. Yeah, very nice lady. Which is very important, I think. But her website did not support that. And she gave me just tons of stories about the work she had done. And how she had helped people. She had tons and tons of testimonials. She said, I have over 800 testimonials. She had a lot of them on her website. But that's it. She had the video. She had three lines of content on her homepage. It was her content. Three lines of content. Her video. That was the entire homepage. The next three pages said, coming soon. Then she had a bunch of testimonials. And then a contact us page. And I'm not even sure what was on there. She had nothing. Like, absolutely nothing on this. And she was so concerned about, I want to be on the first page. Well, I want to be number one. That's what she kept saying. Like, I want to be the number one person on Google. I want to beat this guy. I want to beat that guy. And the first thing I said was, hey, we'd love to help you with that. And we will. Yeah. We'll do all that. But we need to look at first things first. And the first thing that she needed to do was change her website. And it's not just because her website wasn't that good. It's also because the competition on that first page. Other people who were, you know, ranked with her, their websites were significantly better. I don't think they're actually that good, but they were significantly better than hers. They were much more appealing. They had more content. They had just so much more information. And I think you're right. Like, they weren't that great. Like, the other one we saw

looked like a doctor's office or something. Yeah. Also a dentist. It wasn't. You brought up the great point. Like, for that industry, it should be more creative. Right. Like, their website should be creative because, you know, people who get tattoos are creative. They are expressive. That's why you get a tattoo. You want to express yourself. And it should, her tattoo should kind of cater to, her website should kind of cater to that industry. But, and, you know, I told her, I said, hey, we can, if we did SEO on your website and we got you to the number one spot, first page of Google. Right up there with your competition, actually. They're going to, your searchers are going to look at you. They're going to look at the next website and probably two or three more websites. And they're going to make their decision, I mean, when I search, I'm going to click the first few websites I see and I'm going to make my decision from the quality of the website. And if I see a website that sucks, I naturally just assume, you know, maybe the business sucks. The service probably sucks. Yeah. And that is false. And I know it to be false. But still, I'm going to have, I've heard this number, and I think maybe you've said it before, it's like eight, ten seconds, six seconds or something. You have, I'm going to be generous and say, ten seconds to get someone's attention. And to really make, and to say, hey, here's why you should stay at this website and research and look at all my pages. If you can't capture that, your visitor's attention, they're going to bounce. They're hitting the back button, they're going to find somebody else in their search results. So we said, hey, if you, we get you to the spot and they look at your website and everyone else behind you, your website has less information, it's less appealing. They're not going to, they're going to bounce. And they're going to go with someone

else. Yeah, they're going to go with your competition who has a higher quality website. Yes. So thus the phrase, you know, look, what was it? Change your look. Change your look before you leap. Because, yeah, we can, we could leap into SEO. We could do a great job, get her on the first page. I think in that particular industry, we probably could, it would be fairly easy to get her into the first position on the first page. And then if the second or third positions have significantly better websites, it's just not going to, it's, the ROI is not going to be worth it. At the end of the day, she's not going to have what she needs, you know. And it's a small business. It's, I think it's a great business. A generous lady, she, you know, she talks about some of her testimonials and some of the things she said over the phone. You know, if you've got no money and you've got a tattoo on your face and you're trying to, you know, straighten out your life and get a job, she'll actually remove the tattoo for free. Yeah. And, and, you know, that's, that's awesome. You know, we're, we give back in the podcast and in other ways. When you meet somebody who does that, then you want to just do the right thing by them. And we're not, you know, we're not the cheapest service out there, but we're giving her the right advice. You know, we make more money on SEO, but we don't even want to start SEO until we do the website. And that's the right thing that I felt like it was definitely the right thing to do. And there are companies, I know there are companies out there that would have said, sure. How much can you, first page. Yeah. Give me your, you want, yeah, you want this, give me your money and we'll, we'll start doing it. And, you know, and her ROI just would not have been there. You know, she may have

been happy to see, oh, I'm on the first page, but why, why aren't it, why, why am I not seeing any more business? Yeah. You know, why am I getting a ton of, a lot more traffic, but my phone calls aren't increasing. Nothing's, nothing's converting. Yeah. And there are people who would have done that, um, just taking the money and run. But, you know, of course, everybody knows we are world-class customer service. We've said it about a million times. We're going to do what's best for her business. If she wants to grow, we're going to say, hey, this is what you need to do to grow. And we'd love to help you. We'll work with you. But this is the very first step. You need to change your look before you take this leap. Which, and in fact, something you said just kind of triggered something. You know, this is an SEO podcast. If you guys are out there and you're doing your own SEO and you're actually doing pretty good, but you don't feel like you're converting enough, you know, we'll be happy to consult with you, give you some ideas, and, you know, try and win some of your web development business. Or even your SEO, because let's be realistic. If you're a small business, and depending on the type of industry, as you, if you're doing well with your own SEO and you're getting that business, then you really should be focused on the business. Let that revenue generation move that off to the experts, and you need to become an expert in your own business. And that's not necessarily an SEO expert. That's our business, so we have to be experts at SEO. But, you know, no matter what you're selling, service, product, you really want to be focused on your business so you can grow your business. Let us handle your SEO. Or at least, like I said, if you're not getting the ROI that you're expecting, you know, and that investment in that case is your time. And that's

all you've got as a business owner. All you have is time. And so you need to use that for the exact right things, the exact most profitable things for your business. Yeah, it's your most valuable asset is your time. And you're probably more valuable closing the deals or, you know, talking to the customers. Making phone calls, something. Sitting in front of a computer for two to three hours a day trying to figure out what's the best meta tag to put in this particular position. Yep. So you close the sales. You convert your sales from phone calls into sales. We will convert your, help you convert your clicks into phone calls. Yeah, whatever. Three steps. First page, phone calls, clicks, phone calls. And you brought a good point that kind of reminds me, like, if you're working on your own SEO and you're getting great traffic and you're having trouble converting your sales, you know, converting those, that traffic into potential leads or into sales. Traffic is great. And I tell people this all the time. You know, everyone wants more traffic. But you do SEO to bring in the sales, you know. So you want to, if you need help, get, you know, call a professional company. Call eWebStyle. Because the real meat and potatoes of SEO is once you're, you know, what are they doing? By the way, what's our phone number? 718. If you need to give us a call, you can dial area code 713-592-6724. And we will help you convert that, convert that traffic into phone calls or into sales from your shopping cart or whatever it is that you're looking for. A million different things. So give us a call. We'd love to help you guys. Excellent. Well, we're going to cut our podcast a little short today. We've got a little bit of corporate training today. So that's going to be a lot of fun. Improv training. Improv training. It's going to be a little different today. It's going to be totally different. I'm going to enjoy that. You

can, the place we're going is actually a place called ThirdCoastComedy.com. So I'm going to give them a little plug. So that's the end of our podcast. Thank you so much for joining. Keep sending your emails. And come back next time. We'll see you then. Until then, I'm Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now.