Think Tank - Ideas to Grow Your Business

Basic Things You Need To Know About SEO

Episode Summary

If you are new to SEO or online marketing, this episode can give you a good place to start. We will go over the basic things you need to know in order to grow your business on the web. We will go over what is the difference between brand recognition or keyword ranking. What are backlinks, and why content creation became so crucial for any business in our days.

Episode Notes

In this episode we will do a short overview on SEO for beginners and people who are new to online marketing. We will explain the overall craft and strategy. How google works and then dive a bit deeper on a few key points:

03:00 Backlinks -  What are backlinks and why SEO does not stop there (as must people think...)
04:30 Content Creation - Why content is the new gold of our times and how to create and distribute content in the most effective way.

10:00 What are keywords and how to build your marketing strategy based on them.

Episode Transcription

Whether you're a small, medium or large business, you must adhere to the modern marketing methods. I think an idea provides insights into marketing techniques that work for today's businesses, as well as consumers alike. Learn about the best methods of business development for today's marketplace, internet marketing, utilizing social media, in business marketing, put on your thinking cap as you enter the thing

for search engine optimization, and what that means is when you go to Google, like if you put in ABC avocado and let's say that's a catering company, then that's going to come up, but people already know you. So that's more like brand recognition. But if you actually wanted to rank for let's say, you know, high end organic catering then you Don't just come up for that you actually have to write content. So your website has to have content about organic catering, you've got to write blogs that are on site, you've got to build some off site.

And in those blogs, you know, using target keywords that, you know, you know, the potential customer or client is going to type into Google so right, you know, the forethought to think oh, somebody might search for, you know, avocados, and we want to do 20 different variations of avocados and this county and avocado, catering and all this kind of thing, right? That's going to generate a lot more results than just plugging in your business name.

Yeah, there's there's also some tools that people can use if you're watching right now, a lot of mistakes that business owners make is they think they know what people search and like you're the business owner, you know, the most, but the customer doesn't know anything.

So maybe working or teaming up with somebody who is not, you know, committed to this right.

Maybe Set eyes. But then also there's software out there where you can actually look to see what is being searched. So you should do that before you start building content. Because how do you know what kind of real estate to build, if you don't know who's going to show up? Like we use the, the AdWords Keyword Planner on Google, it'll actually tell you like, what volume of searches will happen per month. And then we also use a tool called sem rush. And you can put keywords in there too. And it'll actually give you suggestions and give you like, different types of content and questions that people are asking. Right? So you have to know like, where the traffic is, the other thing that you want to do to when you're doing SEO is actually looking at your competitors. Because most of the time, if you start from scratch and you like try on your own, you're gonna cost yourself a lot of money. But by using sem rush and some of the tools that our agency has, we can actually look at your competitors ads, and shortcut that path, so that we're actually on the right track and again,

develop a comprehensive strategy that's going to target all these things. Yeah, exactly. So okay. And then Could you talk about backlinks a little bit? What is a backlink? What does that mean? Yeah, so

a backlink is just like, you know, if you were to create a Facebook business page with a URL and a link, and that has relative content to your keywords, then that's going to help raise up your domain. It's almost like, you know, superheroes like on Marvel or DC Comics, it's like if, if you hold hands with, you know, Wonder Woman, you're going to get powers. And backlinks are kind of like holding hands with somebody that's going to raise up your website. But it's just like, I would say, probably the law of influence. You know, when you have good people around you, it raises you up. When you have bad people around you. It kind of pulls you down a website's the same way. So if you're connected to let's just say like a Facebook and a really cool LinkedIn presentation, and you're on Pinterest, and you're on some of these high domain authority sites, or someone's Instagram Exactly. It's going to bring your you know, your Google ranking factors up higher having social media links on your website, having Google Maps links on your website, it all sends a signal to Google saying this site is relevant. So this is a typical report for our clients. I think the biggest fear for a lot of people that are actually hiring someone to do SEO, is they have no transparency. They have no idea what the person is doing. In fact, just even as of last week, I talked to somebody paying somebody $5,000 a month, and they have no report,

then they know they don't have much to show for it.

Right, exactly. So we like to be really transparent with people so they know exactly what they're getting. This is what we're doing every month for this one client. You know, we're building out 703 links per month. And it goes everything from social bookmarking to social media optimization, classified videos, search engines, image sharing, articles, press releases, blogs. Different podcasts, business citations, and then document sharing. So for example, if we go to Tumblr, you can see that some of these URLs are very specific to, like this URL here is very specific to the keywords. And then we're building out all these before and after shots with the phone number. And I mean for somebody and sit in an office and do all these things. It would take them forever. I mean, that's just one link. So we're building all these micro sites, and Tumblr has a high domain authority. So we know that you know that's, that's going to be beneficial. But I mean, these are all links we provide the username and the password. And that's social bookmarking. If we go to classified ads, we're building out classified ads again, all these contribute to the ranking factors all

just for one

client, one client Exactly. If we go to SM o submissions, we build out alias social medias that aren't official to send social signals back And Drive, drive those up. And it goes everything from social bookmarking to social media optimization, classified videos, search engines, image sharing, articles, press releases, blogs, different podcasts, business citations, and then document sharing. And if you look over here, even just after, you know, two, two and a half months, we have him on the first page of Google, right and position 10. Yeah, so that's great movement, we usually don't tell people it's going to happen that quickly. But if there's not a lot of activity, then we know that by building these links, and actually doing all the necessary factors that we can get the improvement, and most of their keywords are all moving up. What they say there's actually some, you know, good materials on Google, they say that you really should have a good one to two year strategy. When it comes to SEO. You shouldn't like you know, it's like planting a flower in the garden. You shouldn't expect it to grow overnight, right? And if it doesn't grow overnight, you don't jump up and down and like get a hammer and Right, beat it up and get upset patients on like week two, right? So

and then you know some of the numbers that are still lagging behind and you're finding them on page six, let's say of your search engine, being able to target those, you know, and bring them up to the first page. So looking at the report and and setting up a strategic plan going forward.

I mean, the overall thing is like, we go after the ranking for the keywords, but as we write the content, even if you're going after 50 keywords, after six months, you're probably going to be ranking for about three four or 500 keywords because within that thousand words is other words to that's exactly the ones you aren't focused on that are just necessary. There's

exponential growth

essentially. Exactly So, and that's social bookmarking. If we go to classified ads, we're building out classified ads again, all these contribute to the ranking factors. That's

all just for one

client, one client Exactly. If we go to SMS submissions, we build out aeleus social media that aren't official to send social signals back and drive drive those articles submissions. Here we're submitting articles to Facebook and medium and Evernote. There's a lot of SEO companies that don't do any content creation, they just build backlinks. And you need the content element. So this is the off page articles. But then we have on page blogs to that we're writing and publishing and for the doctor, he doesn't have time to write articles because he's busy. He's not a writer. Exactly. So we put that up in order to get it ranked. here's here's press releases here. Live journal PR sink, and we're writing it again, it's focused on specific keywords strategies, blog submissions, blogger, video submissions, we're putting up videos on YouTube and dailymotion, search engine optimization RSS feeds, we also do image sharing. So most of the times people will provide this huge Google Drive or just image Dropbox or whatever content is like assets, so we get more assets, we can push it out on the web, we can get better results. So yeah, so we have a client, that's a Mercedes dealer. And when we first started, we thought, Oh, you know, I don't know if we'll be able to do as good as who they have. And they were actually with a designated partner for like, the Mercedes umbrella hired by corporate Yeah, hired by corporate. So a lot of times when there's partnerships, what happens is that now, people don't start to ask questions. They just assume that those people are doing what SEO should be right. And so, you know, we started digging and we started looking at it and literally now after literally like almost a year, they're getting calls from all the other dealerships and all the other cities because they're upset because their interactions were basically outranking every dealership within like 100 months radius. And that makes us aware that all these other dealerships really aren't doing what we're doing. Right. They're probably just sitting on their laurels thinking they're getting what they should be.

Right. And their SEO development is what's driving all that.

Exactly. And when you say SEO, I mean, a lot of people get confused, because, you know, they don't understand SEO. But I mean, I just went through like content, image sharing, document sharing, SoundCloud, podcasts. It's like almost everything under the sun that we're doing on the backend that creates those results. And the biggest question is, you know, what is the SEO that you're getting? Because some people do SEO and just Google My Business, and that's it. No content, no blogs, no podcasts, and they call it SEO. And some people you know, we get people report like this. I've literally seen reports that are like a paragraph of chicken scratch in an email. And that's their SEO report. And I'm like, that's

it. That doesn't make sense.

And I'll ask the client like, what are your keywords And the clients like, Well, what do you mean? What are my keywords? They're just doing SEO,

they've never even asked.

They've never even asked the question. So a lot of people don't know the right questions to ask because they don't know what SEO means.

And it's not even their fault. It's just like, you know, it's relatively new. Exactly thing that everyone's kind of now understanding is huge. But if you can have the knowledge, like what we've just talked about, that's gonna make or break your business.

So I mean, because what we do takes a lot of work. It's not like pressing a few buttons right here and there. We put a lot of thought into it. So we want to get the right customer where it's like a win win, where we can help them grow and we grow. If someone doesn't have the right mentality, which I call just like a long term marathon mentality for business, then they're not going to be be in business too long.

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