Quick Steps to Improve Your SEO – in Just 7 Minutes with Stephan Spencer

This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about Quick Steps to Improve Your SEO on the Marketing the Invisible.

Hello everyone. A very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. My name is Tom Poland. I'm joined today by Stephan Spencer. Stephan, where are you hanging out, man?

Santa Monica, California.

Santa Monica. They've got a boulevard there, right?

Hell yeah.

I've seen a song somewhere. And a promenade and pier it's a beautiful place to live. Fantastic. Well, I'm just delighted you joined us. For those of you who don't know Stephan, he's a bit of a legend, really. He's generated millions and millions and millions of dollars of revenue, but it's not in his bio. But I wanted to tell you that because I want you to understand that it's a bit of a privilege to hear from him. So well, I mean, it's well deserved. So, the bio is understated: very modest, three times author, avid blogger, international speaker, and consultant on all things SEO. 

He founded his own SEO agency, Netconcepts, in terms of marketing. I'm just a lot of this because he created a very unique world-first pay-per-performance SEO technology, which meant that you paid for results. As opposed to handing over a fat fee every month to an agency, I hope to hell that I get it right. So, from a marketing point of view, that's just brilliant because it removes the obstacles for people to buy. But I'll get off my little marketing hobby horse now and get back to Stephan, I promise. He's also the host of the two weekly podcasts, Marketing Speak and Get Yourself Optimized. Very. We're going to do that in just seven minutes, Stephan. Our time starts now. Question number one is who your ideal client is.

Anybody who wants to improve their rankings in Google will benefit. But my ideal client is mid to large-sized businesses. Brands like Zappos, Volvo and Chanel, for example, are my ideal, but any business that is innovative and nimble. I love working with.

So what's the problem you solve?

A lot of clients don't understand what the secret sauce is to get high rankings in Google. They just look at Google as a black box, and if you're listening to this and you're thinking, yeah, I see it the same way, it's just black magic voodoo, as far as I'm concerned. It's good you're listening to this episode. Right. So when someone regards Google as the big black box, they have no idea how to get found at all. What are some of the typical symptoms of frustration or disappointments they're going to be experiencing?

Well, for one, they don't know when they're winning and when they're losing. They just hand-check their rankings in Google. What they don't realize is that those results are tailored and personalized to you. So you're getting different results than your prospect who doesn't see you on page one, but you're instead on page two for them. Your results are customized based on your search history and so forth. Your location etcetera. So, you got that problem, and you're just not even aware. You haven't set up the proper baselines to measure against. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know where you're at. 

You're flying blind. You don't realize there are tools out there that will help you to compare yourself with competitors in terms of the number of organic keywords that you're ranking for and estimated traffic volumes coming from Google for you versus competitors in your space, etcetera. It's like trying to diagnose a disease without even being able to articulate the symptoms. It's very hard. So you get a lot more traffic, and you just don't know how.

And so if people are wanting more traffic before they come to you and get a professional solution, what are some of the common mistakes that are likely to make?

There are so many. So many because they had a design firm or web developer build them a site, and they said they knew SEO, or they just there was never even brought up. And it's like building a house without having the electrical wiring put in. And nobody knows to bring this out and say, "Hey, the light switches don't work." Well, that's because you didn't tell us to wire the house with electrical. Then, you have to tear the drywall, wire the house, and patch the drywall. Very expensive. You want this stuff baked in from the ground up. 

SEO needs to be baked into the site from the ground up. So, let's say that you've gone with a platform that is search engine-friendly. Let's say it is search engine friendly. Let's say you're running on WordPress, which is very search engine friendly, but it's not search engine optimized because you would have had to think about all those things like the electrical and the plumbing and everything ahead of time and get that all squared away as the site was being built. You have to go back retroactively to fix all this stuff. Big pain in the butt. What sort of things do they have to go and retroactively fix? 

Well, let's say that you have a site that includes a blog, and you've got date-based archives, you'd have author pages, you have tag pages. These are all pages that are probably not going to be good for your SEO. They're going to be considered thin content by Google. They're going to be considered duplicate content because you're reusing all the same content from the blog posts on these tag pages on these date-based archives pages. It's a mess, and you have to go in, and you get to fix all this.

 And might be using the words that are industry vernacular but not the words that your customer base uses. Like for example, I was working with Kohl's department stores and so there was a client who insisted on ranking for kitchen electrics, and I'm like, nobody's searching for that. Nobody even knows what that is. Do you know what a kitchen electric is?

I guess it is an appliance.

 It's a small kitchen appliance for the countertop. Like a food processor, blender or toaster.

Right. So, in the industry, they would refer to that talking to each other an electric kitchen electrics, but no one goes, and I wonder what kind of kitchen electrics today. OK.

Now, getting those words wrong means that you're going to rank for the words that nobody searches for, but maybe your CEO does.

Yeah. OK, so not very helpful. All right. So, Question number five: what's one valuable free action that an audience member can implement that's going to take them not gonna solve the whole problem but it goes take them a step in the right direction?

We'll figure out what words people are searching for. And there are some great free tools that do this. Google Trends, for example. Did you know, in fact, Google Trends? So if you go to Google.com/trends, you can put in multiple keywords and compare them with each other, like putting kitchen electrics, Kitchen Appliances and see the difference in search volumes over time with those two keywords? That's pretty cool. You can also do the same thing inside Google Trends and choose the option underneath where it says web search. Choose YouTube search. And now you can see what the number two search engine, which is YouTube is not Bing; it’s not Yahoo. See what the search behaviors are for YouTube searchers.

Is very valuable, very valuable.

Google Trends, answerthepublic.com is another free tool that's awesome. If you get questions back that people are typing into Google. So if you put in, let's say, kitchen appliances, then you'll get questions like 'How do I repair my kitchen appliances? Where do I go to school to learn how to repair kitchen appliances? Where do I get the best deals on kitchen appliances, etcetera.'

Terrific. Thank you. Thirty seconds left. Two questions to go to the next one for the second time. The valuable free resource you can find is wwww.marketingspeak.com/invisible. Last question: 20 seconds left. What's the one question I should have asked you but didn't.

So, how do you avoid getting snookered if you don't know SEO that well and you've got to hire an SEO expert? You can hire me but you probably you're going to hire somebody else. And for that, go to my valuable free resource, and you'll get the SEO Hiring Blueprint and the SEO BS Detector, which has trick questions and it's so that you can slip those into the interview and you have the answers there. And you'll find out who the posers are.

Perfect. Marketingspeak.com/invisible. Stephan Spencer, thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Thanks for checking out our Marketing of the Invisible podcast if you like what we're doing here. Please get over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us and leave us a review. It's very much appreciated. If you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours, check out www.FiveHourChallenge.com.

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