IH: If you’re looking for some helpful advice about search engine optimization, this is the episode for you. Whether you’re just starting and looking into building your company’s website for the very first time or to make sure your business shows up in the top search results on Google and stays there. Stephan shares tips and tricks that are going to be extremely helpful to get more traffic to your company’s website with SEO. He elaborates on ranking at the top of search engines and staying there.

Using a combination of paid advertising as well as organic search, if you’d like to join world-renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius Network, go to GeniusNetwork.com. So, I introduced to you, of course, Dean Jackson and Stephan Spencer. Wow, I can’t wait to hear what he has to say now. This is gonna be very exciting, Stephan. I’m excited that you’re here.

This is always a topic that people have a lot of mystery around. There’s a lot of mystery around how these search engines work and SEO, this magic witchcraft that you perform. So I’d love to maybe have in your words talk about what the importance of this is or why you’ve kind of dedicated yourself to this pursuit and what can come of it.

It’s really fun to break apart and put back together something like an algorithm, or think of it like an engine that you tear apart and you rebuild. I love figuring things out, like poking and prodding at the black box that is Google. I am so excited to get a breakthrough and then share it with others.

And yeah, that just lights me up. And I like demystifying how search engines work and how Google works because it puts the power back into our hands instead of seeing this as, like you said, black magic or witchcraft or voodoo. It’s science.

So, I love cracking the code element of it, too, because I look at that’s what direct response is and human behavior. Suppose you can find the right words to put on a postcard that get people to go to a landing page and get them to leave their name and their email address and the right words to say. In that case, it’s all very. What I call what I crack to is algorithms, marketing algorithms, you know, to figure out the right way to say things and the right things to do. But your outcome of the SEO is traffic. That’s really the thing that people see as, how can I get to be number one on Google? Or how can I use it? So is that really the most important outcome of it? Is it traffic the thing, or are there other more important things with that?

In doing SEO on a deeper level. I would say the outcome is to change the world, and you’re just using Google as a vehicle. Google is like the operating system of the internet. It’s the quickest, most efficient, most direct path between points A and B. Somebody is Googling you, your business, your services, products, and your competitors. You need to show up. Otherwise, you’re not in their consideration set. You’re not. And remember the days of the white pages and the yellow pages. So you might be on the white pages, but you’re not on the yellow pages. 

And the area that they’re looking for in the topic space and the niche or industry. And thus, you’re invisible. And suppose that is what’s holding you back from reaching your outcome of changing the world, changing how people think about your topic, your niche, your industry, and helping them too. In that case, I don’t know, reach greater heights, amplify their message. It’s not happening because you’ve made a mistake, or your team or your webmaster has made a mistake in configuring your web server so that it’s not optimized for search. It’s kind of de-optimized, it’s anti-SEO. Right.

you don’t get to get your outcome and change the world. So that’s sad and we got to fix that. So, that’s how I see SEO fitting into the bigger picture. Yes, you want to delegate tasks and get things done, but you’re much better off focusing on the end game, right? So begin with the end in mind. And if you delegate, for example, an outcome instead of a task, you’re going to get a better outcome for yourself, your business, your family, and your community then if you just say, here’s this task, here’s this task, here’s this task, or here’s this traffic source, here’s this traffic source, here’s this traffic source, let’s plug them all in and, you know, create some funnels and so forth. That’s what I don’t know that misses the bigger picture for me.

So when you say that, like looking at the bigger purpose of the world, it is getting people access to information. You’re saying that if people have knowledge or information that they wanna get out there and they’re not properly doing the right things that information can get out there. They’re missing out on their opportunity to make whatever impact their purpose is.

Yeah, I remember Anil Gupta, I don’t know if you know him, the author of Immediate Happiness. Great guy. He once told my wife that because you’re not getting your message out there at the time, I don’t know if she was podcasting yet. She’s got a great podcast that’s been going on for like five years now, Stellar Life. It’s the name of it. But at the time, I don’t think she was doing that yet. And he said, because you’re not stepping up and doing the thing that’s going to get your message out there, people are dying. 

And that really struck a chord with her. And I always remembered that. Because you’re not stepping up, and I’m not talking about her. I’m talking about all of us. People are dying. People are lost. They’re depressed. They’re sad. They’re unfulfilled. They’re not getting their sole purpose fulfilled. So yeah, we need to step up.

Wow. I get it. That’s amazing. And it’s true when you really think about it that if you do have information that can change somebody’s life if it’s not in front of them at the right time, it’s not doing them any good. That’s true. I want to dig into the effort, the knowledge, and the actual help or work that it takes to get free traffic. And in the comparison, both in terms of if we have a standing start and start right now, you could have paid traffic literally today for the keywords that matter to you. So, I’d love to hear your take on how you find its position for SEO.

So I will say, first of all, that paid search is great if you need to turn the spigot on immediately. There is not a lot of opportunity with SEO to do that because SEO does take time. In fact, Google engineer Maile Ohye and former Google engineer Maile Ohye famously said it takes four months to a year to give the SEO practitioner four months to a year for the results to come in from their work. And I think that is accurate.

But the old adage, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. So if you’re not doing SEO, start today, not tomorrow, not next month, and not two years from now because otherwise, you’re missing out on an asset that paid search is not. Paid search is a traffic source and it is an income stream if you do it well, but it is not an asset in the same way that SEO is. SEO can put money in your pocket month after month, year after year. Because you have some equity, some authority, and trust that you have built up with Google by building links, getting yourself out there sharing your knowledge, and being remarkable.

And I use that term remarkable very deliberately. I’m using that term because Seth Godin and the Purple Cow defined it as being worthy of remark. Right. If you have content that’s worthy of remark, that can get you a lot of links, a lot of social shares, and a lot of buzz. And, of course, it creates a lot of light in the world. So if you think of it as I’m building an asset by doing SEO, and I’m also diversifying my traffic sources by also doing paid search, I think that’s a nice way to frame it. If you think of every page of your website as a virtual salesperson, if you have 500 pages of content, that’s great. That’s like 500 virtual salespeople.

Who are offering products and services on Google for hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands different of keywords. But then if you go to, let’s say, 5,000 pages, now you’ve got 5,000 virtual salespeople, and that’s way better. So the more pages of quality content that are non-duplicate, not thin, just good quality and hopefully some of its remarkable content, those are so many more opportunities to rank. And it is that leveraging effect of that asset spread across many thousands of pages.

H: So what does it actually take then to rank highly in Google? And where do we start with that?

I would suggest framing it with the three pillars framework where you have content, architecture and links, and then everything goes into one of those three buckets. Let’s say you have to do keyword research that goes in the content bucket or pillar. Let’s say that you need to change some settings in the Yoast plugin for SEO for your WordPress site that would go in the architecture bucket. Let’s say that you need to do some digital PR public relations and, uh, hit up some journalists and make some pitches and see if you can get featured in some articles that would go into the links bucket.

So, different activities again with a bigger outcome in mind of changing the world or whatever it is that your MTP is. All these different activities will get you there at varying degrees of speed. Your Achilles heel is that you have very little authority as far as Google sees it because you pulled up a tool like Majestic.com and you put in your domain name, and it tells you that your trust flow is a four out of 100, then you know that that’s what you need to fix.

And all the other stuff can just sit by the wayside for now in terms of SEO. This is the thing to focus on. A lot of people think that they have to do everything because it’s a best practice. Well, I need to go through every single one of my meta descriptions and rewrite it so that it’s better and I have 5000 pages. That’s going to take many, many hours.

Well, meta descriptions don’t and increase your rankings. They only help with the click-through rate for wherever your position is already. If you’re number 10 and you have a better snippet at number 10 because you’ve optimized the meta description, it really didn’t move the needle much. Focus on the things that are the highest and best opportunities, the biggest needle movers.

If that’s getting link equity, link authority because you’re in the basement in terms of your Trust Flow score, your Citation Flow score, or both. That’s where you start. And it’s as simple as that. And you don’t need to be an SEO expert to see that. You just pull up with Majestic.com for free, your Trust Flow and Citation Flow score. So that’s where I would start. I’d also look at things like your page speed.

There are plenty of free tools that will give you some reading on different issues in those three pillars. So, PageSpeed would be on the architecture pillar. If you pull up PageSpeed Insights, you just Google for that. You don’t even have to know its URL. PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google. You put your website URL, like for your homepage, in there, and it will tell you, out of a hundred, what your score is. If it’s a 20 and it’s in the red, and it says you don’t pass Core Web Vitals, oops, that’s a big problem. That is something that you need to address as well. Google is going to start demoting sites that have slow-loading pages that don’t pass core web vitals. Core web vitals are this new metric or three metrics that Google’s been talking about since last year. And the page experience algorithm is gonna come live very soon. It’s due to launch in May. And when it does, if you don’t pass core web vitals, you will get demoted.

How stable is what you’re doing in SEO? I haven’t really paid attention to it as a thing to move forward on. So I’m glad that you’re here so that I can kind of, for my own situation, look at it and say, is this the juice worth the squeeze?

It is stable as long as you’re not trying to game the system. Right. I have been pearly white hat from the very beginning. It’s not a game you can win if you are going to try and cheat the rules. Google has guidelines on whether or not we think they’re fair. They can call the shots cause it’s, it’s their ballgame. It’s a company with a profit motive.

And if they want to set a rule that you think is unfair, that’s it’s, it’s their search engine, and you’re getting a lot of traffic free. I put in quotes air quotes here because you do have to put time, energy, staff, and budget towards SEO. It’s not really free, but like I said, you’re getting an asset. But you’re getting this traffic without spending money with Google, and it comes with some rules.

And so, if you’re trying to figure out how to outsmart Google with regard to fake links and private blog networks, you’re trying to fool Google. And you don’t know. I never bought into that. I always thought that was unethical and that it was just bad business. It’s bad business karma. Yeah, that’s why it’s stable for me and for my clients: because we don’t try to play those games.

What size of business has the best sweet spot for outcomes with SEO? Is it an advantage for big corporate companies with huge teams of budgets and footprints versus a small business or an entrepreneur?

In some ways, yes, it is. In some ways, no. If you were a big business that your hands were tied in various ways, like for example, I remember working with Chanel and there were so many pages of the Chanel.com site. We were not allowed to put any content on; it could only be images. There’s no text. Like how are you supposed to rank for keywords with pages that have no text on them? And so it felt like trying to do SEO with your hands tied behind your back. And yet, they had massive amounts of authority. If they wanted to and were willing to put text on the page, they could own a lot of keywords.

So, in that way, they were not nimble and at a disadvantage to the small player, to the entrepreneur who’s nimble, who is a quick start and, you know, just get stuff done. On the other hand, if you are a small startup with no authority, your trust flow is a four out of a hundred. It’s going to be really hard to rank for anything but your brand. Maybe even then, you can’t rank number one for it, depending on the brand name.

But regardless of what your business is, whether you’re getting, let’s say, 100% of your business right now from referrals, if that’s the case, you still would benefit greatly from SEO. It’s not because you’d add another referral source; it’s because maybe you would. But it’s because where do people do their due diligence? Right. Google. How do you want them to be able to find you? Not just to find you but to see all the good stuff about you and nothing bad. Right. You’re curating those brand search results. So it’s all of your best stuff that it’s the game is stacked in your favor. Like everything, the shelf space is full of all your best.

PR and press mentions, blog posts, podcast interviews, social accounts, and so forth and so on. So if that happens, then they think, okay, this guy or this gal is legit. I’m just going to work with them. And all those people you never heard from because they were referrals who stopped when they saw that your LinkedIn was ranked number one instead of your actual website or when they saw there were some negative reviews, just a few positions lower on a Yelp page for your business. You lost it, and you had no idea that it had even happened.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. One piece of evidence is that I wrote an article on Medium a few years ago about the nine-word email. And so that email on Medium, I get the Medium Digest, or whatever. It shows you that, you know, and I’m constantly getting 100 to 150 reads of that article, you know, every week for, it’s been years now, and I imagine it’s because, in Google, people search out nine-word email, one of the top things that come up is that Medium article. And that’s the kind of thing, I guess, what you’re talking about, the long growth of that, like what the value is to get 100 eyeballs a week on something.

Yeah, but here’s the problem. I guess the opportunity is how I would reframe that. For you, how many of those 150 are reaching out to you and saying, hey, I want to book a call. I want to.

Yeah, quite a few because at the bottom of the article, I offer a by-email mastery book that they can get.

Okay, awesome, awesome.

That turns into people going to opt in, which is basically the free traffic that you were talking about. So, you know.

That’s awesome, and just to point one thing out.

It wasn’t anything I did consciously.

Here’s where it could even be on steroids: if it were your own website that ranked with that same article instead of medium. Yes. Medium does have a lot of authority, but imagine that your website had enough authority that it outranked the medium article. And then you could put an exit pop. You could offer a, uh, like some sort of additional irresistible. Offer all of that over on the right-hand side and, further conversion, optimize the page.

H: Now you’re talking about so much more lead flow.

Yeah. Well, there you go. It’s like James Schramko, a friend of both of ours, believes in owning the racetrack. And if you are playing on some driving the car on somebody else’s racetrack, they can change the rules on you. They can kick you off the racetrack. It is not a stable platform for you. And that’s what’s happening because you don’t own that platform. You’ve built a house on rented land. And at any point in time, they could, you know, mix metaphors, pull the rug out from out.

Right, exactly. Yeah. So, would it be helpful to talk about where somebody could start? Let’s say, like, I think if we think about who’s here with us, you know, we’ve got a few hundred people that are probably running six- and seven-figure businesses as entrepreneurs. There are probably some people with ten or more million-dollar businesses, but the majority of them, I would guess, are going to be mostly six figures on the way to a million or a million-plus businesses.

And they may be in lots of different, lots of different things, some local businesses, some that serve, you know, national or international audience. So, what would be a good jumping-off point for people? What are some of the, is there an 80-20 to this that these, if you just gonna do these things that if, that would be the biggest impact?

Yeah. So I love the 80-20 rule, the Pareto Principle, but I also learned from James Schramko that the 80-20 rule is fractal. So there’s actually another layer where there’s an 80 20 of the 80 20. Yes, and 80, 20 of that and so forth. So, 4% of the activities that you could possibly do or that are on your to-do list are going to generate 64% of your outcome. So let’s find that 4% because that’s going to get you most of the way there. And I think about SEO kind of technical wizardry, which many of our listeners and folks here are probably not in that boat, not in that position to go in and tweak settings and check the XML site maps.

And wouldn’t know where to start.

Like that’s, I was joking that you know, I’m-

So give up on that. Front of the screen, yeah. Who, not how, that’s what we need, yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. That’s what you took the words right out of my mouth. So you get the right who, who can do that technical wizardry for you. And you just know to ask the right questions, actually have this Hiring Blueprint that includes a BS detector, which you can use when you’re interviewing the technical person, the SEO practitioner, a specialist, and ask them they get them wrong, there’s only one right answer, and you don’t have to be an SEO expert to know that they got the answer wrong.

So for example, you could ask them about what’s your process for optimizing my meta keywords. That’s a trick question because meta keywords never counted in Google, ever, not on day one. So if they say something like, “Well, those don’t count as much as they used to, but here’s what we do,” that’s as wrong of an answer as “Oh, we love meta keywords.” Like it’s all wrong, and let’s say said, “Meta keywords never counted,” cause that’s the right answer. So if you know what the right answer is, and you have the cheat sheet of all these questions to ask, and you just kind of fold a few into the interview, then you know you’re hiring the right person or at least somebody who’s skilled, even if you’re not skilled in SEO yourself. And so that handles the technical side of it.

But what about the creative content side of it? There’s not a lot of wizardry involved here.

That’s the beauty of it. For example, let’s say that you wanted to come up with an editorial calendar for not just social media but for blogging and for videos and just, yeah, for all the content that you’re gonna produce for your content marketing. Well, you could use a tool called AlsoAsked.com. Okay. AlsoAsk.com, and what that does is you put in a keyword. I don’t know. 

Let’s say it’s podcasting, and it will come back with all of these different questions that people are asking Google. Then you can take those questions and create an FAQ page, or you could create a bunch of blog posts around that, and you can schedule those out, and that’s your editorial calendar. You can do this for a number of different keywords, and this tool is based on the people also asked box. That’s why it’s called AlsoAsked.com. When you are searching on Google, you see a bunch of questions related to your search query, in addition to all the regular results.

Oh yeah. Down at the bottom.

You can click on those questions. Yeah, well, or just, you know, shortly lower down the page, start clicking on these questions, and it will not only expand to show the answer but also keep adding more and more questions. It’s kind of like a bottomless pit, right? And you can go very deep down that rabbit hole. Imagine having a free tool that, in a great kind of tree structure, sort of visual, shows you a bunch of these questions.

Then, at any point, you can click on one question. 

Then it re-centers that as the beginning of the tree and then does another query for you and comes up with all of these additional questions. You can save this to an Excel spreadsheet. You can save it as a PNG file, like as an image, and as I said, you can use that as fodder for determining what your editorial calendar is, what should go on your FAQ page or what you’re going to shoot videos about it’s really.

So would it be fair to say then, this is what would fall into? This is what would be called keyword research. Is that what you’re looking at? Is essentially seeing what, because beginning with the end in mind, you would guess to think about what is it that we wanna be the answer to when people are going to Google? And would it be fair to say, or is it true that you would be looking for the most traffic? Or the ones where you’ve maybe got the best chance of making an impact.

If we take it’s kind of a combination, there are three criteria that I would recommend evaluating a good keyword by. One is, is it attainable that I can rank on page one for that because if you’re on page two, you’re in no man’s land. Can I also attain that ranking? Can I attract my target audience with that? Is that relevant to my business or to my audience? And then, is it popular? Are there actually enough searches for that keyword that warrant my time? So that’s the juice worth the squeeze, right? Yeah. And, if you think about

Let’s go laterally a bit broader and think, let’s say that I’m selling something that doesn’t have a huge keyword search volume for it. I don’t know. Let’s say that baby bassinet is. Let’s say you make bassinets and sell them online. Maybe the search volume isn’t that high for a bassinet, baby bassinets, baby bassinets, etc. But if you think about who your audience is, it’s expectant parents. So what are expectant parents searching for? So you go to where the fish are and do your fishing there.

And in the case of expectant parents, they are searching for baby names in droves. That is a massive keyword, and it’s only expectant parents. How many people are searching for baby names that don’t have a new baby on the way? Probably nobody. So that’s your target audience, and that’s who you’re going after. And sure, you’re not selling baby names, but you’re reaching your audience, and you’re going to add value.

You’re going to do content marketing. You’re going to maybe provide some remarkable content around baby name meanings or new trends or maybe spiritual baby names or conscious baby names or whatever, and it resonates with your exact audience. And then you can have that soft sell of the essential nesting checklist, those 31 things that you’re going to need for your new baby when he or she arrives and includes a bassinet.

Okay. I just had a light bulb come on for me because now we’re saying something in a world that I understand now. I see something that became clear. One of the things that I was talking about with our reaching people is that sometimes it doesn’t have to be exactly the thing that you do. You said baby bassinets that a lot of people aren’t searching on that. Years ago, I did some work with a party rental company in Toronto, Canada.

I asked them, “What would be the dream come true client for you? What’s the home run? What is the best client that you could get?” And they said an outdoor wedding would be a home run because you get the tents and generators and linens and tables. They need everything, right? But party rental companies are way down on the list of sexy things that a new bride and groom or potential bride and groom are searching for, right?

Or looking or even on there where are we going to have the wedding and when? Those are the first two items on the list, right? So we put together a directory of 101 great places to have an outdoor wedding in Toronto and started advertising this directory, which was getting amazing responses because that’s the thing that people were interested in and excited about. And now he had that audience to himself because he was the only party rental company that had identified people early on in the process. So now I get what you’re saying about a content strategy. 

What would be the content that your market is searching for that maybe it’s not directly related to buying a baby bassinet? It’s not somebody looking to buy something, but it’s somebody who’s in the world that’s going to require, at some point, a bassinet. That’s smart. And that’s, so you’re saying those are the kinds of things that would have the longest-reaching impact, not just competing on baby bassinet prices or for sale or anything like that. Right.

So, we’re looking for that 4% that generates 64%. Yeah. And, here’s another way to: it’s about time. So if you think about how I get links in droves as well, yeah, you have to have something super remarkable there that is so worthy of a remark that it causes everybody to just proactively without prompting the link to you. I mean, it’s going to help of course, if you outreach to folks and let them know about your content.

But imagine if it’s so buzzworthy and link-worthy that folks just wanna beat a path to your door. They want us to link to you from their blogs, their resource lists, their homepages and everywhere else. So, if you think about what could be an incredibly valuable piece of content that is so link-worthy and shareable that it’s just gonna have a life of its own. Let me give you an example or two. So this is an old one, and it’s not even mine. It’s from another SEO who will remain nameless because he cut some corners.

But back in the day when Digg was a thing before Reddit was the king, it was really big. And he had all these accounts that were in the top 100. He had to have some top 10 ones as well. So, anyway, he utilized that, and he also liked to cut corners in terms of content creation. So he found this article for his client. The client was LifeInsure.com, a small life insurance brokerage.

He probably had a dozen or fewer employees. And what was the magic here is that he found this article online: 20 things he didn’t know about death. He just lopped off one of the items, making it 19 things you probably don’t know about death. He put it on this life insurance website, and he hid it so that it was only available if you found it through Digg. And he submitted it to Digg, of course. And it made the front page of Digg.

Imagine if you could make the front page of Reddit. Yeah. It’s a big deal. And he has tons and tons of links for his clients. It was a disturbing article, too. Like nobody’s going to buy insurance after reading that you’re, you’re still conscious for 15 to 20 seconds after getting decapitated. So, that’s the sort of stuff that was in that article. And he just kind of quickly paraphrased it. It was another article he found online. But it did incredibly well, not just on Digg, but as I said, with getting links. And these were not people who were looking for life insurance. This was like 13 year old alpha geeks who think, oh, that’s cool, I’m gonna link to that.

Or I’m gonna drop that in my blog, right? And so all of those links propped up the entire lifeinsure.com website, the homepage, all the landing pages, Term Life Quotes, whole life quotes, universal life quotes, etc. They all started to rank much higher, and it actually got to the point where, just from that one article, the term life insurance returned the home page for lifeinsure.com like I think it was at number three or four, and it stayed on page one for years. It was right up there with State Farm, MetLife and Geico. It’s this tiny little insurance brokerage.

So this is how you punch above your weight, not by cutting corners, not that extreme, but by thinking outside of the box and creating something that’s so remarkable. It’s a foregone conclusion that you’re gonna link to it when you see it.

That’s amazing. So, do you have some examples of that? Like how, cause I’d be interested to see what your approach would be. I’ve asked people if people would just get out of the way and let you do what you could do for them. What’s the kind of dream come true scenario that you can create through SEO?

So many, so many. So this is a pretty recent one from last year. We took over the Pinterest account of Everypedia, which is a competitor to Wikipedia. It’s built on the blockchain. And we got their Pinterest account from 31 monthly viewers to over a million. Wow. One million monthly viewers and an eight-month time period.

Yeah. So they just gave us the keys and said, knock yourselves out because we can’t figure out this Pinterest thing. And if you can, that’ll be amazing. And we did. We just crushed it for them. Another example is an old one, but many years ago, it was OverNightPrints.com. They print business cards and all that overnight. They weren’t ranking very well or not at all for the term business cards.

They were just buried for that. And I came up with a contest idea to win free business cards for life. It was the free business cards for life contest. And you could design Jeremy Schoemaker’s new business card. If you remember Shoe Money, he didn’t like his business card. I knew that, and he loved his logo, though. He had his logo, like the Superman S logo thing, on the bottom of his pool and everything.

So I knew he liked that, but he just didn’t like his business card. So I approached him and said, hey, how about we do this contest and we’ll get all these great entries, and you’ll end up with an amazing business card. And he did; he loved the winner. It was like a super chip-looking credit card business card that won.

The winner got free business cards for life, which, in the small print, was 20 years’ worth of a thousand business cards per year, which is pocket change. And so that put them on the map to the point where not only were they ranking for business cards on page one, they got all the way up to number two, and they didn’t do any on-page stuff because all the stuff that we wanted to do on their site. We just kept getting roadblocks and more roadblocks. And so we weren’t able to achieve anything in terms of on-page SEO. It was purely from that one contest.

Would you say, I mean, that’s exciting too when you start to think about all the possibilities there? Would you say that being a local business or having a smaller geographic area where you’re trying to impact one community is easier or more difficult than is that you know for businesses that might be local businesses?

Yeah it’s easier in the sense that it’s less competitive. I mean, there is competition in the national or international sites that rank for a lot of different geographies. But you’re competing with smaller businesses. Like if you’re in the restaurant space, you’re competing with local restaurants and many of them don’t know SEO from anything.

And so you have a competitive edge if you know a little bit about SEO. And one thing about local SEO that’s good to not only know is that local links are important and make a really good difference. So if you’re chasing after links from the local chamber and convention and visitors bureau and local chapters of nonprofits like that.

Is that where things like writing articles in the local newspaper would be useful thing to have articles on there site.

Potentially. Let me preface that by saying you have to do a little bit of homework first to see if it is going to be worthwhile or if it’s going to be a waste of your time. Meta descriptions are not a total waste of your time, but they won’t move you up the ranking. So it’s very much a second-order activity. If I go to the local, let’s say, business journal website and see that they never link out in their articles, or when they do, there are no-followed links. Meaning that they strip any link equity from flowing out.

So, I’m checking. I’m doing my due diligence first before I say, Hey, I will write for you for free. I’ll be an unpaid journalist for you. Yes. That sounds great for them but not so great for you if you don’t get any juice out of it. So you got to see if the juice is worth the squeeze yourself before you just say, “Oh, well, Stephan said you should write for a local business journal. Your mileage will vary.”

It depends on the scenario. So if it’s a local nonprofit and you’re, let’s say, on the board of that local nonprofit, like it’s the American Marketing Association, Madison, Wisconsin chapter or something like that. And you are putting a lot of time into, I don’t know, an event that you guys are doing or the Newsletter, or maybe there’s a resource site or something that you guys are launching.

I’m not saying don’t do it because you’re not going to get the link equity, but at least know ahead of time if you’re going to get any SEO value from all those activities because maybe that’s going to be a consideration. You know, a factor in your decision to put all that time into it.

Do you have any, like I consider the nine-word email, magic tricks that we can share with somebody? They could do it today and get some results. Is there anything that everybody listening should be able to do at least this or this or maybe a couple of things if there’s something that they could do to dip their toe in the water here or to get some kind of outcome?

Yeah. So start with your home page. That is the most important page of your site as far as Google is concerned in almost all cases. And start with the most important element of that page. As far as Google is concerned, that’s your title tag. It’s the first thing, the most prominent thing that appears in your search list thing. And if there are no good keywords in there, that’s a big missed opportunity. And then you think, well, what are what are good keywords?

If you use a tool like Google Trends, which is a free tool, then you’ll get a sense of which keywords are popular versus other keywords. You have to compare them with each other because the tool only provides percentages. It doesn’t provide actual numbers. But if you put in, let’s say, laptop, laptops, MacBooks, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Pro, you know, you try and compare the singular and plural.

You could put a little string of keywords there, separated by commas, and you can see which one’s the most popular. And then you could say, all right, laptop or whatever the keyword is, is the most popular. I’m not using any keywords right now. It’s just the name of my company. And then it says dash homepage. That’s a big oops. Let’s fix that. And let’s put the most important keyword that we’re trying to rank for. We’ll put it in the title tag. And don’t make a spammy keyword list for your title tag. Just make it read well and be value-focused, and maybe even have a little bit of intrigue in there, kind of a curiosity gap.

If you’re building up tension in the reader’s and visitor’s minds, the Google searchers’ minds, and then they have to click in order to relieve that tension, Buzzfeed is fantastic at this with its headlines, right? Yeah, they are. So, if you have some curiosity gap that you create with your title, that would be the best of all possible worlds, keyword and value proposition and curiosity gap.

But two out of three I’ll be happy with as well. So just make it better than what you have now. And that’s an easy win. Googlebot will probably re-crawl the homepage very quickly. It will also probably re-index it in the Google search index pretty quickly. And then, hopefully, you’ll see some improvement.

Maybe check the rankings beforehand. See, oh, I’m number eight now for whatever my keyword is. Let’s see if I can move the needle a bit. And oh, wow, a week later, I’m at number seven. Yay, that’s a win. Right. Another thing that you can do is to get your Google Search Console account claimed if you haven’t already. Then, you can see not only what your position is for you as a searcher individually but also the average across all of the searchers who are typing in that keyword.

And that shows up in your Google Search Console performance report. And that’s a free tool as well. So if you don’t have access to Google Search Console, just Google it and follow the instructions to add your site. And for free, now you’re gonna start getting data on how many clicks you’re getting for which keywords, how many impressions, how many impressions don’t lead to clicks, and then your CTR, of course, taking into account both of those numbers, the clicks and impressions, and you can start making tweaks and seeing how you move the needle.

Cause you know, as Peter Drucker famously said, what gets measured gets managed and if you’re tracking your rankings and the traffic coming and so forth, you don’t know if you’re winning or losing.

So if none of these, all of those words that you’ve just said, I have no understanding of as the technical terms of those. And, but I’m happy that I know what these things are, what they exist, and that there are those who can help with this kind of stuff how would you budget in terms of cost and the time of moving forward with an SEO plan and what timeline of when you might expect to see some results from that.

If you spend $500 a month on SEO, you’re probably in a much worse position than if you spent nothing at all. The people who are willing to take $500 a month for SEO are not only not good at SEO, but they are probably atrocious at it. And getting you bad results or no results and potentially lying to you in the process so that you keep paying them while you’re still not getting the results. So the danger is you could end up with a sullied link profile that is just toxic. People have linked to you that bad juju, you know, it’s like porn sites or, or scams or malware infected sites or whatever, they’re linking to you now and they weren’t before.

And it’s because of the bad SEO firm that you inadvertently hired. So you got to be very, very careful. If you don’t have more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then you are probably better off not hiring an SEO firm until you save up, let’s say, five or $10,000, and you just buy a one-off SEO audit. If you hire somebody for even 1500 a month, they’ll probably not be very good. It’s rare that you could hire, hire somebody good. It’s like trying to find a house that is $20,000. Like, what are you going to get $20,000?

I think that’s an important thing that I have to say to people to look at not thinking about it as an expense, but thinking about it as a capital investment. Because what you’re doing with SEO, it’s not an expense that you’re, I spent 500 on SEO this month and I didn’t get anything. It’s not that, it’s that you invested $2,000 a month or whatever it was for a period of time to build this SEO.

Footprint or whatever you, I don’t know what the word would be, but all of these assets that you’re creating that are going to bring you traffic forever and ever and ever, and that’s kind of an I get it that that’s a better way to think about it.

Now if you have, let’s say, five to ten thousand dollars a month, then you could also, in addition to maybe doing some auditing of your website and finding all the issues and missed opportunities. Might be able to do some link-building as well. Now, PR firms are not inexpensive, but this is a specialized form of PR that normally, uh, you either end up hiring a really bad firm that builds low-quality links, and those end up getting you in trouble. Like I described, the link is spam. These are toxic links.

The alternative is to hire a really good firm, and that firm charges a monthly retainer. And like most PR firms, they would charge that retainer and keep that retainer regardless of whether they get you the results or not. And that can be really frustrating. It’s like the PR firm coming back to you saying, you know what, we couldn’t get any results this month because coronavirus just took over the entire news cycle, and nobody, like none of the journalists, would return our calls and they all,

But we sure worked hard.

And so forth. Yeah, we sure did. And I’m like, that’s not a good consolation for me. I don’t feel any better about that. So I want to get a pay for performance arrangement if I’m in the position of, of the client, so that’s what we offer is pay for performance link building.

That’s awesome.

And so, let’s say that your budget is $5,000 a month for that. That’s the monthly retainer that you would pay at the beginning of the month. Then, the links that we build would be costed out based on the authority scores of the linking websites, like the trust flow and the domain rating. DR is the metric, and Ahrefs is another great SEO tool. We just have a formula for the price for that particular link.

Yeah, it adds up all those different links to the month’s budget retainer. And then we move on to the next month. And if a link gets stripped out, or the opportunity falls through or whatever, okay, well, that’s not going to cost the client. That’s on us. We have to replace that link. Then we go and replace that link.

We just have to backfill it from that previous month. So that’s how we work on a pay-for-performance basis. And that’s how I recommend finding a service provider that does this is if they’re willing to put skin in the game and get paid for performance, then you’ve got the right firm working for you.

That’s amazing. So where are you able, can we have people, if they have some questions? About this, we’ve got a real. I no doubt that you are working from your wisdom bookshelf; I say it: you’re in field reports, not book reports; you’re not book smart about this; you’re actually in the field smart about it. Where can people reach out to you if they want to? They want you to be there for this. Because I think it’s one of those things where you could, it’s very costly to try and figure it out on your own, I guess. That’s yeah. So, yeah.

So, me at StephanSpencer.com. So that’s how you email me. My website is StephanSpencer.com. And, yeah, there’s a ton of resources on there. That’s sent me into a loop here. Me, that feels like I’m emailing myself at StephanSpencer. 

My mind just went into this loop, and that’s you. Okay, you at stuff. That’s when I emailed you StephanSpencer@Stephanspencer.com. Okay, perfect.

It’s funny. Yeah. Yeah, that’s where StephanSpencer.com is the website where you’d find the SEO BS Detector with the trick. I love that. That’s great. So you go to the learning center and it’s on that page and the resources.

I’m sure that there may be some BS detector stories that people might have about some SEO experience, too. Well, I think, Stephan, there’s so much wisdom here. I mean, definitely, you definitely have a deep, deep well of knowledge about this. I appreciate you coming to share it. It’s eye-opening. I feel like we’ve just kind of scratched the surface of what’s here. But I really appreciate you being here. And I appreciate everybody joining in with us. Next month, we do the same. We’re back with another I love marketing meetup Zoom. I love doing these zooms. It’s great to connect and see everybody.