In 2017, Google generated $491,179 a second, putting it into the hundred billion dollars club that year. The figures for last year are not out yet, but they’re a lot bigger than that. Why? Because Google has become the primary search engine on the internet. If you’re searching for anything on the internet, you’ll need Google to find it for you.
The question you should consider is: Does Google know who you are and where you can be found? Your website needs to be found, and the only way that happens is based on the rating Google gives you.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Based on those three letters, if you’re not doing it right and yours is broken, it’s costing you a lot more than 250,000.
By a show of hands, is there anyone in this room who does not have a website for their business? That’s pretty much no one.
Since almost everyone is pretty much in business and certainly in this room has a website are your prospects finding it? Without an SEO audit, you’ll never really know. When they don’t, and why, according to Stephan Spencer. For over 20 years, Stephan has been a leader in the field of SEO.
The Art of SEO by Stephan Spencer, Eric Enge and Jessie Stricchiola
His best-selling book, The Art of SEO, is considered the Bible in the SEO world and is used as a college textbook. Stephan founded his SEO company over 15 years ago and back in 2010 sold it when it was doing over 6 million a year.
Since that time, he’s been consulting and coaching one-on-one with entrepreneurs, doing podcasts, producing two podcast shows, and sharing his wealth of knowledge for those who want to optimize their presence on the internet.
Stephan’s title is, Your SEO is Broken, Let Me Prove It to You. Please help me welcome Stephan Spencer.
Your SEO is broken, and I’m going to prove it to you. And you might be thinking, “SEO, oh boy, I don’t want to learn SEO. That’s not my unique ability.” You can take a deep breath. Like we just learned this is on a need-to-know basis. I have a book that you’re welcome to take home with you.
I brought enough for everybody, it’s a thousand pages. If you do want to read it, please be my guest. I would start actually with chapter seven, which is on content marketing. It’s not overly technical, and it’s a lot of fun, but you don’t have to learn it. Stay in your zone of genius, your unique ability, and just hire out that expertise.
Now, if you completely neglect SEO, you’re leaving serious money on the table, money that your competitors are going to scoop up. I would recommend that you focus your business on getting to the top of Google and just, as I said, focus where you need to focus and you need the essential tools that will help you to do that job to get to the diagnosis of what is ailing your site from an SEO perspective.
These tools include Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Deepcrawl, which is another spidering tool, Majestic, Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, which are all excellent SEO tools and tool sets. SimilarWeb, which is hacking your competitor’s Google Analytics and Link Research Tools, which is my favorite link analysis toolset.
All these are great tools and if you don’t have a skilled SEO operator operating these tools, it is worthless to you. Don’t spend the money if you don’t have an amazing in-house SEO person. Instead, I want you to be an excellent person, an excellent expert at hiring the right SEO. As somebody who knows a fair bit about SEO, I took the liberty of looking at some of your websites and I found some free money actually.
About 250,000 worth each. I didn’t go through every single one of your websites, but I did go through a handful of them. And Tim, for example, Camelback Recovery, you have a toxic link problem, which is free money because we’re going to fix it. This is a tool called Link Detox, it comes from Link Research Tools.
And you’re well into the red zone. It should be under 1,000 and it’s 2,240. So there are a lot of sites, in fact, over half of the sites that are linking to you are toxic. This means that they have malware or viruses that have infected them, and they’re linking to you, or they’re spam sites, or they’re in a bad link neighborhood.
So we want to fix that, but you’re not the only site that has that problem. Here’s Dew Wealth: Jim Dew. 1142. Not as bad as Tim’s, but it’s definitely bad enough that you need to deal with it. This means a link cleanup initiative and then there is Capitalogix. I’m going to be speaking quite a lot about you in this talk.
We’re just getting started and I’m getting warmed up. We’re going to find lots of interesting things. Starting with the link profile of 2800 in the toxic zone. That’s not so good, now we’re going to move on to on-page elements, we were looking at the link profile. This is stuff that is on the page itself.
Your title tags are the most fundamental, basic aspect of SEO. It’s the first thing that people will see when they click on a search listing, right?
Is that a big title? It’s also the most important thing that people or search engines are looking for.
Gender Intelligence by Barbara Annis
Looking at two, it gives the keyword focus for the page and most of these as you can see are very keyword-light, let’s say just one or two words each, but you’re not the only one with that issue we have Gender Intelligence: Barbara, you’ve got title tags that include things like client list and associates.
I don’t know when the last time any of you searched for the word associates in Google but I’m probably guessing it was never so that’s not so hot then, we have Jim again with dual wealth and the same sort of problem about our process our team not very keyword rich. Seeking Health. Ben, we’ve got the same problem with you, Fullscript, Seeking Health Supplier, et cetera.
Now, back to Capitalogix. Have tag pages that are in full force in Google. Google doesn’t like these because they’re thin content and duplicate content. They’re made up of a lot of the same content that’s elsewhere on your website.
You have quite a lot of them many pages of them. This is exasperated by the fact that you have pagination pages, meaning that you don’t just have a tag page for, let’s say, gadgets. And you do, you have about 50 of them.
And then I went into SEMrush and had a look at what are the primary keywords driving traffic. I don’t know if you wrote about this, but Tom Brady shirtless, you are winning. And then we have Harry Potter and Star Wars. I don’t even know that there’s Harry Potter and Star Wars, but you are winning for that one.
We have duplicate content here. We’ve got a lack of canonical tags. No time to explain what that is, but it’s a problem. We also have Jim, I’ll take the heat off of you for a minute, I don’t know how long it might take to read this, but I’m certainly not going to curl up next to the fireplace with my iPad to read the DWM footer logo page, because it’s empty.
But we got to get creative and cleaned up. And then we also have Jim, having a problem with your mobile page speed. In fact, your page speed for desktop as well, but specifically with mobile here, I’m looking at a tool-free from Google called Lighthouse. And you’re 26 out of 100, you’re well into the red zone.
This not only affects your Google rankings negatively, but it also really drastically impacts your conversion rate. So when people are on your site and it’s slow loading. Now we have the coup de grace. Andre Norman, who’s downstairs. You’re in for some free money.
You have this little problem here. It’s called disallow which tells Google and all the search engines I don’t want you to look at any of my stuff. I don’t want you in here, get out and this is what ends up happening. These little error messages are on all of your pages. No information is available on this page.
Google Power Search by Stephan Spencer
Learn why. That’s not a great first experience. Now, what do we do? I probably raised all of your cortisol levels. Thankfully, there is a solution, and that is that we’re going to hire an SEO expert or at least a practitioner to do an SEO audit.
We’re going to do just basically a diagnostic, you go to the doctor, and you should be going to your SEO practitioner to get an audit. So I have a handout, it’s a seven-step process to hiring an SEO. I’m also going to be around for the rest of the day and I’m also going to make myself available for the next few weeks to do a 15-minute diagnostic, screen share with you, and I’ll record it and I’ll send you the recording for free, for anybody in the room and downstairs who wants it.
I suggest you take me up on that’s pretty valuable. And, by all means, take some books, because I’m not taking them home. If you are worried about going overweight with your luggage, I have a bunch of these as well. This is Google Power Search, it’s not an SEO book, it’s a book about how to find anything in Google, confidential business plans, and Forrester research reports that normally cost thousands of dollars, all that is available at your fingertips.
Thank you very much.
