Episode 40 – How Can I Rank Better In Search Engines with Eric Saropyan

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, and welcome back to the how to build a team podcast with Pam and David. On our episode today, we have another special guest Eric Serapion, who is the founder of this is my soap bait, which is a digital marketing agency located in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. Eric is versed on the subject of search engine optimization while teaching SEO classes at orange County search engine Academy. Welcome Eric.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Hi Eric, going there.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
We’re, we’re getting ready for a small storm to blow through Los Angeles, but you know, compared to other parts of the country and the world, it’s not a big deal. So, but for us, it’s a big deal to get, you know, any rainfall or have any cold weather. So everyone’s bundled up and ready.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
I see. Well, I think that’s good. Everybody’s ready. So before, before anything else Eric we know that you are on a search engine optimization expert, but we would like to hear it in your own words, who is Eric Serapian?

Speaker 2 (01:11):
That’s a good question. Well what I do is my background actually is back in the day, I used to be a jewelry designer and had a jewelry business with my brother and kind of as I started to get more familiar with search engine optimization and digital marketing, I left that business to my brother and pivoted over and started my second career, my second life. And so I really took to it. I love it. I love the, the mix of you know, SEO and digital marketing is part math, part science, part art. You know, you need a little bit of everything to, to be successful at it. And I, I love what I do as far as being able to do the project, see the results, and then, you know SEO is kind of a moving target and I think advertising is a general.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
And so it’s not like you can just be thinking, okay, I got the campaign, I nailed it. And so we’ll just let it go on auto and it’s just going to be like that forever. It’s just not how it works. So I have a digital marketing agency in the South Bay part of Los Angeles. It’s, it’s a small community that the nickname for the South Bay is the hidden gem it’s if you ever flying out of Los Angeles and you fly out and you’re going over the ocean, it’s on the left-hand side as far down, as you can see it’s about, I would say about 10, 10 miles by 10 miles part of Los Angeles. And so there’s about a million people in the area there. And through my social media, I’ve become somewhat of a small influencer in the area.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
I have probably about 35%, I’m sorry, 35,000 followers on social media, geo targeted in the area. So if there’s a fundraising event, if there’s a church, that’s doing something. If there’s a small business that needs some sunlight shine on it, I I’m there to, to kind of get the word out for everybody. And it’s a good way to kind of mingle with everyone and be able to you know, meet everybody. And I think that it’s a good way for businesses also that are local, that want to make connections with other businesses down the street, or what have you. It’s a good way to do this as opposed to having a million followers, whichever one’s reaching out for 10,000 followers, 50,000 followers, if you have all our number, but they’re actual followers and they’re within the niche that you’re doing the category of business that you’re doing, or geographically they’re there within those limits, then you will do very well with social media.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
Yeah. You know what, yeah, I do agree with you, you know, a lot of people right now, a lot of entrepreneurs are aiming for so much, you know, followers. Yes. It is good. To, to give you that credibility, that you’re the authority in your field, but I think most of the people right now are, are forgetting that, you know, it is important as well to do organic SEO as it is. You know, it’s, it’s so much different in paid ads, you know, but search engine optimization is still very much alive and some people are just, I’m just gonna, you know do the ads and that’s it. And then if it didn’t work, they’re like what’s happening, you know, but you know, you’d have to go back to the basic. And I always tell this to our clients, you have to go back to the basic. And one thing that we would always get asked for is how do we, you know, how can I find keywords for my website that will rank, and, and you, now that you’re here, Eric, I can’t here. What I can’t wait to hear from, from you? How do our listeners, you know, for our listeners, how do they search or how do they know what keywords to target so that their website or their content will rank?

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Sure. I’m going to take a step back what you were saying as far as sometimes people are overlooking SEO and going straight to Google ads and going to Facebook ads or, you know, whatever platform they want. Now, two things with Google ads. First thing is Google is their secret formula is that they are user centric. They are not advertisers centric. So they want, there’ve been many search engines that have come and gone where the advertiser can go and place the highest possible bid for a keyword. And they will get ranked. They will get the traffic for that keyword. And sometimes along with the traffic, they get, they give them the organic also. And so that didn’t work because they weren’t, those were not the best possible search results for the user. So what happens is with Google, if we, if we take a step back and just look at the Google ads, apparatus, Google ads has what they call a quality score or a ad rank where they rank your keyword with the website.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
So if the website, if they feel that that, that keyword is not a good fit with that website, they will not even sell you the traffic let alone rank you for it. So they’re, they’re like, keep your money. We don’t, it’s not working. You know, we’ll rank you for these other keywords, but we’re not gonna, we’re not even gonna sell you the traffic for this particular keyword. And so you have to be careful because you can’t just buy the traffic these days. Also so, so that’s the first thing, as far as keyword research. What I usually do is when I’m looking at a client, a prospect is I do two things. I do a competitor analysis and I do a keyword analysis. So what we want to do there, there’s certain apps out there like Moz, H refs, SpyFu SCM rush that you’re able to put in the website, into the box, into the search box.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
And it will tell you what keywords that website is ranked for. So we take a look at competitors. If it’s a local business, I feel like local businesses, they have their eye on the person down the street that they feel is doing great. And they’re like, I want, I want to know, I want to do what they’re doing and I want to do better. So they all have that one or two, but, you know, you need about five or 10 direct competitors to be doing a competitive research. And after that, we take a look at all the keywords that they’ll rank for, and we make one list and we send it to the client so they can look through. And even though they’re direct competitors, you know, not all pizza shops are the same, not all mechanics are the same, you know, there are going to be keywords that are completely off.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
And so we want to drill down and we want to not waste time with keywords that either are not relevant or it doesn’t have a good search volume. So you want to take those keywords out, and then you want to take a look at competition for that keyword. So I’ll give you an example back in the day. When I first wanted to do the first person I wanted to do was my mom. She had a, she was a real estate agent in the South Bay. And so we, we spun up a site and we started to do SEL. And so the, the numbers it’s kind of stuck in my mind. There was a, there’s a suburb of the South Bay, it’s called Redondo beach. So there’s, there, there was a keyword that’s Redondo beach condo for sale that had, I believe a hundred searches a month, but had several thousand pages fighting for those searches.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah. And then we had Redondo BCH condo sale or something. And instead of 40 sir, instead of a hundred searches a month at 40 searches a month, but it had two competitors. So it made sense for us to go for the low lying fruit like that. Traffic’s there at worst. You’re going to be number three, but you have to optimize for that keyword. And so that’s what that’s, what SEO is about, is about finding that traffic. That’s the low lying fruit and getting ranked for that sooner. It’s kind of like when I was doing jewelry, when I would do the keyword jewelry, there’s no way I’m going to be ranked in the top 10 for the keyword jewelry, with all the, you know, Zales has a thousand stores nationwide and all these, all these competitors. And so what you want to go for is, you know, the long tail keyword, the ones that are going to convert much

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Better. My next question for you.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Yes. Like if you, instead of going for jewelry, because with jewelry, there’s watches, pearls, opals, you know necklaces, pendants, everything engagement rings. And so, for example, instead of going for jewelry, if I, if I went for men’s platinum diamond wedding dance, if I went for that, that’s like five words or six words, whatever it is. And that’s that’s even if you get a hundred searches a year from that, and you get 10 people that click from Google to come to your site from that keyword, the conversion rate is going to be much higher than just jewelry, even if somehow you got ranked for jewelry. So in the beginning, let’s not worry about the volume of traffic coming in, the number of people that are liking your post on social media, the number of followers that you have, let’s make sure that we’re, we’re doing it in a way that’s, you know, today you’re ranked for 10 keywords three months from now, you’re going to be rank for 36 months from now, et cetera. It’s kind of like building blocks

Speaker 3 (11:13):
As you go. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
And so you’re able to, just, by looking at competitors, be able to put together a list of keywords that you feel would work for for your website. And again, it’s not just competitors. The business owner obviously will have some insight into what their business would rank for. It’s just difficult to have them do everything, because I’ve done that before, where I’ve taken a pencil and taken it to paper and said, okay, give me keywords. And they’re just like, I don’t know, you know, I’m a mechanic, or I’m a, you know, I, I sell shirts online or it’s, it’s difficult, but then when you get their mind going, and they’re like, okay, this keyword, this keyword, and it it’s it’s gets the conversation rolling. Right.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
It’s not just as simple as coming up with some keywords that we as business owners think we want to use, but like you said, is going out there and looking at what people are actually searching for. You know, we put out, you know, digital marketing, digital marketing is probably one of the huge, you know, one of the largest keywords out there. But our, our, our clients or potential clients, are they going to go in search for just digital marketing? What are they going to search for? And I guess that’s what you’re trying to say is finding that maybe those smaller searches that nobody else is pursuing those keywords that nobody else is pursuing is a better way to be than throwing all your resources at a huge, huge keyword.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah. Yeah. I think also where, where the, the clients are getting confused when they do their own research and they see, okay, this is a high competition keyword, they go for it and they don’t understand that you can also target keywords that are, you know, that are marked low and medium. And that is where you’re gonna show up the, the higher possibility of you showing up in the search results for, for targeting those low and medium keywords. And the long tail keywords is are very important as well, because like what you and David mentioned, digital keyword. So many people are targeting for that. And for you to be able to, to be in the search results is for you to add another keyword or two after digital marketing. So you have to be specific as well. You have to keep in mind as, as the business owner, you have to be specific, it can be digital marketing in South Bay. So there’s a possibility. So you have to not just, you know, think of a keyword and, okay, this sounds great. You have to do your research, take a look at the numbers. And then that is where you’re going to plan what keywords to target.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, exactly. And you want to what I try to do is, you know, I try to set expectations because it’s not something that you can just go by, the, the traffic that comes in from Google for free, you know, it’s just, it’s just not something that can be promised anyone that promises you, that you should run from them because I’ve had people promise me first page ranking on any keyword that I choose back in the day. And it’s just a, it’s been a disaster. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
I still see those ads all the time, rank you number one on your, in your market or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
So there’s different ways to kind of take a keyword and use it in different ways. One way I’ll use the jewelry example again if we, if we look at men’s platinum diamond wedding band, are they looking to, you know, they bought it and they, they gained weight through the years, or they lost weight. Are they looking to resize it? Are they looking to praise it? Are they looking to upgrade upgraded? Are they looking to sell it? Are they looking to repair it? So we have to anticipate user intent. Why, why are they typing in jewelry or a men’s diamond planning, a wedding band? And so that’s, that’s one part of it. The other part of it with certain products and services obviously is geography. So, you know, a lot of times you can put the city, you know jewelry, Los Angeles, or digital marketing South Bay or Manhattan beach, or Redondo beach, you can put different types of keywords, just kind of add to it, or it could be are you frustrated with your digital marketing in Los Angeles?

Speaker 2 (15:56):
You know, there’s different. There are people that are just upset. There’s a like David mentioned in the beginning, I teach at a search engine Academy here in Los Angeles. I was teaching until COVID hits. It’s an, it’s a classroom setting and it’s, it gets pretty intense because we’re literally people are coming in. A lot of the people that are coming in are not looking to be digital marketers. A lot of the people that are coming in are tired of digital marketers taking advantage of them or doing things. And it, you know, they did it legit legitimately, but it didn’t work. And so they want to know what’s the bounce rate, you know, what’s what, what is what’s a good time on site and w you know, what’s, link-building, and what’s, what are all these things so that when they hire someone in the future they’re in on the conversation, it’s not just, they cut the check and off, off the digital marketer goes, and let’s see what happens, fingers crossed.

Speaker 2 (16:53):
And so these are things that I think that if you’re, if you’re gonna throw your hat into the arena of digital marketing either you’re going to know someone that you really trust. That’s a family member that is really versed on the subject and is going to take care of you. Or you’re going to need to do some studying and figure out, you know, the terminology, you know, what to expect, what upsets, Google, what makes Google very happy. And how do you feed Google? The, the, the content and the, and the things that make Google happy. You, you just need to do some homework on it. And then after that, I don’t, you know, there’s a lot of people that, you know, they have a full schedule. They have a family life, they have a social life, they run a business, or they have a job, and they’re not looking to stop doing their business and do digital marketing. So, but they, they want to be understanding of what’s going on. And so that’s a lot of, a lot of times, that’s, that’s something that small business owners and entrepreneurs really need to pay attention to.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
That is so, so true. Eric you know, as a business owner, you really need to do your homework. It doesn’t mean that you have the budget, or you have a team to work for, for the projects that you have. You’re just gonna, you know, let them do what they do. Yes. The trust needs to be there. You trust who you hire, but you also have to do your homework, at least have an understanding of the tasks that you assigned to your team. And it’s, you know, it doesn’t mean that you have to do all the nitty gritty stuff, or for SEO or for whatever task you assign them to. But at least I have the understanding of how it works so that you know, how to direct your team to the goal that you want to achieve. And so you mentioned also Eric earlier about some tools that they can use to search for the right keywords to target.

Speaker 3 (18:56):
I am familiar with all the tools that you mentioned, because back in the days 2011 to 2013, I was an SEO manager. A good, very good client that I had in, in Australia taught me how to do SEO. So I’m kinda like aware and understand still how SEO works, but I don’t do the nitty gritty stuff anymore because I have a team, but I do direct them and still understand what needs to get done for the clients and for, for great work online as well. But, you know, I know Sam rush they have a free account, but can you tell us what is the best tool right now? And if they are on a tight budget and they cannot afford yet to purchase a premium account, what is the best tool for them to use?

Speaker 2 (19:55):
I’ve tried the free, a portion of the apps that I mentioned. You’re not getting much. That’s, you know, I’ll be honest. Yes. And I could be wrong. They, they can go sign up and see what happens. But I don’t know if there’s time limitations or number of search or something there there’s, there’s a lot of, you know, it’s a business, you know, they’re, they’re gonna want to, you know, they’re not gonna want to give away their service when they’re charging

Speaker 3 (20:22):
To get all the, the report from, from SEMrush and other tools as well, but at least, you know, they can have a feel of what is this tool gonna provide to me.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yes. It depends on the company. You know, if this is important to you, to, you know, it could be that, you know, there are, that they’re on the seventh floor of an office building. They have no walk by traffic. They have nothing. They have to get the people coming to their site. It’s like life and death for their business. I wouldn’t say to cut corners on the apps, you know, and you don’t need all, all the apps. You can, you can do SCM rush one month and then try H reps and other month, and then try, you know, others and try Mazda. Spyfu, there’s, there’s a lot of them out there and every month try it and, you know, do month to month and see which one you click with, which one, you, you’re getting more information with. It just, you know, you can, you can do, I think the starter for SCM rush and I’m not a reseller or anything, I’m just saying, I think it’s a hundred bucks a month or something.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
So if nothing else for the, for one month to download all your competitors, your website, everything. And then if it’s just not in the budget, then come back to it six months from now or three months, and look at your to see your ranking, how, how it’s gone in that, in that timeframe. So, but you’re going to need to spend some money on some things to, to get things rolling. So a lot of times I have a consultant, a mentoring that I do, where we, we set aside almost like literally a couple hours a month so that we lay out the game plan on what to do. And when they work with me, I actually just give them the reports on, you know, their competitors and, and their websites. So they don’t have to pay for those things. But, you know, as a business owner, if you’re going to get into this field, you’re going to need to spend some money on some of these things, for sure.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
You have to invest, right. Yeah. Yeah. So now let’s move on to, you mentioned, how are we going to get, and how are we going to know what keywords to target? I think, how can we rank better in search engines?

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Okay. And I want to backtrack for one second. When I was saying to just go after the low lying fruit, if we’re going to target, let’s say 10 keywords. I don’t think that we should go for 10 of the keywords that have lower volume. We can take our shots with the, with the higher volume keywords here and there. Just not all of it, you know, not all of them and just kind of mix it up. And eventually you’re going to get some of the higher volume keywords also. So a couple of things that Google is looking for that I, I would suggest is first and foremost, as a good user experience, Google wants to make sure that your website is functioning properly. That it’s a mobile friendly. And that the load time on the site is within the parameters that they’re looking for.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Because if it’s loading in 10, 15 seconds it’s not a good user experience. If there are a bunch of broken links on your site, that’s not a good user experience. If they go all the way to the end and they click purchase, and the shopping cart is disconnected or something, it’s not a good user experience, you click on about us. And then you go to this other website that has nothing to do with that website. You know, doorway pages, et cetera. It’s, it’s not keep in mind if you just understand what upsets Google, then you just stopped doing it. And that would be upsetting if I owned Google and somebody comes into my site and I’m a donut shop in Los Angeles, they come to my site and they’re wanting to buy donuts. And on the side, I’m saying click here to buy donuts.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
And then I take them to my business. That is an e-commerce selling socks. It, it just is not a good experience. And these are all things that people have tried gotten away with for, until Google has figured them out. And then Google is penalize them. So we want to make sure that the website is run ethically. You know, you’re not doing spam from the site. You’re not any inappropriate conduct is not being flagged, et cetera. So the website is running properly. After that, you need to make sure that your pages on your website are taxed correctly. So when Google comes into your site and in a split second spiders, your site, and looks at all your pages, you wants to make sure that you want to make sure that Google knows exactly what each page is about, what each category, subcategory product, page service page, a blog page, everything that Google knows that this is a lady’s yellow leather jacket.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
You know, like it knows not just jacket, stock number XYZ, two, one, four Q. Like they’re not, Google’s not gonna understand what that, what that means. So every page needs to be tagged correctly. And so once you have the websites tagged correctly and running properly, then you want to start looking at the keywords that you’ve selected. And I don’t in the beginning, if you’re starting from a dead stop, I don’t suggest doing too many keywords at once. Try to do it correctly before you try to scale it. So I would say the first month, take two to four, depending on your budget and your manpower, obviously. But if you’re a small business and you’re just starting out, take two to four keywords, and don’t take the top keywords that, you know, eventually want to rank for, because your worst work is going to be in the beginning.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
So take those keywords and build content for those keywords. It could be a blog article. It could be a video post. It could be that’s like an infographic. It could be any one of, you know, 10, 20 different things. And so you want to start consistently building out content. And so what I always tell my students is if you’re going to blog 50 times a year, don’t blog 50 times on January 1st and nothing. The rest of the year, it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for link building. It doesn’t work for reviews. It doesn’t work in life. Like if I’m going to have 365 dinners, I’m not going to have all three 65 January 1st and nothing the rest of the year. So think of it like that. That’s how Google is looking at it. Just Google’s looking for consistency. And then it’s going to figure out consistently if your website is a good match for those keywords, or if it’s not, and if it’s not, we’re going to change the content on the page, we’re going to change the pictures, change the videos, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
So you start building out content. Secondly, there’s something called online link building. So a link is when there’s a clickable link from, let’s say from my website to yours. So I’m giving you a link from my site to your so I’m vouching for your website to Google and go to my, to my people that visit my website. I’m vouching for you and Google is watching that. And so the more people you have that are linking to your website, the better ranking you’re going to have now, obviously not all links are created equal. If you get something coming in from Harvard EDU versus, you know, another website, it’s going to be a different score. So I think Harvard right now is that it’s up to a hundred. I don’t know, who’s a hundred, I think, NASA or something, but Harvard is at 87. So when you get to the higher numbers, it’s just ridiculously difficult to get links from those, from those sites.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
But you want to also inversely, you want to avoid getting links from sites that are domain rank zero. Because if you have too many zeros, they’re linking to your site, then it’s going to affect your ranking negatively. And this is something that I went through years ago when I first started out where the company said, we’re going to get you a hundred links a month and we’re going to, Oh, wow. A hundred links. Okay, great. And then, so when it didn’t work, months and months of paying and off, they went, the next person that came in and said, we have to disavow all of these links, these links are hurting your campaign. So it’s kind of like when we’re in grade school or something, and our parents come to visit us at lunchtime or afterschool, and they say, who’s your friends. And you point out your friends.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
You say, these are my friends and you get it. They get a gauge. It’s still okay. My, my kids in the right crowd or in the wrong crowd or whatever. And so Google is kind of by association either giving us a good score or a bad score just by the peop the, the links that were associated with. So the platforms that I mentioned I’ll stay SCM rush, but the other is also, and there’s many others. There, there’s a function in there where you can, when you put in your website or your competitor’s website, you can see where they’re getting links from it’s for the world to see. So there are no secrets, you know, in these things. So if we look at our links coming into our website, and we see that I never asked, I never verified these, these websites to give me a, and there’s a bunch of them that are zeros and ones and twos and fives.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
I don’t want them to link to me. And so there’s something I don’t want to get into the technical part of it, but there’s ways that you can disavow those links. You can let first thing is to email that website, to let them know, Hey, if you don’t mind, let’s end our relationship, take me off. And if they don’t do that, then you can through Google webmaster tools or submitting through your site map, you can actually disavow those links. But you want to make sure that you, you know, you’re getting links that are coming in, that are, you know, that you have some kind of a relationship with. And so the links are very important and you want to make sure that the links are relevant. So let’s say I own a I’m a mechanic in Los Angeles, for example.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
And if I have a website that’s selling books in Canada, how was that relevant to, why would they give me a link? And so the power of that, even though it could be a domain authority, 50 website, it’s not going to be as powerful because they don’t have anything in common. So you want to make sure that whether it’s by category or by region or something, that’s when you get a link from another website that it has some relevancy to it. And so that’s, those are things to keep in mind. Should I keep going as far as what, what helps your ranking

Speaker 3 (31:09):
Fire hose? So, so good. Eric, speaking of backlinking, I remember, you know, we created a blog about the tools that we use for, for for time management, you know, how do we track our team’s hours? And we talk about the tools that we can use. We talk about time, doctor. We talk about Hubstaff, we talk about a lot of things that, that a client can use to manage their team, their remote teams. And one day I got an email from time doctor, so we’re whatever SEO thing that they’re doing, they found ours, and they were asking for if they can use our blog and link to Y’s. And, but we can, if we can add like one paragraph in our blog, and then, you know, in exchange it’s link-building and in exchange, they’re gonna give us a shout out to their social media.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
So who’s going to say no to that, right? It’s time, doctor everybody now in our digital world, everybody I think is using time. Doctor, if not everybody, well, a lot of, you know, the market is, is big. So I said, okay. And then I get to my team and told them to, you know, edit the blog and put this disparity graph for time doctors. So that’s, that’s an example of what Eric is saying. You have to think about as well, you know, the, the, the sites or the articles that you are putting into your content and linking to that site, it needs to have a good reputation. And there is a tool for you to use. There is a plugin in Chrome we’re in, you can install and get those numbers. Thing, I, it would be funny if you can see I hope I can see Eric’s browser.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
I’m pretty sure there are a bunch of numbers there. And you know, some tools that you use plugins that you use to get those domains authority, but it is important if you are doing it on your own, do your research, do your homework. There are a bunch of tools that are free, but of course it is limited. You can’t have all of it if it’s a paid account, but if you have a team, you also have to track and take a look at what your team is doing in order to hurt, if you’re gonna, you know suggest to your team that, Hey, maybe we can take a look at this, do your own research as well, and then direct them to your team for them to, to implement. But that is a good, good way of, you know doing link building.

Speaker 3 (33:59):
And if you don’t know how to do it, then just find, you know, find, do your research and reach out to them because I’m a, I’m a small business. And when I got an email from time, doctor, I felt important. I felt special because, you know, time doctor is a big company now and they are reaching out to me to a small business for them to link to us. So that’s huge for us. And so those are the things that you can do reach out to these people, reach out to this company and see if they say yes to you. If they say yes, then that’s good. If they don’t reply, then try to, to, to the other company that you can reach out to them

Speaker 2 (34:47):
Linked to so many websites out there to get links from. There is no shortage.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
Yes, yes. And

Speaker 2 (34:55):
I think personal, if they don’t reply

Speaker 3 (34:59):
And again, it’s, you know, it’s not about the numbers, it’s not about the quantity, it’s about the quality and making your, your, your, your website simple. You also have to take a look at, you know, how is it going to be if it’s me as an audience, why would I want this website to take me to a journey? How can I simplify this? So you always have to put yourself in your audience shoes, if you yourself, it’s getting confused, how you take your website to the next page or to the other page, or this call to action button links to a different page. Then definitely your audience will also feel the same thing. So always put yourself in your audience shoes and, and make everything simple. There’s also other, some technical terms that we use in the search engine optimization world. You know, when you build your website, make sure that everything is optimized.

Speaker 3 (36:11):
You don’t want to share your URL to the, somebody to send it to a messenger, to a link. And then it’s going to show up another WordPress site that needs to be taken care of inside your website. The optimization needs to take place before you send an announcement to the world, because you don’t want them to see that there is another website, another, a WordPress site. It has to be for example, for, for us great work online you know, a team for coaches and speakers. It needs to go up there. And if you are targeting a specific keyword, then it needs to be up there. So those are the things that I think, you know, you have to take care of first before you really put some promotion into it. That’s why search engine is still very much alive. And aside from doing ads, you need to, I think you need to perfect.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
First, the organic SEO, you have to do the research. You have to know your keywords. You have to know your, your competitors. You have to optimize your contents, and it’s not just about optimizing your website. It has to be everything that is in the website from, from the, the images from, to, to the videos, to the blogs, everything that you have in there, because like what Eric is saying, Google is watching your site and how valuable contents you have on your site. That is how Google will see you. And that is how effective you can be to be able, if you want to be to be shown in the search results. No one, no one is clicking for page two, page three, page four. So your aim and your focus is to be on the first page and for you to be able to do that, you have to do the optimization for all of your accounts.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
So also one of the things that Google looks at is there’s a tool called Google analytics that most people that have a website know what it is. If you have a website and you don’t have it, you should get it. It’s a free app. Basically Google is looking at that report and looking at to see, you know, time on site. If someone, yeah, it’s coming to your site and leaving it’s called bounce. If they’re just bouncing, then that means that that’s not a good user experience. If they’re on your site, in average visitors on your site, let’s say for the month of January, they were on your site two seconds and your competitor had a average visitor on their site for two weeks. Guess who’s going to get ranked it’s that simple sometimes. So Google is looking at that and saying, okay it must be that, you know, this, this website they’re going there, they’re reading, they’re watching the videos, they’re going to multiple pages.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
You know, they’re not able to see if there’s conversions and what money was transacted. They’re not able to do that, but they can see how many people, you know, certain metrics. And so you have to, you have to be cognizant of that. I got into doing for clients where I do a per conversion. I have some clients that that I do where it’s per conversion, whether they fill out a form or whether they call. And so the phone call has to be at least 30 seconds and an SB unique to consider it a conversion. So if it’s the same person calling over and over again, or you can listen to the phone call and it’s a telemarketer calling, it’s not, you know, it’s a, it’s not counted as a conversion. And so one of the clients that I set up years ago several years ago I got him a board and it’s a company that they’re closed on the weekends, but they still take phone calls.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
And the, the family member that they had that was accepting the phone calls over the weekend. When I set up the call tracking, they didn’t tell us they didn’t even think of telling this person. So it turns out that this person wasn’t even answering the phone. So their business went up 30% just by the fact that they let that person go. And they hired someone that actually answered the phones over the weekend. And they were getting a lot of phone calls on Saturdays and Sundays. And so it’s always good to have the data. And so with that data, what you do is going to be a business decision, but at least you see that, you know, the phone’s ringing but there’s no conversions or vice versa because at the beginning I would do a certain time. Certain clients, I would do like a campaign where I would say, I’m going to do this many blog posts.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
I’m going to do this many videos, et cetera this many links, and I’m going to charge this monthly fee. And so month to month, three, four, whatever, they’d be like, Eric, you know, we like you the phone’s ringing, but it was ringing before you. So we don’t know if it’s, if it’s worth it for us to keep you a board. And so I got into, you know tracking my campaigns so I can tell you spent this much on Google. You got this many phone calls this much on Yelp, this much on me, et cetera, on SEO. And here’s, here’s the cost per conversion. And I feel like the industry is going in that direction where, you know, before it was banner space, then it turned into impressions. Then turn into clicks and slowly it’s turning into, you know what is my cost per acquisition acquisition?

Speaker 2 (41:59):
What’s my cost per lead. You know, those conversations are more prevalent than cost per click or cost per impression. So, you know, make sure that you have things set up, that you can track people if you’re gonna outsource things out and be, be aware of the subject matter that you’re getting into or else don’t get into it. It’s going to be difficult just to, cause you’re going to end up having a bad feeling in your, in your heart for people that maybe did or didn’t do the work you, you just don’t know. And I have so many students that have come through that they’re just upset. And I tell them, look, you know, it’s your business. You should know. You know, because it’s not just the money that they paid out, it’s the time that they lost, because they need those new clients coming in to be able to grow their business and to pay their rent and pay their expenses. And so on. Like they need that. It’s like food for them. And so it’s not just the monthly two, three, $5,000 that they were spending, which that adds up also. But you know, they, they, they were banking on that. Turning into clients, have a lost opportunities that are there.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
Yeah. Yeah. Take a look at the reports. I mean, it’s there, you have to take a look and see which one is working in, which one is not. And I think as a business owner, you have your in-charge of, of that. You have to ask, if you’re asking someone to do it for you, you have to ask for the reports and see if it’s working. And you also have to do again. Bottom line is basic is you have to do your own homework as well. And at least have an understanding of the work that is getting done so that you don’t have this negative feeling of you, you know, blaming someone that, Hey, you didn’t do your work, but how can you tell that you didn’t, that that person didn’t do her or his job when you don’t understand what is going on? So at least do your homework, get some understanding of how it works and, and then delegate it to, to your team.

Speaker 3 (44:04):
If you have, you know, the, the capacity to delegate it to someone or do it on your own, but I’m telling you guys, if you are a business owner and you want to scale, you have to let go of some things that you’re not good at. And if you know that SEO is something that’s gonna drive you crazy because you don’t understand fully what is SEO, then hire Eric, call Eric, or call us, you know, find somebody who is an expert in that field so that you can concentrate on the things that you love the most on the things that you’re more passionate about on the things that you are good at. And so that you can have more time with your clients, strategized with them, and then outsource the things that you don’t know anything about, what it doesn’t steal, you know limit you from trying to understand what is going on inside your business. Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
There’s a couple of different, you know, we’re all at different parts of our lives sometimes. And so you have someone that maybe as a startup that doesn’t have a lot of money, but has more time. You know, and, and they’re a little bit tech savvy and they have a curious mind and, you know, they, they, they’re looking for this kind of challenge and, and they can learn and kind of grow and maybe they need a little bit of mentorship. And again, it could be someone that’s, you know, tech savvy, but they don’t know how to build out a website. So they’re still going to have to hire someone or, you know, most of us you know, even though we have a website, we don’t host the site on our, you know, w we don’t have servers that we’re hosting in our office, it’s usually elsewhere. So we’re all doing that to some extent anyway, and then there’s the person that, you know, has a business has, you know, has a functioning business has limited time. And, and they’re not gonna be able to do it themselves. And so that that’s a different situation. So it depends on where the person is at. Cause there are people that just, if you ask them for an extra hour a week, they just don’t have it. They’re just booked with family and work and sleep and you know, and that’s it.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
So, yeah, there’s a lot more to get into an SEO, but I think that we covered like the, the beginning, almost like the takeoff and without getting too technical, obviously, you know, Google is watching your social media, making sure that you’re you know, that if you’re posting on social media, no, one’s liking it. No, one’s following it. You, you have a hundred followers today and you had a hundred, two years ago and four years ago, and you know, you’re not posting or you’re posting no one’s following or liking. You know, there are a lot of things that Google is just picking up the signals, the reviews are big, you know, your Yelp reviews, Facebook, Google reviews, et cetera. So you know, but start slow and and be consistent. Consistency is huge. It’s, it’s a huge thing in life.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
Yeah. Even if you’re gonna post one one content a day, whether it’s a video, an article, a blog or whatever, you have to be consistent if it’s one. So once a month, then once a month, if you’ve got more time than make it twice a month, you know, it really depends, baby, I guess, and consistency. So I guess that’s it, Eric, you’ve, you’ve shared so much in, into this episode into our show and I’m pretty sure that for our listeners, they are able to get, you know, tons of nuggets out of this. And, you know, we, we clarify what is search engine optimization? How does it help in your business? What, how do you get your, your target keyword and how do you optimize your, your site? So thank you so much, Eric, before we wrap this up advice, what can you advise to our listeners give advice?

Speaker 2 (48:07):
Well, I would say the first things that we talked about making sure that you have a functioning website, a website that Google can spider and make sure that they understand what it is that you’re offering, what product or service and whatever you’re going to do, lay out your game plan and take it. Step-By-Step lay out a calendar and laid out work like right now, I’m finishing up February for a lot of my clients. We already have everything scheduled, ready to go contents and, and whatnot. So if anybody wants to just pick my brain, they’re welcome to go to my website. This is my South bay.com. Click on the book now, button to get a 15 minute consultation. It’s free. It’s a, we can jump on a zoom call and we can talk about you know, what keywords that they’re ranked for which keywords they would like to rank for what their competitors are doing. Any questions that they would have in the realm of digital marketing. I’d be happy to set aside 15 minutes to go over with them.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
All right. Thank you, Eric. We’re going to also put all of your links in the show notes so anyone can see and contact you. So any, thank you, Eric. So I guess that’s it for now. Welcome. And I hope you guys had a good time and learned a lot from, from Eric today that Pam and David of how to build a team podcast. Thank you guys. Thanks sir.