Whether you like it or not, Google does hold the keys to the castle of marketing on the internet today. All the pay-per-click values are assigned by them, and they are the place that you buy and pay for ads. At the end of the day, the key to ranking on Google and being able to make money through your content comes down to the written content. With 1.2 billion websites on it, the entire world is going to Google to search for answers. How is your platform holding up in the rankings? To determine this, we use a five-point platform evaluation for platform reviews. The five things to check are their web, their social media presence, their influence, their content and then their promotion. The most important thing to remember is originality is the key. Google cares about original content, consistently and constantly provided, and making that content available to the world.

 

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Why Your Podcast Will Never Be Heard By Millions (Unless You Do This First)

We are going to talk about Google power content. It’s all about Google. We’re sure that many of you, when you saw this title, you may be rolling your eyes and like, “If one more person tells me they can do SEO on my website and make me rank higher in Google, I am going to scream or I’m going to punch the wall.” We understand that conditioning that you may have gotten into from just how you’ve been bombarded for years with emails from these SEO specialists that say they can get your ranked, that can’t spell stuff in their own emails, by the way. That drives us absolutely insane. There’s so much junk out there, there’s so much of this Google SEO crap out there that it’s hard to know what to believe. The reality is that the statistics and the numbers show. We’re just as frustrated and get just as annoyed with somebody who tells us that they can help us on Facebook. In fact, we’re more annoyed with that because there’s less value at the end of the day.

Here are the statistics that are from BuzzFeed, Mashable and TechCrunch. These are where these numbers come from. They are pretty credible and pretty up to date. There’s an average of 1.3% conversions on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, ads in general on social media. If you place ads, if you’re boosting posts, those count as ads, if you’re straight out placing ads, you have a 1.3% conversion rate. That’s really low for the amount of money you’re spending. From a lot people, we hear probably about $7 to $10 is an average lead cost. That’s high. You also get a lot of emails about, “Buy our list.” Buy your list is probably somewhere around $1.50 a lead. Are they any good? There’s a whole lot of questions there. That doesn’t mean the leads going to close. You’re just talking about response to the ad. Clicks, views if you’re putting up a video, whatever that might be, these are actual conversions of something happening, not just how many people viewed it. That’s a big difference. We don’t even look at that number because that’s a useless number. If you’re doing it on views, you’re just wasting your money. Impressions are gone. Nobody does that anymore.

If you’re only getting 1.3% conversion on social in general, then where are we with Google? That’s where we look at the number and you’re getting a 13% conversion on Google. That is not just ads but when your post is ranking on the first page. It’s both things. Some of the things are unpaid and you’re still getting a boost and benefit from Google. That’s really high. This is why you still are seeing all these emails, because that’s 10x power. Google in reality, whether you like it or not, really does hold the keys to the castle of marketing on the internet today. All the pay-per-click values are assigned by them and they are the place that you actually buy and pay for ads. I’m excluding social media. The conversion of over 13%, it’s all done through Google. At the end of the day, the key to ranking on Google and being able to make money through your content, which is your podcast and you blog content in particular, it really comes down to the written content, where it’s generated from, it can be your podcast or your video. It’s also video content because Google owns YouTube. You have to think about those things together. You want to rank on YouTube, you better be ranking on Google to begin with.

Today, we’re not talking about actual monetizing of videos on YouTube. That’s a totally different game. It’s a different animal and a subject for another podcast in the future. Today, we’re talking about the power of Google in terms of your written content. Let’s face it, the entire world is going to Google, to their search bar and typing in search words, criteria that they want to get an answer on in Google search bar. That’s where people go first. There are 1.2 billion websites on Google. That’s a really, big, big, big pond when you think about that. This is a mind-blowing statistic if you’ve never heard it before. Fully one quarter of all of the search terms entered in the Google search bar every single day, Google has never seen before. 25% of stuff people type in, Google has never heard it before, never read it before, never seen it before, never indexed it before, never done any of those things. That’s astounding. Keep in mind, nobody can spell nowadays. There’s probably a lot of misspellings in the process of that. That does happen, but that’s still too many to count for all of that. It does include misspelled words.

Misspelled words get indexed by Google just as well as correctly spelled words do. There are also phrases, really poor grammatically worded search terms. When we talk about keyword ranking on Google, we’re not just talking about single words. We’re talking about combinations of words, phrases of words. The reason that 25% is never seen before is because a lot of times there are things happening in the world that is new news or new words that get made up by people, new expressions. There’s always new things but they also get mixed with existing things. When you do that, every time you type a different combination of words into Google, there’s a new keyword phrase.

This has happened to us specifically in our 3D printing podcast, and we want to use that example of it. We found out that Google was sending us traffic from ‘cloud CAD computing,’ that term, which is associative because a lot of 3D software is cloud-based. But it’s not something that you would automatically consider belongs to a 3D print website or through a 3D print podcast in this case. We’re receiving the association of that word, and then we did a post specifically for it, which became what they call a power post. It drew in a lot of traffic.

We created a new piece of content that poured a lot of fuel on that keyword phrase and associate it with a bunch of other things. You can go on to a number of search tools that are available on the internet. One of them is through Google themselves, another one is something like Ahrefs and there’s BuzzSumo. There’s a bunch of good tools in order to really data mine what’s going on there in search on the internet and figure out where the high valued pay-per-click words are. Sometimes we find words that were ranking and they’re paying $25 pay-per-click. That’s huge when the average pay-per-click amount paid is less than $1.

What we’re finding is those new words are highly valuable and that’s really the association that can happen when you already have a site with Google authority, a site that already has Google value. We’ve been doing a lot of platform reviews. We actually call it a five-point platform evaluation. Usually, it’s a lead generation from a webinar we’ve done or if somebody is interested in perhaps starting a podcast, or just wanting to expand their platform reach overall on the internet. We will evaluate that for them and look at their website. It’s five things: their web, their social media presence, their influence, their content, and then their promotion. How are they being promoted on the internet? Promoting themselves and/or others they’re associated with. We really go and look at each one of those. Usually, between the web and the content is where you run up against these issues of Google and learning how it really is all about Google. You can have sites that have been around a long time and have zero Google ranking.

Here’s an even trickier one. I was evaluating someone’s platform. First of all, they had too many websites in my opinion. There’s a school of thought that you should have all these different domains and cover all these different stuff. There’s value in having everything come back really to one website and having that be where all of your author equity and keyword equity is on the internet, is in the one site. Just on a side note, we’ll probably cover that in a future podcast. That’s this old school niche, backlinking website strategy. It’s a little bit old school and it doesn’t always work now in today’s SEO and Google ranking system. We have this prospect who we did this evaluation on, and they had several very, very good domains in terms of website addresses, URLs. They were ranking very high in terms of, not Google, but just in general rank on the internet. Ahrefs, that’s one of these. One of their websites was ranking 800,000 out of the 1.2 billion websites out there. That’s an incredibly high rank. However, they had absolutely zero organic keywords that they ranked on in Google’s search.

On one measurement, they had a very popular website, a very high ranking website. It’s because the websites were very old. One of these domains was started in 1997 or 1998 in definitely 1.0 version of the worldwide web. They were noted so many times. There were a lot of backlinks from other sites going to their site. They had a very high backlink profile of over 5,000 good backlinks from other sites are going to theirs. That’s the entire way they were generating traffic. While that’s a very good thing to have and we all want to have those backlinks, it’s not the only thing you want to have. How many people are typing in your web address? Very, very few. It’s good to have name recognition. They’re typing in your web address and that’s great. But if they can’t remember who they are, they’re going to be ‘digital marketing service provider,’ whatever it might be that they are typing in, ‘coach for health and wellness.’ You don’t know what they’re going to type in.

This was an odd experience because very rarely do we come across a website, evaluating someone’s platform, that has absolutely zero organic keywords they rank on. Usually, they have a few. They’ll be ranking on something. They’ll be ranking on their own name of the website at least as a keyword on Google, but they had absolutely zero. To further contrast that, you had a website that ranked very high in terms of websites in general, all the criteria, the cross section of criteria that websites are ranked on, and then still had zero organic keywords. It really blew us away. What is wrong with this situation? It surprised us. This is that old school SEO practice that is now getting outdated by Google’s algorithm that rewards content over rank and over backlinks .

To illustrate it, let’s say, you’re searching on a subject having something to do with the tax code or your tax lawyer, it’s time to do your taxes that time of the year. You’re going to type in some search terms on taxes in Google. On Google, you’ll have a couple of companies that are advertising to people that are specifically in those keywords. You’re going to have Intuit, TurboTax or whatever. You’ll have ads for them. Then below that are the actual real websites that are coming up or the articles usually that are coming up that are ranking out that highest position on the first page of Google. You are going to look at some of those, and click on some and go to some of them that are most relevant to why it is or what it is you’re searching for.

Once you realize it, you’re going to go to content, you’re going to go directly to blogs, articles, things that are written on that subject and have been posted on the internet. It’s highly likely there that you’re going to have sites like CNN Money and you’re going to have other ones where there are sites that are writing about taxes, writing about finance that are going to outrank the general blogs unless your organic keywords are matching better and are being given Google value. Here’s the great thing about Google: Google doesn’t discriminate. Google doesn’t care if you’re the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, or you are John Smith with the little tax blog. They really don’t care. It’s all about the content, the keywords, the consistency and the frequency with what you’re putting out content. You can absolutely, as a little guy, compete and start ranking and get on that first page of Google and compete with the big guys.

Returning to this tax example, when you don’t rank on any keyword terms on your website, then you will not come up in Google search. The only way people are going to find you is if you go to somebody else’s website, someone else’s content. On that website, there happens to be a backlink to the one that had no organic keywords they rank on, but their web domain is linked through and out there in a lot of different places. That’s that old school way of doing it where you got backlinks on other people’s sites, where you got listed in many, many directories. Because this site was around for a really long time, that’s how they ended up in those listings. That’s how they have all of that but don’t have the content to support it. Today, it’s a content-driven power. That’s where Google power is coming from content today. It is a content world we live in. If you are not creating content, you would simply not be found when people are searching on the internet for these things, and you absolutely can be.

We have a current client of Brandcasters, Inc. who we produce their podcast and their blog posts. They do a post every week day of the week. On a Wednesday, they had a post that went up that referenced and mentioned another company. They’re in the financial business, the financial world involved in real estate. They just happened to mention this company. By Saturday, Google had indexed the site for a bunch of keywords, including the name of this other company, which really was just mentioned once in the content, once in the article. That company had such a low Google ranking for even their own company name. While they did come up on the first page of Google if you Google their name, what came up right after them was the blog post for our client on their website. Their company now is associated enough with this other company’s name when you typed in just that company’s name. Nothing about the podcast, nothing about the website name of the client that this post was on, just that company name. Their post came up on the first page of Google search just underneath that company. They were getting lots of exposure.

This is where that connection to bigger websites, other things where you can get boosted up in the rankings and really help yourselves be seen next to and as powerful as bigger name brands. One of the things we do want to mention about the company that was not ranking on any keyword terms, they actually did have blogs on their website, but it’s an older website. It wasn’t WordPress. Not that it has to be WordPress, but there was something wrong about how their posts and/or their site was configured so that they weren’t ranking on any keyword terms. We know you guys feel you’re really in love with your old websites or you just think it’s too much trouble to switch them out and change them, but it’s so easy for you to go in and have an analysis made and have it fixed. You don’t have to change everything about your content. Sometimes even just switching themes because a theme is not supported on WordPress anymore can make all the difference between you getting no ranking and you getting ranking again.

There are some other potential factors as well. If you’ve had a website that you’ve had on the internet since the mid to late 90s, and probably not many of us do, but if you had one that old, you probably are with the same host you’ve been with since the late 90s hosting that website. It can also be a hosting issue or it could be just whatever program or tool you use to create the blogs and put them on your site if it’s not WordPress. So much has changed on the internet. If you’re not a technical person, and I really don’t expect many people listening to this podcast are because you’re business people, you’re entrepreneurs and you have a primary business you’re doing. You don’t have time to be an IT expert or an internet expert as well. If you’re not on top of those, you need to make sure somebody working for you is on top of those things. Google changes their algorithms, the rules change.

We think what’s happened is this is websites has been out there so long. They get a little complacent. “I’m not going to fix what isn’t broke.” Problem is, they don’t even know that it’s broken. You really have to have a professional evaluation, an independent evaluation. We have some resource that we use all the time that we feel very confident. One of the things that we want to do when we evaluate whether or not we’re going to bring on a client is: Is their site capable of ranking? Are all the things that we’re going to do for them going to work for them, or is their site too old? It’s one of the criteria we have. If their site is too old, instead of letting them pay us money and do services with them, we would rather turn them away and go have them get that fixed. In this case, we refer them to someone to have them fixed because it makes the most sense. Then we can add a lot more value.

It doesn’t just have to be an old website issue. You could have a fairly new website that just is not properly set up or configured in order to rank properly on Google. We feel this is a very important thing. It’s really not very expensive to get your website evaluated and to either know it’s in good shape, or it’s not bad but there’s a couple of improvements it need to be made, or it has some significant issues that have to be changed before you even consider growing the site or doing more with it. It’s part of why we started offering our five-point evaluation because we needed to do the screen check to make sure we weren’t taking on a client that couldn’t benefit. If they really do need the adjustment to their website, we can provide them an inexpensive and quick way to get it done. That’s we’ve done. We have partners. It’s not the primary thing we do inside the four walls of our office, of our business, but we absolutely do provide those services to our clients as they need them through an absolute trusted and proven partner.

A lot of times, we don’t even charge. It’s a part of the services we do. If that’s working, then we aren’t going to crash their site, then we aren’t going to have issues. It’s just a part of the process. People are always asking, “How can I market my business? How can I actually exposure and start making more money in this modern world of the internet?” It really all does begin with Google. It’s a 10x proposition. You can place ads on Facebook and spend tons of money and only get a 1.3% conversion rate, or you can have a 13% opportunity with Google. 13% with spending money, but we see it even bigger without. There are absolute appropriate situations, there’s a time and a place to go bigger and to advertise in a real push marketing campaign on social media and other places, absolutely. This stuff with your own website and content marketing and being on Google, this is foundational. If this isn’t right, then you’re going to waste even more money because it’s not going to add all the extra residual value that it has for you. You’re not going to be able to take advantage really of all the opportunities that come your way by doing paid marketing and advertising.

This is how you cast the widest net possible on the lowest budget that you can on the internet today, is to be spending the least amount of time by recording content, either audio or video, and then converting that into written content for your website that gets indexed by Google. Then anyone in the world can find you who enters keyword terms that are things that are in your written posts. If you do this right consistently, on a regular basis and constantly, you will end up ranking on thousands and thousands of keyword terms and eventually tens of thousands of keyword terms. It’s just the way it works.

Of all those SEO things that you’re receiving in your inbox and all over the place where you’re always getting pushed notifications to them or you’re getting them in your LinkedIn profile, they’re junk. They’re absolute garbage unless they’re really talking to you about this power of mixing SEO and good foundational practices on SEO with content marketing. If you’re not combining the two things, don’t even bother to read them. You can’t just get your website to magically rank on Google by doing some configuration tricks on the backend of your website. It is content. Google cares about original content, consistently and constantly provided, and making that content available to the world. They want original content.

You don’t put the same piece of original content on more than one website or else Google penalizes both websites. Just a little pro tip there. You’ve got to have original content. Google knows the difference between content that came from thinking and writing versus speaking. Believe it or not, since 2009, Google has valued the content that comes from speaking higher than written content because it knows by the word order and the incorrect grammar that people speak versus what they write, think and type. They know it’s original, and originality is the key. Your content gets boosted higher when it knows it’s original and from speech. It knows that. That’s why we’ve built this whole system and process that we do around speaking your way to content either through video or audio. It’s also so much fun when these things happen, when you have the client whose post just went out there and someone searched on some term they would never expect to come up for, and they’re on the very first page of Google within a week. That gets us excited.

If you found this valuable, please share it on social media @FeedYourBrand and also come to the website, FeedYourBrand.co. Download the app and have it directly posted into your phone, which is just so much easier because you can go and share on Facebook straight from there. We hope you enjoyed this. We’ll be back next time with another great subject. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed Your Brand.

Important Links

• BuzzFeed
• Mashable
• TechCrunch
• Ahrefs
• BuzzSumo