The digital world is always changing and SEO or Search Engine Optimization has changed a lot in the last ten years. It has become unnecessary in the world of digital marketing and in the world of your website today. With 1.3 billion websites today, it’s hard to be heard on Google. But believe it or not, it is not necessary for you to have an SEO manager who helps you get search engine optimization on a daily basis and getting you ranked in all the top keywords. You only need three things – an updated website, good and relevant content and advertising. Learn how you can apply these to optimize your site, grow your business and keep it thriving.

 

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Podcast SEO Management: Find Out Why Your Show Is Not Ranking On Google’s First Page

We are here with a controversial episode from what’s going on in our business right now because we’ve had a lot of discussions with some organizations about this recently. I’ve had an occasion to talk with a lot of digital marketing agencies and digital marketing companies in general in the last month. We’re going to talk about SEO management. We’re going to call this a public service announcement for our clients and for any of you who are listening to this podcast. Most of our episodes for Feed Your Brand, we would classify as evergreen in that the subjects we talk about are still going to be valid six months from now, a year from now, two years from now, for the most part that is. SEO is something that has changed in the last ten years but it’s also gotten to a point where even this episode will still be valid a long time from now.

Typically, if we were going to talk about SEO, we talk about search engine optimization. Let’s define that here. For those of you who don’t know what that means, SEO, search engine optimization. We’re talking about the management about that. In the past, there have been all these companies, you get emails about them because everyone all over the world and all over the places is mining you. The minute you order a URL at either Network Solutions or GoDaddy or wherever it is, they’re trolling you and they find your email address for what’s registered in there. It’s pretty sneaky that even if you’ve private registered, there’s 24 hours before private registration gets wind of it and they have people scrubbing that every twelve hours so that there’s high likelihood you could get trolled even if you private registered your URL. You should know that and be aware of it. That’s why you’re getting those junk emails. We are so sick of getting all of those unsolicited emails, and we still get them. It’s ridiculous. We don’t actually deal personally firsthand with the SEO for our websites, and we have several websites. We still get peppered with these emails. It’s almost as bad as robocalls on your cellphone.

The reality is, and this the public service announcement side of it, it’s absolutely unnecessary in the world of digital marketing, in the world of your website today. It is not necessary for you to have an SEO manager who is helping you get search engine optimization on a daily basis and getting you ranked in all the top keywords. That’s what they’ll say to you. The reality is that you have three things that you need to do in terms of search engine optimization. Number one, you need a website that’s not so outdated and so old that it’s not on WordPress or something like that. If you have one of these really hardcoded old websites, get a new one. It’s time because you’re not ranking and you never will rank well.

There was a time when really all that mattered on the internet was how your website itself ranks in terms of SEO in the headers and in its configuration and having some keywords burried places so it would come up. But still it was mostly ranking for its own name or one or two keywords of what you were about. We’re industrial designers, it would have been for industrial design. It would have been variations of that word. That’s not an issue today. Sites are capable. When you have a new site, it’s on WordPress, it’s got all the good things that it needs to be involved with. It needs to be capable and set up properly. We will not argue with that. Absolutely get yourself a web developer who knows what they’re doing there. That’s why we love our friends at DotCom Global Media. There’s no question on our mind that they understand the power of setting it up properly so that it works for you later. That’s what you need.

Setting it up properly is not enough. Setting it up properly is a $300 to $500 cost to do one time in the life of the site. This is not like it goes and gets broken year after year. We would recommend that you get it updated once a year. You should have it looked at once a year because a lot changes on the digital side of plug-ins and other things that happen on your website. You should have it and make sure nothing’s broken and it’s still working. That’s $50, $100 audit once a year. That’s general website maintenance that you need to be doing anyway. It’s not specifically SEO. You’ve got to make sure nothing’s broken because when something breaks down and that SEO doesn’t work anymore, you’re in trouble. You have to maintain your website. You cannot just assume that the fact that it’s really good today means that your site is going to be healthy six months from now. No. Definitely, things happen; plug-ins get updated, themes fall by the wayside and don’t get updated by the companies who originally developed them. In those things, search engine optimization can get broken in the process. You’ve got to watch out for that, it does happen.

It’s critically important and it goes too wrong where people don’t take their website seriously. Your website is your storefront. You’ve got to wash your windows. You’ve got to sweep your porch or your sidewalk. You have to do those things for people to be able to find you, see you and take you seriously that you are still in business. That is the one and only requirement of having a website, is that it shows that you are in digital business. You digitally exist today. That’s very, very important. It is a baseline requirement for being in business. If we Google you and you don’t show up for your own name because something got broken in that process, then you didn’t do a good job of maintaining your site, but still, that’s old school SEO.

Number one, we want you to set your site up, get a new site if you need it but get it set up properly and keep it maintained. Get someone who can maintain it, at least once a year do a good audit and check out the system and update for you. That’s the number one thing in terms of proper SEO management procedures and how you develop it. But nobody is going to get rich on pay-per-click or start ranking on anything really valuable on the internet or grow a big audience by doing that old school SEO. Thinking that one of these emails, somebody who has solicited you to do SEO on your site, that that’s something, “That’s the thing I’ve been missing that’s going to help me make more money.” No, that’s just going to allow you to be legitimate. Your website is never going to rise above the crowd just by doing that. It’s really hard with 1.3 billion websites on Google for you to be heard today. If you’re falling among the websites who are dead essentially but they just still exist because nobody took them down, then that’s just ridiculous. You’re in business today, you should exist in business and you have to keep it.

The second part of that is you have to do something every single day or every single week to make sure that people know you are still in business. That’s where content comes in. This is really the key thing. SEO management today, search engine optimization, is all about content. It’s all about content because Google only cares and Google controls the majority of how people find you. It’s not even worth considering anybody else in reality. It’s just not worth it. It’s not enough return on investment in your time to figure out being in other places out there. It will work the same way. If you figured it out for Google, it works the same way for everyone else. You don’t have to optimize separately.

The reality is at the end of the day no one is going to find you if they don’t type in something that has a direct link to you. Meaning a company would have to know your name to type it into a search engine to find you and your company name or your product, which means you have to spend money advertising. You have to spend money multiple times advertising so you get your name impressed in front of them enough for them to do that. It’s a high cost way to go about it if you don’t use content as a basis for getting yourself found. Wouldn’t you rather people find you because of things that they type in the Google search bar that are just needs that they have, problems that they have or things in general that they’re looking for? Then when they do that, your business name, your product name, your website name is going to come up because it’s associated with those terms in Google’s database.

Let’s say you’re a chiropractor. It’s one thing for someone to type in the name of your practice. We have our friends at Precision Chiropractic in Rancho Santa Margarita. People could type that in. They could type in the name of the doctor. They’re going to get the practice. They’re going to find them no matter what. They will find them some way. There’s a directory listing that. They’re going to find them. But what if I’m suffering from migraines and I want to know if chiropractic will help? I might type in “chiropractic migraines, migraine help chiropractic, or how can I get relief from migraines?” It might not even mention chiropractic. There might be all kinds of things that people type in and you want them. These are someone seeking break pain relief. What does a chiropractor do? Relieve pain. Wouldn’t they want to be found?

If you’re not found in all the possible areas: Number 1, you can’t cram that into your website on your homepage. All the different things that you can do for people, it just sounds too broad and too much stuff. People who sell something complex: complex software, we sell very complex design services in our core business. We sell lots of different things that are complex. When you’re selling something complex you think that you want to cram all that into the homepage in your website. It just hurt sales. When we see a webpage like that it’s like, “We’re not going to read through all this.”

Simple clean messages are much more effective in terms of direct straight selling on your website. But selling on your website should be done through viable content that provides value and serves others who will then come to your website. It doesn’t mean you don’t have a services page that lists your services and how you charge and who you are and what you do, that’s totally fine. If you’re going to talk about all of the benefits, all of the issues that you can solve, do them one at a time via content. These are ways that we look at that. People come in and look for things at 3:00 in the morning when they’re up because they can’t sleep because they’ve had a migraine for three days straight. These are where people start seeking help for you and it would be an absolute shame if they couldn’t find a great chiropractor, if they couldn’t find you offering your great services because you are only listed under your name.

Does this work in a local business? That’s a big question that a lot of people ask especially professionals, doctor’s offices. We have a lot of clients that are doctor’s offices and professionals that have only a local business. They’re only serving a geographic region. That doesn’t matter because at the end of the day actually Google has an algorithm that will serve up local results first. What happens is just because I happen to be in the Orange County, California area typing in ‘chiropractic’ and ‘migraine’ it’s actually going to serve up results from anyone that is in the Orange County, California area first. You’re not actually competing with anyone worldwide on that particular subject or that particular pain topic.

The reality is if you are a doctor and you think, “There are lots of doctors all across the country and they all our writing content on these different subjects. How is that going to help me because there’s a lot of competition? I’ll never outrank them.” Nationally, it may be a little more competitive but when it comes down to locally you will rise to the top.

These are things that we really want to get across to you. When you’re looking at that SEO being content-driven, it’s a great way for you to dive in to all the things that you can do and why you’re so brilliant in whatever it is that you offer to the world. There are reasons your clients, your patients, your consumers or your customers, why they love you. There are also the things that they ask you all the time that you could be self-serving to them when they’re forgetting to ask you. They’re helping themselves along the way and in the process they’re getting to know you better. This is where you cannot buy this content. This is the number three thing.

Number one was get good SEO capabilities, build that into your site, make sure you get the basics down. Number two is get your content and build content because it’s going to help you, and you don’t have to do this in an extreme way. Once a week for most businesses is plenty to keep you up to date. There are lots of other ways and we talk about that from strategies to grow a business, but just to maintain your business and keep that visibility high on the SEO side of things, on the search engine optimization side of things and showing up on Google, once a week is plenty.

The next part of that is, don’t buy help here. Do not buy a 400-word blog post. They are out there. You can buy them in any subject matter. You want to write about social media. They will write you 400-word blog post in keywords just so that you can supposedly rank. The reality is they do nothing for your site in terms of really ranking you or getting you more clients. They are a waste of money. You need to have at least 1,500 word blog post in reality, up to even 2,500. We are seeing really they have to be well over 2,000 right now. It keeps going up as time goes on. It’s not getting shorter, they’re going up higher.

This is the thing, you don’t have to be a great writer. You don’t have to write these into blog posts. That’s what we use here, this is our whole Brandcasting system, is you can speak that. We will speak this episode and this episode might be 3,000 words or more, or it might be north of 4,000. Very typically our blog posts are between 3,000 and 6,500, maybe 7,500 even if we do some longer interview episodes. You can speak intelligently about it and you can have someone if you would like to just brush it up and clean it up and make it a little bit more well-written, a little more easy to read.

They can also do what we do. We add this one extra layer of it. We add keywords in there. What we do is we screen what we’re talking about here. We just pull back the curtain so you understand. We chose the title here: “Is SEO Management Dead?” Our keyword that we want to rank here is we want to associate Feed Your Brand and the Brandcasting You website with the term SEO management, which is a really broad term. We want those two to be connected because there are many, many times in other episodes where we mention the word SEO. Google will start to see a pattern of language that’s going around that, but I want one at the top level. I want one at what is the keyword level, that’s why we chose one of these high valued ones.

What we do here is we’re going to make sure that we mention all sorts of varieties of it. We say search engine optimization management. I just worked in another variation of that phrase. Another pro tip is we actually go and search on the Google ad word keyword planner and that’s where we find some of these high value keyword phrases like SEO management. Then we will look at the next 100 keyword phrases that the same people in the last month typed in who also typed in ‘SEO management’. Did they type in ‘SEO manager ‘or did they type in ‘search engine optimization phrases, keywords’? Here’s my favorite one. You’ll see how many searches were made by people who misspelled SEO management. They probably get the SEO part right because that’s pretty easy. Pretty often you will find SOE management. More likely management is spelled wrong actually. You may not realize it but that is a valuable keyword to rank on because people who are typing these things into Google often typed them incorrectly and you can rank on a misspelled keyword. That’s not a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing.

One of my favorites is UBS, which is a financial management company. It is one of the most often hit and impressed keywords because people type in USB all the time but they’re typing it wrong. That was actually pretty clever. We don’t think they did it on purpose. That’s a different thing that’s not really a strategy we recommend too much unless you have a name or an acronym for your company that happens to be just one letter transposed from something that is a very high search volume thing. Maybe a very, very small fraction of people who are trying to type in USB and type UBS would actually be interested in anything that company offers. We actually do that all the time in our regular businesses because we’ve always typed in Hazzard and Hazzards and we specifically do occasional episodes about the hazards of product launching for instance or the hazards of launching a podcast. We’ll use the hazard combined with Hazzard. It will be the Hazzard’s rules or something like a podcast launch hazards and we’ll use the name interchangeably or spell them differently because we want to make sure if somebody typed our name in wrong, that we should still show up.

We know that there’s a lot of really prolific writers and authors out there who are probably listening to this podcast that are probably shaking their heads and even cringing the idea of, “I would never let a blog post on my website be there that has a misspelled word in it.” We respect your opinion. We understand that line of thinking and we respect that. However, if you missed it, we’re going to reveal that again. If you missed it, we were talking about how often SEO is misspelled, so instead of SEO management, you have SOE management. There you go, I just worked it in to a sentence. We are now going to be ranking on that search term in Google search bar. We would personally rather win at marketing our business and reaching more people. This is where we’re talking about casting a wider net on the internet for people that are already searching for things you provide. These people are already out there looking for help. You’re not trapping them. You are attracting them because you are there when they need you. You are attracting them in spite of themselves. They spelled it wrong and they’re still going to find you. That’s actually a good thing.

That’s how we look at it. These are not black hat tricks. This absolutely above board the proper way to do this; you either write it or you speak it and then write it. You work in a keyword term, a phrase and variations of that word that might be used, and you work that into it and thinking about this as if you were a writer of a book. For those of you who are authors out there, this is actually a technique that you use as well, especially if you’re writing a book that is a how-to, helping people. You are writing a book about that. You will focus each chapter or subchapter on one single topic. That is exactly what you are doing here but you are just breaking them up into posts, podcasts, single episodes, single posts, written documents. You are working that out in the same format and you are spreading it out so that it is consistently posted each week on time because that’s another thing that Google rewards.

Not only post it as a podcast. They’re sending it the way it publishes a post on your website or publish it as a social media post as a headline and the keywords on those headlines make a difference. They are attracting people back to your website to read your post. As we’ve been out there giving a lot of speeches over the last couple of months, we’ve talked to a lot of digital marketing agencies and here’s what they’re all struggling with. They are all struggling with how to create enough content, how to create original content. What they are providing for their clients is a lot of un-original things. It’s a lot of reshuffling of words, “I say the same thing for this dentist that I say for that dentist. I shuffle some of it around. I rewrite the same stuff so it’s technically not the same post. It’s an original post but it’s a spin article.” That’s what they call it. It’s a spin post. While that’s perfectly okay, that isn’t actually going to help you grow your business because it’s not your voice. It’s not your message. It’s not the way you would write it yourself. It’s not the way you would say it yourself to your clients.

If you really want them to connect with you and you want them to show up, then you need to participate in the creation of content, which means that you will be participating in the SEO management of your own website. You will be participating in the content creation. We are proponents of recording that content, because who out of us who are running a business or a very high level in our company have the time to sit down and spend three, four hours writing a blog post, which is what it takes the majority of us to do?

This is hard for us. We are recording this on a Sunday afternoon. We’ve got a niece’s soccer game in 20 minutes so we’ve got to be done and be ready for it. But we are recording this ahead of time before it is needed because we know this valuable and important to our business. We’ve been doing a lot of traveling and we haven’t had time to sit down and do it in our normal process. It’s gotten circumvented by a heavy travel schedule. But we are making time to do it and it’s taken 30 minutes out of our day on a weekend. What we know is that the value of this to our business goes beyond the value of that 30 minutes for us.

The other we want to mention is, we’re not just being selfish in this. We are doing this for our business but we are also providing this information, this content, to you for free as a listener, as a site visitor and it has value for you and your business, whether you are a client of ours or not. You can do the same thing in your business. The example of the chiropractor who records content, podcasts, videos or converts them into written content for their site are providing value to people out there who are trying to search for ways to relieve their pain, among other things.

You are serving the community, helping them find solutions. At the same time you are serving your own business by attracting them and showing them you are a provider of solutions to help them. If you think that does not come back to you, it does. They know people. They might not need you right at this moment but they know people who do need you. When it comes up, they’ll be like, “I read this great blog post. I heard this amazing podcast about this and you should listen to it.” The next thing you know, you do have a client. That is how it has worked for us time and time again and that’s how it works for a lot of our clients.

At the end of the day, what we are at least minimally comfortable with is the fact that we know that marketing effort and time and money that we put into our business is at the utmost attractive value for Google and for the right type of clients or consumers, whichever way you’re looking at it. To come to us and find us in the keywords, in their pain, in their need, in the problems that they need solving, that they are coming to us at the right time and we are there for them. We are there for you.

That’s why this process and all of the things that we talk about and share with you on this Feed Your Brand podcast and on our website at BrandcastingYou.com is all about really true organic marketing at the most primal level. This is the type of thing that if you are out just marketing on Facebook with ads and try to target certain people, putting certain kinds of content out there, you’ve got a chance that Facebook’s algorithm has changed, how the targeting people has changed. You are going to have varying degrees of success and failure doing that. The long game that is going to be the most valuable to you is putting out this kind of original content.

Being you out there is the most viable way to highly convert your efforts, your money, your time spent marketing. That is the most value you can receive from digital marketing today. That’s what we want to do, is we want to make that simple and easy. That’s our goal in all the information that we provide you on this show. That’s our goal for our services that we provide to our clients at Brandcasting You. That is exactly what it is. We want to make sure that you are not wasting money in time doing other things that aren’t working like old school SEO management. Stop doing it. That’s the point of this episode is about.

The title of the episode: Is SEO management dead? I would say old school SEO management, personally, is dead. You need to still do it to a certain basic level but it’s so minor that if you do the rest of this that we are talking about and produced the original content on a consistent basis, it really won’t matter at the end of the day if some of that older stuff isn’t there. If you don’t rank actually by Googling your own company name, because your company name is going to come up so much cross referenced with so many other things people will enter, they are going to find you anyway. We still do it and we are recommending you to do it. But it’s dead in the sense that it’s really unimportant in the big picture.” The reality is we’ve been doing this business in various formations and we have never paid for SEO ranking, SEO management in any way shape or form that didn’t come from content in the last ten years.

We practice what we preach. We’re not just telling you to do this for any self-serving purpose, hoping you are going to come buy something from us directly related to this. We actually use this to market our own business. We use this to market this business Brandcasters Inc., but we use it to market our other businesses. We have three different revenue streams. We have three different podcasts and content generation machines for websites doing exactly this in totally different ways.

It all comes down to the same core pieces of information, core principles of what we are doing here that surrounds web, social, influencers, which you should go back and listen to that episode because that has a totally different value in SEO, because that is called backlinks. That would be the old school way of talking about that, a complementary value. Those three things have to be in order: Your web, your social and your influencer or your partnerships. All of those things have to be in order. Those are basics to doing business today. When you’ve got those basics in order, the two things that you can provide, that you can give your site and your business fuel, is through content and promotion.

We don’t like to spend a lot of money on promotion when promotion converts so badly, but content is better. That is how we do it. That is how we’ve seen it grow. That is where we have not spent money to market our business but we have grown our business year-over-year, month over month, because we generate a lot of content that is valuable. That’s all we are telling you. It doesn’t have to be a lot. It just has to be valuable and consistent, regular paced as well. You can’t just do one this month and three next month and expect that you are going to see significant results. You’ve got to do it consistently. We recommend a minimum of one a week, what if you can do two a week so much the better. Very important, have people find you, don’t make it so you have to spend a ton of money going out to find them.

We would love to hear your thoughts. You can go @FeedYourBrand at Facebook. You can also find us at BrandcastingYou.com. We would love to hear your comments and hear your thoughts. We love to know if there are any of you out there who are still paying SEO management fees to companies. We love to hear how much you are paying. Let us know. We love to have some numbers behind that because we really don’t know anyone who pays for that anymore. We would love to hear if there are some companies out there paying for that and hopefully not too many. If you don’t want to share that information publicly, there is a way you can submit an email or send us a private message over Facebook and you can be anonymous. If you are willing to share with everybody, I’m sure that everyone will appreciate that.

We hope you find this episode of value. We will be back next time for another great episode. Please tell your friends about Feed Your Brand because we are always trying to grow our own listenership. Please tell your friends, we would appreciate that. You can also download the app at FeedYourBrand.co. Thank you so much. This has been Tom and Tracy on the Feed Your Brand podcast.

Important Links

• Precision Chiropractic
• DotCom Global Media
• WordPress
• Network Solutions
• GoDaddy