SEO

SEO is super important however most people simply don’t understand how it works.  Watch this masterclass I presented on Marketing Mondays with Ira Bowman, a show that airs on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook each Monday.

Marketing Mondays with Ira Bowman – SEO Masterclass

Mon, Aug 14, 2023 4:04PM • 1:48:24

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

google, page, seo, website, content, serp, pillar, volume, click, people, called, search, keywords, digital marketing, backlink, rank, bounce rate, bowman, digital media, moz

SPEAKERS

Ira Bowman

Ira Bowman 

Hello, and good morning or good afternoon, wherever you are, my name is Ira Bowman, I am the host of marketing Mondays with Ira Bowman, I am always excited to do this show because of the information that we share. But today, I’m especially excited because we’re gonna cover into the thing that can honestly change your life and change your success, the trajectory of your business more than any other thing that you can do to market your company.

SEO is not only important, it is the most important thing that you can do. Why? Because it can reach the most people. This is simply about volume. I know a lot of people don’t understand SEO, as I said in my TED Talk, in fact, I’m going to be sharing if you didn’t see my TED talk yet Shame on you, you should go watch it, it’s 18 minutes of power-packed concentrated information that will change your life. However, if you watch the show, you’re gonna get most of that same information and a lot more. So stay here, then you can watch it later, I’m actually gonna show you the slides, which are not in the video.

So if you weren’t there in Wilmington, Delaware, in April, you didn’t see the slides, you’re gonna see those today. But look, this is not about anything but getting, allowing me to help you understand why you need SEO, we’re going to explain in detail what SEO is. And then I’m going to give you some action tips, some things that you can do without spending any money. So if you’re a solopreneur or a small business owner, and you just don’t have money to Market, I’m going to give you some things that you can actually implement that will help you increase where you rank on Google.

And for the things you actually need to rank for. I’m going to get into it in a lot of detail. Starting right now. Now what I want to do is I want to say this, I have 60 minutes of content, for sure. Probably going to go along. I do that if you watch the show, you know. But I do want to still take your questions. So at any time you have a question, go ahead and put them in the comments. Hello. Don’t forget to say hello, give us a shout out let us know where you’re watching from. I’m always fascinated by the following that I have the global following I so appreciate each and every one of you. I can’t do any of the things I do without your encouragement, your support, helping me share my posts, you the comments that you make help increase the visibility in these algorithms.

 So I really appreciate it. So whenever you say hello or tell me where you’re from, I’m always going to put them in the comments. So Hello, Dr. Grandma. It’s good to have you here. My good friend Mariela. Arturo Sunday, Michael from Poland Rabb we got people like we got Santa Monica, we got Poland. I’m not sure where the other people are from at the moment. But yeah, so Michael is my buddy. Now this guy, look if you’re watching and you are interested in sustainable, earth friendly materials for clothes or other types of products, my buddy Michael runs a manufacturing company over there in Poland and you should talk to him. He’s business to business, but you can get your stuff created my sister from another Mr. Schary is on from Vancouver, Canada. We’ve got a manual in from Ghana, I always get good support from West Africa.

And I totally appreciate that. And I’ve got my buddy Damon, who runs exit your way if you guys are looking to sell your business and you need help Damien’s the guy to do it. He’s coming to us from Washington up near Seattle. We’ve got to Shar from India, you might want to update your settings, my friends. So if you change your settings to public profile, then everybody can see it. We’ve got Arturo coming from Houston. I knew that I somehow forgot. But I knew from my hometown call in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ll actually be there later this week. My mom’s turning 70 to 70 on Friday, so we’re going to be out there for her birthday this weekend. And Kurt Anderson is Kurt and I didn’t see Kurt But Kurt is also my buddy. I think he’s over in the Atlanta area. And Santa Barbara, as we talked about pretty hot today.

Hey, Mary. Oh, we had a we had clouds yesterday. It was amazing. But anyways, all right. Enough chitchat for me. I need to get to work. What is SEO, look, if you’ve never understood what SEO is, I want to explain it to you right now, I’m going to be doing a lot of screen shares today. Because honestly, this is probably the most important thing that I can going to do is not just tell you what it is, but show you what it is. So let me get my screen going here. And there it is. Okay, so I’m going to be in this little box most of the day, and that’s alright. If you go to Bowman, digital media.com. I’m going to turn this off for a second. We’ll turn it back on in a minute. That’s part of the lesson.

Okay. So on my website, go to the Services tab. And then the very first one is SEO. That’s where I’m at right now. So then you’re going to scroll down, get found by your target audience on Google faster. That really is the work of SEO. Why do you need this? Why do you need SEO? Look, I’m gonna come back to all of this in a minute. But I’m just showing you, if you scroll down past the offerings, you can hire us to do this and full disclosure. But this is not a commercial. I’m not trying to sell you anything. today. I’m just trying to show you where to find the information. Scroll down past the menu, where it says SEO matters TEDx Wilmington talk, you can watch my latest TEDx talk. Look as folks, it’s been seen 110,000 times. And it’s not done.

Why? Because the information is game-changing. But just scroll down even to right here understanding pillar content. I’m gonna explain what that is a little bit later. But I’m just showing you what’s available. So I’m teaching you about this information in detail on my website. You can learn it for free demographics and identifying your audience how to do it and why it’s important. Keeping in mind what pillar content is, how other parts of your website are supported by the pillar content, how pillar content can help with your SEO efforts bringing home a content summary for pillar content, is Seo really worth the investment?

Yes, and no, it’s not if you’re not doing it correctly, it is worth every penny, if you’re doing it correctly. So that’s a little bit of a just depends on who you’re paying to do the work for you or doing it yourself. What about domain authority? And how does it affect SERP. We’re gonna get into this in a minute, five reasons to keep working on SEO each month. And I’ve got an article written on this in detail if you want to read even more. Okay, so that’s all on the SEO page, boom, digital media. Alright, but now what I’m going to do is I’m gonna switch over to my slides, and we’re gonna go through okay, and we got a couple more people.

Here we got Dr. Gemma from Nigeria. And then we’ve got Frank coffee from Ghana. So we’ve got a couple people from Ghana. Welcome, everybody. All right. Let me scroll back up. This is my slide deck, from my TED Talk. All right. So why does SEO matter? It matters because over half of all internet traffic runs through Google. I want to park right here for just a second because I don’t want you to have your eyes glaze over and not understand what I’m saying. What I’m saying is not I’m not trying to be grandiose. I’m trying to be factual here. Over half of the people All who are on the internet, we’ll use Google to get somewhere else.

If you want Google to help send those people to your website, then SEO matters, because they will not send people to your website. If you are not on Google, on the first page, or the second page, little bit on the third page, if you are trying to get prospects, and draw them into your website, through Google, what you should be doing, because again, over half the people using the internet or using Google to find what ever resource they’re going to, you need to get on the first page, if you can, the second page will be okay, a lot less volume, but it will be okay.

By the time you get to the third page, it’s very, very small numbers. And it’s less than 1/10 of 1%. Go past the third page. Gotta get high up in the rankings. I’m gonna show you how to do it. All right. Here’s some numbers for you. I’m a stats guy. I love stats, because people can say whatever they want, but show me the proof. Okay, so here’s some proof for you. And this actually, this data is a little bit outdated, these numbers are actually higher today than they were at the time I prepared these slides. For example, it’s now 99,000. Google searches every second on average for 2023. These numbers are the average numbers for the entirety of 2022. So in 2022, over the whole year, every second, on average, there were 81,000 people on Google searching for something. Okay, that’s a lot. 7 billion searches per day, in fact, 90%, it’s actually 92 to 94%, depending on if we’re talking about desktop or mobile. But over 90% of all search engine traffic happens on Google as opposed to their competitors. In fact, I said this in my TEDx talk, if you take the second, which is being the third, which is Yahoo, and the fourth, which is duck, duck, go and add all of their total searches, search volumes combined. If you add it all together, combined, it’s less than 5% of all search engine traffic.

Okay. So if you’re doing SEO work, and you’re not focused on Google, I don’t know what you’re actually doing. It doesn’t make sense, your SEO strategy needs to focus on Google for search engines. Now, there’s also just so you know, SEO work that can be done on YouTube, which is the second largest search engine by volume in the world, even though it’s not considered a search engine, you understand what I’m saying? 81% of Americans use YouTube every single month. So there are strategies for some of these other platforms. But today, we’re talking about Google. All right.

I love it that Steve is in the top 10 for the area. That’s really good. And I’m going to show you some things today, Mariela that can help you get them to number one. Okay, so that’s excellent. I’m always, of course, rooting for and supporting as best I can you guys over there in Santa Barbara. Alright, so over 60% of all internet traffic runs through Google, it can get as high as low 70s. Okay, just depends a little bit. There are categories, subcategories, months things change. These numbers that I’m showing you, again, are the cumulative numbers for 2022 across the board. All right, let’s keep going.

I want to define some key terms, so that you, no matter where you are in your SEO journey, you’ve never heard of SEO before, or your, you know, a little bit of knowledge background, I want to give you some foundational terms and definitions, so that everything else I say, hopefully will make more sense. Otherwise, you’re gonna have to rewind the tape, and that’s fine. It’s on video. You can watch this as many times as you want. Alright, so here we go. SEO is an acronym. It stands for Search Engine Optimization.

But what does it actually mean? And what work is involved in SEO? Well, we’re going to dive a little bit deeper in that right now. If we’re looking at SEO, what it really is, I’m gonna go to Google real fast. We’ll spend some time on Google today. Fancy that.

Alright. Let’s say you were looking for somebody to do digital marketing services. Why? Because, well, I’m in digital marketing. Alright, so we’re going to use me as an example. So I live in a place called Moreno Valley. It’s here in the greater Los Angeles area. Yeah, if I type in digital marketing services in Moreno Valley, what comes up? Well, first, which comes up is the ads. But most people just scroll right by that. Now, what I’m very pleased to see is Bowman digital media is the very first result in the maps have you went to Google Maps and typed digital marketing services in Moreno Valley, or you happen to be here and you did near me, I would come up first, or my business page would come up first. And that’s what you want to see.

Now, the numbers that I’ve shared with you so far, don’t include this. But this is another component of SEO. And one of the best ways that you can get this to happen is get these you want to get customer reviews? How do you get them? One of them? It’s so simple, that you’re gonna be like, Duh, of course, but nobody’s doing it, or most people aren’t doing it.

You just have to ask your happy clients, Hey, can’t will you go to Google Maps, and give my company in this case, Bowman, digital media, a good review, if you are happy? If you weren’t happy? Can you tell me what you weren’t happy about, so I can make it right. If you would approach your clients that way, I’m sure that you could get people to do that, the more reviews you get, the higher up on Google Maps, you will be.

Okay. So Google, verify your business as a as a minimum requirement, which means they’re going to send you a postcard with a code on it, verify your business, and then get these reviews by asking your clients if they were happy to give you the Google review, and if they weren’t, ask them what you could have done better. So you can make it right. That’ll minimize anybody giving you a negative review. And we’ll help you get a lot of positive reviews. Most people will do this because it doesn’t cost them anything but a few seconds of their time. So do that. Okay. But when we’re talking about SEO results, and the numbers that I’m going to be sharing for SERP in some of these other words that we’re about to get into, this is what I’m actually talking about.

This is the number one rated result, organic result by Google. So this is the best one. It’s not Bowman digital media. I know it pains me Look, this is, this is something that you have to work on really hard, and all the time, or you have to pay somebody to do it for you. Alright. But if you’re in this spot, number one, statistically, you’re going to about 28% of all searches on Google are going to click on that very first organic result. In other words, what Google is putting out first, not the ads, not the maps, but the actual response to your request or your prospects request. So then, so this is spot one, this is spot two goes down all the way to 10. And then you could either click on page two or next to take you the next page. But most people won’t do that. They’ll stay right here on the first page. So if you’re not on the first page, there’s a problem.

I’ll give you the math in just a minute. All right. But if they don’t click on the first on something on the first result, instead of going to next page, what most people will do is they’ll come up here, and they’ll revise the search, like SEO Services service provider. near me. That’s a very common thing. Right. So then again, you’ve got your ads, which you pay for, then look, we’ve got Bowman digital media up number one, again, it’s important to get those Google reviews, okay.

And then you come down here, and again, this is position 123, and so forth. And bummer. I am in clutch. But it doesn’t have Bowman digital media on the first page, right? It happens, okay, so we all have work to do, when I’m trying to show you is that’s the work that we’re that’s where we’re trying to all the work for SEO is trying to get you from wherever you are up to where you need to be. And I’ll show you where I am in a in a few minutes, because I’m going to go over how you can track where you rank for your keywords. I’m going to show you that later in the lesson.

All right, so SERP SERP stands for search engine results page. Now some people also will swap out the page with position or place. The technical definition is page. But I actually like position the best because it’s really about your where you’re stacking up. If you’re in fourth spot versus third spot, it makes a big difference mathematically on how many people you’re going to draw in. So your goal should be to get the first second or third spot on the first page. That’s the SERP that you’re trying to accomplish key words.

Now what a lot of people think are the key words aren’t necessarily the keywords? What do I mean? Great question. What I mean is this, you do what you do, and you have nomenclature, or terminology that you use. And it might be industry specific or pretty technical or terms that you learned in college. But the fact is that the people online who are not experts at what you do, who need a service provider who does what you do, might be using different words, you need to figure out what words they are using, when they’re over on Google and filling out that search bar.

Those are the keywords that you need to go after, you need to figure out what those are, and need to go after it. There’s a variety of ways to do it. You can do surveys, you can ask questions on social media, you can send out emails to prospects and say, hey, when you go into Google, and you’re looking for somebody who does this, what phrases are you using, get some feedback, you can also use tools, we’re gonna get into some, the one that I like, is Google dot trends or word tracker, those are the two that I use. So I’ll show you those in a little bit. All right. But keywords are not necessarily what you do. But the terminology that people are using to find what you do, it seems like a subtle difference. But it can make a huge difference in volumes, especially if you’re in a very technical field.

Alright, eat, I like eat a lot. It’s an acronym that Google actually came up with themselves, stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trust worthiness. So what you want to do is when you’re creating your content, specifically your pillar content, which I’m about to explain what that is, but when you’re creating your content, you want to show that you’re an expert, you want to establish that you’re the authority, you’re going to do that by getting other websites to point back to your content. And you want to establish the fact that you’re trustworthy. Part of that is done through your Google reviews. So you want to establish that you’re an expert, you want to become an authority by having other people now the expertise comes from the content that you write.

The authoritativeness mostly comes from the backlinks that you build. In other words, these other websites are saying, Hey, if you want to know about SEO, you should go talk to Ira Bowman digital media on their website, it points back to your website. Okay. And then your trustworthiness a lot has to do with your Google reviews. Okay. So if you’ve got a competitor that has 1500, Google reviews, and you have 12, they’re probably going to be on top of you for that trustworthiness score. Right. Okay. On page, what do I mean by on page on page? Is any of the content that is actually on your website? So you know, Singapore?

Nope. There I am. Okay. So, for example, why do I have all of this content about SEO, on the page that I’m selling, or at least offering services for SEO on what I did that for this reason, because this is labeled a pillar page on my website. And it goes deep into SEO and why they cover a variety of topics. Pillar content, domain authority, a variety of things I talked about in detail, I have over 3000 words written on this page. I have videos for people to watch. We’ll get into all this in a minute. But all this is here to help establish my expertise on the topic. That’s why it’s here. Okay. Let’s go back to the slides. On page simply means figure out which one is which. Okay, this right here is on page anything on my website, anything that’s on BOMA digital media, so whether we’re on the homepage, or one of the service pages or whatever, anything that’s written on here, this is all on page. So in my blogs on any ani any page on my website, so off page is any content that’s on another website that points back to Bowman digital media.

Okay, so it could be that I wrote a blog on SPN or I was on a show for somebody and they put a backlink from the show over to my website to do me a favor, or a video that I have on Google. I have in the description. Bowman, digital media.com Those are all Off Page, they hyperlink back to my website. So that’s off page content. What is a backlink? A backlink is something that you can click on. I’ll give you an example. It’s really simple. But if we come oops, I turned on my I turned on my Photoshop. Alright, if we come to my website and we click on backlinking that’s not a backlink.

Okay, we’re gonna go SEO. So that isn’t a backlink. That’s a menu. Okay? But if you have a word inside, like right here, okay, see how it changes from the arrow to the hand, anything that’s clickable like that, like if I click on this, this guy gave me a referral. He said Bowman digital media perform wonders for my corporate website before turning to them. I was stuck somewhere after pay. The seventh page of internet searches on Google said he stopped looking after seven pages. Most people don’t even get to page two, he went to page seven. After they worked their magic by website went to page one, I have already seen the difference in a number of unsolicited calls I’m getting. So that’s a referral that I got.

But then I linked to him his LinkedIn profile. Okay, why did I do that? Well, I didn’t want people to think I wrote it myself. So I wanted to make sure they could get a hold of Steve and ask them a question, if they were if they had any follow up questions. Right. So here’s Steve there, Steve. But I click on this, this is called a backlink. So you might know it as a hyperlink. But anyways, is anything that’s clickable that takes you to another place on the internet. That’s what a backlink is. All right.

Anchor Text, what is anchor text, I can show you the same example. So here in this case, what’s clickable is the name Steve Hammett. Right. So this right here is all clickable. So the anchor text in this case is Steve Hammett, CPA. Now, I also have Bowman digital media hyperlinked. So in this case, the anchor text is Bowman digital media. This also happens to be anchor text, because it’s got an H tag. Now I’m not going to get into h tags a lot in this particular lesson. But H tags, there’s h1 through h6, you only want to have one h1 Tag per page. So most H tags should be h2 or h3.

But the higher the number, the smaller the font typically. So sometimes for aesthetic reasons, you’ll use like an h4 and h5. It’s still an H tag. It’s still anchor text, but it’s just smaller on the page. Okay, that’s just a formatting thing for web developers. Alright, let’s keep going. Bounce. Bounce is probably the second most important term I’m going to teach you SERP is the most important. So number one most important thing to learn about SEO is search. It’s all about SERP. Whatever you’re doing for SEO should help you with SERPs in one form or fashion or the other. Now bounce rates a little bit different. Let’s say I want to go to a website. And I’m going to pick on myself a little bit here. Let’s go to Projecthelpmegrow.com. That’s my philanthropy, if you’re not familiar with it,  projecthelpmegrow.com

If I was going to this website, and let’s say I was trying to find something about Ira Bowman, and it has my name here. So it populated in Google when I searched Ira Bowman project help you grow came up because it is populated there. But it says this is not about Ira Bowman this is just something that IRA Bowman works on. It could be instead of scrolling, or clicking on the video or clicking on the button. I just did this. And I left. That would be considered a bounce. Once a person scrolls, or once person clicks on a video or once person clicks on a button, or they go into the menu and pick something that’s no longer a bounce.

Now one of the reasons why I don’t like pay ads is because the bounce rates for paid ads are typically higher than 80%. A lot of campaigns are in the 90 percentile 91 92 93 94 95% Bounce. What does that mean? Well out of 100 visitors if you had a 90% bounce rate, that means 90 people who paid you paid when they clicked on the ad, but they didn’t stay to actually consume your website. It cost you a lot of money, but you didn’t get a lot of ROI return on your investment.

When we do organic SEO, and we just get Google to increase our SERP, again, where we rank on Google in their listing, the bounce rates dropped down to 40% or less, meaning only 40 of the 100 people left. But we didn’t have to pay for the for the click. So it didn’t cost us anything other than whatever it costs us for the SEO work, you can retain 60 of 100. And you don’t pay for the 40, who came and didn’t leave and didn’t stay.

To me, it’s a much smarter way to do it. And that’s why I focus on what we call organic SEO, we’ll get into that in just a little bit. In fact, it’s next. All right, organic, when I use the word organic, like we had our buddy, hang on a second, Michael, from Poland. If you ask Michael. To define organic, he’s going to use completely different terminology than me, because we’re talking about two completely different things. He’s talking about nature, right? Plants, and trees and organic, right? The thing that you think of healthy stuff, stuff in nature, in SEO has nothing to do with nature.

What it has to do it instead is it has to do with things that happen naturally. In other words, when we go back to Google, what words are what? What came up for free, that’s organic, these are all organic, there’s no sponsor, like these, these are the paid ads. If I click on this, then that company, smart sites has to pay money. Now how much they pay depends on the market. But it could be $2. Could be $12. It could be 70 cents, could be $25. Right? The cost per click varies per campaign. And Google has a whole auction system if you’re not familiar with it. But the fact is, this is not organic. What is organic? Is this right here. This is the first organic results.

So this is considered SERP position one, right? Okay. So hopefully that makes sense, organic is getting in the list that Google is naturally recommend recommending for the topic. Now, before I go any further, I just want to stop and pause because that is the definitions, the key terms that I’m defining for this show. Is there any questions? And Marielle is asking your questions to the use of hashtags help, or no, they help on social media, they don’t help on Google. Okay, there is something called Google tags. That’s different. But that is a good question.

Hashtags help you on like Twitter, and Facebook and Instagram, to draw on people who don’t know you. They’re not in your circle of friends or followers or subscribers. But they’re searching for content on that topic. It doesn’t work that way for Google. But it does work that way for social media. It’s an important distinction to make. So I’m glad you asked the question. All right. SEO matters, because over half of all the internet traffic runs through Google. So please, if you need to pause this, and write these things down, or save the video and use this as a reference guide, whatever you want to do, but please do it.

Because it’s extremely important to understand what these mean, or at least how they work from a 30,000 foot view. So you can hire somebody, like me or whoever. There’s plenty of other people who do SEO work out there on on the planet, of course. So if you’re going to outsource it, you don’t need to understand it as much, but you do you should understand SERP and bounce. Because you can monitor your bounce rates. And you can monitor your SERP, you should know how many people are coming to your website, you should know how many people are going to your competitors websites, you should know what keywords you rank for. And you should know the positions of your rankings. So you can monitor how you’re performing.

Because SEO is not a static thing that you just do once and you’re done. It’s it’s like a marathon that continues as long as you have a website. And as long as you rely on Google to help you help bring prospects over from Google to your website to increase your website volume. Got a couple more people here on the show. We’ve got Mohammed from Kuwait welcome. We’ve got I don’t want to mispronounce it. So I’m not even gonna try sorry, I don’t want to butcher but from India, welcome to the show. All right. So we are just finished with the key terms. Now we’re gonna get into why the key term gyms all matter what they’re about. Alright. So surf matters. Like I said, this is the number one thing like, if you only leave with one thing today, I want you to leave understanding that over half the internet traffic runs through Google and surf is extremely important. Again, this is about the behavior, the psycho behavior, consumer behavior. 75%, or more of all people who go to Google will put in what Google calls a query, but they’ll put in a term up at the top in the search bar, they’ll hit Search, and Google will give a results page 75% of people will never leave that one page.

In other words, they’re going to click on one of the things that Google recommended on the first page, or they’re going to do a new query, they’re going to try a different search expression. And they’re going to do that. But they’re not going to click Next and go to the second page. So if all your terms, if you rank on the second or third or fourth, or like Steve Hamlet, you rank somewhere after page seven, most people are never going to find you. less than 1/10 of 1% of people make it to page four.

Okay? So when I say cert matters, it’s extremely important, over 28 of over 28% of people will just click on the very first term on Google, the organic term is what we mean here, not the ads, but they’ll go down. Those just scroll down past the ads. Many of us are trained to just look past the ads, right? We’re used to having a lot of sidebars, we’re used to seeing a little bit the top, we’re used to seeing the little pop-up stuff.

And what do we do most of us we just blow right past it, because we’ve been trained, or we’ve trained ourselves to do that. So most people 28%, in fact, are going to click on that first result, okay. 60% will click on one of the first three. So if you know that 28% are clicking on the first one, that means 32% are clicking on a combination of the second and third. So you really want to be in position one, two, or three, if you can’t make position one, but you can get in the top three, your website will get a ton of traffic.

That is a way. Remember when I said you can change the church trajectory of your business, this is what I’m talking about. Once you get to position one, two or three, it’s huge. And by the way, that also includes this map. So let’s not underestimate the importance of asking people for housing, why is that not coming up? Let’s not forget the importance of asking people for reviews, okay? Because the fact that I’m on the top here means I’m gonna get a lot more clicks. And look, there’s a link to my website right there. If I click on this, which I’ll do that right now.

It takes us, as you can see, to Bowman digital media, that’s huge. That’s absolutely huge. So get your reviews in and get your SERP up, so that you can dominate the traffic, instead of going to your competitors website or going to somebody else’s website, they’re coming to your website. That’s what we need them to do. Alright. 9% or less, we’ll make it past page to about about 20% of people will go to page two, they’ll click on from page one to page two, but you’re going to lose 91%, if you’re on page three, you’re only going to get about 9% of the traffic. And it’s only about a 10th of 1% will go to page four. So it’s 1/10 of 1%. It’s not very many. So if you’ve got a keyword volume of like 1500 searches per month, that means only 1.5. People, one and a half people would make it to page four in that frame based on the math.

Now it could be there’s some anomalies. So your your keywords might have a little bit different results, but just as a whole. Okay. So these are things that you can research by the way. All right, less than 1% of people will go to page past page three. So SEO matters, because over half of all internet traffic runs through Google, but it really matters where you are with your SERP with your rankings because 75% or more people are going to be only on that first page and 60% of people are only going to click on the first three bots. So is it desirable to be on page one? Yes. But it’s a lot more desirable to be position one, two or three. Okay?

SEO versus social media. Now I get asked about social media a lot, because if you’ve been following me for any length of time, and you’re watching me here on social media, you know that I have a pretty large following on social media and I started my business solely as a social media service provider. So we were managing business pages for, you know, LinkedIn, or all the other platforms for our clients. And that was really the main service that we provided. But in 2021, I started to realize that I was not doing myself a service, and I was not doing my clients a service by ignoring Google. And so we increased our positioning on SEO and in 2022, SEO at Bowman Digital Media at least, became a bigger source of revenue.

It’s something we concentrate on more than our social media channels for our clients. Because the volumes are so different. This seems like I’m making this stuff up. But it’s actually true, you can research it yourself. Alright, these numbers again, are all based on 2022 volume for the entire year. Okay. So what is the difference between SEO volume and social media volume, it goes like this. There are 4.5 billion monthly active users. Many of us use an acronym called MAU, which is monthly active users, on all of social media combined, okay. 2.9 billion of those are actually on Facebook.

I hear a lot of people talk about they don’t want to use Facebook, because it’s not for business. And I’m telling you, that is a mistake. For most of you. There may be a small fraction of you who Facebook doesn’t make any sense. But it isn’t about your personal preferences. This is not about you remember, you’ve got to get out of your own chair. And you’ve got to put yourself in the position from the people across the table. That are your prospects who don’t know you exist? How are they going to find you?

Well, they’re gonna find you with Google. Yes. But if there are 3 billion people, and it’s just point zero 2 billion shy of 3 billion now it’s 2.9 8 billion people a month in 2023. That number is increasing. It’s not decreasing. The demise of Facebook is a fallacy. It’s not real. More people are using Facebook now than ever before. And it’s still the number one rated social media platform by a lot. Number two is YouTube. Number three is Instagram.

Both in over now at two, 2 billion I know at the time, these these this date is a little bit old now. Right? 1 billion each for Instagram and YouTube. It’s not that way. YouTube is now 2.5. It’s 2.5 billion monthly active users Instagram right now is 2.1 billion monthly active users. So if you’re looking for volume, can you find it on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram? Yes, you can. Now if you tell me the demographics that your business is targeting as an avatar, I can tell you which one of those or which few of those that you should really concentrate on.

Now, here’s the thing that gets me so many people and it’s almost like, it’s almost like an air, like, you know, and there’s an air to it. There’s a sophistication or a badge of honor that people were like, I only use LinkedIn. I’m only on LinkedIn. Okay, great. That’s fine. But there’s an opportunity cost that you might be paying, because you’re only on LinkedIn. First of all, if you’re only on LinkedIn, because it’s your personal preference, shame on you. Your business wasn’t designed to serve you, right? You created your business, you have your business, your business exists for the purpose of serving your prospects of serving clients, right. So when the question that I asked everybody before I get started on campaigns for them, who is the audience that they’re trying to reach?

I want to know about their age, about their gender, about their education level, about their income level. I want to know how they think, what are they like, right? So I’m into the demographics and the psychographics of the Avatar. And then we let that tell us where they are on social media. Okay, so if we were gonna race well, here’s the thing. Look at it. There’s 300 million active users per month on LinkedIn.

But let’s say for example, because this happens a lot you got to A business here in the United States. And you only deal with people in the United States Well, there are 300 million monthly active users on LinkedIn, which is, by the way, is only the 20th ranked platform on the planet, social media platform. In other words, there are 19, other social media platforms where there are more people than LinkedIn. So if you’re only focusing on LinkedIn, you’re focusing on the 20th best platform for volume. But then, if you break down the numbers inside this 300 million, you’re gonna know this. If my geofence this, this area that I service is the United States, only less than 30% of LinkedIn monthly active users are from the United States.

What does that mean? It drops the number down from 300 million, so below 90 million, so less than 100 million monthly active users are from the United States on LinkedIn, any given month. I’m not saying LinkedIn is invaluable. I love LinkedIn. But it isn’t the only platform I put out content on, it isn’t even the one I put out the most content on, I put out more content on Instagram every day than any other any other platform.

Because of the psycho analytics and the demographics of the people that I serve. All right, if you are going to race Google, against social media, one month of volume for Google will be 210 billion searches. It takes 47 months of social media volume to generate the same volume that you get in one month on Google, that my friends, one month versus four years minus that month. That’s a big spread. But let’s say you’re one of the snooty people who only use Google because you are LinkedIn because you think that LinkedIn is the only thing out there? Well, it would take you 700 months. That’s over 58 years to equate the one month volume of Google.

So I’m just trying to help you change the way you think. Because a lot of people’s thinking is incorrect. And it’s based on their gut or based on some bad information that some person who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about put out. So SEO matters, because of the volume of people that are on Google every month, compared to everything else. Look, Google is the ocean. It’s the only ocean. Social media is like a small pond or river compared to Google, as far as volume is concerned, I’m not saying the companies are worth you know what I mean, I’m not trying to talk about the values of the companies, I’m just talking about the volume of people who use them. All right. And to Mario’s point here, without your clients, you have no business clients come first.

But actually, even before clients is about prospects, you have to reach these prospects, they’ve got to see who you are and know who you are, then they’ve got to believe that you can help them. So you’ve got to show them that expertise, you’ve got to establish a little bit of trust and authority, that’s the Eat acronym, and then they become your clients. And then you really need their help in spreading the word, right.

That’s where social media comes into play. You get your, your friends and your clients to help you share the message and increase your visibility. And in doing that, they can help you rank higher on Google, especially if they’re taking the time to fill out that Google review for you. And if they’re like, I have partners tabs on all my websites that point to friends. I have friends that also have websites. And I point to my friends websites from my partner’s tabs, because I’m giving them a backlink to help establish their authority, the authoritativeness that’s the A in the E acronym.

Okay. All right. Let’s keep going. So paid versus organic. Why do I focus on organic SEO as opposed to paid which I have kind of already covered this, but 28% of traffic on Google is generated by the paid ads. So in other words, of all the traffic that in that Google is is generating 28% of internet traffic comes from paid ads on Google, that’s a lot that’s nothing to sneeze at. And I’m not anti paid. I just don’t focus on paid ads, even though In a lot of ways, it would be easier for me to do that. But the reason why we focus on the organic search is because the volumes are higher, it’s 40 to 50% of traffic on the internet is generated from organic search. In other words, they’re going down to what Google suggested and clicking on that, as opposed to one of the ads, so there are more people doing it. And also look at the bounce rate comparison.

This is the main thing for me, the volume is higher, and the bounce rate is lower. It’s half 80%. Plus for PPC. And to be fair, most campaigns are in the 90 percents. So let’s be real. If you’re running your own paid ad campaign on Google, you’re likely getting somewhere around 95% Bounce Rate, you may not even know that, because you don’t know to check. But that’s what’s really happening. The bounce rate from organic search drops all the way down to 40%. Why? Well, here’s why. When you click on the ad, Google didn’t actually recommend that company or service provider, they just paid for the spot.

But they had to earn the recommendation from Google down below. And people trust Google knows what they’re doing. So they go, Okay, I asked who’s the best at whatever. And Google said, these guys are the best. So I’m gonna give them a shot, and bounce rates go down all the way to 40% or less. So you spend less money on organic search, and you get a better rate, you get more traffic from it, and you get lower bounce, so you keep more of them there. So that’s why I focus on organic and not paid. Okay?

If you only have the money to do one or the other, unless you have a very short window, or a very, very small geofence. Like, let’s say you can only do your service in your local city. If one of those two are true, then paid might be better for you. But if you have forever, and your geofence is relatively large, I would focus primarily on organic search. Okay. All right. Three methods to gain organic traffic. We’re going to talk about this in some detail. And we’re going to go over because I’m already I’ve only got eight minutes left officially on the show, but we’re going long today.

All right, keyword research, what is it? How do you do it? Well, I already said in the definition, what keywords are it’s the words that people are using or the expressions they’re using to find a service provider who does the thing that you do? That’s your key words, whatever that is. But how do you know what those are? How do you find them? Let’s go to it. All right. So one of the things that I like to use for this is a thing called Google Trends. So you just go trends.google.com, it’s here in the URL in case you want to find it. All right. But what can you do here, you can do actually quite a bit. But let’s just let’s just look for something real quick. Let’s just go digital.

Just trying to be consistent, right? Digital Marketing. Obviously, we spell it right, and search term, okay. So on here, what we can see is, we can see the interest over time. Now, this right now is set up for 24 hours, it looks like Sorry, I’m on a smaller screen here with the shared screens. I’m trying to I’m trying to do a couple of things. All right. But see this dark blue, that tells you the area where this word was searched the most. So they rank them out of 100. This is not mean 100 searches.

This is from zero to 100. So what they’re saying is, the interest in New York was really, really strong. Second most interest was in Oregon, which is interesting, because it’s on the other side of the country, a lot of times you’ll see cluster groups, where regions are are focusing on terms, but New Jersey is in the list, which obviously is right next to New York. So you and you’ve got Virginia, which is actually not too far away, either. And you can kind of see it. This is Virginia, New Jersey is right here.

Are the New Jersey yet. Sorry, it’s so small. That’s Connecticut. There it is. It’s right below it. I thought it was this, but it’s actually that Okay, so there you go. So that’s one way that you can use it. But then you can also come down here. And you can see related topics related queries. Now this is the one that I pay attention to. I put in digital marketing. So I put in the term that I’m familiar with. But now this is saying hey, what is a digital marketing marketing agency? Now I have not answered that question on my website.

Guess what I’m going to do later today. I’m going to write some content about what is a digital marketing agency and I’m going to add it to my website. I’m writing this down I know this is thrilling, but this is what we do. So we come here to Google Trends, we put in the keywords or topics that we think we should use, then we come down and we look at what it suggests. So if I come here, now I can see the activity spikes, and I can change this date, right, and I can change the region. Actually, this doesn’t seem like it has a ton of activity.

So maybe it’s not the best thing to do. Now I can compare two terms, which is really cool. And I can see the traffic levels for the two. Now again, this doesn’t have all the data, so it’s probably not a great one to do. Let’s do something else where we get a little bit more, let’s go. Organic food now see the volume here has changed. Now I can see where some of the dark blue, so organic food Alaska had the most, then District of Columbia, which is Washington, DC, then New Mexico, Rhode Island, Wyoming.

Now I could come in here, instead of organic food, I could say something like. Right, it’s a different term, it’s gonna have different results. And now I can see, Well, which one is being used more healthy food is being used a lot more than organic food. So if I’m creating content, and using the word organic food, and I want more volume, I just need to change the term or the expression that I’m using. switch that over to healthy food.

And there’s a lot more volume available to me that way. And you can do this for anything. Say you want to do it again. Right? So come on over. Hit this and then change it. Let’s go. I don’t know. NFL. Yeah, let’s just do NFL. And then we’ll do NBA. And if I want to do MLB for baseball, okay, so I’ve got three professional sports here, which term is searched the most? Well, baseball season is in season right now. So it’s higher. So that doesn’t shock me. NFL is got more views, but not by a lot. They’re basically the same, just a little bit more than the NBA. Okay. But now, if I waited till Christmas to do this, when the NFL and NBA seasons are both in full swing, and MLB is in winter break, I imagine these curves would change. Okay, so this is one way you can use it.

But let’s say you don’t even know what to search for. You can come to a tool now. They have a free version. And full disclosure, I pay for this tool. So you know, there’s some things I can do that you won’t, wouldn’t be able to do. But I’m just going to show you the free stuff right now. So I put in digital marketing earlier. And what it will do, it’ll actually show me the average number of searches per month over the past 12 months. So in other words, 54,200 people searched for something related to digital marketing on Google per month, over the last 12 months on average, the competition rate out of 100 is basically 50.

In other words, it’s pretty hard to compete for digital marketing. And that’s why I’m not on the first page because I don’t have the the budget of some of the really large companies that are making eight and nine figures in digital marketing. There’s there are some Goliath Sout there and I’m still a David you understand, but it’s a competitive field as you can see, and what this means in anchor and text it I showed you this with the backlinks but this means that in the heading in the URL or in the in the backlinks, people are using digital marketing 109,000 times I’ve quite a few websites competing with Bowman digital media for digital marketing.

But now I can come down here and I can look at some of the other expressions. Now I have this ranking descending in volume, because to me, it’s all about volume. But what I’m looking for, if I’m doing your SEO is I’m looking for expressions like this. They have a competition level under 20. And they have a low IAE t score. So this has 557 websites that compete on this topic. What is digital marketing? only less than 16% competition rate out of 100 but there are at 300 searches on that per month.

That’s pretty good volume. You see if I can get on my SERP up on the first page for that, and generate, you know, what, say 20 or 30% of the ad 300. Now I’ve got an extra, what, 400 500 visitors per month, just by adding content that talks about what is digital marketing. And that’s how this works. So once you find these key terms, you add it to your, you add it to a list to your strategy list, and then you start creating content on your website, and you’re gonna put it in your pillar content, you’re gonna put it in your blogs, you’re gonna put it on your pages. And over time, as you get indexed by Google, your SERPs scores will go up, they will increase.

Okay, so because we’re at the hour mark, and we’re going in a bonus time, I’m going to speed this up just a little bit, but I want to go through the others. Okay, so that’s keyword research, use trends dot google or use word search, or there’s other tools out there you can use to, but the big thing is, you want to make sure that you’re looking at something that’s showing you the volumes that are actually being searched.

So take your expression, your keywords, put it into some type of tracking system that will show you how many searches per month are being done, and give you an idea of the competition rate. You can also look at the PPC, the price per click, or the CPC if you want cost per click right. Same Same thing, basically. But the more expensive, the term is, typically that means the more volume there is, and the more competition there is, typically, that’s not always true, but it gives you a general rule of thumb.

All right, pillar content, what is pillar content? I want to spend some time on pillar content, because pillar content is extremely important. So Oh, another one for for key keyword research is answer the public. I’m gonna go to that real quick. I didn’t, I didn’t go there in the demo here. But let me go there now. Because it’s a good tool. It’s actually owned by Neil Patel. So it’s answer the public.com. And what you can do if you’re struggling. And you can use this for free too, by the way.

So if we go digital marketing, search, what it’s going to do is it’s going to give us some diagram wheels, which kind of cool. Data hit search, but I’ve got to sign in. Hang on. Oh, I reached my limit. Okay, hang on. Oh, I reached my limit. I can’t show you. Sorry. Not upgrading today, Neil. Okay, well answer the public go there. And you’ll see it’s pretty easy to use, it’s got a diagram, it’s color coded is the way it works. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to see, it’ll give you like suggestions, it’ll have a wheel that’s all the way around the dark orange means that it’s heavy volume, the light color means that it’s less volume. They don’t always quantify them on there.

But it’s a pretty good tool, if you want to use it. I don’t pay for that one. I just use it for free. Maybe I can’t anymore. Maybe Neil needs to give me a free subscription since I promote his stuff all the time in my SEO talks. But anyways, it’s here, answer the public.com if you want to try it. Alright, pillar content. This is going to be new for a lot of you. But it is extremely important. Pillar content is probably the biggest change in SEO in the last year. But basically, if I was to look at most of your websites, there would be a few things that would be a tell that you don’t have someone like me working for you in just the way your website is laid out.

And the number one thing that I would see that you would probably not have correct is you would have an absence of pillar content. Because when I go to most websites, what I see is very few words, a lot of graphics. And Google is looking for answers to questions. They’re looking for content, the answers to questions, questions that needs to be in written form. I’m pulling up a website that I just started working on last month SEO, and I’m gonna show you one of the major changes that we did. First of all, she didn’t have a video up at the top. And I’m going to come back to this in a minute.

But we added this video for a very specific reason, but it’s up at the Top. But the other major thing that we did was we added these 1234567 spots. Now you might be looking at that going IRA, that looks awful. Yeah, well, it might look awful. But guess what, most people aren’t even going to scroll that far. Most people are going to stay up here above the fold. Okay?

But why is this so important? If you were to look at this website and do a word count on the website, before I did the extra work, what you would find is that the word count was about 350 words. And if I go on most your websites, that’s about what I find somewhere between 300 and maybe 900 words less than 1000. Now, what if I told you that pillar content is so vital to the success of your SEO? Because, on average, in 2022, to make the first page of Google on any search topic, you needed an average of 14 147 words.

Why is that so important? More remember, 75% or more of people are not going to page two. So if you’re not on page one, they’re not going to find you. If you don’t have 1400 47 words, on average, and 2022, you weren’t going to make the first page. So your absence of written content is affecting your score, you need to add more content, you specifically need to add pillar content. I’ll get to more of that in just a second. So one of the very first things that I did for Candice Montgomery’s page here is I added written content, how many words did I add? Well, I added over 3000 words, but I did it in this way. These are what we call accordion style. So you can click on it and expands, click on it and unexperienced see what I mean. But Google, when they go and do what’s called indexing your site, they scan your website every month for what’s on it. And specifically, they’re looking for what’s new, they’re checking out your load times, they’re going to check to make sure everything works, everything’s still good.

But all these extra words that we added, the reason why we did it, is we’re going to be supercharging. Her score, she is going to shoot up right now, according to Moz, she has a four, watch what happens to this website next month, it’s gonna pop up into the teams, it’s going to do that just because I added all this content. But it’s not just any content. It’s specific content around what she does. I’m answering all the questions, a beginner’s guide to budgeting, one of the things that people look up on Google is something like. That’s one of the things I look for. Now I want her page to be right here.

NerdWallet is probably spending a little bit more money than Canada’s Montgomery. So that one’s going to be probably hard to beat. But I bet you that I can get to the second spot pretty fast. And that’s what I’m going after. I’m going after the Supreme King, she’s not on the first page anywhere there. Okay. In fact, she only had one key term that ranked at all before she hired me. When I’m done, she’s going to have over 50 words that rank. Okay. So why add this content? Because this is exactly what Google is looking for. If you want Google to help you, you have to understand what Google wants.

And then you have to serve it to them on a silver platter. So they want written content. They it’s not that Google doesn’t want videos, I can show you for a fact they do. I believe it because we inserted this here, right? It’s part of a strategy. But this is what we call interactive media, which is the next thing, make sure you have at least one video on every page on your website that you want to rank. Why? Here’s why the videos are not for Google. The videos are for the actual visitors. How many people are going to visit Candace Montgomery’s page, come down here and read the importance of being debt free. The odds are very few, if any.

This is not for humans. This is for artificial intelligence. This is to make Google happy. But that’s why it’s there. So the reason why we put it in accordion style content, so that you didn’t have to scroll through all of it. Like this long laundry list, we try to make it easier to consume, which is what Google calls UX UI. You want your UX UI to be good. So you need to have contrast and your fonts you need to make sure your words are easy to read. You need to make sure that the site looks good and everything functions like if I click on this, and it doesn’t work, that’s a problem. I want somebody every months to go through and click every button, every link, every video, every portfolio that you have on your website, make sure somebody is clicking and checking every one of those every single month. That’s part of SEO, making sure that your UX UI is in check.

But again, if you don’t have enough written content on your page, the odds of you ranking on the first page of Google go down. Like you have an anchor tied to that page. It says sinking, sinking sinking. So if you want to cut the anchor and float to the top, you need to make sure your website has at least 1500 words of written content on every page. But your pillar content needs to have at least 3000 words. Now, here’s the difference between pillar content and regular content. Let’s say for example, that I have this now set as pillar content on this page, which I do if I’m going to write a blog about budgeting and being debt free, for the key or the keys, to your freedom, and I’m going to add this blog to Candice Montgomery’s website, right.

Here’s some of her blogs. If I’m going to add a new blog. What I want to do is inside this new blog, is I want to make sure that I link then back to the pillar content. Every new article that I write about that topic that’s covered in the pillar content, I want to have at least one link that goes from it over to the pillar content. Because through my sitemap, I’m basically highlighting to Google that my pillar content is this singular place on my website where you can get the most information is the well of information on that topic. Why is that important? There’s this thing out there called link cannibalization. It’s a it’s a fun thing to say. Little bit weird to explain, but I’m going to, I’m going to give it to you right now. Anyways, here’s what it is.

Link cannibalization is the anti monopoly safeguard that Google has instilled to make sure that nobody dominates anyone’s space? It’s ironic when you think about Google how much of a monopoly they are, I don’t even think monopoly describes Google adequately enough, because they dominate search engine traffic dominate over 90%. So they’re the they are the monopoly. It shouldn’t be called Napoli. It should be called Google. But Google is synonymous with searching for something. But it should be synonymous with dominating your field, your industry. Nobody dominates like Google does, right. Okay. So what Google did in their algorithm is put in a safeguard and here’s a safeguard, no singular business will be inside the organic search results more than two times for any singular search.

So and I’m searching Beginner’s Guide to budgeting. Candice Montgomery, might be somewhere here in the list, I hope she is, she might not be yet if she hasn’t been indexed for what I added yet. But eventually she will be. But she’ll only be in there up to twice. So in other words, if I’ve got three blogs on a topic, and pillar content, it’s extremely important to have the pillar content outrank the blogs, because I want to make sure the pillar content is something that Google puts first. So in, in your metadata, you want to designate your pillar content as pillar content, but by putting a link from the post over to the pillar content, what you’re doing is establishing authority, you’re increasing what’s called Page Authority on the pillar content, and that will naturally boost it up and over yourself.

You’re competing not only with your competitors, Google does not recommend web sites, they recommend web pages. So your pages are competing just as much as you and your competitor are. So you’re competing, the pages compete, and you compete with outside pages, or competitor pages. So you’ve got to beat them all. You’ve got to get your pillar content up over the herd. And the way you do that is by making sure that you add new content to your pillar page, every single month. So refresh, pillar content monthly, add a new video, add a new picture, add a new link to a blog, add something at least something every single month to make sure that it’s the newest content on your website, any given index.

I’ve said index few times I haven’t explained what it is. Here’s what it is. Google every four to 28 days comes to your website, and they we used to call them spider because it crawls your page. But anyways, they’re AI bots. They come and they click on everything. They they test, the speed, they they test all the links and buttons, they check to see if you have broken pages or 404 parent pages or pages not found things that that don’t work anymore.

They’re looking for new content to check in to see if you have a schema and a robotics and a sitemap. They’re checking out your metadata. They’re looking at all of it. And they’re looking for specifically, what is your website about? What information does it share? How well does it share it? What is the authority or the credibility of your site, so that it can reformulate its algorithm for any one of these expressions. And then, if you go periodically and do searches on Google, if you clear your cache memory, you’ll get different results over time, because some, some pages are moving up the rankings.

And some pages are moving down the rankings, the ones moving down, can be moving down for a variety of reasons. The number one reason websites lose position is because they have stale content. In other words, it’s old, it’s outdated, nothing new. They created their website, they paid somebody a lot of money, they thought it was perfect. And they just kind of left it there like a crab pot. But you can’t do that with websites, websites, living breathing apparatus, you got it, you got to keep adding new stuff. And where you need to be adding it most is in your pillar content. And in your blogs, those are the two places to focus. Alright, so I want you to refresh your blogs at least every six months. What does that mean?

Refresh, that means go into old blogs that you wrote six months ago. And add some new content update, you know, put a little thing at the bottom says updated, right and then add some stuff can be a paragraph doesn’t have to be a lot could be a new diagram can be updated stats can be anything you want. Update your content, because Google likes it. There’s something called the Yoast flesh, eat flesh, ease of reading Yoast rules, Google it and follow it. But basically, there’s a structure to how you want to format your content.

For example, you only want to have one h1 Tag per page on any given website. So most of your tags, like I said earlier, should be h2 or h3 tags. You also don’t want to have too many words between headings. So every 300 words or less, you need to add a new heading or a new age tag. When you’re setting up your blogs, let me show you what that looks like when you’re setting up your blogs. And again, I’ll just go into this one because I have a blog up right. So this is my h1 tag. It’s my title. So there it is. That’s okay. Then I come here, look, this is what we call an h2 tag. This is an h3 tag.

So I’ve got a lot of h3 tags. But notice the space between the tags, or between the headings is less than 300 words. This right here is probably about 95 words. Okay? Now the other thing I have in here it’s a little bit hard to see, but digital tools or apps to set reminders that is this right here is a backlink. Some of the links you want to have go to your page, some of the links you want to have to go off of your page. Okay, so inside your content, you want to follow these Yoast rules, I don’t have time to teach them all. But you can google that and then follow them. When you’re creating your content for pillar and for blog. You definitely want to do that.

Now what is interactive media interactive media includes videos, but it’s not limited to only videos. It could be mp3 files, which are voice files, audio files, it could be slider reels, it could be accordion content content could be anything that when you click on it, something happens. It moves it plays, it does something. So it is not a static JPEG. But it could be like an image carousel is a good example of interactive content. So you want to add slides, videos, accordion style text again, what is that that was over here on Candice Montgomery’s page as well. We gotta go back to the homepage for that see how this opens when I click on it, that’s called accordion text. So that’s what we call interactive media. Because when you click on it, it does something.

There’s Google has gone away from cookies tracking cookies, and they’ve gone to something called pixels. Pixels don’t work exactly the same way cookies do. So instead of tracking what site you’re on, per se, they’re tracking your Are engagements on pages, it’s a subtle difference why they’re bothering I really don’t know. But when you scroll when you click on a button, when you click on Play, when you slide some media over, when you expand content or whatever, what you’re doing really in reality for as far as Google is concerned, is you’re validating that you’re still consuming the content on that website. So they give the website owner extra credit for having you still there. So how many pages you click to matters, how long you stay matters, as long as you’re scrolling? Or as long as you’re clicking on something? If you have, like I do on your browser, if you have multiple if you have multiple tabs open.

Yeah, anyways, if you have multiple tabs open, like I typically have somewhere between 10 and 20 tabs open at any one given time. Well, you’re not actually on all of them. In the old days, though, all those websites will get credit for user time. Not anymore. You have to be doing something on the page to get credit. Okay. So my computer’s frozen a little bit. The screen is frozen up, I’m not sure what’s going on. I’m gonna stop the share for a minute and see if we can get this back. Okay, well, I’m kind of stuck in limbo here at the moment. So we’re almost at the end. If you remember, because I can’t show you the screen just a second, because my computer’s doing something.

But as soon as it unfreezes itself, then I will update the slides. But I’m just going to walk back through it with you just by way of summary. For the moment. What is SEO, SEO is search engine optimization. But really the activity of SEO is anything that you can do to increase your ranking on Google, where you are right now, for the words or expressions that people are searching for. So not the things that you if somebody asks you, what do you do, and you give them a laundry list, you’ve got your elevator pitch, like, perfected, that’s great. But people may not be searching for those specific things.

So that wouldn’t be your keywords, the keywords or the terms of phrases that they’re actually using in bulk. Those are the ones that you need to focus on. So do some homework and figure out what those are. Then add those to a list a whole like a task list, and then create content centered around those expressions. Do that like as often as possible? Because that’s going to help you more than anything else? Okay. Now, SERP SERP was stands for search engine results page. But really, why that matters is because most people will not go past the first page of Google, right 75% or so of people are going to stay on that first page. In fact, 60% of people are not only going to stay on the first page, they’re going to click on one, two, or three positions one, two, or three.

So you really want to do activities, to increase your rankings, so that your rankings are in the first second or third spot of Google. Now, I shared with you a couple of tools trends.google.com word search or answers the public from Neil Patel, you can use any of those to help you get an idea of your keyword search volume. What most people lack on their current websites, is they lack written content. So one of the things one of the action tips that you can take to make a huge impact for your rankings right away without having necessarily to hire anybody. As you can create more written content for each of the pages on your website that you actually want to rank.

You might have some, like a contact page, but you really don’t care if that ranks, that’s totally fine. Maybe you don’t care if the let’s say you’ve got a an employee directory, and you don’t really care if that ranks on Google, again, totally fine. But your homepage, your about page, any of your service or product pages, your blogs, your pillar content, those pages should all you should be you should be trying to get all of those to rank.

Okay. So you definitely want to you definitely want to do that. Add more content. 300 Plus words. Okay. That’s what that’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to get your rankings up. Trying to get this thing to work here. And it’s like, I don’t know, it’s kind of working but not working now. So there’s progress? I don’t know. Okay, um, hang on a second, I’m trying to click a button, see if I can do this. Yeah, it’s still not working. Okay. It is what it is. The other thing that we haven’t talked about, and it’s actually important, so I’m going to spend some time on it, I’m going to go even longer than I thought, because I thought I was basically wrapping it up here.

Every website has something called domain authority. Now, it’s interesting because it actually isn’t something that Google looks at. So this is kind of funny. But there are two main players in the game. There’s Moz, which is m o z.com. And there’s sem rush, and I intended to show you this on my screen. But right now, I can’t. So I’ve got too much stuff on my computer. So something’s going on. And I don’t want to ruin the live, and then early without doing it on purpose. So it is what it is. But mas mo z will rank your website out of 100. It’s a score from zero to 100. And the ranking actually is like a good barometer.

Even though it isn’t exactly what Google uses. Google has 250 Plus elements inside of its algorithm. And the quickest way to kind of get an idea of how you’re doing compared to your competitors, is to look at your Moz ranking, and look at their Moz ranking. So if you’re coming in at like a 12, and they’re coming in at a 32. The odds are they’re kicking your butt, they are coming up above you on searches probably across the board, mainly because they have a higher domain authority, not because it’s the domain authority itself, but it’s because the things that Moz is using to establish that ranking, namely backlinks, they’re probably kicking your butt with backlinks, that’s probably true. So they are seen as more authoritative on a topic than you.

But you can go to sem rush, which is actually more commonly used than Moz or Moz. And there’s others too, like a refs. There’s, there’s a bunch of these, these websites out there that will check your they will check your domain authority, but you want to know what your authority score is and monitor it. You want to know what your competitors’ authority score is and monitor it. And even inside of that, what I say the number one thing that I use Moz and SEMrush to do is I go to check the backlinks because that’s the main thing that they do, they evaluate the backlinks.

And again, the backlink is your website on another site that points back to your website. So for example, partners tabs on a page that have a logo and then click here to go to that website. That’s a backlink. Now you can have internal links or external links. I don’t want to confuse you too much. But internal link would be like on the blog for Candace Montgomery, and I linked back to the pillar, that’s considered an internal link because we’re not actually leaving the website. But it does take us to a different page. Okay. But really to raise authority on Moz, or SEM, you need an external backlink, you need somebody from another website to point back to your website.

So if you can do that, then then really you’ve succeeded, you need to do that more than your competitors. So get your backlink account up work on your backlinks. It’s not your primary focus, it shouldn’t be the only thing you do. If you could only do one thing, you should add more written content to your website. Action tip number one, add more written words, at least 1500 words to your website, each and every page of your website, not just the homepage, but all the pages that you want to rank. The second thing that you want to do is you want to make sure on your keyword research you’re going after the expressions that have the traffic, right. So for example, if you’re doing something that’s kind of obscure, and it’s very technical, you might want to change some of the terminology to fit keywords that are being searched in higher volumes. So make sure your written content is covering keyword topics that are actually being used. The third thing that I I recommended was add interactive media to your website for two reasons.

A because 80% of all people on the internet are going to end up on a video somewhere. So if you add videos to every single page on your site, you’re giving your self a shot at not only getting more users, but keeping them there longer. That’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for videos. So give them what they’re looking for. Take all the written words that you’ve added to your pages, turn on your video camera, say them. And then it’s finally working. I’m so happy. Say them, and then what, and then you’ll give them that video. So you can just take that video and put it right in the blog, right in the pillar content right on the page, they’ll watch what you’ve written out.

The written part is more for Google, the video content is more for the end users. So you’re going to be fine. Okay, so I’m going to show you real quick. I’m going to risk it here. And I’m going to show you real quick Moz. Because I think this is important. But I’m going to show you Moz. And I’m going to show you sem rush, okay, because it’s important. So what I’ve done here is I’ve gone to Moz. And then it came to free SEO tools. And then inside that they’ve got domain analysis. So I’m at moz.com, free SEO tools, domain analysis, that’s where I’m at. Okay, I put in Bowman digital media, because I wanted to show you guys what mas says about my website, we have a domain authority of 50.

We have 360 linking root domains, that means 360 different places on the internet. different servers are pointing back to Bowman digital media, and we’ve got 28 words that rank in the top 100 on Google, according to Moz. Important to note, when I’m going to show you a very different search result when I go to sem rush, these things are not there’s there’s some conjecture here, there’s some there’s some opinions, this is Moz is opinion, as technical as they are and as good as they are, it’s still all just conjecture, it’s their opinion. So don’t take this as the gospel, because Google doesn’t necessarily see it exactly this way. But this gives you a barometer. If you go here and you go to your competitors, you can compare if your numbers look better than you probably pretty good. But let me show you how I also use it, which I really like.

Okay, so this tells me some of the different places where I have websites pointing to me, these are all Google products, again, you want Google to be your best friend, look at these domain authority scores, the highest score is 100. I got 90 eights across and 90 is across the board here. But these are showing me what pages they point to. That’s kind of cool. Now this is something that’s neat. It shows me how many links that I’ve gained over time. And as you can see, over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working really hard. And we’ve gained a lot over the last couple of weeks, we’ve got an extra 1381 and 54. So that’s 150 new links just in the last couple days, because we’re working on it. But you can also come here and see where you rank for some of these keywords. So look how to go from being how to go from being followed LinkedIn, which doesn’t make any sense, but I’m getting I’m on the first page for that one, stop falling all connections on LinkedIn, people are coming to my website to learn about LinkedIn.

That’s one of the things that we’re seeing here. Okay, but this is the money money. I love this section right here. This is actually my favorite part about Moz. So it’s saying that I have one key word that ranks on the top page, it saying that I have 11 keywords that rank on page two, it saying I have six words that rank on page three, I have four words that rank on page four, and I have six words that rank on page six. Now, I would love it if there was a lot here, but there isn’t. But the fact is, this is actually improvement.

We’re taking words from these and and like cascading them over over time. And how were we doing that? We’re doing that with written content. That’s how we’re doing it. So you can come in here and you can search your competitors. Now it’s funny is this is what Moz thinks are my top competitors. And actually most of these are not my competitors. So again, it’s not 100% accurate, you’ve got to go and figure this out. But you can see a lot of information and this is all free. I didn’t have to pay for any of this. Okay, now, if you want to pay for Moz it’ll give you a lot more but you can get all that and you can use that as part of the SEO tool.

Now, to be fair, I also went over to sem rush so if you go to sem rush go to domain Oh review and then put in the website address right here and hit search, they do have free limit uses. So I think you can do like 10 a month or something like that, it’s, you know, if you only have one website, it’s not a big deal, but you might want to check out your competitors. So you might use three or four of them. And that’s okay. But this is saying I have a authority score of six, the other ones that had an authority score of 50, that is a huge variance.

So again, you have to take these things with a grain of salt. Now the other one said I had 390 backlinks, this one says I have 570, it doesn’t match up. Why? Because this is seeing some stuff that Moz isn’t seeing. And Moz is giving me credit for some things that SEMrush is not giving me credit for, but it doesn’t really matter. What you want to do is evaluate your competitors on Moz evaluate you and your competitors on SEM rush. And just look at the correlations.