Podcast Q & A
Thinking about inviting us on your podcast? Here is a sample list of questions and answers we could cover on your show:
Q: For a business owner that knows the term “SEO” but can’t quite explain it, how would you define SEO in a couple sentences?
A: In a nutshell SEO, or search engine optimization refers to all the things you do on your website (on page SEO) and outside your website on other places around the Internet (off-page SEO), that affects how Google ranks your website in its unpaid search results.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
A: We’ve heard from many business owners over the years that have felt burned by web design, SEO services, or other failures related to randomly applied Internet marketing tactics. Marketing has changed forever, yet the web design industry still markets and sells websites as digital brochures, when they should be engineered from the ground up to be search engine friendly, inbound marketing hubs. It’s become our mission to change the way web designers and business owners think about websites, and to get people to develop an “SEO mindset” so that they can generate many more leads through SEO and other digital channels.
Q: How did you two [John Jantsch & Phil Singleton] come together on this book?
A: John Jantsch wrote the bestselling book, Duct Tape Marketing, and created the Duct Tape Marketing System, a marketing system that is installed by Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultants, and used by thousands of small business around the globe. Phil Singleton is an active Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant (see Phil’s Duct Tape Marketing Consultant review) and through participation and active involvement, quickly became a go-to SEO resource within the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network, and this naturally led to John and Phil cooperating on a new kind of SEO book geared for marketers, web designers and entrepreneurs.
Q: How has marketing changed in recent years and why has SEO become so important?
A: In short, consumers are buying in a whole new way. The older outbound style of mass-market advertising is fading away because consumer buying behavior has changed. Consumers don’t buy from what they hear or see in advertisement, they buy based on what they find on the Internet. In this new search engine economy, Google has become the default tool in terms of how we all vet products and services before making that “final” purchase decision.
Q: How has Google and SEO changed over the last 10 years?
A: For many years, backroom tactics drove the SEO services industry. It was all about keyword tweaking, volume-based link building, and trying to find and exploit the next algorithmic loop-hole in the never ending cat-and-mouse game that Google played with SEO service providers. That all changed with new algorithm updates (ie Penguin and Panda) that started to penalize this sort of system “gaming”. Google has become much smarter at finding and ranking the best content, as well as finding and measuring many more kinds of ranking signals.
Q: What is content marketing and what are the keys to doing it right?
A: Content marketing is an inbound marketing tactic that uses many forms of content, such as blog posts, eBooks, infographics, whitepapers, videos, etc., and positions it and distributes it in a way that helps you build an audience, and helps you draw ideal customers into your sales or education funnel. The keys are to have a great website, and to consistently produce and re-purpose high quality, highly informative content that your ideal customers will want to consumer and share. Content marketing helps companies establish niche authority, and helps convince and convert web traffic into sales.
Q: The SEO service industry seems to have reputation issues, can you explain?
A: SEO is a victim of its own success. Everyone knows that Google rankings can make or break a company. Yet, Google is really secretive about how its ranks websites. This makes it really easy for companies to make false claims. Businesses want these coveted first page rankings badly, which makes the SEO services market the perfect target for scams and shady service providers.
Q: What keeps business owners from getting more leads out of their websites?
A: In today’s economy, a company’s website is the key to marketing success. But most business owners treat their websites as an expense, or cost of doing business, rather than as a revenue generation asset. As such, they are often priced shopped, then neglected, then blamed for not working. SEO should start well before the design phase is started and before the first line of website code is written, yet in most cases SEO is an afterthought – and you can’t really “do SEO” on a website that wasn’t engineered to be SEO friendly from the ground up.
Q: What should local business owners be focusing on to get more local online leads?
A: This has been a pretty big year for local SEO and next year may even be bigger. Local business owners need to focus first and foremost on their website, just like every other company should do. Local businesses need to blog, work on citations and NAP consistency, and be proactive about reputation management. Google My Business optimization is key and any local business with a showroom or lobby or any kind of office space they are proud of should also consider a Google Virtual Business Tour.
Q: For a local business owner with a limited budget, what is the one thing you would tell them to start working on right now?
A: Pound for pound, authentic online reviews are the most valuable local SEO asset. Legitimate good reviews are hard to get, while bad reviews are easy to get when you screw up – the system is rigged against you this way. All local businesses should take control of their online reputation before it takes control of them. One of the best ways to do this is to setup a custom review funnel.
Q: Why is WordPress such a popular content management system and how does it tie into SEO?
A: Love it or hate it, WordPress has become the defacto content management system (CMS) standard for small business websites. WP powers around 30% of the entire web, and some report that 50% of all new websites are being published on WordPress. WP is very easy to use, has a huge community of developers, thousands of free plugins, and SEO pros love it because we can tweak it as much as we need to – and even develop our own plugins for SEO. It’s also very SEO friendly out of the box and very easy for business owners to add and edit content to their websites.
Q: What are a few of the technical websites updates and tweaks that a company can make to improve (on-page) website SEO?
A: The list is long, but some important website tweaks would be: installing and properly configuring an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, installing an SSL certificate for https, ensuring your site is mobile friendly, and adding structured data markup site wide.
Q: How does social media fit into SEO and Google rankings?
A: Google has flip-flopped on whether or not social signals are a direct SEO ranking factor. On one hand, they can’t put too much weight on any one social network because it’s out of their control, on the other hand, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to totally dismiss social signals, because this is how we as user are starting to assess the quality and relevance of new content.
Q: Why is blogging in particular so important for SEO?
A: Blogging is important for many reasons: blog posts add fresh content to your website, which means Google has more reasons to check, crawl and index your site on a regular basis. For users, blog posts show your knowledge and authority in your niche, and it’s been proven that an active blog with quality content will help improve your conversions rates. Blog posts not only attract natural back links from third party websites, they also enable you to target long tail keywords over time, enabling you to cast a wider SEO net. Blog posts are also the key for distributing content throughout your social media channels in a way that pulls people back to your website where you have a chance to convert them. Finally, blog posts can be re-purposed into other forms of content.
Q: Are backlinks still important for SEO, and if so, what kind of backlink building should companies be doing?
A: Backlinks from other websites link back to yours are still one of the most important ranking factors, it’s just that today, it’s all about quality and relevance. In terms of link building, as John Jantsch says, it’s become the new form of networking. Companies should try to find ways to build links and connections online with partners and organizations they have offline. And through outreach and occasional guest blogging, companies should seek to get their content published on quality websites. Companies should avoid paying for backlinks.
Q: What forms of content are important for SEO and inbound marketing?
A: In addition to blog posts, other important content formats include, videos, eBooks, whitepapers, slide shows, podcasts, landing pages, infographics, user guides and manuals, and even print books.
Q: What is your favorite content marketing tip?
A: One of our favorite tips relates to blogging. We like to map out a blog series for our clients that could include anywhere from 10 to 15 blog posts. As we plan the content calendar, we will brainstorm a list of titles for this series so that each post will not only become a standalone blog post, but all of them will also be stitched together at the end of the series into a cohesive eBook.
Q: What are keywords and how does a company go about keyword research?
A: Keywords are the individual words and phrases that your customers type into the Google search box to find your information, products or services. There are many free and premium tools in the SEO industry that can help you find the keywords most important for your business. We like to use Keyword Planner, a free tool available to people with an active Google AdWords account. There also other places on Google to get keyword insight, such as Google Trends, Google suggest (the auto suggest drop down as you initiate a new search) and especially the “related to” list at the bottom of every new search result page. There are also some great premium tools such as Moz’s new Keyword Explorer.
Q: How does AdWords and pay-per-click advertising fit into SEO?
A: No matter how great your SEO strategy and execution are, you will never get top rankings for all of your targeted keywords, and Google AdWords is a great way to supplement an organic SEO campaign so that you can fill in any organic keyword gaps. AdWords is also the best way to get immediate search engine visibility as organic SEO takes time.
Q: How long does SEO take and how do you know if SEO is working or starting to work for your company?
A: In order to get the best results, SEO takes time – especially if you take the time to create a marketing strategy and bake this into a new website. In general it takes 6 months to see minimal results, and a year or more to start seeing more complete results. SEO is a long term investment and it takes dedication, participation and discipline to really make it work. There are several ways to monitor progress before you start actually seeing sales growth. By monitoring Google Search console, you will begin to see first page “impressions” start to increase before you see an increase in clicks to your site. You can and should monitor a keyword list that will show keyword movement over time. For example, moving from page 10 in the search results to page 3 is a big step forward, but since few people go to the 3rd page of search results, you would not see an increase in sales, but this kind of improvement would be very strong evidence that SEO is working. Finally, there are some great 3rd party tools like SEMRush that will help you monitor your SEO program.
Q: What do you read and where do you go to stay on top of SEO?
A: Some of our favorite industry sites are Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, The SEM Post and Search Engine Watch. A personal favorite is Search Engine Roundtable – this site aggregates SEO chatter from around the web, and it’s one of the best ways to get real time intelligence from the field.
Q: Should a company do SEO in-house or hire an agency?
A: Once you know the basics and get an understanding of what Google wants and how it “thinks”, there is nothing really that hard about SEO. Most companies will need some professional help getting their websites setup, but every company can do basic content marketing and participate in social media. It all boils down to time – most business owners and small businesses do not have the time or resources dedicate to SEO in a way that would enable them to achieve and maintain results. And in most cases, hiring an entry level SEO specialist for $40k/yr and buying all the premium agency tools needed is more expensive and produces a lower ROI than retaining a professional SEO agency. Yet, with SEO being one of the most snake oil infested segments of marketing, business owners really need to do their homework before hiring an agency. That being said, hiring an SEO company is usually the best choice for most companies.
Q: What kind of red flags are there when hiring an SEO agency?
A: Where to start? Never hire a company that cold calls you, never hire a company that offers any type of guaranteed rankings, avoid offshore service providers, try to hire local if you can – a company that you meet with or talk to in person is less likely to take risks with your website, avoid long term contracts, ask companies specifically what their approach is to link building is, ask them if they use “PBNs” or private blog networks which is nothing more than a blackhat link scheme that Google despises. Be sure the company talks about content marketing and social media. Ask who will be working on your account in terms of strategy and planning, and who will be executing the weekly SEO tasks. Make sure they offer some form of monthly reporting. Make sure they can provide references.
Q: How much should a company pay for SEO services and how long does it take?
A: SEO usually takes 6 months for minimum results and 12 months or more for more complete results. Many companies that get a new SEO-friendly re-design see an immediate boost in rankings, followed by more gradual ranking improvement over the following year. Most SEO companies will have an upfront, one-time setup fee that could be anywhere from $2,500 to $10k and up depending on the complexity of the site.
In terms of local SEO, most agencies will start at $1,000 per month or more for basic SEO, with $1,000 to $5,000 per month being the norm. National SEO programs usually start in the $5k/mo to $10k/mo range and up. Keep in mind most of the SEO snake oil is sold in the $1,000/month and under range. It’s really hard to get any type of good SEO service for under $1,000/mo unless you are paying for a specific SEO tactic, like citation management or local reputation management, etc.
Q: Where can people buy SEO for Growth?
A: The best way to buy SEO for Growth is to go through seoforgrowth.com so that you can be sure to get all the special offers and the free eBook bundle back that includes a 45 page eBook on Local SEO, as well as popular eBooks from Yoast and WordStream.
