Ep1 – SEO Considerations for a New Website

Podcast – SEO Point

Transcription

John: Okay man, you got your questions for me?

Byron: Yeah, so we’ve got a new Web site and I’m wondering whether I should start off with .com.au or a .com domain name. I’m wondering what you recommend in that aspect?

John: All right we’ll just back it up a little bit just for anyone that’s just tuned in. The whole – well, the angle that we’re taking here for this podcast is to help business owners get a better understanding of exactly where to start or what to take into consideration in terms of SEO for a brand new site. Okay?

Byron: Perfect, it sounds great.

John: All right, cool. So you’re asking – you want to start with domains?

Byron: Yeah, correct. So…

John: Okay.

Byron: I’m an Australian business and I’m wondering whether there’s any value in using a .com.au versus a .com when it comes to search engine optimization?

John: All right, I might just back it up just a little bit before the domain and just mention hosting quickly because hosting is something that is often overlooked and, as you know, Byron site speed is really important. In fact, Google has openly admitted that site speed is part of a ranking signal, it’s an actual factor that they look at.

Byron: Sure.

John: I guess, you know, when you’re registering your domain name you’d probably be looking at hosting as well so for business owners that are thinking about getting started its worth spending a few extra dollars and going with a credible host, a host that’s got good uptime and can deliver good speeds.

Byron: What about hosting, you know, within Australia versus overseas you know? There’s a lot of cheap hosting in the U.S. Do you recommend Australian hosting or can we get away with U.S.?

John: You know, that’s the question that always seems to come up and it’s certain – it’s an interesting question. I’ve only ever hosted overseas.

Byron: Okay.

John: And if you set up your Web site correctly the difference in load times will be barely even noticeable. I think Australia, unfortunately, is well known for having really crappy hosting services although I’m sure that will change over time but in my opinion and from what I’ve seen over the past 10 to 13 years or so is that there really isn’t any difference. Apart from – I mean, there might be a slight difference in terms of speed but you can overcome most of that with a content delivery network nowadays anyway so…

Byron: Sure, yeah.

John: Yeah, it’s not something – look, my simple answer would be this, it’s not something that business owners should lose sleep over. Don’t become obsessed about I’ve got a .com.au Web site, I’m in Australia, I’ve got to host in Australia, that’s not true. You can host overseas and I even host my own site in the U.S.

Byron: Okay, that’s good to know.

John: So it really comes – yeah. It comes back to the quality of service delivered from your hosting provider.

Byron: Sure, yeah.

John: Up-time, support, speed, all of these things need to be taken into consideration and not just I’ve got to host it in Sydney or I’ve got to host it in Australia. That’s – I mean, if you can get all of those things that I’ve just mentioned as well as find a decent host here in Australia then, yeah, sure go for it.

Byron: Can’t do any harm I suppose as long as the host is (good).

John: Yeah, that’s right. It’s not worth losing sleep over.

Byron: Yeah, sure.

John: Yeah.

Byron: All right.

John: So in regards to – sorry, what was your next question?

Byron: The next question was about the domain names and whether a .com.au is more beneficial for an Australian business?

John: Yeah. This is something that I know that we spoke about and if you’re operating in Australia always go for the .com.au and something else that I always try and recommend business owners think about is registering the .com as well. So you’ve got both.

Byron: Yeah, absolutely!

John: You want to promote the .com.au because you want – obviously you’re operating in Australia and you want everyone to know where you are but a lot of people, for whatever reason, will still just type in .com. I guess it’s just – it might just be a force of habit or whatever.

Byron: Yeah.

John: But, yeah, I always recommend that business owners get the .com.au and if possible get the .com. In a lot of cases, not all, but in a lot of cases you might find that the .com is taken.

Byron: Yeah, sure.

John: But if you get both you at least – you’re going to capture the traffic that may be typed straight into the .com address because if you’re chatting on the phone to someone and you say what’s – and they ask you like a customer or whatever else, they say what’s your Web address and you say, oh johnromaine.com.au they may just type in the johnromaine.com. In fact, I speak to a lot of real estate agents that have been working in the real estate space for decades and a lot of them still even to this day will say we list our properties on realestate.com. And that is a completely different Web site. You’re actually referring to .com.au.

Byron: Yep, exactly.

John: So the last thing that you want to do is start pushing traffic to either someone else’s Web site or a competitors Web site. So if you can get both use the .com.au address as your primary and set up a redirect. You can actually set up a redirect from the .com across to the .com.au which I think you’ve done on your own site.

Byron: Yeah, that’s correct.

John: Yeah.

Byron: Beautiful, all right. That sounds really good. In terms of content management systems, a question that is often asked is WordPress any good, is it full of holes? Is it going to get me the SEO results? There’s a lot of templates out in that space as well which (tout) themselves as being SEO ready and that sort of thing. Is – do you recommend a particular content management system to kick start your SEO?

John: Yeah, you’re talking about the actual Web site itself?

Byron: Yeah.

John: Ad for anyone that doesn’t know, I mean a content management system is simply – it’s like an out-of-the-box solution that allows you to have your Web site up and running quickly so that you can start publishing content and setting it up. I just thought I’d clarify that because a lot of business owners don’t understand that terminology of content management.

So, yeah, okay. The question was – I mean, you’re asking me about WordPress. There are so many different content management systems out there that it’s – I mean, I spoke to someone just the other day and they’re using Concrete5 or something and I think I may have heard about Concrete years ago but it’s not something that I’m overly familiar with and I think there are a couple of things that business owners probably need to take into consideration.

Obviously cost, right? I think if I – you looked… Looking at your list of questions here you may have been – I think you’re asking me about custom built sites or maybe I’m off the mark but…

Byron: Yeah, it was, yeah. Mentioning custom built and then there’s sort of the templates like Genesis that (tout) themselves as being super fast, I suppose.

John: Yeah, okay, well I give you – there’s a couple of mistakes that a business owner can make in terms of putting their Web site together and just ring the bell if I go off on a tangent but one thing you don’t want to do, for any business owner there is no need to go out and spend an absolute fortune on a custom-built Web site written in either .net or .php or something or some other weird language that might look wonderful and get lots of ooh’s and aah’s from everyone in the lunch room at work but that, while it works, is great but let’s just say for instance, say that you go down that path and you hire a developer to build you a custom site….what happens if that developer drops off for whatever reason? You know, he moves overseas or he gets hit by a Mr. Whippy van or something and he’s no longer…

Byron: You get locked in don’t you?

John: Yeah, yeah. So, you’re then in a position of having this thing that only one guy knows – if we change this one file the entire sites going to fall over, or in order to make this change here we’ve got to do this and this but it’s got to be done in this particular order. That’s the position where business owners don’t want to find themselves because, 1) custom built sites are hugely expensive and, 2) it’s like buying a custom built motor vehicle or a car. Can you imagine taking something like that to a mechanic? He would just lift upon it and scratch his head and say, what the hell is this?

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: Whereas if you just buy something generic like a Holden or a Ford or something, right, you can just go to any mechanic, they’ll pop the hood and say, yeah, we’ll replace that part, $28.00, thank you very much see you later.

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: Okay, and that’s the beauty of WordPress. I mean, I’m a huge fan of WordPress because it’s just so easy and it just makes so much sense and it doesn’t matter who you’re working with, I mean, there was an interesting statistic put together just recently and it was something like 16 or 18% of the Internet is actually made up of WordPress. That is a huge number and that really highlights just how popular WordPress is. I mean, WordPress has got its problems but any site has whether it’s custom built or its Joomla! or Magento or whatever or if it’s something else. Any site can be compromised.

Byron: Absolutely, yeah.

John: But I definitely recommend WordPress.

Byron: Yep, as a good starting platform.

John: Always as a good starting platform and you know just as well as I do that – especially in terms of SEO, you know, there are so many plug-ins available that, you know, WordPress for SEO from Yoast being one of them, I mean, you can have your site SEO friendly within minutes.

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: So…

Byron: Yeah, there’s a lot of tools and support for it.

John: That’s right.

Byron: It comes under a lot of scrutiny, you know, so anything that’s not functioning or anything that’s, you know, it’s got a lot of eyes on it so that’s continuously improving.

John: That’s right. Yeah, so – yeah, for business owners listening in, I mean, a plug-in is simply like… It’s – how would I explain it?

Byron: Kind of like an app on an iPhone, I suppose, where you can increase the functionality of your phone but in a Web site sense.

John: Yeah, it’s just an add-on or a feature so rather than having to go to a developer and say, you know, we need this extra feature, I mean, because it’s Open Source, and like you said, because there’s so much – there’s so many people working on it, it’s an open community. The amount of support available is just – it’s absolutely huge.

This is the other thing that’s attractive, well should be attractive for businesses owners if they’re thinking about WordPress is that – I mean, whenever you sit with a client the first thing they’ll say is can we update the pages ourselves or do we have to get our Web guy to do it?

That’s a huge bottleneck for a lot of people that are in that position because – we need to change the meta tags or the content on this page. We can’t do it ourselves so we better call old mate at ABC Web design and get him to change it and then they’ve got to send over the requirements, wait a week for it to happen. It gets done and then it’s wrong so they end up going backwards and forwards whereas with WordPress, you know, you can just log in and make those changes yourself.

Byron: Yeah, so that sort of brings me onto another question in terms of your Web designer that you get to develop your Web site if that’s something you choose. A lot of businesses obviously build their Web site themselves, others choose to outsource that to a professional. How important is your Web designer in terms of your initial search engine optimization and getting some early traffic to your Web site?

John: Yeah, that is a really good question and it’s something that a lot of business owners really don’t think about before they get started and I’m so glad that you asked that question because this is how it normally goes. A business owner goes to a Web developer and says, hey, we want this Web site and they sit down and the fuss about with colors and pictures and whatever else and all this fancy mumbo jumbo and then it gets finished and they go, wow, look how beautiful it looks and then they think, hmm, we’re not getting any traffic to this thing like how can we get more traffic and why isn’t it performing in Google? So they’ll then go, after having spent $15,000 worth with a Web designer they’ll then go to someone like me, an SEO agency or an online marketing firm and say, look, our site isn’t performing can you help us and the first thing they’ll say is, man, this thing is a dogs breakfast. It’s full of photos and flash and it’s not optimized for search at all.

You really need to do one of two things; like fix it or start over. You can imagine how business owners would feel when they’re in that position because they’re thinking, you know, I’ve just spent $15,000 with these graphic designers and people to help me promote my brand and everything else and these guys over here in this online marketing agency are telling me that this thing is worthless and now they want to spend another $10,000 rebuilding the site and it just goes – it can become a real nightmare.

Byron: Yeah, it happens far too often.

John: It happens all the time because Web developers know nothing about online marketing and that’s where there’s a real separation. I mean, business owners look at a Web site and they just see a Web site. There’s a huge difference between a Web designer and someone that does what I do in terms of online marketing because a Web designer might give you a pretty looking Web site but that’s not going to – that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to put money in the bank and that’s where I come in because I can pull things apart and make them work.

But what business owners really should be doing is going to an online marketing agency first or an SEO agency first with their intended design mockups or whatever else and sitting with them first and saying, this is what we’ve got – this is what we’re thinking of doing, right? And then the SEO agency or online marketing firm should guide their developer in terms of site structure, information architecture, the best way in which to put the site together so that, A) it looks good and, B) it actually performs.

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: So that term – that order is very important not the other way around because I’ve spoken to business owners that will spend, you know, $10,000 on a Web site and then they want to do all of their online marketing for $500 a month. It’s completely backwards.

Byron: Yeah, well it’s quite difficult if you’re starting from a Web site that has been designed for looking good and looking pretty when realistically that’s not always – the two don’t go hand-in-hand in terms of traffic and SEO and generating income from your Web site.

John: No, no and you know, a pretty Web site means nothing if it’s not converting.

Byron: Yeah, absolutely. All right, so we’ve talked about domain name, hosting, content management systems and the design of your Web site. Let’s just say that we’ve got all of that up and running now. What do we need to do to sort of kick start traffic? It might sort of blend in a little bit with the questions we’ve already been talking about. But what are some of the first things you might do to kick start traffic to a new Web site?

John: Okay, well, the first thing you want to do Byron, and you should know better, the first thing you need to do before you even start thinking about traffic is tracking conversions, right? Because it doesn’t make sense to start driving traffic towards something or at your Web site. It doesn’t make sense to drive traffic at your Web site if it’s leaking money or if it’s leaking conversions.

Byron: So let’s just talk about conversions for a second. What do you label as a conversion to business owners out there, what’s a conversion look like to them?

John: Well, that answer depends entirely on what the business owner wants to achieve and I always ask clients or prospects when they come to me, what’s the purpose of this Web site, what do you want someone to do and this one question that I always ask, what do you want someone to do when they hit your Web site? And in a lot of cases, right, they’ll talk for about five minutes. They’ll say, oh we want them to go here and we want them to call and we want them to buy something and then we want them to subscribe to a – and I’ll stop them right there and say, listen, stop! That’s too much. If you’re not sure of if you’re confused or there’s too much then how could you possibly expect the person at the other end that doesn’t even know or hasn’t seen your Web site before, how do you expect them to know what to do?

Byron: Yeah.

John: So you really need to be clear; business owners need to be absolutely clear about what it is that they want someone to do when they hit their Web site and. In 95% of cases they’ll want one of two things to happen; they’ll want an email inquiry or they’ll want the phone to ring.

Byron: Yep.

John: Okay, of course you might be running an ecommerce store where you’ll be wanting to make sales and that’s fine. But I usually always say to clients, give me no more than two things in order of priority that you want someone to do when they hit your Web site. Now, once you’ve got that information then that answers the question you just asked; how do you define a conversion? If they want to track phone calls obviously they’d have to get call tracking or something like that.

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: I don’t do that but…

Byron: Yeah, that’s a tough one.

John: Yeah, well it’s not hard it’s just a matter of whether or not they’ve got the allocated funds to do it and how fancy they want to get with it.

Byron: Sure.

John: But sales and inquires should be easy, you know, we want people to buy something or we want them to send us an email. So, before you start driving traffic you’ve got to know your numbers and this is where tracking conversions is really important. Even if you’re only getting 500 visits a month, know at the end of the first month or the first two months what your conversion rates are. It’s a little bit hard to explain over a podcast how to go about setting up goal tracking and so forth. The process is pretty simple.

Byron: Sure.

John: But…

Byron: I mean, in terms of conversion rates, you know, is there – when are you in the ballpark for a solid conversion rate or to feel like you’ve…

John: Yeah, anything above 1% is always a good starting point.

Byron: Yeah.

John: You know, if you’re up and around five plus percent you are kicking some serious goals.

Byron: Sure, yeah.

John: Most of the sites that I look at are in and around 1.5 to maybe up around four.

Byron: Yeah.

John: And that’s typical. It varies depending upon – oh, there’s a number of different factors but… I probably shouldn’t go into that because that will be an hour long discussion in itself but…

Byron: So we’re talking about between 1 and 4% of the total traffic that Web site receives

John: Yeah, 1 to 2% is typical.

Byron: Yeah.

John: Okay? If you’re running a site and you’re getting like 0.2% conversions or something there’s a lot of room there for improvement. That – you know, 1% means that one person out of 100 is actually engaging and doing something so there’s plenty of room there for improvement but if you get down to the 0.2, 0.1%, there’s something seriously wrong.

Byron: Yeah.

John: And that’s – you know…

Byron: Cool. I mean, I don’t want to talk too much about conversions today even though that is a big part of the services that you offer and a very important one but it’s quite a large topic as well so in terms of a brand new Web site, getting new traffic to it, is it a matter of having service pages that are optimized and then you’ll start seeing the traffic or do you recommend business directories or some other form of marketing to start getting some of that traffic to your Web site in the early days?

John: Okay, well speaking strictly from an SEO perspective and getting search engine traffic or search referral traffic, keyword research is still important, okay? For business owners I would recommend, I mean I’m talking DIYer’s, people that are interested in potentially taking this on themselves, take a look at long-tail keywords. Forget about short tail stuff like real estate or credit cards or car loans; forget about that stuff unless you’re pouring a lot of money and time into it, it just won’t happen.

Byron: Yeah.

John: So for business owners that are wanting to get traffic to their site, optimize for long-tail queries, search queries, and by long-tail search queries I’m talking about washing machine repairs central coast.

Byron: Okay.

John: Or, you know, refrigeration ……furniture removalist North Sydney or something like that where the search volume will be lower but the competition will be lower as well.

Byron: Okay, yep.

John: So – and that comes back to on-page SEO. So optimizing, you know – optimizing your site to capture long-tail queries. It’s always best to begin with to go for the low hanging fruit. I know that sounds like a cliché but its true because, to begin with, your site won’t have any power. You won’t have any domain authority so you’re best off trying to optimize for the long-tail stuff.

In terms of generating traffic, man, that’s a huge topic in itself but start with the basics. Get your site – I mean, I do this as part of my service; foundational links I call them and it’s essentially just submitting your site to reputable business directories.

Byron: What do you recommend in that space? You know, does the Yellow Pages do a hold up for Australian businesses?

John: Absolutely, absolutely! And the reason – I mean… Okay, I’ll give you a quick list. TrueLocal, StartLocal, Yellow Pages, White Pages, I don’t have a list in front of me now but Oneflare is another one.

Byron: Hotfrog, is that one?

John: Yeah, Hotfrog. What are some others? There’s a whole bunch but I mean, it’s not hard to figure out which directories to list in because you’ve only got to go to Google and let’s just say for instance sake you’re selling landscape supplies in Brisbane. Do a search in Google for landscape supplies, Brisbane or whatever market you operate in and see which directories pop up on the first page. These are directories that Google loves. So it only makes sense and I mean, if you typed in, say Web design Sydney or Web design North Sydney or something like that and TrueLocal pops up first, which it does already for a lot of search terms, then wouldn’t it make sense to put your – to at least submit your Web site to that directory?

Byron: Absolutely. And I mean I think that’s a key point as well is that many businesses talk about the number one ranking in Google whereas in the online world today there’s business directories, there’s YouTube, there’s all forms of content-based Web sites that you can use to dominate the first page rather than just being number one and just thinking about it from your site perspective.

John: Yeah, yeah. That’s right. And in a lot of cases it might be like a secondary step referral so they might do a search in Google, hit Yellow Pages and then from Yellow Pages click through to your Web site. So that’s how you need to think about it.

One thing that’s really important there, and I want to stress this for business owners, is that when they go about submitting to directories like this, firstly, only submit to high quality directories. This is a mistake that a lot of business owners make is they’ll just start submitting to directories all over the place and a lot of them are garbage. Just go with the big names, okay? I could probably list a few in the show notes once we transcribe this podcast.

Byron: Exactly.

John: But set aside a dedicated email address to do all of your submissions with. Make note of the email address and the password that you’re using to do the submissions because I work with so many businesses and they’ve got listings all over the place that have got the wrong phone number, the wrong Web address, the wrong postal address, the wrong images and they’ve all been done by half a dozen different people and they don’t know what the log-ins are to fix them and that can be problematic because if someone types in a search term and they hit your listing and then they click through or they try and call the number and it’s wrong, you’ve just lost a lead.

So, centralize that stuff through one email address. I normally just tell business owners, you know, to set up a generic account like social@ and then your domain name or something like that and do all of your… So directories still have their place but only list in reputable directories and you’d be surprised how much referral traffic you get from sites like that and it’s always a good starting point. That as well as listing in Google My Business which Google have just changed recently.

So if someone types in your actual business name or brand you get that map with your image and logo and contact details to the right-hand side.

Byron: Yeah sure.

John: Organic search.

Byron: So in regards to business directories, Google business, anything like that, you know, for a new Web site there’s obviously a section in the Google results to show Google business pages or Google local pages, what do you need to do in order to get your site in that section of the Google search results? Is it based on reviews? How important are reviews to getting your eyes on certain things like business directories or Google business for example?

John: Are you talking about – was it Google Local Places or where it shows your business address in between the results?

Byron: Yeah, so there’s a few ways I’ve seen it. One is that obviously you can have it showing underneath your brand name in a Google search or there’s sometimes a section where it’s just Google Business Pages usually from about the third result down and you might get about ten Google Business Pages listed and then following on with the remaining of the result.

John: Yeah. Well, I know Google had just made changes recently and they’ve scrapped a lot of that stuff and they’ve centralized it under what they’d now call Google My Business. So, I mean, beforehand it was really messy and, in fact, I found it so confusing because you had to go to like three different places to submit your business listing.

Now for business owners, they’ve simplified it so for anyone listening in on this Podcast all you need to do is type in Google My Business and then just follow the bouncy ball and submit your information there and it should display in those areas that you’ve just mentioned.

Byron: Sure, yeah. All right.

John: I mean, I think their intention there was just to try and simplify the process.

Byron: Yep.

John: Because, like I said, I think there was – how many was there? There was Google Places for business, there were a few but now thankfully they’ve centralized it so it’s much easier.

Byron: Yeah.

John: But what – something else I should point out there is just make sure that you don’t have any more than one listing and make sure the listing that you’ve got is correct.

Byron: Yeah.

John: Because I’ve seen a lot of businesses will go about submitting their business information to Google and they’ll end up with two or three separate listings that have been done by Web developers or whoever over the years and they’ve got the wrong address and it comes back to what I was talking about before with the directory submissions; just make sure that it’s – you’ve only got the one listing there and that it’s correct.

Byron: Yeah. So, I mean, in terms of reviews on these listings, is that a key part of your strategy at all in terms of having clients review your services? Should businesses be spending much time on getting reviews on any of those business directories? Is there any value to it?

John: No, no, that’s not something that I do and I don’t think it’s something that business owners should be – business owners shouldn’t be sitting around worrying about what people are saying on Google and Yelp. Okay, if their service – I mean, we’re moving in a bit of a different direction here but you’ve got to be really, really careful because I’ve seen a lot of people do serious damage to their businesses by starting flame wars online on Yelp and Google Reviews and the worst thing you can do – I mean, I’ve seen business owners that create their own reviews. Don’t do that! Just stay right away from that stuff. Service your client’s, keep your customers happy and positive reviews will follow.

That’s not an area that we do here, no.

Byron: Yeah, exactly. All right so we’ve got…

John: Unless you’re bribing customers.

Byron: Yeah, we don’t condone that on the Works Media Podcast.

John: No.

Byron: All right so we’ve talked about business directories so what else can we do for a new Web site to generate some traffic or generate some interest in the services we’re offering? What do you normally do in that space to kick start?

John: Yeah, that sort of falls under what, again, the customer has engaged us for. I mean, what does the customer want? This is what the business owner needs to have a good think about. Do they want to just focus on SEO or are they interested in attracting traffic from multiple sources and this is something that I’ve probably spoken with you about and it’s something that I speak – I try and educate all my clients on the importance of diversifying their traffic, right? This is something that I learnt from James Schramko years ago is that you’ve got to have some redundancy in place, you’ve got to diversify your traffic. So if you’re just – if you’re running your business and everything’s going along peachy and you’ve got good rankings in Google and you’re publishing content and you’re getting email inquires and the phones ringing and you’re not doing anything else but SEO or your business is 100% dependent upon SEO and you lose those rankings, I mean, your business is gone.

And this – in all honestly this is why I’m running this Podcast, right? Because I’m trying to diversify my traffic sources and I think if we go back you would have originally found me over at Flying Solo.

Byron: Yep, that’s correct.

John: Right? So, you know, Podcast for marketing so I was hanging out over at Flying Solo, I get good conversions from there because I track everything. You know, business owners really need to think about diversifying their traffic sources. You know, being on social media, considering starting a Podcast like this, doing videos, doing whatever they can to ensure that they’ve got some redundancy in place because if you’re completely dependent upon Google and you lose your rankings it’s game over!

And you know, that’s not so bad if you’re just running a small hobby business from home where you might be selling knickknacks on your Web site for $50 a pop or whatever but if you’re running a large corporation or a business where you’ve got multiple locations across Australia with hundreds of staff and you’re 100% dependent upon Google and you lose your rankings, that is incredibly dangerous because you’ve got people’s livelihoods at stake.

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: Unless of course you’re getting, you know – you’re doing a fair bit in the offline space but yeah, diversity is really important.

Byron: Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, in terms of content, you know, we’ve spoken about things such as this podcast which we’re doing now, forums, you know, another common one is blog posts; everybody seems to have a blog these days, you know, do blogs send you instant traffic or what’s an expected timeframe and what kind of content do you have to create to make that beneficial?

John: You have to think about business owners, right? For (Mrs. Marge) sitting at home in her pajamas sipping a caramel latte watching Oprah Winfrey during the day she’s probably got time to sit down and write a blog post entry once a day. But trying to convince a business owner that’s really time poor that’s trying to run a business as well as manage staff and inventory and everything else, trying to tell that person, hey, you need to sit down once a week and write, you know, once or twice a week, and write a 500 word article or a 1000-word article; that is really, really difficult.

Byron: Yeah.

John: Because, you know, they either – I mean, writing’s not for everyone.

Byron: No.

John: But the biggest problem there is time for business owners, right? And this is why this is where I always say to business owners there are multiple ways to generate content just like we’re doing now. We’re talking, how easy is this, how quick is it? I say to business owners, right, okay, (Barry) you’ve been in the real estate industry for 45 years, how much knowledge have you got in your head that you could potentially talk about in a Podcast? How quick and easy would it be to just bang out a Podcast or an episode in 45 minutes?

Byron: Absolutely and I mean…

John: As opposed to… Sorry.

Byron: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people commute on their way to work where you can get a little voice recorder out and just get your thoughts down on a recording and come and transcribe that back onto your blog as well so…

John: Absolutely!

Byron: Not everyone loved English when they’re at school, a lot of people hated (uni) for the thesis they had to write, you know, some people aren’t writers. However you can make that easy for yourself in generating content I think is key!

John: Yeah, what’s really important, and I’ll say this and I hope a lot of people they’ll take anything away, especially business owners if they take anything away from what I said in this Podcast today is that ongoing frequently published and consistent content is going to be come more and more important as the Web ages and the audience matures. If you’ve got a static Web site that’s just sitting there and you’re not publishing content and your competitors are, you are absolutely gone. You’ve got to be publishing content. It’s really, really critical and business owners will have to say – ask themselves like do I have the time to generate content about my business and about the marketplace that I operate in or am I best off hiring someone to do that for me whether that be someone in-house or it be an agency. That is the absolute truth about content marketing. It’s becoming more and more important – business… Long gone are the days of just building a ten-page Web site and hoping people will find you.

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: That’s done so content it super, super important.

Byron: And in terms of – you know, if you do outsource your content is it something that you can just throw away to an experienced individual or is it something where you get the most benefit when the business is involved in that process?

John: I always say to business owners, nobody knows this business better than you. Seriously, stay away from outsourcing writers at $2.00 an hour. That is garbage and your sites going to get hit with Panda which is, you know, low content. I mean, we might touch on that in just a moment. But no one knows, for business owners, nobody knows your business better than you, right? If you’ve got someone that you can translate your message to and they can go about generating content for you and that works whether it be in-house or an agency and that works, then fine, do it. But, you know, two methods of generating content which I’m a massive fan of, Podcasts and video.

Byron: Yep.

John: Podcasts especially because they drive, and video, because they drive warm traffic because people overtime establish a relationship with you, they learn to – it’s like I guess you get a picture in your head of what someone looks like. If you’ve never met them but you hear their voice over time. So…

Byron: You’re a – what’s the men’s, not deodorant, I’m thinking the men’s body spray or whatever that the ladies all love. I think that’s what all the viewers are picturing of you right now John. Your deep Barry Manilow type voice and…

John: Oh, right. Cheers, I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not. But for business owners, content is super important, really, really important. If you build a site, ten page site, and it just sits there and you’re not running a blog because it’s the blog that can help you drive traffic. It’s – I say to business owners, your blog is like – it’s your opportunity to broadcast your message each and every time you’ve got something to say whether it be discussions in the market, questions that come through from people that walk through the door, questions that come in through email or whatever’s happening in the news or whatever, that’s an opportunity for you to publish content.

And search results, coming back to SEO, are content driven. Okay? And the likelihood of you getting found as you’re publishing more and more content and the likelihood of you getting found increases because your footprint becomes bigger as does your Web site over time as you publish more content.

Byron: Absolutely. Yep.

John: That’s probably a really long-winded response wasn’t it? I’m good at those.

Byron: No, no, it’s doing well. Content, you’ve got a lot of content out of that, just that, section.

John: Yeah, yeah, we were talking about SEO right?

Byron: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, once we’ve created this content, I mean, how do we know whether it’s successful or not? You know, like – oh, I published my blog today and I got one like and it’s on the tenth page in Google, you know, hooray! You know, it’s sometimes a fairly disheartening process because it’s not something that happens overnight.

John: No, but it will happen. Yeah, you’ve got to be really, really careful about publishing content for business owners especially because you can sit around for forever and a day publishing content and not making sales. There’s a very, very fine balance there between, you know, I’m having a really fun time publishing all of this content and neglecting my business.

Byron: Yep.

John: So there needs to be – content needs to be published with purpose and it’s super important that you track and measure your efforts so at the end of each month, okay, you should be able to say, all right, the Podcast that we shot here got three leads or the videos that we shot on YouTube got X amount of inquires. Everything that you do, right, should be tracked and measured, okay?

Byron: Yep.

John: Once we start pumping out a few more episodes of this Podcast I’m going to be able to look at how many downloads the Podcast got, how much referral traffic I got from iTunes, you know, and I’ve spoken to you about this as well, like, tracking and measuring your efforts is super important. You should be – I can log into my analytics right now and look under campaigns and I can say, okay, this inquiry that I got five minutes ago came from this video that I shot two years ago on YouTube. I can narrow it right down to exactly where it came from so for business owners, I mean, that’s a little bit complicated for business owners and that’s where we come in, we can help because that’s what we do but, yeah, there needs to be – it’s really important that everything’s tracked and measured. You’re publishing content with purpose, okay, at the end of your content you should always have a call to action like pick up the phone, call us, send us an email, always have a call to action at the end.

And I can’t think of the third one, I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.

Byron: Yeah.

John: But, yeah, content, content, content but make sure you’re publishing content with purpose, make sure that you’re tracking your efforts and invest more time with what’s working, okay?

Byron: Yeah, I think it’s a big thing for businesses these days when you speak with people you’re like, I don’t see any value in social media or I don’t see any value in having a blog. I don’t see any value in, you know, I’ve even had some businesses talk to me about online and having no value investing in online marketing or even to the point of a Web site and really it does come back to your goals and tracking everything that you’re doing with your Web site in order to understand, you know, where your best investment is or where your best leads are coming from because clients might say, you know, is Facebook worth my time? But if you’re tracking conversions you can actually understand whether you are actually generating any income from those social media sites.

John: Absolutely, yeah, yeah! I mean, I can understand and I can sympathize with business owners when they say, look, you know, Twitter’s just such a waste of time and it’s because they get it in their heads that they need to sit on Twitter all day telling jokes in order to drive traffic to their Web site.

Most businesses are doing it backwards. They’re trying to drive traffic starting at the social media platform and driving it back to their Web site where you really should be publishing content to your own site first through your blog, broadcasting your message out across these platforms, social media platforms, and that attracts the traffic back in.

Byron: That’s basically like a big megaphone for your voice isn’t it? You know, your message to get it out there.

John: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s all about, like I said just before, broadcasting your message. If you’re not making any noise, you know, than no one is going to know about you. And business owners especially need to be thinking like, hey, you know, my competitors running a Podcast, my competitor is showcasing all of his products on YouTube. My competitors all over the place, what are we doing? We’ve got this 15 page site that hasn’t been updated, I mean, the last blog post entry was two years ago. They’re going to get slaughtered so a blog is really important.

And you know, SEO, it’s all intertwined.

Byron: And I think, yeah, it’s important for businesses to understand because it is so easy to get disheartened in this world where we kind of, you know, look at our likes and our social shares as whether we’re doing a good job or not but really that’s just an indication of some die-hard engagement on each platform. It’s once you know if it converts you get an understanding on how much time you should spend on it.

John: Yeah, there’s a guy that I know, his name’s Dan Norris, he’s always good for shits and giggles but he talks about likes and followers and all of that sort of stuff as vanity metrics.

Byron: Yeah.

John: And I just couldn’t agree more. You know, you’ve got 1000 followers on Twitter, wow…you’ve got – your last blog post entry got 50 likes, whoopty do, you know, let’s talk about what matters; how many sales did you make, how many inquiries did you get? Forget about vanity metrics.

Byron: And I think that’s a key point because even for myself, you know, when you said who’s available to join in on your Podcast John and one of the questions I asked you was, you know, how are you going to get anybody to listen to it, right? And there was that expectation from you that you’re in it for the long-term in terms of the content that you’re developing and, you know, in the early days it’s going to be hopefully an exponential kind of growth in your listeners and in the early days it’s likely that they’ll be a couple and each week you’ll get a few more.

So I think it’s important to know that.

John: No, you raise a good point there and it’s all about having a long-term mindset. I have so many people come on board that want help with SEO and they’ll say, John, if this isn’t working in two months we’re going to cancel. And I think, you know, that’s like walking into a gym and saying I’m going to put in a little bit of effort here for two months and if I don’t – if I’m not ready to step on stage in two months I’m going to cancel my membership and I’m going to go home and have a pizza.

You know?

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: And another good friend of mine, Sean Kaye said this, unless you’ve got an audience you’re just shouting into an empty room. And everybody’s got to start somewhere, right? You can’t expect to record two Podcasts and have 100,000 people subscribing to your list or listening in. It just doesn’t work that way.

Byron: Yeah and…

John: It wasn’t – sorry, go on.

Byron: Yeah, sorry, I was going to say just in terms of your gym analogy there, you know, sometimes you kind of feel like you’re not losing any weight because you’re looking at it every single day. You look at, oh, has this bicep grown since yesterday? And realistically it’s only when you look back 12 months prior…

John: That’s right.

Byron: …and you’re like, wow, there’s a big change! So it is the long-term with this kind of stuff.

John: Business owners need to take on a long-term mindset with their online businesses especially when it comes to producing content. You know, I see it all the time, yeah that sounds great John, I understand what you’re saying and they’ll do one video or one blog post entry and they’ll drop off and I’ll go back a year later and they haven’t done anything and I think that’s such a shame because if they had of stuck with it, they would have had like how much engagement now?

Byron: Oh, exactly. It would have been quite a well-developed site, you know.

John: And this is the other thing, right? Good content gets links. I mean, it’s hard, I’m not going to sugar coat it and say like just write a couple of blog post entries and you’re going to get a whole bunch of links. But if you’re publishing good quality content that people really get a kick out of like I’m going to transcribe this Podcast and host it on my site and hopefully it attracts a few links. That helps you with SEO. So it’s all tied together.

Byron: Yep. Yeah, absolutely! And I think in the SEO industry there’s a lot of snake oil salesman but if John, if you were to walk up to somebody on the street and said, hey, you know, today you’re – if you’re feeling unhealthy, you’re not feeling – you don’t have the body shape you wanted to but tomorrow I’ll have you with an eight-pack set of abs, you know, ripping biceps all that kind of stuff I think most people would sort of turn around and say, yeah, no, I’ll catch you later. But, for some reason with the SEO industry a lot of people (tout) the overnight success but… Yeah, it’s not that uncommon.

John: No, unfortunately people buy into that rubbish and I published an article not so long ago about the dreaded SEO expectations gap which I’ll link in the show notes but, yeah, there’s no such thing as overnight rankings, there really isn’t. There really isn’t, it’s a long – well, I shouldn’t say long, but it should be a slow and steady incremental effort with a longest approach.

Byron: Absolutely, yeah.

John: It doesn’t – this is something else I’ll see, business owners will come on board, do two months with an agency, that’s not working so they go to another agency, they’ll do three months there, they’ll drop those guys, they’ll go to someone else. Essentially they’re just starting over!

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: And that’s just going to do more damage than it would be to just stay the course with one agency that – as long as they’re doing the right thing, stay the course with them and see it out.

Byron: Yep. And I mean, in terms of the long-term what can you do to check in with your SEO specialist to kind of – if I come to you and say, John, how’s things going? What timeframe is a good indication to see some return? How can you track that?

John: This is where conversions are really important.

Byron: Yeah.

John: Because, you know, it’s pointless saying, okay, you’re now ranked number 1 for Elephants Riding Skateboards, it doesn’t really mean anything.

Byron: No, exactly.

John: So conversions are always a good – it’s something that I always try and focus on. I mean, rankings, yeah, okay, you want to see your rankings go up by conversions as well.

Byron: And that’s typically something, you know, you can work with from Day 1 with whatever traffic you’re receiving.

John: Yeah, I mean, you should be able to log in or get your reports and say, okay, we’re heading in the right direction. As for timeframes, that varies. I mean, I’ve gotten some clients, you know, ranked the top three first page within three months but that’s a different – you know, that marketplace is less competitive than others. So it’d be silly for me to take someone on board that wants to rank for say, credit cards, and say, yeah, we can have you first page in six months because that’s just not going to happen.

So there’s no real answer for timeframes. It varies depending upon so many different factors that I couldn’t possibly cover them all here but the biggest one is competition.

Byron: Yep.

John: And where they’re currently at.

Byron: Well I think that’s a new topic in itself so we can probably focus on a few of those topics that we just touched on today in the next few Podcasts.

John: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

Byron: Yeah.

John: But I think just to summarize, the business owners that are just getting started, just keep it simple; don’t over complicate things and don’t become obsessed about keywords and Google. I know we’re talking about SEO but, you know, just keep it simple and use some common sense. I see a lot of people just keyword stuffing and becoming completely and utterly obsessed about where do I place the keywords, do I put it in the title twice or do I put it in the page three times? You know, that’s all superstitious nonsense.

Byron: Yep.

John: Just keep it simple. Write for your users, publish content for your readers not for algorithms.

Byron: Yeah, exactly and I think most people, you know, if you cast a realistic eye over your content you tend to know whether it’s something that you think is valuable. You know, if you look at your own content and you think, well, this is garbage, I didn’t enjoy writing it, it took me ten minutes, that’s a good sign that you’re probably wasting your time, you need to look at improving what you’re doing.

John: Exactly. Yeah and a lot of business owners will do that. They’ll create doorway pages, you know, washing machine repairs Cremorne and washing machine repairs Killarra and the page just reads like absolute nonsense. I mean, that really doesn’t – I mean, I know myself personally when I land on a page like that I’m like what is this rubbish? You can tell it’s been written in India or something. So you just click away but I mean content like this, this Podcast that we’re doing, I mean, I’m sure that, well I’m at least hopeful, people are either listening in or reading the transcription. It’s share-worthy and its engaging and it actually helps people as opposed to just garbage slapped on a page just for the sake of trying to rank for one particular term.

Byron: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, that might be a good thing to mention now just before we finish up is your listeners, if they do have any questions for you, then is that something that they can send into you or shout out questions to you that you can answer for them?

John: As part of the Podcast?

Byron: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, I’ll take on questions. Yeah, if anyone’s got any questions send them in and I’ll send them over to you Byron, yeah? No, that’s a good idea man because I’d like to get people involved.

Byron: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

John: So I’d be happy to answer any questions. Yeah, send them over and we’ll see if we can tie them in with the topic that we’re covering on the day, I guess.

Byron: Yeah, absolutely. Beautiful. All right, thanks very much John. Thanks for answering my questions today and hopefully the listeners got some benefit from everything you’ve spoken about.

John: Absolutely. My pleasure and I look forward to doing a lot more Podcasts with you Byron, it’s been a lot of fun.

Byron: Thank you John.

John: I really enjoyed it.

Byron: And what’s the frequency for your visitors and listeners?

John: Oh yeah, as long as we’re not slack we’re going to do these every Wednesday right?

Byron: Every Wednesday that’s it.

John: Every Wednesday?

Byron: Yep.

John: Okay, as long as you don’t have screaming kids or dogs barking or chainsaws or anything like that going on in the background we’ll be all right. So we’ll be doing these weekly, every Wednesday.

Byron: Yep.

John: Be sure to pop over and check them out. Eventually we’ll get these up on iTunes as well. If you have any questions that you’d like to see covered or included as part of one of the episodes send them in and we’ll do that for you.

Byron: Beautiful.

John: So all good.

Byron: Thanks for listening everyone.

John: Thanks so much Byron.

Byron: And thanks John, we’ll speak to you soon.

John: Cheers mate. All right, cheers, bye.

The post Ep1 – SEO Considerations for a New Website appeared first on SEO Point.