Digital marketing is more important now than ever because we have such a captive audience online with more people working from home. Is your business showing up in Google searches? Have you implemented new website strategies to keep up with changes stemming from COVID-19? Have you hit any snags along the way?
In this virtual conversation, our Julie Holton of mConnexions sits down with Lance Beaudry to talk about digital marketing during COVID-19.
Transcript:
Julie: Hello! Welcome to our Lansing Marketing Hackers Facebook page. We are doing a live Q&A today. I am joined by Lance Beaudry. Hey Lance how are you?
Lance: Good, how are you Julie? Hi everyone.
Julie: Yes, so hey everyone, we are coming to you live today because about a month ago Lance did a presentation of a virtual presentation on SEO and we thought you know let’s give it a month let’s give it a few weeks and then come back to Lance with any questions that we’ve had during this time as we’ve been really putting his strategies and his ideas into place. So the presentation last month was called tracking goals and building demand-based websites. So if you missed that that is live on our page on our YouTube channel so you can see that at any time, but Lance I’m really excited to get started today. Quick word from our sponsors. So Lance Beaudry of Avalanche Creative thank you so much for joining us today. Quick shout out to our other sponsors. Chad Munce is on our Lansing marketing hacker’s committee from WLNS, Paul Schmidt of Unodeuce multimedia, Timothy Haynes of Symposia Labs and of course I’m Julie Holton of mConnexions marketing agency. So thanks so much for joining us. Guys give us a thumbs up if you can hear us, we want to make sure we’re coming through loud and clear and feel free to use the comment box to ask questions throughout. So lance and I talked in advance and we have some questions lined up ready to go. Some of the most frequently asked questions and Lance has answers. So we’re going to dive in there, but we will also go through your questions throughout our time. Okay Lance, ready?
Lance: Absolutely let’s get into it.
Julie: Alright so first of all I think we need to give up just a brief explanation you know we’re talking about SEO, search engine optimization, we generally most business owners know that’s important when it comes to making sure their businesses are found on Google. Can you start by just giving kind of a quick overview what the heck is SEO?
Lance: Wow, how much time do we have again? In a nutshell yeah search engine optimization is helping people find exactly what they’re looking for through search engines. So Google I’m going to use Google as the example because that’s probably the one we’re all most likely to use, but when I say Google think of that as any search engine. They’re all after the same thing. Giving the searcher exactly what they’re looking for. So a good search engine optimization company, agency, person, is going to try to do the exact same thing and there are many activities that contribute to making sure that you are offering users what they need, but that’s essentially in a nutshell what search engine optimization is all about. It is driven by a lot of things really depending on who you talk to will say this with a grain of salt, but it can really boil down to two things and that’s content and links. Content being written, images, video, on your page and then links being both internally on your site and then from other sources. So other people’s websites essentially saying hey that content is good or this company is trusted. Those are kind of the two pillars of search engine optimization.
Julie: Okay awesome so and back in the day there were a lot of black hat tactics, not that there’s still someone out there, but of course you know we’d go to search for something and something completely unrelated would pop up and so what Google and all of the other search engines have done is really refined their algorithms so that when you search for a black piano you don’t get some you know pink shoes that show up. So that was a really bad example I should’ve thought that through, but anyway that’s essentially what SEO is all about. Okay so Lance what is one of the most underrated, but yet simple SEO tips.
Lance: Yes, this one is my favorite because we have been able to actually address this tactic, this issue, a lot for our own company over the past month just during this pandemic we’ve just kind of like said hey we need to take a look at our own website, our own SEO, and just start making some adjustments in that most underrated tactic is updating your old content, okay. There’s a lot of ways to go about this. Look at your website and it almost come to it and maybe even bring in a high school student, bring in a grandparent, bring in a child, have them read and maybe even one page on your site, maybe a service page right and then talks to them and say hey what questions do you have about this? What happens when you update old content is its providing or ideally should be providing more context. So as an example what we did last month as we look through with the help of search counsel which I’ll talk a little bit about that, we have another question that’s going to come up I’ll geek out about that, but search counsel is a free tool from Google where you can actually see what keywords are driving traffic from Google and to what pages on your website. So we found this blog post that I wrote a couple years ago when we were kind of getting involved in building Shopify sites we don’t do too much of that anymore, but it was something very specific. It’s about adding sections to Shopify which if you’re if you ever worked with Shopify it’s pretty easy to do, but there’s just there was something that was difficult about it and I couldn’t find that resource on the internet like to solve a problem that I had. So I found the solution, I created the solution, then I wrote about it on our blog, put it out there on our blog. So what we did is I realized we actually got a lead through that blog post and we ended up helping somebody with some SEO, but they originally found us through that blog post. We were like wow that was a pretty good blog post then. So I went back to it I said well okay we’re getting a decent amount of traffic every once in a while, but are we fulfilling all of those intentions. So we can see all these different keywords that page would show up for in search results. So we said okay how can we update this content to be more valuable and fulfill the intentions of the searchers, of the people they’re searching by these terms. So we added a new section just to dive in a little bit deeper on the topic of creating custom Shopify sections and then all of a sudden no joke in a matter of weeks we doubled and I think we’re onto tripling the traffic to that page now and so the reason I say most underrated is because it’s kind of like where you can find some quick wins and if you’re maybe to add some more examples. If your service based company and you have a list of the services that you offer and one of them is actually a really big topic, but you don’t have a lot of information about it. Create a blog post, link it. That is one of the easiest ways to add more context because Google the user is going to look at that content on that page and they might need more information about it, especially if it’s a really large topic.
Julie: I love that and if they need more information on it don’t you want them to stay on your page, right?
Lance: Exactly. You don’t want to send them off. A lot of people are like well pay if they want to find an answer to that they can just google it. It’s like well you want them to leave and go Google something that you could answer, that you should answer.
Julie: Right, especially if they leave and land on a competitor’s site. We don’t want your competitors giving your potential clients the answers. Lance the other thing you said that I really liked is you talked about intention and we talked about this with our clients a lot of mConnexions because it’s not just about the numbers it’s not just about you know high volume of people going to your website. You want the right people. So what a great tip, especially right now. A lot of business owners those that have time can be spending time refining and updating content. I also love that you’re not saying that we necessarily like your number one tip isn’t to write loads and loads of new content it’s to take content that already exists and make it better.
Lance: Absolutely, we even yesterday we updated a new blog post and immediately again started seeing today better results from it.
Julie: Awesome, yeah. Okay next question, what can local businesses do for more search engine visibility? We get that question a lot. Everyone wants to be number one.
Lance: Yeah this one I really like. First of all, I’m going to overemphasize this all day long Google my business if you don’t have it obviously get it, it’s free. Get verified, complete your profile, that’s just a gimme okay. It’s so easy to do. There’s no excuses. The next one tends to need you need a little bit more context to this, but go out there and complete your local citations and what I mean by that is things like Yelp, yellow pages, even Foursquare. I don’t do you I don’t even know anybody that uses Foursquare anymore, right? I’m not sure if that’s even a thing that people use, but here’s the reality, is Google is looking to that almost as a validation that like you exist. Imagine I like to maybe give this example, maybe a friend tells you about a great restaurant that they went to and they’re like oh it’s so great you got to try it and then you ask where is it and they go oh I don’t know. I’m not sure where it is. That’s almost like Google like if you’re going to they’re looking for those recommendations and they’re looking for consistency. So yeah you’re not going to get customers especially my business we’re not going to get customers on Yelp, but we have a Yelp profile because it just validates us. It’s one more place to make it very clear to Google because they will crawl all over those sites, that you are a business that operates locally. So that’s just one of those moz, moz.com, has a great list down to categories. So if you are let’s say you’re a cleaning service right you’re a local cleaning service it will tell you the top 10 places to go and fill out those free profiles and they tend to be free. Now when they’re free I do want to say this you fill out your yellow pages and they’re probably going to try and sell you something you’re going to get on their email list you know just unsubscribe from it, but create those free profiles. A lot of times they can really give you a little boost in local search engine visibility.
Julie: I love that. Okay I have to jump over to comments for a quick moment to acknowledge Nathan Creswick because he is laughing at me I just said for the business owners who have time right now and he’s laughing because Nathan Creswick is the owner farmer at Creswick farms. Nathan thank you for taking the time to join us. I know you have been extremely busy with your business lately so thanks for joining us and feel free everyone, comment, ask questions, Lance is here to answer your questions as we go through. Okay Lance next question I have for you, what is your favorite free tool for SEO?
Lance: Gosh, there’s so many but I’m going to probably start with the one that I already mentioned Google search console. I don’t think many business owners many people who are responsible for management website even know about it, unfortunately and even if you do know about it you probably don’t know how to use it to gain valuable insights. So Google search console it’s a free tool it’s different than analytics you can almost divide up the differences between search console and analytics like this, analytics is for everything once the user makes it to the site, now we can understand where they’re coming from, but it’s also on all route all types of traffic it’s not just search engine traffic like we can see who’s coming through from email and pay-per-click, social media, all of that stuff right and then down to a science of where they’re coming from, are they on mobile on desktop? Search console is just data from Google’s search engine results page. So just that search engine and it will actually give you the exact queries so those keywords that you are getting visibility for and clicks through to your site. You can see your positions on those keywords, you can see trends data, you can boil it down to specific pages, specific keywords, there’s the filters aren’t amazing hopefully they continue to get better over time, but it’s just one of those tools that if you’re looking for opportunities to improve your overall website’s capability, to get good qualified traffic, you start spending some time in those performance reports within search console and you’re going to start to make some improvements that are going to generate new business for you. We actually we had a relatively new customer in the last few months who they had an amazing site, really nice-looking site and when we loaded it on our phones it seemed like it was mobile-friendly the other benefit of Google search console is it will tell you if their crawler believes that it’s not mobile-friendly. So it will give you an alert and what we realized and this business was like hyperlocal like they’re all about getting foot traffic. So it was getting flagged for all these mobile usability issues even though like when we load that we tested it’s like okay I don’t understand it’s fine, but something was wrong. We sent that information to the developers somehow they figured it out we got those removed and all of a sudden mobile traffic went up. So that’s another huge benefit it will tell you if you have any errors that would be preventing them from recommending you. Now here’s something else that we are aware of but it might be worth noting too if I’m going down the rabbit hole of mobile. Google indexes mobile first, meaning you got to make sure you have a mobile-friendly website. Okay in a nutshell and here’s something that we realized with this particular customer they actually get a lot of branded searches. So branded means they are looking for them by name right and Google is not going to penalize if they see that you know mobile the site is not mobile friendly, they’re not going to if I searched for that company by brand they’re still going to show me that site right, but if I search for that company by product or service and not including their name, they are less likely with an issue like that to be recommended because Google wants to send them to a site with a good experience and if they’re like oh this site has some mobile usability issues then it’s like okay well we don’t want to recommend them because that’s not a good experience. So it gives you just tons and tons of great insights. If you wanted a few more awesome free tools answerthepublic.com tells you type in a key word tells you all the questions that people, ask related to whatever topic it is whatever key word that you entered. Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool that is getting better and better all the time. There’s probably loads and loads more but.
Julie: And it’s important to point out too that I know for our clients it’s it seems intuitive that we’re going to know what the keywords are but not always the case right. So these tools that you’re talking about are so important. We think we know what people are typing into Google to find us, but very rarely do we actually know those top keywords people are using.
Lance: Yes, exactly and that’s where it’s so important like if you spend enough time and you look in the right areas you can start to develop a little bit of that we call search empathy you know like really caring about the way that they search for but really it’s even it’s more than that it is it is customer empathy and you probably experience this if you talk to your customer, if you listen to your customer correctly. You’re going to hear the language that they use and that should help you develop a sense of like hey what do we create as far as content on our site.
Julie: Absolutely and so important to know too you pointed out that it’s the console is going to tell you what’s working perhaps but also what’s not working. What keywords need to be adjusted or maybe you’re attracting a high volume of traffic, but it’s not you’re not closing those leads, it’s not converting. So why is that happening? Are you attracting people that aren’t actually interested in your services because if that’s the case those aren’t the people you want to be attracting. So next question Lance is for those who are listening and are thinking okay this is great, but overload like where do I start? If I’m a business and I’m just maybe I’m DIY-ing this or I just you know I’m not quite at that point yet to hire someone to really focus on this. Where do I start? What can I be doing on my own?
Lance: Yep, well timing is good on this. I hate to be self-promotional but we do have a course that we launched several weeks ago that teaches you exactly how to go through the processes that we go through or really that I’ve gone through over the last few years in executing SEO. So that’s a great resource and we’re constantly looking for feedback to make it better.
Julie: So tell us where to find that.
Lance: Yes, that is avalanchegr.com backslash avalanche – course or if you just go to the domain you should be able to find it pretty easily.
Julie: Okay we’ll put that in the comments.
Lance: Perfect yeah, the other thing that I want to say though about SEO is the best way to get started is just to start doing it and perform experiments. There are a lot of courses out there and resources that are fantastic, but they’ll just kind of fill your head with knowledge and if you don’t do anything with that knowledge then you’re not going to start seeing results. It’s the results that gets you for me personally like once I start like wow I’m ranking for this, Wow we got a lead from organic SEO, it just gets it kind of like perpetuates that curiosity of what you need to level up in your SEO game. So that’s why I said just get out there, take what we’ve just said, just start doing it. Don’t be afraid of screwing anything up. We mess things up literally every day I’m sure of it, but be willing to learn from every new step that you make. So if there is anyone listening that’s like hey I don’t even have a business, I don’t even know where to start, but pick something. Pick something and just start what do you like to write about? Do you want to start some kind of new local business? It’s okay to build your website first and get a Google my business set up and start telling people you’re open for business even if you’re not open for business you got to start somewhere.
Julie: So I love that you say you’ve got to start. What do you typically see that people do wrong when they’re doing SEO like how can we maybe learn from some of those mistakes you were talking about? I’m sure we’re going to make plenty of mistakes but what’s something you see people doing wrong?
Lance: Yeah, so one of the biggest things is its kind of its caring more about what you are going to get out of SEO rather than what you can give out of it. So all of these tactics all these things that we’re talking about when it comes to executing a search engine optimization strategy, building a website that’s actually valuable for your customer, it’s so easy, I’m guilty of this as well, to look at our keywords, look at our content ideas, for like ooh what are we going to get out of this? You know from that person we’re trying to get in front of and then it kind of like ruins everything it ruins everything that comes after that because you will not be able to produce something that is truly valuable for your target if you have this lens of like hey what are we going to get out of it? You’re just not going to be able to give as much. So that’s something typically that I see a lot of people do wrong and they like to find the hacks, right? Hacks over time like you talk about black hat like they’re worse there’s old-school strategies that quite frankly depending on the business, depending on the website, sometimes black hat and old-school hacks and tricks they can still work, but the reality is like Google literally just yesterday rolled out a big update and there’s some volatility in people’s positions in Google. They’re constantly making tweaks, their engines are getting smarter, they’re using AI to understand this stuff better and better. They’re personalizing search so maybe something you searched three days ago is now going to influence the new search that you make today. So really it needs to be caring more about the customer. I know I say that a ton but I think that’s what it’s about and maybe secondly would be kind of the comprehensive keyword research to inform your overall content strategy and how you organize the content on your website. So we see this all the time where we work with local businesses. I’ll use a landscape design company as an example. They came to us and it’s like hey they’re so focused on getting these big jobs like we want to like do the backyard pool and spa you know stuff that cost thirty, forty thousand dollars to design and install and upkeep all this, but I find we find out in an investigative process like oh yeah they also build pergolas which isn’t as much of an investment or they maybe do outdoor lighting also not as much of an investment. However, it’s related to the overall topic of landscape design and who’s to say that person that has that big project isn’t actually just searching for an awesome a company that does really awesome outdoor lighting. So they’re going to look at and say we want to optimize for pool and spa and neglect outdoor lighting because it’s not as valuable to them right, but the reality is like you might actually get the person who wants the whole thing and you’re attracting them through that like lighter service less productive service.
Julie: Absolutely, such an important point. Yeah you don’t want to – I find that even in general marketing strategy or big-picture marketing strategy we always say to our clients okay let’s talk about your business as a whole. Let’s talk about the most profitable areas of your business where you really want to attract those leads, but let’s also talk about what are other things that people are looking for that you do that are going to bring them to you and then lead to those bigger buying decisions later because oftentimes people start their research small or very focused even if we’re looking for the big picture.
Lance: Exactly.
Julie: The other thing Lance that I really want to point out and emphasize that you talked about is caring about the customer. It’s so important and I love that you brought that up with SEO which sometimes can feel like and I know you were saying earlier your kind of geek out about the technical side of this and how it all works together, but that’s so true for business in general and our marketing in general. I was just giving a presentation last week on our roadmap for recovery as we’re building out what our new marketing strategies are going to look like as we recover from COVID, when businesses are able to reopen and that’s the number one thing is your recovery is not about you. Which is like counterintuitive, but your recovery at your customers, your clients. What can you do to help them? What are your products and services doing to make their lives better and easier? That one’s going to make them part with their dollar which then in turn is going to fuel your recovery. So I love hearing that about SEO because after all the content putting out there needs to be about the clients and the customers.
Lance: Exactly, that’s another great way of saying it. I love it. That’s so true.
Julie: Okay, we have a question that’s come in from Connie. Connie let me see if I can put this up here on the screen, gets a little cut off here, but let me read this. Okay why do we still see brands using Google AdWords to come to the top of the page and search when they are often the second result? So I think she’s saying you know someone is paying for an ad and then they’re not first in the organic rankings, but they’re second so then she says they’re paying for the person who clicks the first result which is a costly ad instead of the organic results. How do brands know if their site is ranking well for their own brand and stop paying for this? Great question, great kind of topic here.
Lance: That is a great question. I would say my quick answer to that is like it’s more real estate. If you have more than one result, more than one link on that search engine result page, that’s good. It’s just a higher likelihood that you’re getting a click-through, especially and I would assume this would be the case in most instances that you have like a different title that you’re optimizing for. So you’re going to see different click-through rates there. Now paying for your brand name, that’s always an interesting one to me. I don’t really get the purpose of that. The only reason that you would definitely want to do that is other brands are paying for your brand name and now here’s what happens to a lot of people think that their competitors are buying their keywords to bid against them, but what happens they’re like if I go back to the landscape example I’ve actually seen this before where it’s like I searched for let’s say that it’s called triple a landscape I searched triple a landscape and a competitor, you know double b landscape you know shows up as an ad. Well Google is not necessarily or that company is not necessarily bidding on Triple A they’re bidding on the word landscape, Triple A just happened to be in there, right. So sometimes it’s not it’s like direct as hey we’re bidding against your name, it’s just what shows up.
Julie: That’s really good to know. I didn’t know that. It’s interesting top Lance when you were the first part of your answer you know you were talking about more real estate. I mean not to jump in on the landscaping terminology. Yeah we’re more real estate on the search engine results page and I know and I don’t know the stats maybe you do, but people are more likely if you have an ad and you’re in the organic space, they’re going to click in the organic space and I don’t know what the stats are, but I’ve read that in that so that definitely lends in to what you’re saying to about more realist, more space.
Lance: Exactly, yes. They’re kind of across the board. It’s going to vary from industry to industry, keyword to keyword, quite frankly, but overall generally across the internet click-through rates are much higher on organic results then paid ads. Now I am not, we don’t do I don’t do paid ads I don’t live in that world and I’m not saying don’t do them like that there’s a Google wouldn’t be as valuable as they are without them. So there is a place for them, but another thing that’s interesting and I want to say the company that put together this data is called jump shot, but they did an interesting case study I think it was throughout 2019 and comparing maybe the search engine results from 10 years previously. You would think that the number one organic result or even the number one paid result would get the vast majority of clicks and then it goes down well over time as Google has changed the visual makeup of the search engine results page. Click through of the number one are actually less. So there’s actually more diversity in the percentage of people that are clicking through to you know the top five results. What makes a huge difference again and this is another one of those low-hanging fruit things you should be working on as your title tags and your meta descriptions because those are essentially your advertisements in the search engine results page. With a really good one you can have position five and potentially get more clicks than position one, it’s possible.
Julie: Great tip. Okay Paul wants to know, hey Paul from Unodeuce multimedia, what about video? How does adding video to your blog post have a written post as well? Great SEO question. So yeah we get this a lot too like can I just post a video on my blog and be done with it? Would that help or hurt mine SEO or do I need to have content there as well?
Lance: Yeah the short classic SEO answer is always going to be it depends. It depends on the intention of the user what the keyword is. However, I will say this, yes to video. Almost across the board. Yes, have video. I wish I had more video for every single blog post because it just thinks about the nature of any content now if it can be communicated in a video if portions of your content can be communicated in a video there are people that prefer that, not everyone, but if there’s someone then it’s important. Another thing that’s interesting is like if you have if you subscribe to a tool like SEM rush is what we use it will show you, you can put in a keyword and it will show you information like the top ten results all include a video for this keyword or you could even take a group of keywords and say show me the keywords that reveal a video in the search engine results page. You know sometimes with a how-to a DIY if you search that in Google you tend to get a video showing up. That is usually a YouTube video. You can actually filter and that is how you can determine the importance of a video on any keyword or topic on your site.
Julie: That is an excellent tip and by the way Lance, Paul says if you need video he knows a guy.
Lance: Is he the guy?
Julie: I think you know Unodeuce multimedia Paul can help you out with video. That was a great question though Paul and that’s something that you know that I have considered as well. I know that whether it’s a podcast or a video oftentimes I see websites including a transcript, does that help the SEO especially if the transcript has keywords in it? What’s the best-optimized video?
Lance: Yeah again I hate to say this does sound like a broken record but it depends. There’s no doubt if it can create a better user experience then it’s worth it like adding closed captioning which I’m not really sure, does YouTube sometimes they do that automatically, I think you can choose to but adding that they can crawl that especially if you’re like embedding a YouTube video like that’s their property. So they can understand the context of a closed caption video which helps them understand exactly what it is you’re talking about in that video.
Julie: Great point, Google owns YouTube for those who don’t know. So the two platforms are certainly going to you know Google certainly going to favor YouTube.
Lance: Exactly yep. So yeah absolutely video all the way. You need to have it. I would even go so far as to say this might be in a bit over the top but like in a perfect world I would have a video with almost every single one of my blog posts, for our company for our customers. I think there’s some case the reality is like that would get pretty pricey especially if you want it like quality video, but yeah.
Julie: Well Connie just confirmed Paul is the guy. So Connie says hire Paul. Okay Lance I have one more question for you and again to our audience if you have questions for Lance jump in and ask them now I’ll ask this question and then we’ll hit anymore in the comments before we wrap up. Lance my next question is about content writing. How do you write content that is SEO friendly?
Lance: Yep, in short write for the human. That’s what we’ve been talking that’s kind of been a theme of everything that we’ve talked about already, but it’s really important to do that and that means it’s okay to be conversational. It’s okay to be fun be you know sarcastic obviously understand the tone of like who like what are you writing about is something are you writing something a medical piece right like you know there’s a time to place a joke right and you need to understand the audience to understand that context, but write for them. Now and we say that it’s like oh that’s hard to do so like what do you mean? Well from an SEO perspective you can at least use your keyword data as evidence of what the searcher does need to kind of help provide and guide what you produce. One thing actually somewhat born out of quarantine during the pandemic that we have been doing a lot more of is what we do is we work with customers to create what we call SEO content templates and though it’s essentially a framework. Think of it as the blueprint of a house to say like hey if we want to dominate this topic whatever this topic is here’s what we need for content and typically what we’ve done is just kind of like sent those off in a Google Doc to a customer and they type away and answer the questions that we have. What we’ve realized is you know what the quality of content that we create are those could be better if we actually just scheduled interviews with them and that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve been scheduling zoom calls where we take our content templates and we use them as kind of like guides to interview and what we get to do out of that is when we have a question in our content template that we ask them we’re listening we’re actively listening and then say oh well I have another follow-up question to what you just said there and that wasn’t in our content template, but because we’re listening it’s like oh I’m curious I don’t understand this topic now we’re really expanding upon it. We’re actually building this really valuable piece of content because it’s conversational and what we’ve learned is subject matter experts if they really like their subject matter can talk about these things for days right, but not everyone’s a writer. Not everyone even though they see a question they can answer a question like to just type it out. It’s much easier to talk it out. So that’s one huge takeaway that we’ve had. We’ve seen a ton of value in that. If you’re looking to you know go out there and produce some really good content set up interviews like that.
Julie: Great idea. Okay next we have a question from Connie before we wrap up here. She is asking do you recommend any specific SEO plugins for WordPress websites?
Lance: Totally. Yep, the one that we probably most I know the it’s probably the most popular SEO plugin it’s just called Yoast. That’s what we use. That’s what we prefer use there are a few others. Really Yoast the main things that we like to use it for are just optimizing meta and title tags. There’s a lot of additional features that Yoast comes with like they have these SEO scores to some extent you can ignore those. They’re not if you get up all green lights because I think they like break it down by like red yellow green. That’s it’s a good guide but just because you see like a hundred percent score or all green doesn’t mean you’re just going to rank for all of the terms you’re targeting. So take those with a grain of salt. There’s another one especially on long-form content. So anything yeah maybe a thousand words Plus that we’ve been using called I can’t remember the name of it. It’s a table of contents plug-in so essentially what it does we like to think and this is maybe a good analogy think of every blog post as a body right and your body has many organs to it and without if you’re missing an organ like the body doesn’t operate very well right. Likewise, if you have a big topic recently I just wrote an email that we sent earlier today about mindfulness. Mindfulness is a huge topic right. If you want to rank for that you can’t be missing an important subtopic. You can’t miss that organ otherwise it’s just not a very full covered piece of content on mindfulness. So a table of contents is a really good experience and helps optimize for some of those short tail keywords. So using that example of mindfulness. I know it gets searched like over a hundred thousand that single keyword alone gets searched over a hundred thousand times per month and anything that short tail is very hard to rank for, but think about the user like what is that there Google is looking at that keyword mindfulness and asking what are they looking for? What is this person looking for? The topic of mindfulness is huge. Do they want an app? Do they want to learn how to do it? Like theirs so many nuances to it. So they’re going to offer the best recommendation where they can go and get everything they need and so a page that has a table of contents that like kind of helps guide like okay you’re looking for mindfulness, but what exactly is it that you’re looking for. A table of contents even just at a page level is helpful for people to get exactly what they’re looking for. So that’s another great tool that we like to use.
Julie: This has been so helpful. Lance thank you so much for joining us.
Lance: Yeah, my pleasure.
Julie: What is the best way for our audience members to get ahold of you if they have any follow-up questions or if they want to talk to you about the SEO services that you provide?
Lance: Yeah just go to our website avalanchegr.com. My contact information is there [email protected], you can we’ve got a weekly email where we just share all kinds of stuff like we shared today and yeah sign up for our course it’s a great way to really learn how to do this stuff and build something.
Julie: Excellent, thank you so much again for joining us. For those of you if you miss Lance’s presentation last month that is on our YouTube page. So just head to the Lansing marketing hackers on YouTube and you can watch the whole thing there and then we will see you back here next month for our next presentation. Thanks so much.
Lance: Yeah thanks Julie appreciate it.
Julie: Alright, bye bye.