Unlocking Business Growth Mastering SEO & Holistic Marketing - Servants Heart Podcast

🚀 I had a blast on the Doing Business with the Servant’s Heart podcast! 🎙️

I sat down with Steve Ramona to chat all things SEO, marketing strategies, and why showing up on Google’s first page is imperative for business success. We tackled the biggest SEO myths and broke down simple, actionable tips to help businesses get free traffic and convert more leads!

💡 SEO isn’t just about ranking—it’s about results! I shared insights on:
✅ The #1 mistake most businesses make with their websites
✅ Why remarketing ads can make or break your conversions
✅ How to grow your online presence without spending a fortune on ads
✅ The secret to long-term SEO success (hint: patience & persistence!)

Of course, we had some fun, too—talking about my love for the beach 🏖️, jazz 🎷, and Rocky’s "Eye of the Tiger" 🎵!

🎁 BONUS: I also hooked up listeners with a free SEO gift 🎁 → SEOOptimizers.com/gift 🚀

Listen in and let’s take your business to the next level! 💥

🎧 #SEO #Marketing #EntrepreneurTips #FreeTraffic #SEOExpert #BusinessGrowth

Transcript

0:02

Welcome everyone to Doing Business with the Servant's Heart podcast. Doing business in life with a purpose, serving others. Yes, Achieving success. I'm your host, Steve Ramona. We created this show for you because we want everyone to be motivated, inspired and educated on this show to make an impact in your world. And as you listen to this incredible guest I have today, one of my favorite topics, by the way, is how will you serve today and what impact will you create with that service today, having that servant's heart. I want to thank my two sponsors, BrainShare US Drive Business Success and sustainability with brain Share business mentors, where your business flourishes and your vision comes to life. Check out the link in the show Notes and then pitchdb.com Imagine being a guest on over 3 million podcasts, speak at over 18,000 conferences, and much more. Build your thought leader platform with incredible opportunities to show who you really are. With that being said, marketing is, and I'm going to use Brandon's word imperative in your business, whatever that looks like. If you're not marketing, as I say, you're in the people asset business. If you're not bringing people to you, you're not going to grow. And that's why I'm excited to have Brandon on today. Brandon, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on today. SEO is the elephant in the room. That's what you do. There's so many different ways to do SEO and there's so much confusion of people I talk to unconfuse us. Yeah, that is my goal, try to simplify SEO. And SEO is just search engine optimization. And that means ranking websites on the different search engines, which primarily Google kind of runs the show. So when you search on Google, there's ads at the top, right below the ads are the organic, the free listings. And SEO is trying to get you your website in those free listings. There's 10 spots on that first page of Google. But it's not just websites that appear. Images appear, videos appear, maps appear, products appear. So want to try to take up as much free real estate as possible on that first page of Google without spending money on paid ads? Yeah imperative is the word we talked about in the beginning. So ROI is what we're talking about. What is that? Roi. Because that's always the big elephant in the room as well. Hey, I want to work with Brandon, but am I going to grow? And that is where I've learned over the years that SEO is not a means to an end. SEO gets you traffic, but people don't care about traffic. Traffic really means nothing if it's not converting. So I've realized over the years that SEO gets people to your website, but unfortunately half the people that come to most websites are going to leave that bounce rate. So how do you keep yourself top of mind and have multiple touch points? And that's where I've started doing remarketing ads where if you look at a product on Amazon, you don't buy it. Those ads follow you around. Do the same for any website. So like if you go to my website for free classes, if you've come to my website but haven't taken one of my free classes, they'll follow you around saying, hey, take my free class. If you have taken one of my free classes but you haven't signed up for like a free consultation, then I'm going to follow you around with like ad saying sign up for a free consultation. And if you did sign up for a consultation put but didn't become a client, then I'll follow you around with different ads with testimonials and reviews. So doesn't have to just be e commerce. It could work for service based businesses and just trying to get those multiple touch points so you can build trust up and get those conversions. Because ultimately we all want those phone calls, sales leads, emails, whatever that conversion goal is. And that's why I try to take a holistic approach to it instead of just only doing SEO. SEO is my main focus, but trying to just make sure that we close the whole loop and make sure that we get those conversions. Yeah, holistic and touch points are huge because people lose sight of that. It doesn't have to be SEO. It's one of the many tools that people can use. So let me ask you this question. You've probably heard, I hear it well. I don't want people following me. I don't want Steve Ramona's website or Brandon's website following me. From a company's perspective like, oh, I don't want to ruin our brand doing that. They really ruining their brand when people. Are following if they follow you too much. So you could set limits. Sometimes you'll go on a website, you look at a product and then you'll see like 50 ads that day for that same product. A little overboard, that's probably not the best user experience or you might have bought that product and then you still see those ads falling around. So you have to make sure you set up all the audiences properly and all the targeting is done. Where maybe you just show your ad once a day for the next month. That way it's not too intrusive. Where it's like, why do I keep seeing this SEO company? I don't care about SEO that much. Like I was interested in it, but I don't need to see it 20 times a day. So setting up those limits and setting up how long you show up for, how many days, all that stuff, the frequency capping, then you can really set it where it's not going to be too obtrusive. But some people don't put those settings in and it just lasts all over the place and it's just a little too much. Brandon, I love that answer because I know a little bit some about marketing. I'm not an expert like you. I never knew that. If I don't know that, I'm sure other people don't know that because that's been my thought too, is I don't. You know, I see Steve Ramon's face all over. I see him on podcasts. I'm done. So being in control controls your marketing. So you don't have that disparaging thoughts when they say, oh, there's another logo of that company. I'm sick of seeing. Exactly That's so powerful. I love that an audience remember that you can control that how often you're out there. And and, and I want to ask this too. So as you ramp up and change your, you can bring that up and down like a slider. Not saying that's just my thought where, you know, I want more now, this week, maybe next week or next month I'll do less due to marketing. Maybe I got too many leads or not enough leads. Is that a big part of this as well? Yeah, it's all customizable. It's all about trial and error. You never know what's going to work. Some people need more touch points if it's like a higher ticket item. But if you're just buying like socks, you don't really need to have that many touch points. But if you're selling like cars or anything that's expensive, then you want to have those multiple touch points but still not going overboard. Like take a step back and think, if you're looking for your product or service, how often would you want to see those ads? I mean, most people would say I never want to see those ads. But just thinking like, if I have to see these ads, how much how many times I want to see them? Because at least now they're showing targeted ads versus maybe you'll get ads that are completely irrelevant. Like in the past, a lot of people will get ads that are not targeted. Like you might get an ad for dog food and you don't have a dog. You're just like, why am I getting this ad? But if you do have a dog, then you get ads or dog food. You're like, okay, this makes a little bit more sense. It aligns with what I'm looking or what I'm, what I have what I'm looking for. I like that. I think it'd be more an irritant getting something like cat food. I don't have a cat. I'm like, but marketing, if I got a marketing targeting ad, that's something I'm always interested in learning more. 17 years. I always tell people when you go out to find marketing's saturated, you know, you've been 17 years. I love that you have the experience. What have you Learned in those 17 years that would be a good tip for the audience? Just be persistent and don't get discouraged if you don't see those immediate results. Because SEO is a long term game and a lot of people get discouraged when they don't see that traction. But you have to keep working and building and building and building it up and eventually you're going to get Google to trust you. But a lot of people just do SEO for a couple months and then if they're not seeing the results as they're looking for, they just give up. But SEO is a long term play and it's not immediate if you want the immediate results. Google Ads, great way to get immediate traction. SEO is that slow growth, but over time you're just going to keep building it up and building it up and eventually you're just going to get to that point where you're just going to have Google bringing you traffic all day long and you don't have to worry about it. You're the expert. So I like that because when you go long term, like you're not spending thousands of dollars. I'm guessing you're building up your pay as you go up. You're not going to put everything in one thing because you know it's going to take a while. That's where you come in as the expert to go, hey Steve, you're company, let's start here and grow this way. So you have a plan, right? Yeah. Making a long term plan that has your goals in place but also has realistic expectations of knowing what's going to happen in the next couple months. Like at first maybe you don't see much growth, but then after month three you're going to see it start shooting up. I mean sometimes it works really quick. I have one client that I'm working with that they don't have much competition. So it all comes down to the competition. The more competition, the more, the more time it's going to take. But I have one client that doesn't really, really have much competition. And within one month of working together I already got them to that first page of Google. They're not the top yet, but they've already gone to page one which usually does not happen that quickly. But every website is different. So it's just working with your website and just trying to figure out what the best game plan is for yours. You take websites and do audits and look at ways that the website could be better for SEO. Yep Always start off with an audit. So that's the first place. And usually I'll do a free consultation where I look at their website and just trying to analyze it, giving them some quick highlights about what's working, what's not working, versus their competition. That way we could figure out a good strategy if they want to proceed to get them up there. And is SEO. I think we talked about this already but I want to bring this up. SEO is not the end all, be all for your marketing, correct? Yeah. SEO is just one part of marketing and you want to diversify. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket because if something happens to your like let's say your website gets hacked or something, then you're just going to be out and there's not going to be much you can do. But if you have emails, you have social media, you run paid ads. It all works to get traction. So I try to tell people you want to try to get traffic from as many places as possible. I just focus more on SEO because it's a way to get free traffic. And I thought who doesn't want free traffic? But everything works to get traffic. Or all the methods I've mentioned work to get traffic. The ads, social media, email, it all works. I like that because that is the thing I think people do wrong is and, and, and to be honest, marketing companies do wrong. They go, hey Steve Ramona, let's just do SEO. And it's the creme de la creme because it's free. And then you go six months and you've never had really any conversions. It's very little. Well, you could have done these other things. And Let me ask you, 17 years in experience doing this as an expert, what say they don't hire you? What should somebody look for in a marketing company to know that they're going to be successful? I would probably say that they've at least been around for a little while, have some reviews, have testimonials, and that their website looks pretty good from an SEO point of view, which most business owners probably wouldn't know how to evaluate if a marketing agency has done good SEO. But if you are able to look at, like, the coding and see if they put keywords in the coding, or if you have tools that will show you backlinks, you could check to see that these agencies have some backlinks. Because if they're not doing SEO on their own website, then, I mean, sometimes you get too busy, like. But they should at least have some SEO that they've done to their website. But I have a lot of friends that do marketing and they just kind of neglect their website and focus on their clients, which happens all the time. I even did that at the beginning. But you have to work on your website and the clients, and that's probably a good indication if they're able to help you out. If they've done rank, if they're able to rank their website for keywords, then they could probably do the same for you. It's interesting because you're right. Every industry does that. If you're a plumber, you don't fix your own pipes, but you fix everybody else's pipes, no problem. So in regards to a servant's heart, this is doing business with a servant's heart. And I know marketing can be complex, like you talked about, but sometimes not heartfelt, where people aren't really caring about the customer. It's like, just do this and this. It's kind of a shotgun effect. Talk about being a servant's heart in marketing. Well, yeah, you have to care about the customer because if you neglect them, then they're probably not going to want to keep working with you and they're not going to want to work with somebody that doesn't really show that they care. And you have to have some vested interest in that business and that website and trying to help them succeed because you're working together as a team and collaborating. Because I can't do it alone. I have to have the website or the business owners help me out with some stuff. And if I'm just not doing what I'm supposed to do. They're not going to get those rankings, and they're gonna not want to work with me and use a different. A different company or avoid SEO saying, oh, I've been ripped off by this SEO company now I can't trust any SEO company. Which I get that a lot as well. Where a lot of people work with SEO companies and go for the ones that are really cost effective, like fifty dollars or a hundred dollars a month. And I'm just like not sure what they could really do for that price. Because SEO is a lot of content marketing and getting you on building backlinks and backlinks until you're getting published on other websites. And usually that means that you have to pay writers to write content and most writers would charge about $50 just for one article. So if you're paying like 100 bucks for SEO, not sure what you're really getting out of it. And a lot of times people come to me saying, I wish I knew ahead of time that going on Fiverr or something like that isn't going to really get me the results that I expected. Yeah, then that's. I, I'm glad you made that point because people will go to Fiverr, WeWorks, all the others, I can't think of all the different names and expect more than they're going to get. You pay what you get, correct? So price point is something because I mentor businesses and you know, if you charge 100 an hour, you're good, but if you charge 500, a thousand dollars an hour, there's that expectation that you bring in value. Is that the same thing with marketing? For the most part, yeah, because you have to. For myself, like I'm spending a couple hundred dollars out of my own pocket each month for my clients for building backlinks, writing articles, getting content, doing press releases. So automatically I'm already out a couple hundred dollars that I included in the fees because I don't want them to have all these extra costs. But if anything is less than a couple hundred dollars and they're probably doing some SEO, but they're not doing the, the real portion that really matters, which is building backlinks. Backlinks are what ranks websites. And without backlinks it's almost impossible to rank on Google. What are some of the variables of price point? And you just mentioned like that one company had no very little competition, so move up fast. Would they pay a little less because there's less work to get them up there than a business coach, which, you know, there's 10 million business coaches, you know, a lot of competition. Does that kind of work that way with the price point? Yeah, for the most part. The more competition, the more time it's going to take me to get you up there. Also the more like if you're E commerce website selling a thousand products versus a E commerce website selling five products, it's a little bit easier with five products versus one hundred or a thousand. So the more pages you have, the more SEO we have to do for each individual page, the more keywords you're going to have to rank for. And it just takes a lot more time that way. But it's kind of nice to just kind of pick and choose. Like, all right, these are my top products I really want to focus on. Let's push all the effort into these and then eventually we'll trickle down to the other products and services that you offer. Yeah, I like that. That's it's the unknown with marketing is social media and all this stuff. You meant newsletters and emails? Is that stuff that you do or partner out or you know, something like that? Because I love partnerships. Yeah I mean I help out with some of it, but email, I usually tell people it's better if they write the emails because authenticity and voice is really important to keep consistent. And if you're having someone go in there and write for you these emails, it's okay, but it's not going to have the authenticity. And I'm not a subject matter expert in everything, so it's best usually to let the business owners write those emails out. I would help guide them on how to like write them, when to send them out, how to collect emails, stuff like that, but actually writing them, that's where I'd say sometimes it's best to just let the business owner take care of that. How important is the authenticity? When you do SEO and you having these people that I'm paying for to. Write content, it's important to make sure that they are experts or at least knowledgeable in that area. You don't want just some person that has no idea what they're writing about. Write about like some medical device and things like that. Because that could require, I mean you could research it, but there's always those nuances that you're not going to be able to get just by researching some content online. So you have to have some subject matter expertise. Yeah, that. And that's good. Let's jump back into emails because I hear a lot of people tell me emails that I totally disagree because it's grown my business talk about emails and marketing. Email probably is the most effective form of online marketing by far because you get full control of it. You send out an email. If you have a thousand people on your list, all thousand people will see it. Whereas like social media post on Facebook, only 5% of the people that like you will ever see what you post that you have to spend money to boost that post, essentially advertise it. So email is going to be the best. Well for the time being it's going to be the best. You never know what's going to happen. But right now it's a really powerful form of marketing. It's just that you have to collect the emails. A lot of people buy email lists and that's where they do it wrong. You have to collect those emails which is not easy. Like how do you get people to give you an email? If you just ask for an email it's never going to happen. Like I first started doing SEO, I'd have on my website join my newsletter. No one ever joined my newsletter. Few years ago I started, well like maybe 8 years ago I did the ebook that I give out for free that got me some people signing up. Not as many as I had hoped, but got me a few people. But once I started offering free classes that's got me a lot more people that sign up to my email list. So thought about just trying to give out something of value. Like if you're E commerce it's really easy. E commerce websites you just give out a coupon saying like first time purchasers get 10% off easy enough to get those emails. But for service based businesses it's a little bit more tricky. Like yeah, offer something that's like for a plumber, like what are you going to give away? If you're a plumber it's a little bit more tricky. So yeah, yeah, I'll give you a monkey wrench. Here's a monkey wrench with our company name. I'm kidding. Well that's a good point that you made is a funnel. You're talking about a funnel where they click the ebook. Because I want people to understand this. And then you put your name and email, like I just signed up for a webinar this morning and took my name email. They're collecting my data to funnel through to an email newsletter. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah that's the best way to do it. So you mentioned ebooks, free classes, any other ways to. Because I think emails are powerful and collecting data is, I've been told $8 per name per email, depending on what you sell of course. But there's a lot of money there. Is there any other ways to collect emails that you like? I mean, those are the more popular ways, but I would look at your competition. So if you have any competition, you could look at them and see what they're offering for free and. Or it doesn't even have to be competitors. You could just look at big corporate websites and see what they're offering in terms of how they're getting emails. Maybe white papers, but that's kind of similar to an ebook or. But yeah those are kind of the more popular ways. What is in 17 year? I keep saying you look so young. I'm 62, but I keep saying 17 years. Like he's so young. You probably started at 12. No, I'm kidding. Half kidding. What is the challenge or what is the tip that you can give somebody that they do wrong on their website? There's millions of websites out there. Well, what have you Learned over the 17 years? That is kind of a glaring mistake a lot of the time. I mean, big one would probably be not having text on your website. So each page on your website, Google feeds off content and each page needs text on it. The more text you have on each page, the easier it is for the search engines to read, understand, and know what that page is about. And most of the times you probably want to put a couple hundred words of text. The more text, the more the search engines are going to reward you. But a lot of people, especially E commerce websites, this have a bunch of products listed there. And Google struggles to read images. They're getting much better at it, but they still struggle. All they could really read on an image is a file name, which doesn't really give you that much text or room to put words in there. So having text that surrounds it gives that relevancy aspect of it and helps out a lot. Yeah. 200 words. Is that through the whole website or per page? Oh, no a few hundred words per page. Like 400 words? Yeah, yeah. Or more per page. I want to clarify that. Yeah, because somebody goes, hey, Steve, I did 200 words like Brandon said, and my whole website's got 12 pages. I want to make sure I clarify that. People do that. Right. More you put in, the better. So if you could write a thousand words, even better. But it has to be original content. You can't copy it from one page to another, so makes it a little tricky. But it really is important to add at least some text on your pages. Yeah, we're coming to the end here. I want to ask some personal questions. I like people to know my guests a little more personally. So it's a Friday night, you're off work. What is, what does Brandon do? Like to out with friends, maybe go to comedy shows or just disconnect from the computer. Get away. I live close to the beach, so usually go down to the beach. Maybe not at night, but during the day. I'll take little breaks here and there. And that's the nice part about having my own company is I could pick and choose when I work, even though I work much more than I normally did at a 9 to 5. But at least I'm able to set my schedule and go out there and just try to disconnect and get away from the computer and get away from all those screens. Go hiking, hang out with friends and things like that. My wife will be smiling when she hears this. She loves the beach. Just loves it. So that's good. She's got a cohort. How about your favorite book? I say maybe like the Power of Now is pretty good where it just like tries to keep you in the moment and not thinking too much about the past or getting stuck on what's going to happen in the future and just try to be present, which is tough most of the time. We're always thinking about the past or the future, but just trying to be present in that moment. Yeah. Last but not least to get motivated. What song would you listen to? Yeah I mean I usually listen to podcasts, but if there's a song, maybe like Eye the Tiger is a pretty good motivating song right there. But usually, yeah, I just, just try to listen to anything. It's that way I'm not just stuck with my thoughts, thinking about the future or thinking about past and just kind of mellows you out. But usually some, like jazz is always nice to just relax too and helps you just keep powering through that day. Entrepreneurs, you heard? He said relax a couple times. The beach and songs. I appreciate issues. That's why I love asking those questions. Because that's a great tip. We've got to step away. I have to do that. I can work 12 hours a day and look up. It's 5 o'clock. What did I just. What happened? Got it. We gotta step away. Brandon, this has been incredible. I've learned so much about SEO. My notepad's full of notes. But people want to reach out to you. How can they find you? So I actually created a gift for everybody if they go to my website at SEO Optimizers. That's S E O-P-T-I I Z E-R-S.com forward slash gift. They can find that there along with my contact information and a bunch of classes I've done over the years. I've done it for free so they could see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about. And also if they want to book some time on my calendar for a free website analysis, I'm happy to check out their website for free and give them some feedback about what's working and what's not working. It's powerful. I'm going to go there right after this show. I love it. I love. I'm a free stuff guy. Especially if it's We're always learning. Entrepreneurs always need to be learning. Again, thanks again, Brandon, for being on. I want to make a note here. As I always say on podcasts, there's a forward reverse button on there. There's so many tips that Brandon gave to you. Powerful tips and from a guy who's been doing it 17 years. He just didn't start last week. But take those and listen to them over and over again. Brandon, I would love for you to watch or listen to the whole show, but if five or six minutes change your life or make a difference in your business, we're going to be extremely happy. Also, don't forget about my TV show. Together we serve. It's every Friday at 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. Also too, where business with doing business with a surface heart on your chest and on your hat. I've got swag hats and shirts and hoodies. There'll be a link in the chat as well and also a link to Brandon's website for that gift jump. On it. He's given to you free. And that's what servant hearts do. People like Brandon, who are great people, they're going to give you something to help you out. And as always, I want to thank all of you for listening. Me and Brian are so excited that you listen or watch this show and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Doing Business with a Servant's Heart. See y'all.