SEO Lessons & Tactics for Business Owners - Active FM Podcast

🚀 Had an awesome time chatting on Active FM! 🎙️ With 24,000 weekly listeners (13,000 in the U.S. alone!), we dove deep into all things SEO, digital marketing, and growing your business online.

I shared how I "accidentally" fell into SEO after getting my business marketing degree and how that first job in digital marketing changed everything. Now, after 15+ years of working with businesses of all sizes—mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 500s—I run my own company focused on one thing: getting free traffic from Google!

In this episode, we cover:
 ✅ The best business lessons I've learned over 14+ years 📈
 ✅ Why diversification is key (don't put all your eggs in one social media basket!)
✅ The power of SEO & backlinks—why they still matter in 2024
✅ Email marketing is NOT dead (it's actually the most powerful tool!) 📧
✅ How to optimize for Google without sacrificing user experience 👀
✅ Conversion rates, A/B testing, and getting more leads & sales 🔥
✅ Why SEO isn’t just for websites (Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor—everything has an algorithm!)

We even talked about influencer marketing, Google Ads, and the best ways to get in front of your audience at the right time and place. Oh, and of course, I shared a special SEO gift for all listeners 🎁.

💡 If you're serious about getting free traffic and growing your business, you won’t want to miss this one!

Check it out now & let’s connect! 👉 SEOoptimizers.com/gift

#SEO #DigitalMarketing #PodcastGuest #MarketingTips #BusinessGrowth #OnlineSuccess 🚀

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to Active FM. And as I mentioned earlier, we have around 24,000 listeners that listen every week to the various shows and 13,000 of those happen to be in the U.S. Brandon, so should we get started? How did you get started and what's your story? I just kind of fell into it. I got my degree in business marketing, and after I graduated from school, the first job I got was doing digital marketing for a company. And they wanted me to help out with SEO, social media, doing email marketing, running paid ads, and kind of doing it all for them. Back then. And back then I realized everyone's going to have a website in the future and that I should probably stick with this digital marketing and just kind of kept going with it and ever since then worked at different advertising agencies, different pop shops, Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between doing their SEO. And right now I have my own company that really focuses on SEO and that free traffic from Google. Okay. Okay, great. What in. I mean, you've been in business for a while now. What's that, about 14, 15 years odd? What are some of the best business lessons that you've learned over those 14 years? Theres a lot of lessons I've learned over the years. Just diversify. Probably don't just put all your eggs in one basket. Try to get traffic from as many different sources as possible. Don't just rely on Facebook or Instagram or one of these platforms because you never know what's going to happen to them. And if you just focus on one platform and you're not really diversifying, like if you just focused on MySpace, kind of be in trouble right now. So you got to make sure you diversify. And having your own website gives you full control of everything too. So always recommend, build out your own website because you can control all that. You have control on social media or other platforms. You're just renting space off them. You don't own it and they can just take you down or you just give them free content that you don't own. So really take ownership of everything. Be patient. A lot of this stuff takes time. So don't just expect immediate results, but just keep working at it and you'll see the growth over time. But test and really look at the data, look at analytics and track everything. But I mean, the list goes on and on and on. I think you raised like a very good point there because let's say you're a small business, perhaps even like a mom and pop shop, as you just mentioned there's so much now, you know, it used to just be, you know, you optimized for Google and maybe you did AdWords and that was like 10 years ago. And now you, you sort of raised, oh, now there's social media advertising. And which one is it? Is it Facebook? Is it Instagram, is it Twitter? So to those small businesses, what's the advice you give or what direction do you send them down? When it comes to optimization, it just. Comes down to who their audience is. Are they on social media? Are they going to be on Google, where are they? That's what matters. Who's your audience and what platforms are they active on? And that's where you need to be active. You don't need to be active everywhere, you just need to be where your audience is. That's the main thing. So just trying to figure out who your audience is and how do I get in front of them. Don't try to be everywhere, otherwise you're going to spread yourself way too thin and it's not going to be effective. You got to just really focus on who your core audience is and take a step back as a business owner and try to put yourself in the user's point of view. If you're looking for your product or service, where would you go? Would you be on Facebook, Would you be on Instagram, on Google or. Where would you go? Try to look at that and that's going to tell you where you need to be. Okay, great. Now I've got another interesting question for you. So you know, when you talk about optimizing a website for, for Google I guess sometimes you also need to sort of keep in mind that people have to actually use your website and to read it. So I guess what I'm asking is optimizers will often, you know, they want a lot of text and it must be the right text and have the right keywords. But then we live in a Twitter age where people want a picture in 160 characters. So how do you balance this out on websites, especially for the smaller or the medium sized business? It just depends what you're doing. If you're trying to rank on Google for SEO, you need to add more content. More content, the better for every single page. You can write 400 words or more per page. It's going to really boost up those rankings on Google. The more content, the better. Google feeds off text. Google can't really read images or video. Google has trouble. They're getting better at it, but they really rely on content. The more content you have on every single page, the better. But then if you like you said on Twitter they get 280 characters that you're allowed to do. They doubled it a couple of years ago, so they're giving you more space. But even then it's not that much space. So you gotta write a short message. And most people kind of shows you like on social media they don't want to read a long 400 word text post. So you're sharing that message from Twitter, you probably repost it on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or Pinterest with that short message and it's going to work really well. But for SEO, you need to have content for Google on your website. I always tell people just throw that content at the very bottom of your page. People don't want to read 400 words of content, but Google needs to understand what that page is about. So just depends where you're adding that content. And each platform is different but you got to know how your audience is receptive. Do they want to read a big long blog post or they want a short snippet? Do they want an image, they want a video. How do you use hashtags? You got to make sure to use the proper hashtags. You don't want to just one word hashtags. You want to use words that are two or more words so it's more buyer intent behind those words. Not just general broad words just to get eyeballs on it, but get targeted eyeballs by using long tail hashtags. Hashtags that are two or more words but just depends where you're posting. Great. And by the hashtags you're talking about the social media hashtags like on Twitter and those sort of places. Yeah. When you're posting on social media. Yeah. Use hashtags not for your website. Yeah. Okay. No, great. Okay Now the, the conversion rate. They often talk about the, the conversion rate in on like a website but just perhaps explaining that to, to our audience and then that's, it's something that you know from the little bit of experience that I've seen or, or what I've had contact with, it's quite difficult to actually do. Its something that you've got to like sort of really keep track of and it's the website is something that you have to, it seems like you almost have to work on it on a, certainly like a monthly or a bi weekly basis. What's been your experience on that side? Yeah, you gotta Be testing that website out as much as possible, seeing what works, what doesn't work because nobody knows. There'S no perfect website. You always have to be testing and that's ab testing, split testing. Hacker traffic gets served one version of your website, half the traffic gets served another version. And you could see what gets the most conversions because you have to test. If you're getting enough traffic. If you're not getting much traffic, it's going to be tough to make statistically informed decisions. But if you're getting a decent amount of traffic to your website, start testing it out. Move the Buy now button, maybe change it from Buy now to add to cart. If you're an E commerce website or if you're a service based business, you could maybe move your phone number up or change the font of the. Phone number or change the color and. See does that result in people calling me up more or does it reduce my conversion rate? And if it drops it then you gotta switch it back. But if you see more conversions coming in then that's definitely a win. And then you test that against something else. So now you have the new font or the new color, test that's a different color and keep testing, never stop testing. You always have to be testing to really hone in and optimize that website for leads and sales and conversions. Because half the traffic that comes to your website, it's gonna leave immediately just because they didn't find what they're looking for, they got distracted or didn't load properly on mobile or whatever it may be. But you gotta keep yourself top of mind and keep making it easy for people to convert. Okay, so I think you just mentioned something interesting, the A B testing. So I've been in this industry for a while, but I've never heard of an SEO person mentioned that before. Yeah, well, more for traffic. So just because you get traffic to your website, just because I can rank you for all these keywords doesn't mean that traffic is going to convert to sales. And if you're getting all this traffic but your website's not converting, you're going to be like, hey, this isn't working. So I realized over the years got to make sure that the website converts as well because traffic isn't a means to an end. Traffic is just half the battle. Once you get that traffic, how do you get it to convert? And that is a tricky part, but it's all about testing and just seeing what works and what doesn't work. So something I've heard of more recently is like the sales funnels top websites, the funnels tops website. Have you had any sort of experience with those? Yeah, ever since I've been doing digital Marketing back in 2007 Everyone says you gotta have a funnel, you gotta have a conversion funnel because just like I said at the beginning like half the people that come to your website are going to leave immediately. So you got to keep them top of mind by first capturing their email address. Then you could send them out the newsletter or send them out updates, have them, you can follow them around on using Google Ads remarketing if you have their email address and then you try to connect them on social media because I think you need about five touch points before people actually trust you. So all that stuff works really well to just get people to trust you because most people are just, they're going to leave your website, they're not finding what they're looking for. So you got to build that trust up. And something, I mean I noticed now sort of going to your, to your website earlier a little message sort of popped up and it was, can't remember exactly now is it like 60 tips on SEO and then into your email and subscribe. So is that something you sort of promote even for the mom and pop type stores or the small businesses? Yeah, email is the most effective form of marketing. If you get email addresses you're good because you own those email addresses. You could send out emails to them anytime and everyone's gonna receive that email. It's not like we're social media where only half your audience or with Facebook only 5% of the people that like your page want to see what you post. With email you have full control and look at how much spam you get every single day. Email is the most powerful form of marketing. It's tough to get email addresses and I recommend to everyone, start last year getting emails. You have to get emails. If you're not getting emails you're not. Going to be able to market as. Effectively as you can. So email is number one and it's tough to get email addresses. You got to give something away for free. You can't just say subscribe to my newsletter. Nobody cares about newsletter. Got to give them something of value. For an e commerce website, give them like a 20% off their first purchase, a coupon. If you're a service based business, give them a free something free ebook or free free consultation or whatever it may be to get that person's email address. Because email is number one phone numbers and all that stuff are great, but. Email is really what you want. That's why a lot of websites, you'll see the pop up, it just says give me your email. They don't even care about your name, phone number, they'll get all that stuff later. It's because the more fields you have too, the less likely someone is going to fill it out. Back to the conversion rate optimization, if it says name and email, that's an. Extra field that you're going to lose a lot of traffic. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but just by asking for someone's name you're losing a lot of people. So less is better. But it's all about testing that A B Testing. Yeah. So Brandon, this. Oh, this is actually mind boggling because one would have thought we went past the whole email era like you would think sort of it's down to, you know, social media and those sort of things. But sorry to harp on this but you, you kind of indicating it's not. Email is actually still the way to go. Yeah, email is the most powerful. That's why nobody ever talks about it because they don't want you to know how powerful it is. Everyone's like sure, jump on Facebook ads and all this stuff because they know Facebook ads are low quality, cheap traffic, that they're not interested in your product or service at that moment. They might have been in the past, but just because they're interested in your product or have interests that are similar to what you're offering doesn't mean they care about or want to use your product or service. Whereas like on Google someone's searching, they're actively looking. But the email, you could just keep their self top of mind. And some of the newsletter updates or product codes or discounts, I mean if you look at almost every website still asks for an email. Somewhere in there they're still trying to capture those emails. Email is by far the most powerful. For now. There's a lot of other ways to. Get traffic but email, you own those emails. You don't have to pay each time you're posting or sharing content. You just have to create the email. Create the newsletter, whatever it is, and send it off to your audience and then see if they'll convert it. If you have 100,000 people in your email list, you send them off that email. Anytime a hundred thousand people are going to be receiving it. It's not like you have to keep growing that audience. I mean you want to keep building it up, but once you have them, they're there. Unless they unsubscribe. But as long as you keep providing value, don't just promote yourself. Give good value. If you're promoting, yeah, put yourself in the user's point of view. If you sign up for a newsletter for, like, let's say a dentist, and the dentist sends you an email about, like, why they're the best dentist, you're not going to really care. But if they send you an email about, like, seven tips to whiten your teeth, you'll be like, okay, maybe this is interesting and useful for me. So don't just promote yourself. People don't care about who you are, unfortunately. They just want to know benefits. They want to know what's in it for them. So offer value. Okay, great. So if I sort of cross my mind back to that sort of 2008, 2009 period, when you talked about website optimization, what it really was was kind of optimizing the website, putting text on there and then getting other sites to link to your site. Now I suppose the problem from 2008 till now is now we have, I think it's something like 50 billion websites on Google. So how important is actually that, what would you call it, backlinking that you have from other websites to your website? Is that still very relevant these days? Yeah, there are a lot more websites on Google or on the Internet. So that's why it's become more competitive. It takes more time for SEO. It's not because SEO is really harder, it's just because there's more competition out there and we're not trying to beat Google. I don't care about what Google's algorithm is. It's just trying to beat those 10 websites on that first page of Google and seeing what they've done. But yeah, the backlinks are such a big part of their algorithm. Google started based off backlinks, and it's still based off backlinks to this date. It's changed a lot how they look at those backlinks, but it's still heavily based on getting other websites to talk about you. The more websites that talk about you, the more trust Google has. And then Google looks at the keywords to figure out what to rank you for, but it doesn't really work the other way around. Without those backlinks, Google just doesn't trust you. And they're not going to rank a website that they don't trust backlinks. Nowadays, Google's looking for quality over quantity. So in the past it was, I have 100 backlinks and you had 105 backlinks, you would rank higher than me. Now it's really the quality. And to Google, what's a quality backlink? Quality backlink is a website that's related to you and authoritative. So like, if you're a doctor and you're getting a backlink from a T shirt company, that's gonna look a little weird. But if you're a doctor and you're getting a backlink from a medical blog or another doctor, WebMD, something like that, Wikipedia, that makes a lot more sense. So relevancy is really, really important with the backlinks. It's not just let's get backlinks to get backlinks, it's let's get quality backlinks that's going to move you up those rankings. Great, Brandon. So I suppose that's one of the difficult things because for a small business, or as you say, a mom and pop store, to get other people to link to you is quite, it's quite a tough process. Yeah, it's a little tricky, but it's. All about getting creative. You could look at your competitors backlinks using tools like Ahrefs or Moz or Semrush. These are all paid tools that you just throw your competitor's URL in there and see all their backlinks. But there's only so many backlinks you'll be able to get from those sites. A lot of them might be old or outdated, so you have to build new ones. And the way to build new ones safely is finding other websites that are related to you and trying to build relationships with these webmasters. Maybe you offer them a free blog. Post or a video or press release. Or sponsorship or whatever needs to be done to essentially get another website to talk about you. But there's millions of different ways to build backlinks, but it's all about quality. So you don't want to just build backlinks to build them. You want to get quality backlinks. That's really important. And the best way to get quality backlinks is really just by blogging on other people's websites, building relationships with other people that are in your industry and seeing if you could contribute a blog post to their website. Okay, great. Now, Google Adwords. So how important are those these days? I've sort of read reports of the fake clicks and you see in some little place in either Thailand or China or something like that, and they've got 104, 500 iPhones and they're sitting There clicking on all the iPhones. So the, the fake clicks is, or the purchased clicks is actually seems to be becoming more and more of an issue these days. How have you found it with the Google Adwords. And, and is that still as effective as what it was many years ago? Yeah. No. Google tries to clean up those fake. Clicks or they'll refund you the money. So they're on top of it. Then there's third party tools if you really want to double check. You could spend money on these third party tools, double check to make sure there's no click fraud. But Google Ads work really well. It's just they're expensive. That's why I prefer the SEO, the organic side of things. But the ads do work. It's just once you stop spending money on ads, you disappear. With SEO, you stop doing SEO, you're not going to just disappear, you're still going to stay up there for the time being. Your competitors are going to try to outrank you and over time you're going to drop down. But it's not just that immediate where you're just gone. So ads are definitely very effective. It just depends on your budget. Do you have enough money to spend on them and do you want to spend money on those ads or invest the time to get that free traffic? And how long does it take? So let's say a small business, perhaps they like a small manufacturer maybe employ that sort of 50 to 100 people, that sort of tight number and you know, they invite you into a meeting in the office and they say come and do SEO for us. What's your general take on how long before it starts becoming effective? So with SEO, it's not really a one size fits all. It just depends on that website, how much SEO has already been done to that website. If it's a brand new website, it's going to take at least six months. If it's an older, more established website, it might only take a couple months. But it also depends on the competition. How many backlinks do the competitors have, how much SEO has been done to the competitors websites, and what's the missing gap between yours and their website. That's going to really let me know how long it's going to take. Because with SEO, every website is different. It's not just this is going to work for your website. It's like you got to look at each one individually and see where the disconnect is between that website and the competitors websites and how to fill that gap. Okay, super. I see on Your on your website you do Amazon marketing services. So is that where people are actually wanting to sell their products on Amazon? Yeah just optimizing. Just like I could optimize a website, I could optimize an Amazon page, could optimize a Yelp, a TripAdvisor, I could optimize pretty much anything out there. There's always algorithms on them. So Amazon is another one where putting the right keywords in the right places helps you rank higher on Amazon so you get more people, more eyeballs on your products on Amazon. Okay, interesting. So search engine optimization is important on Amazon as well? Yeah, on every website. Almost every website. Like if you're selling on Etsy, there's an algorithm on Etsy you're selling on whatever platform you might be on, there's always an algorithm there. So there's ways to kind of tweak it and optimize your profile to try to get you higher rankings. Okay. The other interesting one that I saw on your website, which I guess I've never really thought about, was influencer marketing. Yep. That one is more for social media trying to say, hey, we'll get this influencer to shout you out and they'll shout your product or service out to their audience. And that one has unfortunately now with the engagement dropping so much on social media, it's not as effective as it used to be, but still a great. Way to get your name out there. And brand awareness and get your. Get new people to see your product or service or whatever it is that you're promoting on social. Okay, interesting. So Brandon, what would be some of the key takeaways that you'd like to give to the listeners? Just diversify and try to think about who your audience is and where they are and put yourself in front of them. Don't just be everywhere, just try to be in front of your audience at the right time, at the right place. And that one also patience, being patient with all this stuff is not immediate. It all takes time. But over time you'll see that growth and you'll see that positive momentum and traction. Okay, great man. Well, Brandon, thank you very much for your time and we do appreciate you coming on. I think some of the insights that you've given you have certainly been mind blowing for me. So would you just like to give us your, I mean, we'll put your details on to, in the links as well, but would you just like to give us your email address and your, your website address? So everyone that's listening or watching. I create a special gift for them on my website. If they go to seoptimizers.com gift they can find that there. That's S e o o p t I I z e r s.com gift and they can find that there along with my contact information, everything. Great. Thank you very much and thank you very much for joining us and have a good day. Further, thanks so much for having me on.