Episode Description:
This episode features the infamous SEO Steve! Steve Wiideman has been tackling SEO from the very beginning, before it was even called SEO. In this episode he offers some incredible insight and strategies for best-practices in developing a content strategy, and offering great advice on how to break things down to make it easy to create, measure, and analyze your SEO performance.
You can visit Steve’s website : https://www.wiideman.com/
Find Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seoexpert/
Here are some tools that Steve mentions during the episode:
SEM Rush: https://www.semrush.com/
Moz: https://www.moz.com/
Google Analytics: https://www.googleanalytics.com
Action you can take right now:
- Start Creating YOUR Content Strategy. Using Steve’s suggestion, take a main topic (just start with one), and think about of the that can be expanded out. If you offer a local locksmith service, maybe think of a few articles you could write that mention your town or service area and a specific industry. I don’t know the locksmith industry, but maybe you want to focus on programming car keys. Maybe start with the most popular brands “How to get a replacement key-fob for your Toyota in Atlanta”, then “How to Save Money on a Honda Keyfob in Atlanta”.
- Once your content is created, tailor it using long-tail keywoard research using the google keyword planner (free) or by using paid tools Steve suggests.
- Don’t copy the same content again and again, this is frowned upon and Google will punish you. Create unique content for each sub-category. You could possibly do a case study “How I helped an Atlanta resident save $100 on a Nissan key!” with a nice story and picture.
Episode After-Thoughts
I can’t count how many times I hear “SEO” thrown around, the word, the topic, the “strategy”, the tricks, the secrets, etc. The bottom line is GOOD high-quality content wins EVERY SINGLE DAY! There is no shortcut, there are no secrets. If you create content that is relevant to you and your business your content will slowly climb the charts. If you are in an incredibly crowded field, the only strategy is going to be setting your content apart from the others – but this isn’t so much different from setting yourself apart from everyone else offline. The “strategy” is offer what your customers can’t find from your competition.
The reality is, there are BETTER ways to achieve this goal, and Steve does an incredible job of breaking it down. There are tips and secrets, but these are tools that you will need to take the time to learn. Is using a hammer “a big secret on how to drive a nail into a board”? No it’s common sense for anyone who builds things. SEO becomes common sense for those who take the time to learn the fundamentals of what and how Google does and ranks content.
For someone who has never used a hammer, maybe you could share “tips”, like hold the hammer towards the end of the handle for more impact. Hold it closer to the head for more control.
Episode 45 Transcript:
Justin
Why is SEO so hard to get a handle on?
Justin
Why is it always changing?
Justin
How can you wrap your head around it and where do you start?
Justin
Today’s expert guest walks us through a short history of SEO and answers all of these questions just for you. That and more on the marketing and service.com podcast.
Justin
Hey! I’m Justin Varuzzo here from marketingandservice.com podcast, the podcast designed to help you build your business by creating incredible customer relationships.
Justin
If you find value in this episode, please take a moment to follow or subscribe.
Justin
And if you want to do me.
Justin
A huge personal favor please.
Justin
Leave review, it’s always greatly appreciated and always keeps me motivated. I’d love to hear from you, so please hit me up on the marketing and service.com Facebook page.
Justin
What marketing challenges are you having with your business?
Justin
What would you love to learn more about?
Justin
Let me know and maybe I’ll make a podcast episode just for you.
Justin
I am so excited about today’s guest. Today’s guest is CEO Steve, otherwise known as Steve Wiideman. He’s a writer, a scientist, a professor, and a practitioner of search optimization. He lives, breathes and eats COSM and inbound marketing. He’s the author.
Justin
Of SEO strategy and skills, which is a college textbook, Steve has such an incredible perspective on today’s CEO challenges and strategies because he has been doing it from the very beginning.
Justin
He was an expert on day one of the Internet, so he can quickly walk us through how things.
Justin
Said Bob, and the things that used to work don’t work anymore and the reasons why.
Justin
And he’s going to give some incredible advice as to how you can begin to tackle this on your own.
Justin
Steve Wiideman.
Justin
Thank you and welcome to the show.
Justin
How are you today?
Steve Wiideman
Fantastic scenario.
Justin
Great man, thanks so much for coming on.
Justin
I really appreciate it and I want to jump right into this because you’ve got so much awesome information to share with the audience, but I want to start with you have a background you are.
Justin
Our CEO, Steve, for people who might remember that back in the day, tell us a little bit about how you got started with SEO in the early days.
Steve Wiideman
Sure, yeah.
Steve Wiideman
Back in the Wild Wild West of digital marketing it was something I had a passion for as a kind of a freelancer was working at IBM at the time in Global Services and my job was to move what was print output to the web and had that epiphany.
Steve Wiideman
Went that one day that hey, the whole world is going to need a website at some point.
Steve Wiideman
And I just really got into digital marketing and and web design and and it was.
Steve Wiideman
It was a passion for me and so at one point, you know I started to take all this wonderful information that pioneers of search were.
Steve Wiideman
We’re sharing like Aaron Wall and Bruce Clay and Danny Sullivan.
Steve Wiideman
And I started to organize.
Steve Wiideman
All those different ideas and and tests and how TOS into kind of a structured ebook and that ebook you know, took off quite a bit back in 2005.
Steve Wiideman
And kind of made a name for myself.
Steve Wiideman
Started a group here and a meet up group here in Orange County.
Steve Wiideman
Had about 7.
Steve Wiideman
Hundred members we’re at a point where it was standing room only ’cause I would just sit there and just lecture on and on and on for a good hour to 90 minutes on everything I was doing.
Steve Wiideman
You know, both freelancing and then eventually at Disney.
Steve Wiideman
You know, and then some other you know, amazing projects that I was working on. So yeah, I I was kind of, you know, at least in in the Orange County, LA area you know well known in the digital marketing space as CEO Steve and that.
Steve Wiideman
Anna stuck with me.
Justin
Very cool and for people who might not remember this hard to believe, there’s people that could be listening that don’t remember this, but early day SEO like I remember back in the day with like Yahoo and stuff, if you want it to be the number one search result, all you had to do was white on white just right.
Justin
Sex **** ixxx and every other word you can think.
Justin
Of yeah.
Justin
And no matter what you’d end up on top that was.
Justin
That was the easy cheat for that, right?
Steve Wiideman
It was, it was definitely a lot easier in their earlier days.
Steve Wiideman
We would do some crazy.
But there are.
Steve Wiideman
No rules too, so we shouldn’t be beat ourselves up.
Steve Wiideman
’cause it was the you know if Google is not going to provide us with some guidelines then then we’re going to test and experiment and break things until you give us some some guidelines to work within and thank.
Steve Wiideman
Thank goodness they have because now now I see oh so much easier, right?
Justin
Yeah, absolutely.
Steve Wiideman
All we have to do is is kind of follow alignment with what Jim Rohn used to say is that you don’t have to do extraordinary.
Steve Wiideman
Things to be successful, you just have to do ordinary things extraordinarily well.
Steve Wiideman
And now that we’ve got a set of guidelines, you know all we have to do is just.
Steve Wiideman
Follow those guidelines and do it better and provide a better experience for users than what the competition is doing, and continue pouring water and sunlight on it, not treat it.
Steve Wiideman
Like I said, I forget it right and you’ve got yourself a good ICO campaign.
Justin
Awesome and I want to jump into that a little bit because I I know that a big part of your SEO strategy nowadays is building out a really successful content strategy and I think that there’s there’s still so many people in so many businesses.
Justin
Especially I see it with small business owners.
Justin
I talk to them all the time and I always hear the same thing.
Justin
I I I really I.
Justin
I want to buy some SEO.
Justin
And I always ask him what does that mean?
Justin
Is this like a?
Justin
Is this like a beverage like you pour it in or you give me more money and I’ll give you more C.
Justin
Oh, what exactly does that mean?
Justin
And and of course, you know sometimes they have ideas of you little tricks and secrets and cheats.
Justin
But one thing, and I’m sure you’ve seen it as well as over the years, everyone kind of caught on to that.
Justin
And everyone I know who really tried to take a shortcut.
Justin
To game the system ultimately, not only do they lose whatever they gained, but nowadays Google will even punish that further and you will end up lower in the search results than if you had done it.
Justin
No, SEO whatsoever.
Steve Wiideman
And they don’t know any better.
Steve Wiideman
Just and sometimes they they think they’re doing the right thing.
Steve Wiideman
Oh wow, these guys on fiber can and you know I feel bad for the businesses because they.
Steve Wiideman
They just trying to run their business.
Steve Wiideman
They don’t have time to learn SEO, but SEO is going to be the primary driver of of all the new business they get because people don’t use phone books anymore.
Steve Wiideman
They really they really.
Speaker 2
Right?
Steve Wiideman
Just should take take a small course and and learn the fundamentals so they don’t have to.
Steve Wiideman
You know, fall into the tricks and schemes and shortcuts.
Steve Wiideman
Just learn a little bit of basic SEO and.
Steve Wiideman
Uhm, I think you’re you’ll set yourself up for some.
Steve Wiideman
US and not hit normalized.
Justin
Great, so when we talk about a little bit of C.
Justin
Oh I, I know that I just mentioned it and I know it’s it’s one of your focal points.
Justin
Is this idea of a content content strategy and I’ve done episodes on building content, creating content and using content and having a good content strategy, but I think it’s.
Justin
Worth reiterating from an SEO expert perspective as opposed to hey, if you’re looking to build some content, here’s some ideas of how you can do it.
Justin
And of course, content nowadays comes in so many shapes and sizes and forms.
Justin
You’ve got video, you’ve got chat, you’ve got forums, you’ve got social media.
Justin
Yeah, you you just endless things website blogs, all these things and some things feel old school.
Justin
Some things feel very new.
Justin
What is your take on where the content occurs and the success that people are seeing today with the content they create?
Steve Wiideman
That’s that’s a.
Steve Wiideman
Great point and I think I think we could start by looking at it in two different spaces.
Steve Wiideman
Space one is our holistic content strategy.
Steve Wiideman
It’s it’s the full road map of all the content we need to create that we plan to have appear high in search results.
Steve Wiideman
The second area is going to be around that individual page and what we’re what we’re adding to that page.
Steve Wiideman
You’d mention video and images, and there’s even, you know FAQ and ratings and reviews and all sorts of things that Google will show in their search results so that you get you get more of that universal search instead of it just being.
Steve Wiideman
You know the the blue links and black text of 2005. Now we’ve got video carousels and images.
Steve Wiideman
Isn’t Google got an image search in a video search in the new search?
Steve Wiideman
So many different ways that people are going to look for that.
Steve Wiideman
That information that’s you know as you as you continue to work on making your pages better, you incorporate some of that media and you optimize it so that it appears in those different queries.
Steve Wiideman
So I think the first part, if we look at that holistic strategy.
Steve Wiideman
I think the first thing every business can do.
Steve Wiideman
Is just just take a look at their core.
Steve Wiideman
Pages of what they’ve what they’ve already got on their website, and then look for ways that they can optimize those pages.
Steve Wiideman
Start by looking at the free Google Search console tool for that URL you know.
Steve Wiideman
Then maybe go out to some of the the you know paid tools such as semrush or H, rafts and and get some ideas for that URL that you can.
Steve Wiideman
Apply to make that page more helpful to provide additional context, maybe an infographic or walkthrough diagram you know really.
Steve Wiideman
Look at the competitive landscape for those search terms.
Steve Wiideman
Once you’ve discovered which terms you want to optimize for and see what the competition is doing, study their titles there.
Steve Wiideman
Settings there’s subheadings maybe look at some of those tools to study the links that are coming into their site as well, and understand you know what it is and and that other websites are saying about that competition that.
Steve Wiideman
Helps you at least.
Steve Wiideman
Have a core level optimize what you already have.
Steve Wiideman
The next level is the most challenging, I think for businesses because you don’t have a lot of time.
Steve Wiideman
In bandwidth to be writing content, but if you can create a road map that extends your content beyond just those core pages, let’s say you’re an attorney and the types of cases that you normally handle our car accident cases so you have a page for car accident lawyer.
Steve Wiideman
You handle truck accident cases.
Steve Wiideman
You have a page for truck accident law.
Steve Wiideman
Here, maybe you’re in Los Angeles, so it’s truck accident.
Steve Wiideman
Lawyer Los Angeles.
Steve Wiideman
And then you’ve got another page for workers compensation and another page for wrongful death.
Steve Wiideman
Attorney or lawyer Los Angeles.
Steve Wiideman
You’ve got these these.
Steve Wiideman
Sort of lower funnel.
Steve Wiideman
Sales pages that you want to rank high so that you can get the traffic from array of.
Steve Wiideman
Of really relevant.
Steve Wiideman
That’s where a lot of businesses stop and the businesses that succeed are the ones that say well.
Steve Wiideman
What else can I say about car accidents?
Steve Wiideman
That’s going to be helpful to my visitors, maybe even have enough data and research and and graphical content that people would want to link to it and share it, maybe.
Steve Wiideman
Underneath truck accident lawyer, I can create a page for each of the different types of truck accidents and.
Steve Wiideman
And maybe I could do a page for dump truck accident, attorney logging, truck accident, attorney tractor trailer, truck accident, attorney all underneath my truck accident, lawyer silo, and then I could look at the reasons that those accidents happen.
Steve Wiideman
Negligence and maintenance issues.
Steve Wiideman
Right, people who fall asleep on the road, all of.
Steve Wiideman
All of the different reasons that somebody.
Steve Wiideman
Might be in a truck accident that they could relate to that they’d fall into as they’re just kind of doing those informational sort.
Steve Wiideman
Of upper funnel queries.
Steve Wiideman
You know, not necessarily.
Steve Wiideman
I’m ready to hire an attorney, but I was in an accident.
Steve Wiideman
This truck driver did this thing.
Steve Wiideman
What should I do right?
Steve Wiideman
And they get to the site and it’s really helpful information.
Steve Wiideman
And then they they come back after they see an ad that says, you know, hey, call such and such lawyer.
Steve Wiideman
If you’ve been in a truck accident and the user is like, yeah, that’s right.
Steve Wiideman
That was a site that helped me give me the information I need.
Steve Wiideman
You can retarget them, bring it back in with paid or if they’d perform a search for.
Steve Wiideman
A more specific.
Steve Wiideman
Attorney lawyer law firm.
Steve Wiideman
Related keyword in a week.
Steve Wiideman
Or two, you know they’re going to see your listing and remember in the organic results.
Steve Wiideman
Yeah, this was the site that helped me and hopefully you’ll be able to drive them back in to become a customer.
Steve Wiideman
So I think looking at content strategy is.
Steve Wiideman
First optimize what we already have and see if we can amplify it, because those pages already show up in search results.
Steve Wiideman
Maybe not very high, but they’re already there.
Steve Wiideman
They’ve already got some.
Steve Wiideman
History by giving them.
Steve Wiideman
A little water and sunlight.
Steve Wiideman
You know we might be able to move into page one and see some more traffic and then let’s use those other tools that I mentioned that search console semrush?
Steve Wiideman
And Similarweb both have this keyword gap tool.
Steve Wiideman
You can actually put in your website and then maybe 5 competitors.
Steve Wiideman
And it’s going to.
Steve Wiideman
It’s going to spit back a list of.
Steve Wiideman
Search terms that.
Steve Wiideman
They’re all appearing for that you’re not.
Steve Wiideman
And then you take those and you say, OK, great, do.
Steve Wiideman
Do I even have a page to address that word?
Steve Wiideman
Or I don’t so well, let me think is this.
Steve Wiideman
Is this a keyword that I know my customers or potential customers will be looking for?
Steve Wiideman
And if it is, then you decide where you want to put it in the structure of your website.
Steve Wiideman
When you’re done with this exercise, which by the way it could take months and.
Steve Wiideman
Months and months to do, you know, I think.
Steve Wiideman
Jacuzzi it took us like about three months to come.
Steve Wiideman
Complete all the different ways that somebody might be searching and organize it into you know an actual structure like.
Steve Wiideman
Here’s here’s a whole section I could create around this, and here are the pages that I could create based on my keyword research when that map is done, you’ve got your primary.
Steve Wiideman
You know most important pages that would likely be in your top navigation, and now you’ve got.
Steve Wiideman
Hundreds of sub pages underneath those.
Steve Wiideman
Categories to support those parent pages and give you much more helpful, useful, informative content to show one your customer that you’re an authority and expert on the industry and two to expand the growth of search terms that you could rank for that road map.
Steve Wiideman
Put into a Google sheet or excel sheet or, heck, even uh, a text document if it’s easier.
Steve Wiideman
For you is basically your content road map for the pages that you want to create and optimize.
Steve Wiideman
You know over the next couple years.
Steve Wiideman
So that’s that’s, I think that like I said, the challenging part of a content strategy there is that whole area of what do we do on the page?
Steve Wiideman
Do we put keywords and titles, headings, subheadings, URL and then you know what?
Speaker 2
Right?
Steve Wiideman
What variations and semantics should we be using and where should we using the keyword over and over and over again?
Steve Wiideman
We go on to that.
Justin
Sure, and let let let me ask you this in in today’s world how import?
Steve Wiideman
That goes into it.
Justin
Do you believe those details to be for a small business when approaching their content strategy?
Justin
And I guess where I’m going with this is in in an environment where like we started this a lot of small business owners just don’t know they don’t even know where to start.
Justin
So now you’ve just given this incredible explanation of how you can.
Justin
Just take these few little data points.
Justin
And justice start expounding upon him, right expound, expound more and more and more, and then if I could add in, you could take those same little pieces of content and make short form videos on YouTube.
Justin
You could put him on Tik T.O.K.
Justin
You could put him on Facebook.
Justin
You could do a little podcast about it.
Justin
I mean, you could go on and on, where now you can repurpose this little piece of content you’ve written over and over and over again.
Justin
To really spread out to those platforms.
Justin
Absolutely, because you know this a lot better than I do for my own sake.
Justin
I’m curious when it gets into things like which I knew used to be very important back in the day.
Justin
How you format the page, how it’s laid out is that as in.
Justin
Important as it used to be or is just focusing on good quality content.
Justin
The key to success as you navigate out that web of sub content that would fall within it.
Steve Wiideman
Right, let’s use all the things right.
Steve Wiideman
Every every part plays its role and the more you, the more you work on all of the different pieces, the stronger it you know your strategy becomes.
Steve Wiideman
So I’ve I’ve seen pages that have all of the right SEO elements and then you look at the page and like it just doesn’t flow well and it feels kind of spammy and when they were just they were just thrown together with all the elements optimized with keywords.
Right?
Steve Wiideman
They tried to rank, but it’s just, it’s just not giving you a good experience.
Steve Wiideman
If you’re a visitor and and Google.
Steve Wiideman
Been trying to focus a lot on that in the last year.
Steve Wiideman
You know all the different algorithm updates and and and core web vitals as they call them to to improve mobile page experience.
Steve Wiideman
So my my thinking on it is there’s there’s no go without user experience and and a good user experience is 1 where somebody can get on their mobile.
Steve Wiideman
Nice and as soon as they go to your website they know exactly what you do, where you are.
Steve Wiideman
If you’re local, you know and why they should hire you.
Steve Wiideman
Within two seconds they see that without having to scroll, and they know immediately.
Steve Wiideman
OK, cool I I know who you are.
Steve Wiideman
Yes, you’re in my area qualified to be someone I would work with.
Steve Wiideman
Oh, and whoa.
Steve Wiideman
Check it out, you got all these awards or look at.
Steve Wiideman
Your reviews this is great.
Steve Wiideman
They see all of that front and center within a few seconds.
Steve Wiideman
Now the next move is OK.
Steve Wiideman
I’m going to read on before I do.
Steve Wiideman
How do I contact these folks?
Steve Wiideman
And if if you’ve.
Steve Wiideman
Got some at the bottom of your phones, maybe two call to action buttons that are Evergreen or sticky buttons.
Steve Wiideman
One might be call 1.
Steve Wiideman
Might be chat right and just those two buttons and so and within thumbs reach.
Steve Wiideman
Now you can get the user through an experience.
Steve Wiideman
Where they get.
Steve Wiideman
To your website and they can just tap tap.
Steve Wiideman
Autofill forms right ’cause you’re using the autofill feature on your forms and submit.
Steve Wiideman
Then you’ve succeeded.
Steve Wiideman
A user was able to get to your website, be convinced that you’re the best, most helpful result for them, and with one finger, then maybe they’re driving.
Steve Wiideman
They shouldn’t be, but maybe they’re driving.
Steve Wiideman
They can get through an action like filling out a form or making a purchase.
Steve Wiideman
Or signing up for whatever event you’re trying to promote with just the thumb and.
Steve Wiideman
And not have to pinch and squeeze and look at small fonts.
Steve Wiideman
See everything really large, easy, quick and done.
Steve Wiideman
If you can do that without overwhelming the user and making them think about what to do and creating more friction for them, then it’s it’s going to help with the user behavior signal as users do finds your result.
Steve Wiideman
In the search results, if they click on your listing more because you’ve got some rich content in the search results and more prominence like you mentioned with video and images, they get to your site.
Steve Wiideman
If they don’t have a good experience, they’re likely going to go back to the search results and choose a competitor.
Steve Wiideman
And if that user behavior signal happens enough, you know search engines start to infer that maybe this wasn’t a very helpful result.
Speaker 2
Right?
Steve Wiideman
It’s got all the right links and all the right keywords in it, but I feel like a lot of users come back to my results and choose someone else, so so I think it’s.
Steve Wiideman
It’s very important to to do some user testing to to take the first page that ranks in the search results against your page.
Steve Wiideman
Page and then go to some crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or just go into usertesting.com and and running some tests to see you know what those experiences are like and watch the user as they go through the experience. Take an action and see how you can improve your experience to make it better than the competition.
Justin
Yeah, that’s all.
Justin
That’s really great stuff, and I think that one of the things that to really highlight what you’ve just said is obviously you can have bad content that follows all the great SEO tactics and advice and best practices.
Justin
You can have incredible content that fails.
Justin
To align with all the best practices.
Justin
So now you’ve put in this work, but you’re not really getting the gain you need to because of all the reasons you listed.
Justin
Maybe your user experience is terrible.
Justin
Maybe your website is not mobile friendly.
Justin
You don’t have a good form.
Justin
You don’t have a great call to action all these other things that may actually land the traffic on your page, but not.
Justin
Actually lead to any type of conversion, and I think it’s just super.
Justin
Important to remember that there are so many elements to this, which is why so many companies will reach out and business owners reach out to people like you for help because one of the things that I’ve always been a big proponent of.
Justin
Really having business owners or marketers who or whoever is involved in that process in the company that is seeking help.
Justin
To really have a solid role in the content creation, I I always, I’ve always personally found that it’s it’s really hard like I’m in the music space, right?
Justin
And I don’t know if you know anything about music, but I’m sure that if I said hey listen, I want to make a website where I sell tubas.
Justin
Just make me a bunch of content.
Justin
About 2 bits.
Justin
We both know there’s a ton of companies that will claim to be able to do this in the end, what they get are those spammy pages you were talking about that just somehow says the word 2 by 8,000,000 times over and over again.
Steve Wiideman
Like the 90s.
Justin
With yeah, with pictures of wacky tubas.
Justin
And then they say, alright, job is done.
Justin
Collect the check and then the business owners disappointed because they really didn’t get any result.
Justin
From that, and I think that you know, like a lot of things in marketing, it’s not always so easy to hire someone unless they really understand what you’re trying to do and what type of content you’re trying to create and really have knowledge of the product itself that you or service that that you’re selling.
Justin
So let’s jump into this first.
Justin
Second, let’s assume.
Justin
You have a business owner.
Justin
They have a, you know, a basic, functional, good, mobile friendly website.
Justin
Let’s kind of like you said, the five or six page law firm website.
Justin
Let’s say it’s one of these like canned WordPress websites that they, you know, paid $500 for and. And let’s say they actually have.
Steve Wiideman
Is there?
Justin
Decent content on those four or five pages that they have.
Justin
How do you help take them to the next level?
Justin
How long does something like that usually take in terms of optimization and how long can a business expect before they start to see the fruits?
Justin
Of that labor.
Steve Wiideman
Right, it’s all.
Steve Wiideman
It’s all going to depend on how competitive you know their industry happens to be.
Steve Wiideman
If if there’s a lot of restaurants in a certain area, it might take a little bit longer and be more competitive.
Steve Wiideman
If you’re in kind of a a unique niche and you do something.
Steve Wiideman
Thing like maybe you you paint murals or something and there aren’t very many of those folks that paint murals in your city.
Steve Wiideman
Much easier to rank for probably within a couple of weeks.
Steve Wiideman
You could see yourself appearing, but if there’s a lot of competition and that competition has been around and and Google has been displaying their URL and and users have been clicking on it and Google.
Steve Wiideman
So I say I, I trust this listing.
Steve Wiideman
You know it, it could be a little bit harder to take that one down, so the process normally, if you’re if you’re starting with an SEO strategy, whether you know you’re following our road map that we have in our Academy of Search or doing your own generally takes about 30 to 45 days. Starts with that. A technical audit to kind of gauge, you know where are the things I need to focus on to make sure my site.
Steve Wiideman
Can be crawled and indexed and and page speed issues.
Steve Wiideman
Things like that.
Steve Wiideman
Then you’ll get into.
Steve Wiideman
You already mentioned that the content strategy looking at keywords and kind of figuring out you know what’s our road map look like at a high level and then looking at the link strategy you know that that off page side of things.
Steve Wiideman
So we’ll you know we’ll we’ll kind of take a look at the links that are already coming.
Steve Wiideman
Did we do some things we might?
Steve Wiideman
I’ve regretted that we want to go back and clean up.
Steve Wiideman
Are there some sites that link to four more of our competitors but not to us that we could be looking at to put ourselves closer to the center of of the semantic Web, you know, and get some links from sites that could send good referring traffic that our competitors are getting.
Steve Wiideman
You know, and then you might also have a strategy that’s specific for local or ecommerce.
Steve Wiideman
So looking at categories and product detail pages or city pages that list all of your locations and then the location pages themselves.
Steve Wiideman
So you build.
Steve Wiideman
Out all of those different Rd maps based on doing research around each of those different areas and maybe a competitive landscape too.
Steve Wiideman
So you have something that you can you can use as a baseline.
Steve Wiideman
When you run a delta in a year from now and see what you and the competition have been doing in the last year.
Steve Wiideman
Once that’s put together, you put all of that.
Steve Wiideman
Into a project management system.
Steve Wiideman
You sign the tech tax task for the developer.
Steve Wiideman
The content road map goes to your writing team or interns that are helping you.
Steve Wiideman
The link building goes to somebody who’s doing some outreach for you.
Steve Wiideman
Maybe someone in the sales department and we can do some outreach and build relationships that result in getting some links in.
Steve Wiideman
And you know, and then you set your tracking up with whatever tool you’re comfortable with, and one of our favorites is semrush.
Steve Wiideman
But there’s also H refs and conductor Searchlight and several other tools that you could use to put those keywords in there and the attribute them to the URLs that you want to rank and then watch and every week you make adjustments based on how you see your.
Steve Wiideman
Your pages perform not seeing a lot of growth, not seeing your pages move up after a couple months.
Steve Wiideman
Maybe it’s time to revisit it.
Steve Wiideman
Maybe hit up the peer community of CEOs and say hey go community, what would you do to make these pages or this specific page to rank better?
Steve Wiideman
Someone going to come back and say, well you need more internal links to this page.
Steve Wiideman
Well you’ve got like 5 different versions of this page.
Steve Wiideman
You should consolidate them and keep it simple.
Steve Wiideman
Someone might say.
Steve Wiideman
It looks like you’ve got some shady links coming in that you might want to clean up.
Steve Wiideman
Or you know, maybe it’s something as scary as you’ve put A tag on there that’s told the search engines not to rank the page.
Speaker 2
Right?
Steve Wiideman
So there’s there’s a lot of those opportunities once you know once you’ve got a tracking in place that you can keep track of, but that’s.
Steve Wiideman
That’s showing the process.
Steve Wiideman
How long does it take to rank?
Steve Wiideman
Normally, if you’re.
Steve Wiideman
Starting with a new website, I can tell you the content itself.
Steve Wiideman
If it’s really well done and rich with media and video, you could see maybe second page placement for your desired keywords within about three to four months as you start to get some really high quality links that your competitions earned.
Steve Wiideman
Relevant industry websites now you’ll start to see yourself on the first page between 6 to 12 months and then at that 12 month point.
Steve Wiideman
If Google’s got enough history and users are clicking on your listing more because it’s rich and it stands out and your page is super helpful and fast to to convert.
Steve Wiideman
Then at that year point, you’ll see this really exciting a hockey stick curve where it goes up, and then you’re usually in the top three results.
Steve Wiideman
So three to four months to get to page 2, you know another six months, six or seven months really.
Steve Wiideman
To get to Page 1 and then you know it’s it’s about that clickthrough rate on your.
Steve Wiideman
Search result
Steve Wiideman
User staying on your page, that’s going to determine the long term rankings to get in that top three, but I would expect a year it’s about a year and you’ll get pushed off and impatient in four to six months.
Steve Wiideman
I guarantee it, but when you get past that one year, you’ll go back to the SEO and you’ll be like I’m so sorry.
Steve Wiideman
I was so mean to you, you didn’t say it was going to take a year.
Speaker 2
Right?
Steve Wiideman
It took a year.
Steve Wiideman
I’m there now.
Steve Wiideman
Thank you.
Steve Wiideman
And it happens every.
Justin
Time, so I guess my last my last question would this would be, let’s say you you do everything right, you do it successful.
Justin
You wait your year, you ramp up your now you’re at the top ranking search result.
Justin
You feel good about this.
Justin
Everyone else is going to be trying to dethrone.
Justin
You now how do you stay on top?
Justin
What’s your advice for that person?
Speaker 2
Sure, right?
Justin
If you’ve already got a good CEO, what do you do to make sure that you keep it and that you stay on top?
Steve Wiideman
Better and better and better set set specific API’s with each team tell the tech team every month I want to.
Steve Wiideman
I want to see how you’re improving improving our conversion rate study, you know, conversion, Excel and other conversion.
Steve Wiideman
You know websites, buy books, whatever it is and put some tests in queue so that every month we’re converting more of our visitors.
Steve Wiideman
Because conversion as we already identified.
Steve Wiideman
Will lead to higher rankings because they’re not going back and choosing a competitor for the off page team.
Steve Wiideman
I would challenge them every month.
Steve Wiideman
Are you getting people to curate our short answer at the top of the page?
Steve Wiideman
You know so that we get a little bit of that feature answer position at the top of search or coveted position zero as they call it.
Steve Wiideman
How are you doing with getting us new, better, higher?
Steve Wiideman
Quality links from.
Steve Wiideman
The the sites that we mapped out.
Steve Wiideman
That would be a good fit for that page you know and and the content team.
Steve Wiideman
Are you going back?
Steve Wiideman
And once a month, once a quarter looking at the paid search term reports of what terms are converting for us and pay.
Steve Wiideman
Are you looking at our search console to see what new search terms you can incorporate into our content or to create new sub pages based on the new data that you see?
Steve Wiideman
What are you doing every month you know around all three of those areas to improve.
Steve Wiideman
What’s our CTR and the search results in the last 30 days compared to last 30 days prior?
Steve Wiideman
So really challenging.
Steve Wiideman
The the marketing teams.
Steve Wiideman
To be accountable to those core pages, you know, usually there’s five to 10 of them that are the most important for you that you know will drive the most business to your business.
Justin
Right?
Steve Wiideman
The other thing I would.
Steve Wiideman
Do too is use a tool like visualping and and basically setting alerts so that every time your competitor changes their page that that you’ll see a little notification that says.
Steve Wiideman
Here’s what they changed.
Steve Wiideman
Monitor what the competition is doing with those tools so that you can run those into your tests as well.
Steve Wiideman
If something is really working for them, maybe they made a bigger button.
Steve Wiideman
Maybe they changed their call to action.
Steve Wiideman
Maybe they used a new keyword that you hadn’t thought about.
Steve Wiideman
You know, being able to see that Visualping reports. For that you know the top five or six competitors gives you a bird’s eye view of, you know what they’re doing and doesn’t make you blind so you don’t get flanked all of a sudden and be surprised by it.
Justin
Yeah, and I think it’s so important to mention also that when when you have.
Justin
When when you have the World Wide Web and you if you want to take it analog for a second and you think about you’d mentioned a phone book.
Justin
Earlier and you know the idea that you could, just, you know, be AAA whatever and be at the top of the list in the Yellow Pages, right?
Justin
Then you were at quadruple A and then quintupling day and and pretty soon you just had a company that was 200 days because they wanted to be the first one in the phone book, right? But now take that phone book that was for your hyper local area. Yeah, and now you’re talking.
Steve Wiideman
I read that 88.
Justin
The entire.
Justin
World and and this is what we’re kind of talking about with the Internet.
Justin
So of course it’s worth mentioning.
Justin
Google has done a lot with local search and I know you briefly touched on local search as well and and the impact that locality has now where back in the day if you typed restaurant you might find a great restaurant that ranked well in California.
Justin
One that ranked well in New York, one that was great in Austin, TX. But the reality is I live in Poughkeepsie, NY and I really just wanted to see restaurants in Poughkeepsie.
Justin
And obviously, as we know that that type of stuff has gotten a lot better, so we’re almost like going back to those Yellow Pages days, but we’re not going to.
Justin
We’re not going to get away.
Justin
With the AA AAA strategy anymore.
Steve Wiideman
That’s when I I got a picture from a friend of mine Al Al Safadi and it was funny.
Steve Wiideman
He sent me this thing he’s like.
Steve Wiideman
Yeah, I just went literally went to this eye doctor and the eye doctor.
Steve Wiideman
The sign says Phyllis, it’s I doctor near you or near yeah, eye doctor.
Steve Wiideman
I’m near you and like eating yeah no no near me eye doctor near me I’ll see if I can dig it up you can put it on the you know the comments but us it was hilarious.
Justin
That’s naming the business.
Justin
Hear me.
Justin
It is awesome.
Steve Wiideman
But imagine me in a world where I’m driving down the street and instead of seeing McDonald’s, it says fast food hamburger llamarada and I’m like what happened to McDonald’s.
Steve Wiideman
Oh well, you know we don’t rank unless we use our keyword, so thankfully.
Speaker 2
Right?
Steve Wiideman
Google is doing a good job with making sure that that doesn’t happen, but it’s a little bit silly I think for business staff to get that obsessed with SEO that they changed their name to the.
Steve Wiideman
Keyword, they want to rank.
Speaker 2
Right?
Justin
Right and I I feel like that’s one of those things that will come back to haunt them.
Justin
In six months, Google will be like.
Justin
Yeah, no, we’re not putting that on there at all.
Justin
Yeah, now you’re going way to the bottom of the list and you’re staying there forever.
Steve Wiideman
I hope, Sir.
Justin
So let me ask this as we wrap this up, I I ask all the guests that come on the show.
Justin
What is the?
Justin
What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in business that we can use as a learning experience and make sure we don’t make the same one?
Steve Wiideman
Sure, I.
Steve Wiideman
I think the biggest, the biggest mistake I made was.
Steve Wiideman
Was not charging enough.
Steve Wiideman
You know, I I’d come from a corporate background and and I treated the work I did.
Steve Wiideman
I got like the hourly or salary work I would have done at Disney or somewhere else and I I soon found out after bringing in some folks on me with sales that you know selling these $500 strategies that.
Steve Wiideman
Companies would easily pay 35 to 5000 for and you know, and I was going way above and beyond.
Steve Wiideman
And so it was.
Steve Wiideman
It was tough ’cause all the hours that were required to put those reports together.
Steve Wiideman
So I think I would have charged a lot more and done more research on what I should be charging instead of having that mindset of I’m a blue collar worker, I should be, you know, looking at my hours are to do this and charge that way I should have charged based on what I saw the perceived value of those.
Steve Wiideman
Uhm, of those audits, doing that was probably the biggest mistake I made, was just undercharging.
Justin
Yeah, and and if it makes you feel any better, you are not the first person on this podcast to share that they undervalued themselves outside that I’ve heard it quite a few times and I’m I’m sure I’ll I’ll hear it quite a few times more.
Justin
But yeah, it’s so important to deliver value and and really understand what that value is and and make sure you you leverage it.
Justin
And and my my last question is, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?
Steve Wiideman
Best piece of advice I think for me has been to to not try to figure everything out yourself.
Steve Wiideman
Find some folks that are extremely smart and experienced and and really spend some time with them donates.
Steve Wiideman
You know your time and doing a little free apprentice work for them.
Steve Wiideman
Volunteer to do some free things.
Steve Wiideman
For them, your skill is go do some free SEO for them, get them to become your friends because those folks are going to help you and guide you along the way.
Steve Wiideman
You know, we’ve we’ve got folks like Warren Whitlock.
Steve Wiideman
You know, social media expert and you know, Judy Fox, you know.
Steve Wiideman
And so.
Steve Wiideman
Will Pemble and Michael Krigsman, all of these folks we consider to be business advisors because they’re there for us.
Steve Wiideman
You know to to help us when we have big decisions to make and you know they look at things from an outside view and are just these brilliant people.
Steve Wiideman
So find some brilliant people you know to to surround you with, so that before you make some big decisions.
Steve Wiideman
You know you don’t have somebody to give you a little bit of kind of Big Brother advice.
Justin
Yeah, you know, I I love that so much. And for people who listening in 2022 which it is now, I have repeatedly said the last few weeks on every episode.
Justin
One thing that has really taken me back the the last few weeks is every day I look at marketing news.
Justin
What’s going on in the industry?
Justin
Trade news?
Justin
But I can’t find a single headline that is not a collaboration of two or more brands.
Justin
I mean literally.
Justin
I mean every day I get an Adweek update.
Justin
It never says, you know Pepsi is doing this.
Justin
Or Coca Cola is doing this, it’s always.
Justin
Coca Cola with Tik T.O.K is partnered with Doritos.
Justin
You know Facebook with Tesla is it’s always collaborations.
Steve Wiideman
Applebee’s and their ghost kitchen, cosmic wings and Cheetos.
Justin
There you go.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean.
Justin
Yeah yeah, the the collaborations.
Justin
I mean, they’ve always existed to some capacity.
Justin
But now it’s just insane.
Justin
And I’ve I’ve talked a lot about basically what you just said.
Justin
Whether you call it bartering or trading times and services or collaborating, right?
Justin
You know, finding people.
Justin
That you can work with and help them and give them value.
Justin
And in exchange they have something they can give you.
Justin
Uh, value as well and I I do. I love that advice in 2022 and and Steve, let me ask you for for the people listening they say, Yep, I. I realize this is all way over my head and I need help with this. How do they get?
Justin
In touch with you.
Steve Wiideman
Sure, I would start with the Academy of Search. You know it’s Academy of search.com and your listeners are welcome to take our 600 hour course for free.
Steve Wiideman
Just give me some feedback and let me know what you think and how we can improve it.
Steve Wiideman
Use code CEO Steve OS TV.
Steve Wiideman
Uhm, it’s I don’t think it’s case sensitive and just.
Steve Wiideman
Take take a look.
Steve Wiideman
And go through those different modules on all the things we kind of talked about a little bit today and I’d love to hear feedback in terms of of social media.
Steve Wiideman
I’m CEO, Steve.
Steve Wiideman
Everywhere you could hit the team up our tag is it handles Wiedemann, wiid, man and yeah, whatever we can do to.
Steve Wiideman
They give you some free advice and support you.
Steve Wiideman
We’re we’re moving more to an education model, so when we do provide advice and tips, it’s normally for free, so reach out and if there’s anything that we can do to help you get a head start, make some recommendations into.
Steve Wiideman
Terms of you know, tools to use or people to to work with. Or if you want to work with one of my interns, you know that 300 students I’ve taught over the last couple years.
Steve Wiideman
I’ve got a handful that would love to work for you for free or very low cost to get the experience, so hit me up and I’ll get you connected.
Justin
Very cool and I will absolutely put links to all of that in the show notes and you can also visit the marketing and service.com website for this episode and I will have all those links along with some of the tools that you mentioned.
Steve Wiideman
Sounds great.
Justin
I’ll put some links to that as well, so if people want to try to take a whack at some of this stuff on their own, they’ll have those resources.
Justin
As well, Steve.
Justin
Thanks so much for taking the time out today to be with us and Share your story and share some of these great strategies.
Steve Wiideman
And here.
Justin
I really think it’s helpful for people and I I really love to see people doing it right and correctly because I see so many businesses get duped into these ridiculous contracts.
Same here.
Justin
With ridiculous services that provide nothing and just soak $1000 a month or $1500 a month out of their wallet and they get no results and no value.
Justin
So I love seeing you do it right and I love sharing this with with them and everyone listening.
Steve Wiideman
Thanks for having me.
Justin
Yeah, thank you man.
Justin
Have a great one.
Justin
There you have it CEO Steve. Wow, what an incredible conversation. And sometimes you just need to hear someone else’s perspective on how to tackle something.
Justin
His strategy for really working one page and one topic at a time really takes that thing that seems like this.
Justin
UN accomplishable incredible.
Justin
Monumental task and really breaks it down into very small pieces with very specific and intentional focus, and I think if you follow his guidelines you will have incredible success.
Justin
And of course, if you don’t have time to do that, get in touch with Steve.
Justin
He is the man when it comes to SEO and he’s the one you are going to want to contact.
Justin
So of course you can go to marketingandservice.com, go to the show notes for this episode and you will find links on how to contact him and links to the things and some of the tools.
Justin
That he discussed as well, because I know these things go by kind of fast so it’s easy to forget some of the.
Justin
Games so please check him out.
Justin
Get in touch with him, hit him up on LinkedIn, give him a call.
Justin
Check out his company website.
Justin
He is the guy when it comes to SEO so Steve thanks so much for being on this show.
Justin
It was so cool to have you on it and I’m so glad we got to have that conversation.
Justin
If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment to like or subscribe again.
Justin
If you leave a review, it means so much.
Justin
Which to me always feel free to shoot me an email.
The website of course is marketing and service.com and you can hit us up on the marketing and service.com Facebook page. We’re off to a great year here at the podcast. I feel like things are.
Justin
Rocking and rolling.
Justin
I’ve never been more excited.
Justin
I hope you are too and I will catch you on the next one.