Search Engine Optimization: How to Stay ‘On Top’ in the Age of AI [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 60]

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Mary Brown
0:00:00
All right, Alice, I have to be honest with you. When you told me that you wanted to talk about SEO, I was really nervous about it. And there is a good reason why.

Alex Winter
0:00:07
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Alex Winter
0:00:38
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Alex Winter
0:01:01
We'll see you there at Impact Live 2024 up in Hartford, October 14th through the 16th. Welcome back to Endless Customers, the show that teaches you how to earn trust and win more business in the age of AI. I'm Alex Winter, your host, and today we are joined by Mary Brown, who's a lead web strategist here at Impact.

Alex Winter
0:01:19
Mary, what's up?

Mary Brown
0:01:20
Hey, Alex.

Alex Winter
0:01:21
How's it going?

Mary Brown
0:01:21
It's good, glad to be here as always.

Alex Winter
0:01:23
Glad to have you here. This is becoming more of a regular thing, and I like it. I know, I'm digging it. I'm digging it, too. We have great conversations, we got a great topic today,

Alex Winter
0:01:30
so let's just, now we're seeing what I'm gonna do, let's get right into it. Okay, so we're talking about how to get found online. Yes. Which seems kind of basic, it's like, duh, everyone wants to get found online, but it's

Alex Winter
0:01:41
a lot easier said than done and people have different ideas of what that means and what that translates into in every business and industry, so there's layers to this. So where's a good place to start in kicking off this conversation about getting found and helping your chances of being found by more of your best customers?

Mary Brown
0:01:59
Yes, so can I be real with you for a minute? Please we have a little moment of vulnerability I expect nothing less. Let's go. Okay, when you told me you want to talk about SEO I was I was a little nervous a little nervous because the honest truth that honest truth right now Is that the tectonic plates beneath our feet in the world of search are shifting and they are shifting? Dramatically. Yes, they are this podcast. We talked about AI all the time. AI is disrupting SEO and disrupting search and organic.

Mary Brown
0:02:33
And I would be completely lying to you if I said I could read the future and that I could tell you exactly what's going to happen. And I know absolutely everything that's happening with SEO right now. I know the way things have been. I know that the landscape is shifting and I know that there are things that we need to do differently and some things we need to do the same

Mary Brown
0:02:51
and we will talk about that. But this is a brave new world right now.

Alex Winter
0:02:54
It is a brave new world and I totally love and respect that you just put it out there and said that. I think for everyone watching and listening, the humbleness is great but also it's important for people to know that, that if you're talking to somebody who says they're an SEO expert

Alex Winter
0:03:07
and that AI isn't gonna affect it and that they know all this stuff, that might be a red flag. You may wanna just reassess that situation because you're right, the landscape is shifting dramatically.

Mary Brown
0:03:17
Yes, and if people are saying that nothing has changed, that is a huge red flag because things are changing. It's not the same that it used to be.

Alex Winter
0:03:26
Those people are the same people that are still using AOL. Sorry, if you're using AOL, I'm sorry, I don't mean to put you down, but get Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo, something, I don't know, anything. All right, we're being silly, but let's talk about SEO for real, though, and what people should be thinking of with all the shift that's happening just in general.

Mary Brown
0:03:46
Yeah, I think the thing I want to start with is that SEO is still important. And it's still SEO basics are important for a number of reasons. So what are some of those reasons? One is that we know that competition online is

Mary Brown
0:04:00
increasing all the time. Websites are increasing. I'm making more and more websites all the time. I know personally that we're just sending them out there all the time. And you need to be able to compete, and you need to be

Mary Brown
0:04:14
able to compete online. And so effective SEO is still a way to stand out. You have to be able to stand out online amidst the noise, and you've got to be able to be there and have that presence there. So that has not gone away and that has not changed. I will say that user search behavior, that is a thing that is definitely changing, right?

Alex Winter
0:04:32
Yes, the behavior and how people are searching for things is changing rapidly. Yes, exactly.

Mary Brown
0:04:37
And so they're finding you in different ways, right? So social media is a huge way that people are going to find you now. You've got to be on social, you've got to be on meta, you've got to be on TikTok, you've got to be, and I'm not saying that every business needs to be on tick-tock Sure, find the platforms that are right for you. That makes sense where your audience is That's where you need to be just understand that a lot of audiences are shifting to these other platforms We know that YouTube is the biggest search engine right out there. You've got to be on YouTube. I'm so

Mary Brown
0:05:08
Embrace search on social media platforms. If you are not already there, you have to do that.

Alex Winter
0:05:14
Yeah. And I think too, just to jump in, that's a really interesting point only because that's not a new idea. That's something we've been talking about with the Ask U Answer for almost a decade now. You always want to meet people where they are. So you need to know your personas, you need to know your audience, your key, your key, who your key customers are going to be so that you can find that.

Alex Winter
0:05:32
Like if your key customers are on Facebook and you're doing TikTok, you're not going to meet them where they are. You're going to have gaps in those pieces. So there are still fundamental things that will never change when we talk about building trust. But the delivery and the tools may change a little bit. And that's why we've got to stay on the cutting edge of it.

Alex Winter
0:05:49
Yeah.

Mary Brown
0:05:49
And if people are out there saying, well, I'm on YouTube.

Alex Winter
0:05:51
I have videos.

Mary Brown
0:05:51
But are you doing shorts? Because people are consuming things in different ways. So even within a platform that people have been using for years and years, like YouTube, the content on that platform can change. You've got to have shorts now.

Mary Brown
0:06:02
So that has evolved.

Alex Winter
0:06:04
I only watch Shorts now. I feel like that's, I've been on YouTube forever and I loved YouTube from the get-go, from the jump, but there's so many ads now because as these platforms gain traction and get bigger, that's how they make their revenue and I understand it,

Alex Winter
0:06:17
but I also don't love it. And that old ad blocker on my Chrome extension doesn't work anymore, they figured it out. So Shorts is the only thing that doesn't have ads. And that's why I love watching it. But I think there's also something about

Alex Winter
0:06:28
how quick and direct they are. That's like you just get what you want immediately. There's not like a 30 minute video you have to scrub through and look at the chapters. So like again, but this is a shift that's happened in the last year or two.

Alex Winter
0:06:38
It's not like shorts was something big five years ago that everybody was doing.

Mary Brown
0:06:42
Right? And I, raise your hand if you've ever bought something off Instagram. I have, yep, I have. Guilty. Guilty.

Mary Brown
0:06:49
And I watch stories. That's the thing that I do. I'm not scrolling my feed necessarily as much. So do the research, find out where your users are, and be in those places, absolutely. Where SEO, again, is still relevant in search is that

Mary Brown
0:07:04
Google is still a major search engine. It's not dead yet. It's just changing. And the algorithms are changing. So just recently, it's so interesting. We always, you know, when we have clients, we stay on top of their Google Search Console accounts, right?

Mary Brown
0:07:23
We want to see how impressions and clicks and things are changing like that in Search. So it's something we look at weekly for all of our clients. And we've seen that shift with the algorithm updates lately because they're prioritizing helpful content, right? And it's such a no-brainer because that's the ask you answer. And we're saying, of course, your content has to be helpful. It should have been all this time. But they're done with the BS.

Mary Brown
0:07:45
Big time. They are done.

Alex Winter
0:07:47
Like the next generation does doesn't want. I think that's why a lot of the next generation is on TikTok, because there's none of that on TikTok. Yeah. None of it. They're like already aware of that. And I think it just, again, plays into they ask you answer. Maybe it was a little before its time, but like everyone's catching on to like the advertising practices and all the stuff

Alex Winter
0:08:04
that nobody wants. Nobody really wants it.

Mary Brown
0:08:07
Well, we're seeing it in Google Search too because there was a huge algorithm update last spring, the helpful content update, and they said the goal was to reduce content by 40%. So they wanted to just cut through the nonsense and the content that they deem to be not helpful, that doesn't

Mary Brown
0:08:28
meet their guidelines of helpful, they're not going to serve that anymore. And they said 40%, they ended up cutting something like 45%.

Alex Winter
0:08:34
Well, it's almost half.

Mary Brown
0:08:35
Almost half.

Alex Winter
0:08:36
Dang it.

Alex Winter
0:08:37
That's insane.

Mary Brown
0:08:38
That's a lot.

Mary Brown
0:08:39
But that's, it's real. They really want your content to be helpful. So people are seeing things. If you're looking at Search Console and you're saying, hey, we used to get a ton of impressions for this certain thing and we're just not anymore, if people weren't clicking through because your content wasn't helpful. They're not gonna serve you anymore, right?

Alex Winter
0:08:54
They're getting real with their getting real. Yeah, so it actually does the opposite now So those those ads that maybe started to raise awareness build trust whatever was happening there now is doing the opposite so like you have to be really strategic with how you build trust and the types of Things you're putting out there because you could push people away way faster now.

Mary Brown
0:09:14
Oh gosh, yeah. And local content is going to be huge for this as well, because I don't know if all y'all have seen this, but when you do a Google search now, you can type something in and then a little pop-up will show up and it will say, do you want to see results in your area? So this is new.

Mary Brown
0:09:29
This is within the last year or so that even if you've got something that, you know, nationally ranks, it's a great resource. If it's not local to you, people can say no to that. And they can say, I only want to see someone who will service me in my area. So local content is another huge shift that's getting to

Mary Brown
0:09:46
be more and more important now. Another thing that I wanted to highlight was voice search in AI. This is another big shift that's happening. So people are using Siri more. They're using Alexa more.

Mary Brown
0:10:00
So you need to be optimized for natural language processing and voice queries, which are different, right? They're more conversational than... Way more. Yeah. So you've got to make sure that you are optimized for this as well, because this is only going to continue trending to be more popular. Yeah. So for business owners and for marketing leaders and professionals out there,

Alex Winter
0:10:18
how do you navigate this or what do you recommend for... I know, here we go. Here comes the loaded question. But what do you recommend for, do you hire an agency to do this, do you hire a specialist, do you try to learn how to do this yourself?

Alex Winter
0:10:32
What's the best point of entry, I guess, if you're trying to optimize your SEO and you're trying to continue to further your SEO game?

Mary Brown
0:10:41
Yes, I feel like every time I'm on this podcast, Alex, I always say it's funds. Well, that's.

Alex Winter
0:10:46
And it does. There's industry specific and business size. That all plays into this, but we say that generally speaking.

Mary Brown
0:10:53
Generally speaking.

Alex Winter
0:10:54
Generally speaking, because you're telling me about SEO.

Mary Brown
0:10:58
So if you are a small local restaurant and you need more traffic now, then maybe it's a good idea to consider working with an agency because you're not necessarily in it for the long play of developing content. So that might work for you. That might be something you want to do. But if you're maybe a larger company, and you have

Mary Brown
0:11:20
dedicated marketing departments, and you've got people, and you can hire someone to do some really extensive SEO initiatives. Like I'm thinking, if you've got e-comm, and you have 40,000 products, and you need schema on this stuff, and you need to make sure your product pages are really optimized well,

Mary Brown
0:11:37
then it might make sense to bring that in-house so you've got that person there because there are so many differences and pros and cons to in-house versus outside that it really depends on that situation.

Alex Winter
0:11:47
Yeah. And I think that's not just for SEO but for agencies in general or marketing in general. It's like you really have to do what is going to be best for your particular situation and your business and whatever scenario that may be.

Mary Brown
0:11:59
Yeah. We like agencies. We work with agencies. We know agencies. There are a lot of benefits to working with an agency sometimes.

Mary Brown
0:12:08
One of those things is that expertise, right? So when I was talking about algorithms being updated all the time, if you've got someone who, you know, if you're an SEO agency, then it is your job to be on top of that stuff. And you've got to be on the cutting edge. Also, the resources.

Mary Brown
0:12:24
So again, if you are an SEO agency or if you're an agency with SEO expertise, then you're going to have all the bells and whistles and tools and you're going to have every single thing that your client might not want to pay for. Maybe you don't want to have all those tools. You don't have the budget to have all those tools. They will have them.

Mary Brown
0:12:40
You'll have access to it from them. Also an interesting one that may not come to mind is objectivity. So sometimes an agency will have a fresh perspective because they don't have that tunnel vision of your business, right, where they're just staring the way you are about your business.

Alex Winter
0:12:56
No, sometimes when you're too close to something, it's hard to see the full picture. You have to take a step back and that's not easy to do when you're in that bubble. It really isn't. Yeah. That's an interesting point to have an outside perspective can really shift everything.

Mary Brown
0:13:08
Yeah, and not only will they have sometimes an outside perspective that's different, but they might work with other businesses in your industry and have some good insights of things that they've seen work or not work with other businesses. So that can be a benefit. And I think one of the last main pros I would give

Mary Brown
0:13:24
an agency is that it can be more cost effective. I say can, there's an asterisk on it. Can be more cost effective depending on who you go with, because on the other end of this, I have seen agencies be very expensive.

Alex Winter
0:13:38
Yeah, so and that's a good segue because I was gonna ask you about SEO agencies because for me, I'm a small business owner, so for me it's like if I'm not sure how to do something, I'm gonna find an expert or a consultant or a coach that is an expert to help me,

Alex Winter
0:13:52
just like if when I go to the gym I need a trainer type of thing, right? So the idea in my head is like I would just go right to an SEO agency that has great ratings and I know is like legitimate, but then what do you do from there?

Alex Winter
0:14:03
Because I don't know what you know about SES. So for like a business owner, it's like, what questions should I be asking? What should I be looking for with an agency? Like what are some of those key things that are like good things to look at

Alex Winter
0:14:14
and also some red flags that like, hey, maybe this isn't the right fit or the right company to go with.

Mary Brown
0:14:18
Yeah, I think one of the first red flags that comes to mind is when they, what are the deliverables? How are they gonna report on what they're doing to you? That is so huge. I know of a company that came to us

Mary Brown
0:14:32
because they trusted someone on our team, on our web team. And they said, can you please look at this deliverable that we got from our SEO agency? Because we're spending $50,000 a year on an SEO agency. And they say that they're doing all these amazing things. And we don't, A, don't understand

Mary Brown
0:14:49
what we're looking at, because they'll get these reports. And if you're hiring an agency to begin with, you probably don't understand a lot of this stuff. So they're saying they gave us a 40-page document, but we don't even know how to read it, which is awful.

Alex Winter
0:15:03
It's like astrophysics. I know Elon Musk is going to make it to Mars someday, but I have no idea how the hell they're doing that, because it's way out of the realm of what I'm an expert in and what I know. So that's exactly what I was curious about is, do they sometimes hit you with all the data and all the numbers to make it seem like it's so up in the clouds that you're never gonna figure it out

Alex Winter
0:15:22
and that's part of the competitive advantage, I guess?

Mary Brown
0:15:25
Yeah, but you need to understand the business outcome. You need to understand the ROI of this stuff. And if they can't straightforwardly say this to you and if there is a lack of transparency there, that is a huge red flag. That is a huge problem and unfortunately I do see that.

Alex Winter
0:15:40
I absolutely do. Yeah. I remember back in my old advertising, traditional advertising days when everyone was like, oh, we got you 100,000 impressions. Isn't that amazing? And it's like, I thought that was great because I didn't fully understand what impressions were back then. It was still new. It's like, I think that's good. That sounds good. It's 100,000. That's a big number. But then it's like, oh, that's just people that saw it while they were scrolling.

Mary Brown
0:16:02
No one clicked on it.

Alex Winter
0:16:03
Nobody, yeah. The CTR rate was like 1.2%. Yeah, exactly. So those are things that like through, unfortunately, some bad experiences, you learn, I learned those things and I learned them the hard way. So hopefully having this discussion will help people get ahead of some of those, some of

Alex Winter
0:16:18
those hurdles that they, that you're going to come across.

Mary Brown
0:16:20
Yeah. I mean, if you're getting a huge list of deliverables and it's, our dev looked at this, this, and updated this, this, and this, and you have no idea how that translates to helping your business. That's a problem. Yeah. Because people can hide behind deliverables all day.

Mary Brown
0:16:34
And in the end, if it's not helping you improve, if you're not getting leads from this stuff, then that is a problem. You need to be able to point from A to B for this to actually be effective.

Alex Winter
0:16:44
So true. Yeah, we actually were talking with Tanner in a previous episode, Tanner Holman, who's a paid expert here at Impact, and he was saying something similar about paid where the same rules kind of apply that like just because you're putting money into something and just because there's a lot of technical stuff happening, that's all good and well and you might be checking all these boxes and getting stuff done, but is it effective?

Alex Winter
0:17:06
Are you gaining more business? Are you getting more leads? Are you getting whatever that thing is to help turn the dial up, is it doing it? And if it's not, how are you assessing and fixing and changing things to try to make that true?

Mary Brown
0:17:16
Yes.

Mary Brown
0:17:17
I'm so glad you brought that up. I think that would be one of the main drawbacks to working with an agency can be a lack of control over things. So whether it's the lack of control over the strategy, if you do want to have input, because I work with some really smart clients who know about this stuff, they want to

Mary Brown
0:17:33
have input, they want to have some say in strategy, and their business strategy should be aligned with the search strategy. Imagine that. So you can sometimes lose some of that control. You don't have the transparency, right? The communication can be off.

Mary Brown
0:17:47
It's not there. So making sure that you know what you're getting out of it is a huge part of it. And another one is consistency. So man, this can break my heart sometimes. I was just talking to a new client of ours actually the other day, and they were talking about their experience with an agency.

Mary Brown
0:18:05
And they said, oh, we loved our agency so much, and we were getting such great results, and things were awesome. And then the person we were working with got promoted, and they weren't doing that job

Mary Brown
0:18:13
anymore.

Mary Brown
0:18:14
And the quality just went, phew, pfft. It just totally took a nose dive. And they said, now we're in a, it's a total 180. We aren't getting anywhere near the quality. And they just kind of shrugged at us and they were like, well, this is your person now.

Mary Brown
0:18:28
So that is a huge issue that can happen, you know, with their turnover everywhere, but versus hiring in-house, if you've got someone in-house, you don't necessarily have to deal with that kind of thing, right?

Alex Winter
0:18:43
Right. Typically, you don't. If they're in-house, you don't have to, if they're in-house, you at least can shoulder tap them and you can talk to them and you can be in meetings with them and have your finger on the pulse a little bit better than if you just have an agency

Mary Brown
0:18:55
that you don't know exactly what they're doing. Yeah, you have no idea what's coming, right? It's fairy dust. Companies can have their own turnover, right, for in-house employees, but at least like you said, you will have your finger on that pulse and you can have conversations versus just out of the blue, that turning over and you having no control. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Alex Winter
0:19:14
Can we break down all the tasks that are necessary, whether it's an internal person or an external agency, but what are the SEO to-dos that people need to be thinking about?

Mary Brown
0:19:24
Jeez, Alex.

Mary Brown
0:19:25
OK, that is tall order, because.

Alex Winter
0:19:27
I need a checklist.

Mary Brown
0:19:29
There's a lot. There's a lot that goes into SEO. So no, I cannot give you every single thing. No. Incorrect, wrong, not going to happen. But I can give you a lot of good stuff.

Mary Brown
0:19:37
That can go into this. So the main one, no surprise, the first one that's probably going to come to mind for everyone is keyword research and optimization, right? This is still a thing that people need to be doing.

Alex Winter
0:19:48
Let's say that one more time. Keyword research, you still need to be doing this, and optimization, you need to be doing this.

Mary Brown
0:19:55
It's so true. It's true, especially when it comes to local, right? So because local search assist is so important, understanding not only how you're doing but your competitors, how they're doing with local search, really important. So yes, that is task number one.

Alex Winter
0:20:08
That's a great point. I don't think we've ever really said that on the show but I don't think a lot of people do that to look at your competition. They're always like looking, it goes back to the bubble. What we're doing, our stuff, our company, like they don't really look at what competition is doing and you need to. How else are you going to be able to position yourself to get a competitive advantage. You have to, yeah.

Mary Brown
0:20:26
Well, I know, so when we talk about the ask and answer and big five content and that, that should very much be focused on you, not so much looking at competitors. We say that all the time, right, is that you need to know your customers

Mary Brown
0:20:37
and you need to speak to your customers. Forget what other people are doing in that regard as long as you are covering that, yes.

Alex Winter
0:20:43
Yes, totally.

Mary Brown
0:20:44
If we're playing dirty and we're talking about local SEO, that's a little bit of a different game where you do want to know because filling gaps can be really huge. I'm focused on our web pages and making sure that if we have location pages on a website, those things need to be really tight. We need to make sure we're being competitive. We need to make sure

Mary Brown
0:21:03
we're filling any gaps that we can. So that's where my brain is at.

Alex Winter
0:21:07
Right. It's the same thing too though for pricing when we talk about principles though. Some people may be not open to putting their prices on the website, but your customers are going to want them. So, you ultimately look at your competition to try to get a gauge of like, am I in the range? So, if you're doing that, it's the same thing with SEO where like, it's not necessarily

Alex Winter
0:21:24
like an ill or like bad intention thing to do. It's like you're just trying to get a temperature gauge so you can better serve your potential customers and give them the information that they need and just try to keep it real.

Mary Brown
0:21:35
Yeah, absolutely. Because I know one of the things we always talk about when it comes to pricing is if your competitors are talking about it and you're not.

Alex Winter
0:21:42
What do you think is going to happen?

Alex Winter
0:21:43
What do you think is going to happen?

Mary Brown
0:21:44
Yeah, they're going to go to your competitor.

Alex Winter
0:21:45
We can tell you because we've seen it happen all too often.

Mary Brown
0:21:48
Yes, we have.

Mary Brown
0:21:49
Okay, so back to my incomplete list.

Alex Winter
0:21:52
The list. We got all the way through number one. We're doing great. Let's go to number two.

Mary Brown
0:21:56
So meta descriptions, and title tags. I'm putting on my nerd hat for a moment. When we were talking about impressions and clicks, right, you were like, yay, got impressions, and nobody was clicking on your stuff. Very sorry, sad story.

Mary Brown
0:22:09
The thing that will help people click through is your meta description and your title tag, right? That's what shows up in search results.

Alex Winter
0:22:16
Totally.

Mary Brown
0:22:17
Treat it like an ad. Some people do this as throwaway copy. They're just like, eh, I'm going to copy the first sentence of the page, and I'm just going to throw it in there.

Mary Brown
0:22:23
No!

Mary Brown
0:22:24
You can't do that!

Alex Winter
0:22:24
Yeah, no, you definitely can't do that.

Mary Brown
0:22:26
Don't do that. Treat it like an ad. You've got very limited space, but you need to have a call to action in there. You need to make it compelling. That is going to be the thing that gets you from an impression to a click, right, as long as you're, you know, within the first page usually.

Mary Brown
0:22:39
But you've got to optimize this stuff. You've got to do a good job on that.

Alex Winter
0:22:43
How does that play into the language? And like when we talk about titling and positioning, do you feel like it's important to try to, I don't want to use the word dub it down, but like get a little bit more direct and use common language that like, how we would talk versus like being more formal and typing things out like how we used to.

Mary Brown
0:22:58
Yeah, absolutely, because you are competing. When you think about a SERP, a search engine result page, and you're looking at result, result, result, right in a row, you have to compete with those directly next to you, and you've gotta win. So what's going to win?

Mary Brown
0:23:14
Being very formal and being very stiff and being over-optimized is a thing. Or actually being a human and talking the way your users talk and having them recognize that very quickly and easily and saying, oh, that's me. They're talking to me. That's how I talk.

Mary Brown
0:23:30
I get it.

Alex Winter
0:23:31
Yes. And that's what we want. That's that magic. That's like, yes, this resonates with me. This makes sense. Yes.

Mary Brown
0:23:37
I'm clicking. Yes. Exactly, exactly. So that's huge. Readability is another one that I think some people kind of forget with SEO, because I mentioned over-optimization

Mary Brown
0:23:46
just a second ago.

Mary Brown
0:23:48
It's possible.

Mary Brown
0:23:49
If you are writing too much like a robot, and have you ever opened a web page, Alex, and been like, this is an SEO play, because the heading on the page, every single heading is like, pizza near me.

Alex Winter
0:24:03
1,000%. I see it all the time. And now the new thing is I'm starting to see a lot of GPT lingo. And I'm like, somebody copy and pasted that right out of GPT. Like, they didn't even try to put a little spin

Alex Winter
0:24:14
of their own language into it. So those are things you have to be mindful of because your brand voice depends on it. Your brand voice is what connects with your potential customers.

Mary Brown
0:24:23
Exactly.

Alex Winter
0:24:24
That's the key. And that's fundamental stuff here.

Mary Brown
0:24:26
Yeah, and that's why we always say, you know, we love AI, we use AI, we use it to help write copy but you got to, it's got to be human, you've got to have a human editor and you've got to make it sound like you and be like you. So either really, really, really, really train your bot like I know some people do here is you put in a ton of work to train your bot to sound like you have the tone and do the human editing or, you know, have the bot start the thing and then your humans finish it.

Mary Brown
0:24:51
But either way.

Alex Winter
0:24:52
Totally. And you can train, don't get me wrong, GPT is amazing. You can train it to do all sorts of wonderful things in the language and getting the right voice and all that stuff. But you still need to have a human touch to it and make sure that it's on brand and it's

Alex Winter
0:25:06
on messaging and all that.

Mary Brown
0:25:07
Yeah, people are smart enough to recognize it.

Mary Brown
0:25:09
Yes, they are.

Mary Brown
0:25:10
So readability is huge. And making sure you've got the headings that, it's funny, people can get headings wrong on their websites. Really what you want to do is tell people, orient them to the section they're in. What's going to be in this next section? Sounds really basic, right? Someone will just say something like, you know, from our hearts to yours. What?

Alex Winter
0:25:31
The more you know.

Mary Brown
0:25:33
What does that mean? I'm not going to read what comes after that. Come on. No. So have headings that are clear and are compelling and that are optimized. Please, please, please. Along with your, of course, traditional bullet points, clear paragraphs, things like that, that improve readability.

Alex Winter
0:25:50
We were actually just talking about this for what we do with the show. I was talking with Bob, our CEO, just yesterday, and we were talking about how your heading should really be like your one thing. It's like if you in one word or in like the shortest you can get it really explain what's in this section and then that section reinforces that idea. That's like the dream.

Alex Winter
0:26:11
That's the dream scenario. That's what you want to try to get to. And it's easier said than done, but like that's what you want to try to achieve as you're

Mary Brown
0:26:17
doing this. Yeah, because we've been talking about how people consume content, right? And they skim. And that's what those headings are. People go heading, heading, heading. And if you capture them in that heading, then they will

Mary Brown
0:26:28
read the rest of what you have. So they are critically important. You've got to pull them in and let them know exactly what that is, set that expectation, so they'll keep going.

Alex Winter
0:26:35
Yeah, and in my video mind, because I am a video expert, it's the same thing with YouTube. When you have chapters, the chapter title with a little bit of the description, and people can scrub through and find exactly what they need in the video where they need it, so they don't have to watch 30 minutes of extraneous content

Alex Winter
0:26:49
that doesn't really pertain to anything that they need.

Mary Brown
0:26:51
Yes.

Mary Brown
0:26:52
Yeah. Which goes into the next thing on the list, which is auditing your page content. So you still need to be doing this. This still has to be on the tag list. Okay.

Alex Winter
0:26:59
So number four is audit.

Mary Brown
0:27:00
Yes.

Alex Winter
0:27:01
Are we on four? Yeah. Three was reading. Three was reading.

Mary Brown
0:27:05
Four is audit. So make sure you're doing auditing. And because you always hear me say, right, your website is never done. So put something out there, audit, and optimize. So audit what you're doing, optimize. This needs to be done regularly.

Mary Brown
0:27:17
You can't just do a thing, God, I think I said the exact same thing last time. I'm like triggering myself. But you've got to make sure that you're throwing something out there, but then revisiting because once you optimize something once

Mary Brown
0:27:30
it's never done. Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:27:32
I feel like in the world that we live in nowadays with where technology is at and with how people use and leverage technology, that's true for SEO, it's true for your website, it's true for paid, it's true for pretty much all of your content to some extent. Like you can't just throw something out there and then forget about it and not ever revisit

Alex Winter
0:27:50
it if you want it to continue to be effective and continue to drive business and traffic

Mary Brown
0:27:54
for you. I know, I know. It's amazing how many people we talk to and we'll say, oh, so we did this thing and I'll say, okay, so how is it doing? How's it performing? How's it going? And they just look at me, silence. We don't know. Okay, we're going to change that.

Mary Brown
0:28:07
We need data. Yeah, we're going to change that.

Mary Brown
0:28:10
We need data. And we know how much you love data. I do. I really do. So next one on the list, competitor analysis. I talked about that already a bit, but data behind that. We need to have some data behind our competitors to inform some of what we're doing when it comes to SEO and optimization.

Alex Winter
0:28:27
Sure.

Mary Brown
0:28:28
Okay, because we've covered that, I'm going to go down to, are we on six?

Alex Winter
0:28:32
We're on six now.

Mary Brown
0:28:33
Okay. Internal linking. Okay. Internal linking, really, really important.

Alex Winter
0:28:37
And can you explain, I want to learn more about this because I feel like a noob with this one. I know what it is, like face value, but I would love to get a deeper understanding of what this means.

Mary Brown
0:28:46
Yeah. So when we talk about crawling and we talk about crawlers crawling a website. We call them spiders, and we say they're crawling because it's such a great visual for what they do. And when they get to a website, they really imagine a web that goes to all these other different pieces of the

Mary Brown
0:29:03
web, your site needs to do that. You need to have internal links linking one page to another page to another page to allow the spiders to crawl very easily and connect all of this stuff and say, these things go together. These ideas go together.

Mary Brown
0:29:19
It's like pillar content, right? So when we say we've got this pillar, it's this main page that comprehensively talks about this one topic, but then links out to all these other pages that are related about that particular topic go into more detail. Your website needs to do that.

Mary Brown
0:29:34
You need to be linking all of your pages together to make sure that the crawlers can get to everything and to pass along that SEO juice. Fun fact, I hate that. I hate that phrase, SEO juice. I think it's weird.

Alex Winter
0:29:45
Yeah, I've never heard that before.

Mary Brown
0:29:47
Oh, it's very common. It's very common in the world.

Alex Winter
0:29:49
I don't know how I feel about that. Yeah, don't like it. Okay.

Alex Winter
0:29:52
But it's a thing.

Mary Brown
0:29:53
But it's a thing.

Mary Brown
0:29:53
You need to make sure.

Alex Winter
0:29:55
Feelings aside, this thing is SEO juice.

Mary Brown
0:29:59
I'm nothing if not honest, Alex.

Alex Winter
0:30:01
Remember Tang? I'm thinking about when we were kids. I'm thinking about that's the mental image I have in my head right now. It's like, drink SEO juice and you'll crush it. Your SEO will go through the roof.

Mary Brown
0:30:11
I don't know.

Mary Brown
0:30:13
But you need it. You need it. And so the next item on my list goes back to this. So backlinking is really important, right? And the difference here is instead of linking internally between your pages,

Mary Brown
0:30:25
it's gaining a link from someone else's site, right? Yes. So having a site with good domain authority, a trusted site that has helpful content, when they link to you, that adds to your authority. That's a good thing.

Mary Brown
0:30:37
You want to have high-quality backlinks. It's work you need to do to get them. But when you have backlinks to a page and you have a page with good authority, linking it to other pages that you're trying to boost will help. So the more internal links that you have, the better you can raise up all the rest of your website.

Mary Brown
0:30:57
So all of this stuff goes together, all of this stuff really important.

Alex Winter
0:31:00
That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah. I think I understood it, but the way that you put it, the way that you painted that picture just now

Alex Winter
0:31:08
makes way more sense to me. And it's one of those things where like, if you're back linking to other sites that are also trusted sites, it just helps raise awareness and lets people know that your brand is also part of these brands

Alex Winter
0:31:18
that are good, that are certified.

Mary Brown
0:31:20
Yeah, absolutely.

Alex Winter
0:31:22
And that have a good track record. Yeah.

Mary Brown
0:31:25
Okay, so next one is image and video optimization. So I'm sure you have something to say about this.

Alex Winter
0:31:30
I might.

Mary Brown
0:31:31
I might.

Mary Brown
0:31:32
This is your world. But a lot of people do focus on the copy on their websites and they forget to optimize their images and videos. You can tell me what you see on the video side from an image perspective. I'm talking about making sure that your file names

Mary Brown
0:31:47
are descriptive, and they say what they are, and the file isn't like, MP4, one, two, three, four, seven, six, 12.

Alex Winter
0:31:53
You know what though, it sounds silly, we're laughing, but this happens all too often, where people are busy, I edit the show, so you're on deadline, you edit the show, you crank it out, you put in whatever numbers and digits

Alex Winter
0:32:06
because that's your filing system, and then you upload it. And that's not good. That's not good because then your file that has some weird numbers and digit gadget thing doesn't match the title that you're pairing it with

Alex Winter
0:32:18
and it's a whole mess. So that's really an important piece.

Mary Brown
0:32:21
Yes, all of this stuff matters because all of it, if you think about every little thing, whether it's the file name or the alt text on the image or the video that says what the visual is showing, is data points. And the more data points you have on a piece of content, the better informed the search engines are. And when they're better informed, they can say, OK, I know exactly what this is, and

Mary Brown
0:32:48
this matches this person's query, so I'm going to serve this.

Alex Winter
0:32:51
Right, and that's the key. It's like computing, like, this all checks because the titles and the formatting all matches up. So it must be right, and then I can send it. Where if it's not matching up, that might be a point of contention where they won't serve you up for people that are searching for you.

Mary Brown
0:33:06
Exactly. So make sure that your images, your videos are optimized for SEO and also, of course, for size on my web soapbox. I see this stuff. This can be such a culprit for page speed when we're talking about more technical SEO, when we're talking about page

Mary Brown
0:33:21
performance. And people get super freaked out about core vitals.

Alex Winter
0:33:24
And this is the number one killer for page performance and page speed, right?

Mary Brown
0:33:28
Someone will be like, we put this amazing video in our hero, and it slows down your website. They're like, it's in 4K, it looks amazing,

Alex Winter
0:33:39
and da-da-da, and then it's like, yeah, and it's slowing, it's bogging the whole thing down.

Mary Brown
0:33:42
Nine times edited, not worth it. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry about the beautiful video that everyone right now, they're thinking on their website,

Mary Brown
0:33:49
like, oh, we spent $5,000 on this video.

Mary Brown
0:33:52
But if it's slowing down your website because it's not optimized, problem, not worth it.

Alex Winter
0:33:57
Totally, totally.

Alex Winter
0:33:58
And there are some embedding options that you can do. Like certain players are better than others. I know Vimeo is a great one for embedding where you can get high quality and have a little bit of both, but it does play into your load speeds and your load time. Those are things you have to take into consideration. Ultimately, people are on your website because you're attracting them to do business with

Alex Winter
0:34:17
you. They're not there because they paid 15 bucks to see a movie and it's date night. Even though the quality may not be the best that you shot at that for that one particular instance, if you're focusing on it you're almost like missing the point of what it's supposed to be doing. Yeah. Yeah. Which was a tough pill for me as well because I am a quality control freak and I'm like everything has to be all the

Alex Winter
0:34:35
all the settings on my editing station on the cameras and everything are turned all the way up because why would you pay for a camera that shoots in 8k and you only shoot in 1080 like that's that's my mentality but I'm learning I'm growing It's pretty, yeah.

Mary Brown
0:34:48
Good for you.

Alex Winter
0:34:49
How am I doing?

Mary Brown
0:34:50
Am I doing good?

Alex Winter
0:34:51
You're doing great.

Mary Brown
0:34:52
I'm proud of you.

Alex Winter
0:34:53
Thanks, Mary.

Mary Brown
0:34:54
I'm proud of you.

Alex Winter
0:34:55
Thank you. No, I'm learning, and this is the key to it. We're joking, but the key to this really is, ultimately, it's not about me and my videos. It's about attracting more people to help them with their businesses, with their sales, with their marketing. So it's not about little old me and what I want, okay?

Alex Winter
0:35:10
And that's something that we also talk about all the time with the Ask and Answers. time would they ask you to answer? People need to know that your business isn't me, me, me, us, us, us. We're here to help our customers and the customers are number one. And that's a fundamental thing that you have to figure out.

Mary Brown
0:35:26
Yeah, we always joke that doing a new website for people is oftentimes feels like therapy because we have to have these big conversations where we're like...

Alex Winter
0:35:35
Do you make them lay down on the couch and everything and do the whole like.

Mary Brown
0:35:37
It's not about you. I'm really, it's not about you. We need to focus on them. It's about the customer. And they're like, okay, I can accept that. I can do, yeah.

Mary Brown
0:35:47
And then, you know, things improve.

Alex Winter
0:35:49
Well, you know what the real thing is, whether you agree or you're not, however you feel about it, when you start to actually do it, the proof is in the pudding. So for me, I wasn't fully bought into that

Alex Winter
0:35:58
when I first started reading The Ask Cancer and I was hearing, I was like, no, but it's still important who you are and what you bring to the table. It's still important and the us part is still important. That's what I was thinking until we made these shifts and then I started to see the results. Then I was like, oh, maybe I was wrong and maybe this isn't all about me. When the results start to come in and speak for themselves, it's kind of

Alex Winter
0:36:20
hard not to understand that and see it and want to put it into practice more.

Mary Brown
0:36:25
Absolutely. It's so funny, I think, the way marketers can forget themselves as consumers, right? Because we are all consumers, all of us, every one of us. But for some reason, when we get into marketing, we just forget to flip the script and to say, how do I feel as a user? I have to force myself to do that in my job all the time, where I have to say, flip the

Mary Brown
0:36:48
script. If I am the user, this experience would frustrate the hell out of me. I would hate that, so I can't recommend that. I can't do that. If I go to a website and someone's just jaw jacking about themselves, and it's us, us, us, me, me, me, this is how we're different, that's going to turn me off because that's how I am as a consumer. You've got to remember that.

Alex Winter
0:37:07
So true. So how does that play into SEO? Same rules apply.

Mary Brown
0:37:11
Yeah, absolutely. Making sure that, you know, people always ask about this delicate balance between keywords and they ask and answer, how does this stuff work together? It absolutely works together. It has to work together because they ask you answer first, right? We're making sure that we are answering people's questions, we're being transparent, we are building that trust and also when people ask questions, they use keywords in their questions, right? They are searching and they're...

Mary Brown
0:37:39
Shocking.

Mary Brown
0:37:39
I know, I know.

Alex Winter
0:37:40
I know.

Mary Brown
0:37:41
So, you need to find out what those keywords are and optimize with that. They play beautifully together.

Alex Winter
0:37:50
They do.

Mary Brown
0:37:50
People, I think, sometimes think it's got to be one or the other. We don't care about keywords. They go together.

Alex Winter
0:37:56
They do go together. And that's why I love the big five, honestly. That's like when I first heard that, I think it was either Marcus or Zach, whoever was telling me about it first, the first interaction, it was mind-blowing. It was like, yeah, I do look for best of content. Yeah, I do this. I do. And everyone does that. It's like inadvertently how we search for things. It's just become like the norm for how we prompt the internet to give us back what we need.

Mary Brown
0:38:19
Yes. Yeah, it's crazy. That's what I'm talking about when I'm saying keyword research and optimization and competitor analysis and all that stuff. It's finding out what people are asking and what they're searching for and optimizing that way. That's it. It's the same old thing that has been working and working for years and years.

Alex Winter
0:38:35
So do you have any stories that you could share from the streets? Some, no, but for real, some client stories or you help a lot of businesses and a lot of people and professionals with SEO, with websites, with everything we've been talking about. Do you have an example of maybe somebody that like a company brought somebody in-house or they started to really focus on their SEO and it they went from A to B, something

Mary Brown
0:38:57
like that? Yeah. So we just recently had someone come to us and say that very thing of, you know, we've never really focused on SEO. I think it was one of those conversations where I'll ask a question like, okay, so what does your SEO strategy look like today? And again, it was just big eyes and blinks. And we've never had one. We've never had a strategy.

Mary Brown
0:39:19
So we started having-

Alex Winter
0:39:19
What's that acronym mean again? S-E-O-what?

Alex Winter
0:39:22
No.

Alex Winter
0:39:23
No.

Mary Brown
0:39:24
Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:39:25
Yeah.

Mary Brown
0:39:25
Yeah. So we'll, and I always say like, it's okay. It's all right. We can do this. Yeah.

Mary Brown
0:39:33
And we started talking about, you know, local is huge for them. They've got to compete locally because they don't serve a national audience. They're in a very particular area of the country. So we said, okay, we know we got to do the big five and we got to make it local.

Mary Brown
0:39:47
Right? This is the thing. We got to talk about, you know, top five contractors in X city because we got to do the stuff and make it local so that you can be found there. And the thing that you find is when you do that, you're going to get found. And you're going from, you know, because they were focused nationally

Mary Brown
0:40:06
or they were writing things too broadly, you know, we're on page five, we're on page six, because we're not, you know, they might be writing the right articles too broadly. So when they took that local focus and they started saying, okay,

Mary Brown
0:40:19
we're going to focus on writing the big five and writing it in our area, they're ranking number one in that area. They're ranking number two, number three in that area.

Alex Winter
0:40:28
That's amazing.

Mary Brown
0:40:29
Yeah, because they just shifted that perspective. And so I have seen that happen and I've seen people be successful with that.

Alex Winter
0:40:36
Getting specific too is a good point. That's a really good point. I think sometimes the safety net is like, we'll just keep this broad. So we have a wider net that we might attract or hit. And that doesn't usually pan out the way

Alex Winter
0:40:49
that people think it's going to.

Mary Brown
0:40:51
Yeah, that's one of the things that is changing. When I led this whole segment off by saying, you know, the landscape is changing, you know, you can't be too broad, too general necessarily anymore. You've got to focus on being more specific. You've got to focus on being in your area so that—and sometimes one of the arguments I hear, and I heard from this particular client was like, but the volume is so low for these terms. But if you nail it, like think about

Mary Brown
0:41:19
it, if you're playing the percentage game, if you nail those lower volume local keywords that are right for you in that area, in those big five articles you're writing, and you get those super qualified people, and your website is set up for conversion, your conversion rates are going to go

Alex Winter
0:41:37
through the roof. Through the roof, and your sales team is going to be so happy. Yes. So happy because they're not going to have a bunch of leads that aren't really qualified that they have to try to like strong arm into being qualified and that just extends the whole sales process and takes time and money and all the stuff that really bogs things down.

Mary Brown
0:41:55
Yes. Yeah. So I've seen it, I have seen it work and it's a beautiful thing what it does. I get really excited when I see that happen.

Alex Winter
0:42:04
So last question. We're almost at the end here. What's the one thing that you would say to our audience, to our listeners, to our viewers, that they should take away from this conversation? What's the one SEO nugget that they should really

Alex Winter
0:42:16
be thinking about? No pressure.

Alex Winter
0:42:18
Well, OK.

Mary Brown
0:42:19
The one thing about this is that it's changing. And if anyone tells you it's not, then they're lying to you and that you need to do research or talk to someone you trust about this stuff who will be transparent with you, who will tell you that we can't predict the future about it

Mary Brown
0:42:38
and will at least be willing to have those conversations. So someone who can do that with you is a friend, right? Someone who can say.

Mary Brown
0:42:46
Is an ally, yes, definitely.

Mary Brown
0:42:47
Yeah, is exactly someone that you want on your team.

Alex Winter
0:42:49
Yeah, well said, I couldn't agree more. Thanks so much for your time and for being on the show and for just dropping some knowledge for us. We really appreciate it.

Mary Brown
0:42:55
Yeah, any time.

Alex Winter
0:42:56
Yeah, and it sounds like we're going to have to have you back on to talk about this in the near future as it continues to change and evolve as we move forward here.

Mary Brown
0:43:02
Maybe next week, Alex.

Mary Brown
0:43:04
We'll see.

Alex Winter
0:43:05
All right.

Alex Winter
0:43:05
Well, thanks, Mary. Love having you on the show. And for everybody out there watching and listening, this is Endless Customers. I'm your host, Alex. We'll see you on the next episode.

Alex Winter
0:43:11
We'll see you on the next episode.

Alex Winter
0:43:12
Thank you.