Leverage Data-Driven Tools and Local SEO for Maximum Search Engine Rankings

Hello, everyone. I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of b two b and welcome to Scale Sessions. This is MarketScales live show workshop where you learn from the agency experts to level up your marketing skills. Thank you again for joining us and we're gonna be getting in the weeds today with some actionable and quality tips, so that you can level up your SEO. Exciting to get into it here in a few minutes. Before we do so, make sure you're heading to our website market scale dot com for all previous episodes of scale sessions, as well as some of our other educational content where you can find tips and tricks, as well as education and industry insights across all of our key sixteen industry verticals. Again, market scale dot com. Alright. So today's episode of Scale Sessions. Let's get right into the meat of it. We're gonna be sitting down with the team from Think Creative, which is a leading marketing agency based here in Dallas, Texas. Let's go. And with insights today from Think Creatives managing partner, Chris Wolinski, our session today is gonna delve into SEO, search engine optimization. We're gonna offer some insights and strategies to help enhance your search engine rankings, as well as drive organic traffic to your website. We'll also dispel some misconceptions and, you know, confusing areas of SEO. SEO. There's so many layers to it and so many different, approaches and tools to use. And we're gonna give you the crash course here to really start to level up your SEO with intention. So whether you are a seasoned marketer or you're just starting out in marketing, tap into today's expertise on SEO fundamentals, on advanced techniques, on essential tools to optimize your digital presence, and let's go ahead and have some fun with it. I am pleased to welcome today's presenter, mister Chris Wolinski. He's a managing partner and lead strategist over at Think Creative. Chris, welcome to the studio. How are you doing today, man? Good. Thanks for having me. Oh, we we got you on mic? Yeah. We're all good. There we go. You're back. Hey, man. No. You're good. Chris, hey. Thank you so much for joining us, and, yeah, I'm really looking forward to today's presentation. We've got a lot to break down. SEO is a complex topic, but in a lot of ways too. I'm sure you can attest to this. Getting started is actually not as hard as it sounds. Making, you know, improvements that go zero to one on SEO are are actually more achievable, than it may seem. So I'm excited to hear a little bit more about, SEO in general, but really how to master it regardless of your company size. So thanks for joining us, man. And, let's go ahead and jump right in. You know, when you think about SEO and you hear, you know, concerns, confusion around it, where do those comments usually sit? Right? What are some of the biggest misconceptions that you often hear, from clients around SEO as they try to wrap their heads around it? You know, a lot of business owners first, they don't even know what it is. They just know that they need to have it. Somebody's told them, oh, I'm doing SEO. I'm getting all these organic leads. You should be doing it too, but they really don't know what it is or how it works. It is probably the most confusing and convoluted part of the digital marketing space, and there's a lot of misconceptions around it. A lot of people think that it's advertising, and it's not. You know? It's I always position SEO as a necessary evil almost when you have a website. It's like maintaining your building or maintaining your house. You gotta maintain your website as well, and SEO is a part of that. So we're gonna dive through all of that, go over the fundamentals of it, tell you what all aspects of SEO are, but, of course, there's you could go on for days about SEO and how everything works. Definitely. So today, we're keeping it to about thirty minutes so folks can really digest, some of these strategies and start to put them to work. But let's go ahead and jump in, Chris. You know, feel free to kick off your presentation. If you could give us some introductions to you and the company, and then start to break down what is SEO in practice, and we'll be chatting up more here in a little bit. Sounds good. So as Daniel mentioned, I'm the managing partner and lead strategist of Think Creative. I started the agency back in two thousand twelve here in Dallas, Fort Worth. We're actually based out of the Grapevine area. We're a boutique smaller team, but we really take care of our clients. We've SEO has been one of our services we've offered since day one. We actually have one of the longest average client retention in the business. You know, the average is about eighteen to nineteen months. Changes all the time. We've got six point four years that we work with our clients, so we're really proud of that. Won several awards throughout the years. We're really strong in SEO paid ads and web design. So those are our main services and where we excel. We are a Google partner. We've also partnered with some of the biggest award in the industry. For example, the Nettie Award or Design Rust or even best, and we're up for a couple other awards right now as well. So that's Think Creative. That's what we've been doing. You know, also another thing that sets us apart is my team. I've kept them around for a long time. We don't make a lot of changes. We just get better at what we do with the team that we have, so there's not a lot of turnover, making it a lot easier to work with people and get better results. So what is SEO? You know, a lot of people have heard this term. They don't know what it is. They just know they need it. It's part of your website. Well, it's search engine optimization, which is the process of getting your website to rank higher on search engines. Majority of people focus on Google. They the search engine results page or SERP is where you're going to get all of your visibility. You want to be on page one. Ultimately, this is going to drive visibility for your brand, credibility, drive organic traffic, which then converts into leads and sales. Whether you're a service business or a product business, SEO will work for you. There are some instances where SEO is not a good idea. You know, if you're in a very heavy space like apparel or something like that, you would need some sort of niche in order to to rank up against the big competitors. You'll see in the screenshot, this is what your average Google search looks like. So I scrolled down past the ads because those are all paid ads, but this is where SEO starts. So you have your map pack and then you get down into your organic listings. Of course, one of our clients is sitting right at the top of it. But those are the two components that are the most when it comes to that search engine results page or search engine rankings page. It can be called both of those. But that's the purpose of SEO. Organic traffic is gonna be your highest value too. That's why you want to make sure that you rank as high as possible. Continuing with that, there's key components of SEO. First is keywords. Your website needs to rank for specific keywords in order to get up on Google searches. So if somebody is searching for marketing agency Dallas, one of your keywords needs to be marketing agency Dallas. How does that happen? Well, it's all the content on your website. It's all the links that are pointing throughout your website and from external sources. There's external and internal linking that goes into SEO. And then your website. You know, think of your website as your building or your office. You have to maintain it. You want it to look good for your customers. You want people to be able to find what they need to find. You know, you wanna have good content for them to come interact with as well. That builds user trust. It also is much more cost effective in the long run compared to paid alternatives. And like I mentioned before, organic is your highest value traffic. Whenever I look in Google Analytics for pretty much any single one of my clients, organic always has the highest value. Usually, it is the number highest number of traffic coming to your website, but it's also they're staying the longest, they're converting at a higher rate, and they're engaging with more content than paid traffic or other sources. On the right hand side of the page is going to be a screenshot from one of our tools just showing all the data you can get. That's the other thing from SEO. It's all data driven. You know? So you're making optimizations based on data. So it's very actionable. It's going to have a purpose. You're not out there solely guessing to see what works. There is defined strategies of what works, what doesn't, and that's really how you optimize, your website to rank higher on Google. So how does it work? So there's a lot that goes into it. There's, you know, a lot of jargon that you're even gonna hear me say today even trying to bring it down to an elementary level. But, basically, search engines use a complex algorithm that crawl your websites. They rank you for relevancy, quality, and user experience. So, again, think of yourself going to a retail store. Is it in a good location? Does it have the inventory you're looking for? Is it quality inventory? And then how's the interior design and decor, and how do you feel when you go into that store? It's the exact same for your website. You want your website to look good. You want it to function good and be fast. You wanna have the right content available on there for your user base. That's how you're going to rank higher. So that's how Google views you, and that's why it's really important to maintain it. On the right hand side is all of Google's different different algorithms that impact SEO. Panda and Penguin are the the most important ones off page, ones on page, or off-site and on-site. Very complex on how they actually work, but we're gonna dive into how you can actually impact those algorithms with different strategies for SEO. Why should you do it? You know, as I mentioned before, it's it's not really marketing or advertising. I know we're here talking about marketing, but I view it as an operating cost. It's necessary if you have a website. As I mentioned, there are cases that SEO is not necessary. But for ninety nine percent of the websites out there, it's going to have tremendous value. Unlike paid ads, organic rankings last longer. You know, they're not gonna last forever. You do have to maintain them, but they're gonna last longer. It's not once you stop paying, they go down. You know, paid ads are like a billboard on the side of a highway. You end your insertion order, it comes down. Organic is different. It's similar to buying a house and building equity in it. You're building equity behind your domain name, behind your website. It's not like paid ads, which is like renting an apartment or leasing a car. So that equity carries along with you as long as you maintain it and make sure that you always follow Google's guidelines. It also is gonna have a greater return on investment compared to those marketing strategies. Paid ads, you always have a sunk cost. You've got your spend. SEO, while in the beginning, is gonna take a lot of time to ramp up and a lot of work. And every industry is different, you know, on in terms of how long it's gonna take. But it's gonna have a greater return on investment in the long run because if you want to get more traffic, you don't necessarily have to pay more money. You know, it's more optimization, more work, and it scales in the long term as you can see on the graph, to on the right. PPC will give you those immediate results. You know, if you need leads now, that's great. But SEO is gonna be your long term driver, and every website's goal is to be number one on Google. And that's how you drive sustainable long term growth. So there's three major components of SEO. There's on-site, technical, and off-site. On-site is going to be your website's content. You know, how is the content? What keywords do you have in it? What is all the metadata? What's the linking? Even your URLs make a difference. We're working last week on one of our local tree services company, and just by adding Dallas t x in the URL, we saw ranking shoot up. So it makes a big impact. Little things that you're gonna overlook can, you know, boost rankings ten percent overnight. You just never know until you do it. But that's the most important part is going to be your content on your website. Right now, that's how we're seeing rankings move the most. Not saying you need to ignore the other two, but this is gonna be the most important one to pay attention to. On the right hand side, you can see everything that goes into on-site. So a little bit of it is technical as well, and technical and on-site can cross paths, but they are separate skill sets. You know, writing optimized content is different than speeding up a website from a code perspective, You know, developer versus content writer. Everything is based on data. So, you know, our tree company wanted sense when you think about it and then mix that with your analysis of the market. But optimizing all of your images, making sure your website is mobile friendly. It's two thousand twenty four. Everybody uses a mobile device. I haven't seen a website with predominantly more desktop users in a long time. I usually see anywhere mobile is from fifty five percent to eighty five percent. And, again, it just depends on your target market. B to b is gonna be higher on desktop. You have people sitting in their offices doing research during work because that's their job. B to c, you're gonna be predominantly mobile. So being mobile friendly and responsive is really important, and Google carries that very heavily into their rankings. Then all of your website's content, you know, as I mentioned, is really important, but that's not just pages. We also want blogs, news. They're all different types of content, and Google wants to see you giving users a wide variety of content too. So just think about going to the store. You've got all your smaller products, but then you've got your big products. You wanna have the same thing in regards to content. You've got a lot of diversity of content to offer people. So, Chris, quick question here on the, because we're starting to get into specific strategies. So to, sort of be the voice of the marketer in the audience here today, like you said, everything is super data driven here. Right? And it's a mix of identifying these key data points that are gonna guide SEO strategy, but then also looking internally as a company to determine what is our actual goal here. Right? Which audience are we trying to reach? Which type of content are we trying to boost? Is it evergreen? Is it linked to something timely? I'm curious how you see all of that kinda come around, into specific strategies for things like keywords and content. Right? Like, how how would a marketing team begin or how would you, So there's a bunch of tools in order to do that. And I've got a slide on tools here in a cool in a little bit, but you want to start with research. So start with research, go through, and put yourself in the mind of the consumer that's going to purchase from your business. So from a marketing agency standpoint, you know, I work with a lot of CMOs, VPs of marketing, business owners. How do they think? You know, what is the goal that they're trying to achieve by working with you, or what are their pain points? So, you know, a lot of people will search marketing agency Dallas or SEO services Dallas because they have a need. So I'm thinking like them. What are they going to search? Even when I work with my team and they're like, oh, what should our next blog topic for renewal be about? Well, it what's going on right now in Dallas Fort Worth? We're in a drought. We've got we have a ton of rain. Now we don't. That's causing a lot of problems for trees. So you just have to think like the consumer and then start developing keywords from that. And the way you do that is just simply go to Google and start searching. Right. You know, that that's your number one. Just play around on the search engine and then carry that into data driven tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Search Console, or even Google Analytics, and you can start piecing search terms together because it's all driven by what users are searching. If you rank for something nobody's searching for, it's not gonna do you any good. So now there is such a thing as low hanging fruit because SEO takes time. So you've gotta build up rankings to get the big keywords. So you wanna go after low hanging fruit. So let's say, digital marketing agency services Dallas, Texas. It's a really long tail keyword because there's a lot of words in it. There's going to be less traffic because it's more specific, but there's going to be less competition on it as well, so I could rank for that much higher. And you're like, well, maybe there's only ten searches a month. Those ten searches are literally searching for what I provide. Right. And that gets into, you know, strategy for understanding who are your audiences and really more importantly, what are your key goals as a business. We wanna make sure we capture the bare minimum. Right? We wanna make sure that for the most specific things people need us for, we're at the top of their feed. But, you know, working in in the news side of things myself, like you said, content that taps into the realities of, you know, the market that your company is in. So if you're a health care company and, you know, you're in revenue cycle management, if there's big news around, you know, software cybersecurity and health care or around changes to that ecosystem, putting out news content that has keywords that are gonna bring your site and its thought leadership next to other credible sources that then put you in conversation and put eyes on your site. That's where, you know, the strategy turns into something, practical and content forward. Right? So yeah. On-site SEO, huge. Alright. I'll toss it back over your way for technical SEO, Chris. Sounds good. So, yeah, now we can get into the hard part. So technical SEO is really going to require a developer that knows what they're doing. It's all editing the code of your website. Now not every website code can be edited. So you've got a lot of websites out there that come from a built in solution, you know, HubSpot, GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix. Those are all built out solutions where you can't access the source code, so you're gonna be limited on some technical SEO. Now from a website perspective, I always recommend owning your website. With those platforms, you don't own it, but you can still do great good. But if you own the website, you can access the source code. You literally can do anything you want to impact your technical SEO. Now the first thing you gotta start with is speed. Google is very sensitive on speed. They want it to be fast. They want content to load without any issues. There's a lot of strategies to do that. One of the biggest things that I recommend is any out of the box solution. So all those providers I just mentioned, they all have ways to speed up their platform. You just don't do it from the code. So I recommend researching and finding that. Also, if you're on a WordPress side, there's a tool called WP Rocket. WP Rocket introduces a lot of optimizations for speed and the cache and how pages load. You'd be shocked. Some websites load from the bottom Makes no sense, but that's just how they came out of the box. And unless you optimize that to load top to bottom, you're never gonna have great speed. But WP Rocket will kinda come in, act as a tool that you don't need a developer to set up. So if you're a business owner or a marketer and you wanna focus on this, you may just not have a a developer to help you, WP Rocket is your answer on WordPress. You do have to be careful with the settings. You know, go slow. See how it impacts the site. You can break a site, but you can just go back and undo that setting. So play with it slowly. Also, I recommend doing it on a staging environment. That way, you can look at everything you did before it goes live. The other thing is crawlability. So as I mentioned before, Google's algorithm is going to crawl your website. It's gonna read all your content, click on all your links, look at all your images. You need to make sure it's crawlable. What a lot of people do is they'll put up a hidden blog page because they don't want people seeing their blog content because it's geared towards search engine optimization, not necessarily what they wanna have on the front of their website. I see that a lot with professional services, medical, lawyers, you know, even going into some really well known brands that they want to keep their brand image. Well, if that blog is not linked anywhere, Google's not finding it either. So you wanna make sure everything's crawlable. It's going into your index, and you're making sure that Google is able to find it. Otherwise, it's of no value to you. But that also brings up another point. If you don't want content crawled because we've had this problem too where, oh, that news article was meant for internal purposes. Make sure it's not in the index. So you have ultimate control over that and making sure that the content you want out there is getting out there and it just needs to be crawlable in your site map. The other part is making sure it's secure. In today's world, HTTPS is a must. That's using your SSL certificate to make sure your website is secure. If you don't, Google is really going to hold that against you. It is going to be one thing that keeps you from excelling in the ranks. Then your structure and hierarchy. So this is how your site map is laid out. You know, you've got your home page, and that leads down into categories and individual pages. Even your blog, you wanna make sure you have categories. You're using tags so that you can properly categorize the content, and Google can follow it. You know, again, think about going to the grocery store. If there were no signs above any of the aisles, it would take you forever to get through it, and you probably would end up leaving and going somewhere that does have signs. Or think about driving down the highway with no exit signs. You just have to know where you're going. Same concept here. You need to tell Google where to go because they know that's gonna tell users where to go. Also the user experience. Just make sure from a technical standpoint that users are gonna have a good experience on your website. Again, is it fast? Can they find what they're looking for? Those are the main points. Off-site SEO. So this is the third piece of SEO, which is going to be everything off of your website. It's optimizing links, setting up referring domains to send you traffic and point links to to your website. So the difference there is a backlink is a link on a referring domain. So let's say market scale, for example. They link out to my website. Well, market scale dot com is now the referring domain. I may have three backlinks across their website. So that's what that means. So if you get an article on forbes dot com and they give you three links to one referring domain, three backlinks. It's important to understand that difference because you don't want to have all of your backlinks on a couple websites. You need to make sure it's diversified. Also, working with bloggers and influencers is important as well. They're going to get your name out there and help build credibility. You're not having to tell people about you. You've got people telling about you. Social media is an important part of it. You need to make sure it's set up. You use keywords and content. It all relates back. So you wanna make sure Google sees that you have a well rounded optimization scheme across all platforms. Then citations. So why we gotta call them citations and why it sounds like you're getting a speeding ticket, I don't know. But those are your directories. So Yahoo, Google business profile, you know, even some other ones like Yelp, those are all citations. There's about a hundred and fifty that are important, but there are thousands out there. There's really good tools like BrightLocal that will help you optimize your citations, find all your NAP errors, which is name, address, phone number. You want everything to be the same. You know, if I'm on one two nine South Main Street and it's abbreviated versus spelled out, that can even make a difference. You wanna make sure those are all working together and they're all optimized. And then any brand mentions you can get in the community and being involved and commenting on forums. You know, if you sell exotic cars and you go on Reddit and people are talking about it and you're linking out to your cars answering questions, that's another form of SEO. And that's really what a lot of business owners and marketers fall short on is those are really easy things for you to do. Go engage with the community. It's just like doing sales and sponsoring events. You wanna go out and be active online as well. I'm gonna jump in here real, Chris, real quick, Chris, with a with a question. Social media. Right? It's critical. It's one of those things that I think most companies realize that they need to have a presence on social. But sometimes connecting the dots with how that actually ties back to measuring success And even just the logic of how is an off-site social media presence actually contributing to bringing people to my site, to turning that into, you know, leads and then revenue might be a bit misty. Can you, break that down a little bit for us. Right? Especially with something like social media, how does that activity actually influence how you rank on Google? What's the relationship there? Yeah. So it's a small relationship. It's not a massive piece of the puzzle, but it is a piece and it is important. So So first of all, having all of your social media profiles set up that are relevant to your industry. You know, not every company needs to be on Tik Tok because it's not relevant. You know, if you're b to b, you're probably mostly LinkedIn and Facebook. B to c is gonna trickle into the others. So setting them up, number one, is the first step because you put your website on there, you now have a backlink from that social media profile, and those are big websites. So if you don't have those, you're just steps behind the game. Second is lots of engagement. You know, while Google is not crawling the depths of social media networks, they are piecing two and two together. So using keywords inside of posts only helps reinforce your brand. And, you know, so you wanna have content going out. You wanna make sure it's valuable. It's just like putting a blog up on your website. It's keyword based. It's based on what your consumers want. It's the same thing on social media. Make sure that they all work together. Typically, what I'll recommend is if you put up a service page on your website and then you've got a blog post supporting it, you need to have social content supporting that as well. Linking back to it, discussing it, you know, take a blog post, cut it down into ten different fine points or five or however many, and do short social posts about it linking back to it and open it up for discussion. Have people engage with you on that social network. That's what's gonna drive interest. That's going to contribute to SEO and help your brand overall grow. And that's what I love about SEO is that while it's highly technical, there are a lot of, I guess, more relatable sort of motivators and, guiding lights for how to even think about SEO. Right? Community engagement being one of them. You know, being a relevant hub for thought leadership. Right? If the content you're putting out there is directly tied to conversations folks are having in the industry already, it's making a concerted effort to engage your existing, you know, client communities, vendor communities, whatever it might be. That's gonna create more buzz, which leads to more posts and more literal content and backlinks out in the Internet that are gonna drive people to your website. So, you know, linking the the heart of it to the brain of it, can I I think be less, confusing than it might sound, you know, when folks are talking SEO strategy? Yeah. And even Yeah. And one point on that. On social, don't be afraid to give away things, you know, knowledge. You know, you want users to come to you because you're a source of knowledge. You know, even take me as an example talking about SEO right here. You know, I'm giving away some knowledge, and you're helping become a thought leader in your space. If you own a tree company or an exotic car dealership, get out there, post content that's helpful to people, and they will view you in that way. And that's gonna help build your brand as well. You're not keeping everything closely guarded. You know, you wanna make sure that you're out there sharing. Obviously, don't give it all away. But that's where social can really help you is to help people, you know. And then they're going to end up coming to your website and be like, well, this guy gave away this info. I wonder what else he can do. Right. Building real trust through your content. Yeah. Love that. Love that. Alright. Well, take us into the sort of trends in future side of SEO. Where are things headed with SEO strategy right now? Yeah. So that's the thing about SEO. It changes all the time. You know, it's the fundamentals are always gonna be the same. You know, here's what I wanna do. Here's how I do it. But there's going to be different weights put on things as as Google updates algorithms. For example, a lot of people use voice search now. Siri is starting to get AI worked into it. There's a lot of things happening with voice search, and you need to start optimizing for that. Now that's writing content that can be digested by a voice search algorithm. You know, it's a little bit more conversational. It's a little bit not as lengthy. You know, it's like you and I having a conversation right now versus writing out a blog post for Google to index. So it's just different styles of content. AI and machine learning is becoming very huge in SEO. I have a whole slide on being careful with it. It can aid you and really help you be more efficient. Don't get me wrong, but you do have to be careful. And then also prioritizing mobile devices, that's not going away. As more mobile devices become available, you know, we've got VR and AR headsets on top of phones and tablets. Gotta make sure you optimize for all of those. Visual search is huge too. Getting your photos in Google search results and making sure all the structured data is behind them as well, that's becoming more important. The biggest buzzword in our industry right now is local SEO. That is basically taking everything I'm talking about for SEO and localizing it. You know, if I wanna rank as a restaurant in Southlake, Texas, I'm gonna make sure I append Southlake to all my search terms or working on Mexican restaurant near me. Things like that are very local SEO driven. And then also privacy is huge. Ironically, we're in the state right now that is passing one of the most aggressive privacy acts in the United States, and that's going to have an impact on SEO if you're not compliant. So you wanna make sure you're protecting your users, users, you're following algorithm updates. And then also a big thing that's coming out now is content personalization. So you can write code on a website to personalize content for that specific user. You know, if we detect your IP addresses from this location, serve content that's why websites ask you, can we know your location? So there's a lot of things going on in the industry. As tech evolves and the way users browse the Internet evolves. SEO is gonna be right behind it, making sure you optimize for that. Then as I mentioned, AI is getting bigger and bigger. So we use AI. There's a lot of benefits. There are a lot of negatives as well. It's introduced efficiencies. So you need to analyze a lot of data to do SEO correctly and be efficient. Well, AI can help you do so. Everybody can use AI, but to know how to do it properly for SEO requires expertise. So the only issue with SEO is if you screw something up, sometimes it's really hard to back out of it. You know, the last thing you ever wanna do is get blacklisted by Google or another search engine, then you will have no ranking. So knowing how ChattGPT and some of these AI writers that have been built on the bones of ChattGPT, knowing how they work is really important. So the way it can help you be more efficient is, first, content creation. The task of writing a blog is night and day easier now that ChatGPT exists, but you really need to know how to optimize it and also make sure it doesn't get picked up by AI content detectors. Those are becoming more aggressive and better at detecting AI content. And the reason Google doesn't want their platform to be full of a ton of AI content is because they want content from you. They want to know about your business. They don't want an AI bot that read a hundred articles to write one for you and condensed it into a unique version for your website. They still want custom content created by your team, but it can really help you write content in a more efficient manner, can help you get more content out. Not everybody is a writer. You know? AI now lets everybody it also helps content relevance. You know, you could be sitting there on chat g b t and say, hey. Find me the top ten competitors for this business on Google search results, and then tell me what ranks them higher than my website. So you can talk to it. You know, think of it like you're sitting there with me as an SEO specialist and you wanna ask me a bunch of questions about your website. You can do the same with chat g p t. It actually is very useful in that regard. So it can help make your analysis and research more efficient. And then also just making sure you stay up with search algorithms. What are the changes? What's going on? What's coming? It knows all of these things. So just ask it questions. Treat it like a news source. You know, two years ago, you would ask Siri some stuff. Well, now I found Siri is almost irrelevant until they integrate with Chad GbT because I may as well just ask Chad GbT. You just gotta be careful. Use it with caution. If you have a question on something, don't do it. Research it. Make sure that you're going to be okay. Because, again, the last thing you wanna do is harm your rankings. You've worked so hard to get them up. Don't harm them, but it can really help you be more efficient. And us as agencies are using it to be more efficient. You know? So from a client perspective, you're getting more work out of us us for the same amount of money because we can be more efficient on our end. It also helps us get things out more timely and make sure that we can impact SEO rankings in a much more efficient and faster way. I've got a quick AI question for you, Chris. You know when it comes to AI impacting the actual search process, I'm curious how that's guiding, the advice you're giving to your clients for SEO strategy, considering a lot of people are starting to turn to tools like ChatGPT t as their Google. Right? They're going on there to search for questions to get more information. How should that factor into the technical strategy of SEO when, you know, GPT and, you know, the, search engines today are kind of starting to butt heads a little bit in terms of at least, ownership over the search process, the knowledge gaining process. Yeah. So right now, it's still it hasn't changed a lot in that regard. You know, you still got ChatGPT crawling Google. You know, if you go on there and say and if you treat it like a search engine, you're like, hey. Find me the top five marketing agencies in Dallas. It's It's gonna go to Google, probably search marketing agencies in Dallas, and give you the top five results. That's how it works right now. Now machine learning and all that is going to come into play, and it's probably going to start not just giving you the top five results. I wouldn't be surprised if they release that tomorrow. But that's how it's working right now. So that just makes SEO even more important so that AI tools can deliver your brand to people. Love that. So okay. For now, the strategy is pretty one to one. Good to know. But with AI evolving so quickly, and like you said, the SEO world itself is constantly iterating on itself. I'm curious to see where that continues to take us. Cool. So then yeah. Let's talk a little bit about how businesses should actually get started with SEO. I know you've got a slide here on SEO in your business. Before we jump to that one, where should businesses start when they're trying to gauge the level of investment their company needs to put towards polishing their SEO? Right? How do you gauge if your needed work is, you know, here versus you should just start with some bare minimums and you'll immediately see some returns? So think about what type of business you are. You know, is it a really popular type of business? Is it more niche? Do you have a very specific customer, or is it a broad range? That right there will tell you how, you know, much you invest in SEO. If it's broad and you can pretty much work with anybody, you need a large budget because that means you have a lot of competition. They're working on it as well. If you're more niche and targeted, then you're gonna need a little bit lower of a budget. You don't have to optimize as hard because you are probably gonna have less competition. Different. You know, if you've never done SEO and you just are starting your business, you've got a long road ahead of you. It's gonna require more investment. If you're Coca Cola and you've been around forever, it's not gonna require very much to maintain what you've got. So, you know, that's it's a really tough thing to answer, and I get that question daily. Oh, well, what would a what's your SEO services cost? I'm like, well, we have set up packages, but for what a landscaping company needs versus personal injury law firm needs is totally different. So, you know, that's the thing with SEO is you're paying for the amount of effort. You know, you're not you're not you can't pay for rankings. So you're paying for the amount of effort. How much effort do you need in order to outrank your competitors? Yeah. And, you know, I'm sure a lot of times the industry itself sets the tone for that. So, you know, knowing that your industry is probably at large a bit behind the SEO game, if you jump on that relatively soon, even a lower amount of effort can actually start to put you higher than your competitors because at large, the industry is just kinda behind on getting their, you know, podcast content created and out there. Right? Or actually blogging consistently around consistent news topics. Things like that. Right? So Yep. Pulsing yourself but also your industry, I'm sure matters just as much. Hundred percent. If you're in a new industry, now's the time to go. You know, I've got a client that is in the drone business. Well, they're just all getting started in the US. We're we're behind in the drone business in terms of using it for agriculture and turf. So we actually are starting to boost our SEO because the competition is slow to catch up. And if you do it now, you'll be ahead of the game, and you'll be at the top, and you'll maintain that position. You're not gonna have to work really hard to overtake somebody because you're already there. So, yes, that is very important. You know, the other part of SEO is prices are all over the map. You know? You you'll see all the ads for SEO, one ninety nine a month. You know, you do get what you pay for. You can go overseas and, you know, find teams over there, and there's really great agencies that have established processes doing that. You are going to pay less. But the thing I run into and why all of our team is here in the US is they don't necessarily understand the mind of a consumer in the US, and that is an important part of the process. You know, if you're writing content, you're optimizing your Google business profile, you need to understand the US market and the US consumer. So I'm not saying it's not possible, but, you know, that is a requirement. And that's where a lot of people kinda misstep is you think, oh, every SEO strategy can work for every industry, and it's it just doesn't work like that. Well, go ahead and take us through then the final leg of your presentation here and, give us a little more clarity here then on how folks should start to think about SEO more strategically and in practice. Yeah. So like I mentioned, not all SEO is created equal, and you get what you pay for. If you feel like it's a cheap deal, it probably is. And, you know, there could be all sorts of reasons for that, but all websites are different. All companies are different. All target markets are different. If you take a, you know, a car dealership in Dallas versus a car dealership in Boise, Idaho, your SEO is gonna be so different. One, Boise is a much smaller market than Dallas. How many competitors are there? You know, where's your website versus competitors' websites? There's so many things that go into it, and all of that needs to be taken into consideration. Kinda like I mentioned before, the strategy for a local landscaping company is gonna be much different than an ecommerce retailer or even a personal injury law firm, which I keep mentioning personal injury law firms because that is one of the hardest ones to rank for because it's so popular. I mean, they've been on TV for years. They do SEO as well. So that's one of the hardest. It's got the highest competition level. Medical is right behind it. But you wanna make sure that the strategy is custom to you, and that's where I feel a lot of business owners fall short is, hey. You know, SEO provider, we've got all these packages. Pick one. Well, no. The SEO provider should really recommend, hey. I built three packages for you. Here's how they work and why they work for your business because I've gone through I've audited your website. I've looked at your competition, and here's what it's gonna take for your website to rank in your area, in your industry. So that's really important too is just making sure everything is tailored to you. And then, like I mentioned, the amount of work it takes to do some websites versus another is different. And I always tell people, you know, because they call me and say, hey. Have you worked with a landscaping company before? I'm like, yes. But even if I hadn't, that doesn't matter because you could have two landscaping companies across the street from each other. Their websites are gonna be different. Their tenure on Google is gonna be different, and their competition might even be different based on who they work with and just their brand image in the marketplace. So it's really important to tailor it to you and to what your needs are because it's not all the same. It's not one size fits all. Some of the tools. So tools are how you're going to optimize even better and making sure you're using the right ones. This is where I do not recommend AI automated SEO tools. I've tested them. So I have firsthand experience. They will keyword stuff and do things that are against Google's guidelines. It works for a short term. Don't get me wrong. If you keyword stuff, but eventually, Google's gonna figure it out. And keyword stuffing is putting too many keywords on one page and having it all in the metadata as well. There is such a thing as too much optimization for keywords and content, so you gotta be careful. But some of the tools that we use on a daily basis is Ahrefs and Semrush. Those are your two big data aggregators for SEO. Type in a website, see anything you wanna see about them. You do have to pay to get a lot of the more advanced analytics and to really dive deep, but it's worth it. I've used both. I like both. I don't recommend one over the other. I think Semrush, if you're a beginner, is a little bit easier of an interface. If you're a seasoned marketer, I recommend Ahrefs. It's just dives a little bit deeper. It's also a faster system, so you're not waiting on a lot of load times, which is ironic because we're talking about site speed with SEO. Semrush can be a little bit slow and use a lot of resources on your local computer. Rank Math is a WordPress plugin. It can be used in other platforms, but it's really a WordPress tool. Another one is Yoast SEO. We used Yoast SEO for years, and we've now converted everything over to Rank Math. It gives you really actionable insights inside of WordPress of how well your content is optimized. I highly recommend it, if you use WordPress. Screaming Frog is a website crawler. So this gives you all of the content analytics, all of your technical analytics. A lot of on-site work can be done using a Screaming Frog crawl. That's the heart and soul of a website audit. You know, when you see these complex spreadsheets sheets from an SEO agency or a provider, guarantee most of it came from Screaming Frog. Don't let somebody trick you thinking that they spent fifty hours typing all this data in. All of this can be gotten from Screaming Frog and other tools. And then BrightLocal is the local SEO component. So you need to do everything else, but then you need to localize it as well. So even if you work with national companies or you can work with anybody in the US like we can, we still have a local SEO presence because we're known in the community. We wanna rank locally. We don't just wanna rank everywhere. We wanna make sure we have a presence in our local market as well. And then some resources. Resources are gonna be anything Google related. You know, their webmaster guidelines, going through all their articles. Moz is a really influential blog in the market. Of of the most notable news sources in the industry, and I recommend that too. And then for website speed, Google has page speed insights, which is going to give you scores on all of your page speeds. But GTmetrix is a good third party tool to use as well. So I recommend anybody working on SEO needs to utilize these tools, even if you had to pick one, Ahrefs or Semrush. Ahrefs is a little bit more affordable than Semrush, so I'd probably go that route. And then Screaming Frog does have a free component that you can use, but I would use those two together, if you are on a budget. So how do you measure success? And this is where a lot of providers can fall short. They think, oh, you're ranking high. We won. That's not necessarily true. When you're working with clients or you're the owner of the business, you wanna see dollars in your account from your efforts. So that's the most important metric to evaluate is going to be revenue. What's your customer acquisition cost or your CAC from SEO? It's traditionally gonna be lower than any paid opportunity. There are a lot of metrics and KPIs that lead up to revenue that are important because if you don't have those KPIs, you're not gonna get revenue. So first is your rankings. You always wanna be building new ones. You wanna be improving your existing ones. Again, you wanna be in the top three spots on page one. So So that's the most important part. Anything past page three is probably irrelevant depending on your industry. Page one may be the only thing that matters. Traffic and click through rate. So once you get the ranking, now you're gonna get traffic to your website because you're ranking high enough for people to click on it. Well, your click through rate is the amount of search impressions you get that turn into website clicks. So if you show up in a thousand searches, you get a hundred clicks to ten percent click through rate. Typically, SEO will see anywhere from one percent to five percent. Again, it just depends on your industry. Then your conversion metrics. So we've we've gotten people to click on us on the search engine. They've come to our website. Are they converting? Are they calling you, submitting a form, buying a product, you know, signing up for whatever offer you have. That's conversions. They're either leads if you're a service based business or they're sales if you are in a ecommerce world. So you wanna make sure your ROI is there too. And that's how we're gonna judge the ultimate success of SEO. Then engagement metrics. You know, bounce rate, are people interacting with your content, are they engaging with you, making sure that, you know, your content is valuable. And then revenue, like I mentioned, that's really the only thing that matters at the end of the day, and making sure your clients are profitable off your services is really important. I work with a lot of business owners. That's what they care about the most. How can I drive more leads for my business? Everything gets you there, but that's gonna be the ultimate metric. And I see a lot of providers really getting focused in on the minutiae of, well, we got this keyword higher and, you know, this traffic came to the website. Well, if it all bounced off and didn't turn into sales, you're ranking for the wrong keyword or something is going on that you need to optimize. Sales. Mistakes. Like I mentioned before, you don't wanna make mistakes because you can get blacklisted. You can get shut down, basically. You're no longer gonna receive any traffic from search engines. I had this happen to a client before I worked with them. It took a long time to get them back. We got them back, but it is a lot of unnecessary effort that you could have avoided. A lot of black hat stuff has gone by the wayside because Google has cracked down on it so much, but you definitely don't wanna do any of that. You wanna stay within Google's guidelines. It's really important. You know, you're at their mercy. Follow their guidelines. So some things to avoid. As I mentioned, keyword stuffing, that's where you stuff a lot of keywords into content. AI tools really do that a lot. You have to be careful and make sure you're not overdoing it. And a lot of people will ask me, well, how do you know if you're overdoing it? Just read the content and use common sense. If you've got your keyword every other line, that's not gonna work out. If you mention it three to five times, that's a healthy amount. Also, tools like RankMath will tell you if it's mentioned too many times or not enough. Duplicate content means that content exists somewhere else, either on your website or on another website. You cannot just go copy and paste a blog and publish it on your website. It has to be unique content. Neglecting your website and your technical SEO, a lot of people just solely focus on content, don't focus on their website. That's a mistake as well. You have to work it all together. Neglecting your metadata, maybe you don't know where it is or how to access it. That's another mistake. Metadata tells Google, hey. Here's what this is. So that way, it goes into reading the content knowing what the topic of that that blog post or that page is. And then ignoring link quality. You know, backlinks have a quality associated with them from a domain rating or URL rating aspect. You wanna make sure that they're high quality. If you start building links on a spam website or on a private blog network, those are gonna negatively impact you because they're toxic links. So you have to make sure you pay attention to that as well. And then just not monitoring algorithms, not monitoring analytics, and keeping up with the changes. SEO changes all the time, and you have to make sure you stay up on top of it. Like I mentioned, the fundamentals stay the same. You know, you're you're not gonna all of a sudden have to change everything you've done for the last ten years, but you might have to go back and optimize things a little bit differently because Google enhanced their algorithm and enhanced the ways that you can optimize your website. So I wanna finish this out with, okay. I've been up here talking to you about SEO. Do I actually know what I'm talking about? Well, our latest claim to fame is working with a company called Tactical Fleet. They're an exotic car dealership here in the Dallas Fort Worth area. They're based here. They have another location in Charlotte. They're owned by one of the juggernauts, Sonic Automotive. They are an exotic car dealer. They only deal with exotics. So like I mentioned before, it's really difficult to rank when you can work with everybody, but tactical fleet has a niche, Exotic cars. They really like to focus on anything a hundred grand and up, and they sell all the exotic brands. When we started with them, nobody knew who they were. I even was like, tactical fleet. What is that? So I went through, you know, they had fifteen users a month from SEO. They were all coming through from tactical fleet. And it's probably people that already knew who they were or already bought a car because nobody knew who who they were in the marketplace. They had three keywords that ranked. They were all branded tactical fleet, tactical fleet Dallas, tactical fleet car dealership. They were on pages eight to ten as well, so nobody was even finding them. That's why they only had fifteen users a month. They had zero inbound leads. Everything they were doing was based on their sales team reaching out to clients. Even people that drove by, you wouldn't even know what it was. So it was all very active outbound sales. They had no brand recognition. They had a little bit in Dallas, Fort Worth, but nobody really knew who they were. There were no searches for their brand name really. I mean, it was minimal at best, and they had about thirty cars in inventory. Amount of cars you carry in inventory really kinda speaks to the amount of business you do. Well, we started working with them in April of twenty twenty. We still work with them to this day. They are one of my top clients. And after four years, here's where we're at. A screenshot from Google Analytics on the right kind of backing up what I'm saying, but you'll see we had thirty five thousand almost thirty six thousand sessions across twenty thousand seven hundred and twenty six users coming to their website in a three month period. Keywords we rank for over eighty six hundred keywords. Nine hundred and seventy nine of them are on pages one and two. Now not all of those keywords are relevant. Keywords get built up over time as well, but we do our best to clean them up, and that's another part of SEO. But for the majority, we wanna keep at least eighty percent of them being relevant to what you do. They get about four hundred and seventy five inbound leads per month. And, I mean, it's not everything is tracked. We can track all the way through to the CRM. And now their brand terms are getting over two thousand searches a month. Competitors are running PPC ads on their brand name because they are so well known in the market now. It's almost you think exotic car, you think tactical fleet. And they have about two hundred and fifty vehicles in stock depending on the time of year and what's going on, but that's their average, between the two locations. So that shows the power of SEO. One, saturated market. Car dealerships spend a lot of money on marketing, advertising and marketing. SEO is one of those strategies. But because tactical fleet had a niche, we capitalized on it. We found that low hanging fruit to propel them forward. Well, now we rank on a lot of the big keywords. That screenshot from the very beginning of exotic cars Dallas, they're number one, and they have been for a while. And we're you know, we've worked with them for years. They're getting lots of leads, lots of traffic, but there is still a lot of opportunity, especially from the local SEO aspect. So, you know, this works. You know, it can work on, you know, what you may not even think of as being a big SEO type business like a car dealership because you think everybody just drives by or they see you on Cars dot com or AutoTrader, SEO works as well. So it is our highest value traffic. They spend over three minutes on the website, which is a long time in website world. I've seen upwards of six minutes from them as well because you got a lot of pretty things to look at on their website. But another thing we did for them was rebuild their website. So they were on an automotive platform, and it was just limiting us. Like I mentioned before, having access to the source code is really important. So we rebuilt them a website. We launched it January of twenty twenty three. They now own the website. It's an asset of the dealership, and it allows us to access that source code and really take SEO to the next level. Now a lot of people when you launch a new website, you see an immediate drop in SEO traffic because Google is going, woah. Something happened. We need to evaluate this. It's, like, we don't wanna keep sending people there if something bad happened. So you go into that evaluation period, then you start ramp ramping back up. This can be ninety days. It could be six months. And that's where it really requires a web developer that knows SEO too because when we launched their website, within thirty days, we saw a thirty percent increase of traffic. No decrease. We maybe saw a decrease for a day or two, but Google immediately saw, woah. This website is built much better. It's optimized better. We can read this so much better. Let's shoot them up in the ranks. Because now their website is much better than competition. Google sees that. So that was a huge part of them increasing as well. That website's been live for over a year and a half, and we're still finding ways to optimize it cause it never stops. That's the thing with SEO. There's always something you can do. We have a couple clients in maintenance mode, and that's mostly just because, you know, I I had one client tell me he's a a family counselor in Michigan. So, hey. I'm looking to retire. I'm bringing on people to help. I don't really wanna increase leads while I'm training them. So can we maintain leads for now? He was on maintenance for a year and a half. Well, we've had some competitors come back in. And now we've increased back to an aggressive, growth mode on his SEO campaign for the next six months to kinda catch up. So maintenance doesn't always mean you can maintain everything. It really is dependent on how much your competitors are actively working on it too. So, that brings me to the end of my presentation. But, you know, SEO is just something that every website should do if it makes sense. And that's where making sure the goal you know, what are your goals as a business? If it's driving more business through your website, there's gonna be an SEO component most likely. You know, unless, you know, you're an apparel brand and it's a really crowded space, social media is your game. But for the majority of people, SEO is going to provide the highest value traffic to your business. Chris, that was an incredible crash course. Thank you so much for breaking not only the basics down, but I feel like we actually got more in the weeds than, you know, we were expecting to start. So thank you for getting actionable with those tips. I think last question I have for you is circling back around to the SEO mistakes. If you had to say one thing that you often see your clients try to do that is misguided. Right? And you wanna raise a red flag. Don't do this. What would that one main tip be and why? I I really think it's keyword stuffing. You know, a lot of people think, oh, the more keywords I have on this page, the more Google's gonna like it. No. Make sure it's readable by the end user. Make sure that, you know, you've got, you know, more information in there, but don't take it to the next level and make it sound strange. You know, again, use tools to help you, tell you if there is enough, you know, keywords on the page. Make sure you've got good keyword depth, but don't overdo it. It's not gonna help you. Yeah. I think per usual with these kinds of highly technical, and content forward strategies, it may seem tempting to go from zero to one hundred. Okay. Let's get as many posts out there with many keywords and as as many, you know, LinkedIn posts and backlinks and etcetera. But intentionality is going to be the name of the game here because less but more intentional work organic search power over flooding your website with mediocre content that then in the long run maybe depresses your, you know, your company's SEO growth. So I love That's exactly right. It's the name of the game. Chris, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for your education today, your insights. This has been a powerful session. Again, folks, we've been chatting with Chris Wolinski, managing partner and lead strategist at Think partner up. Where should we point them? Yeah. So you can visit our website at think creative dot com or give us a call, at our number on the screen. And I'm more than happy to work, with you, help you, guide you along. Even if you just have questions, we're here for you. I wanna thank you, Daniel, everybody at Market Scale for having us on, and everybody that joined in. I really appreciate your time today. You see it there, folks. Think creative dot com. Again, think creative with the number eight dot com. Chris Walensky, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. And thank you everyone for tuning in to today's episode of Scale Sessions. If you like what you heard and saw and you wanna tap into previous episodes of the show, or you wanna make sure you don't miss out on future actionable marketing strategies, then make sure you're heading to market scale dot com for our full catalog of educational content and thought leadership, and make sure you're keeping an eye out for the next episode of the show. Signing off for the day, I'm Daniel Litwin, the voice of b two b, and we'll catch you with some more marketing tips on the next episode of Scale Sessions.