If you want to start generating traffic organically, then you’ll need to learn all about SEO! In this episode, Joe and Tami talk about what search engine optimization is, how to start an SEO campaign, how to monetize your traffic, tools you can use, the different types of SEO, and how to leverage each type to grow your business.
Episode 21 Transcript:
Tami: Welcome to High Energy Marketing, a podcast with us, the digital marketing agency Ajax Union, where we interview our CEO Joe Apfelbaum on key marketing topics, and we share everything you need to know to properly grow your business online.
This is a question-and-answer podcast where I interviewed Joe, about different topics and trends in marketing based on his book, High Energy Marketing. You can get the book at ajaxunion.com/book to follow along with us.
This is the 21st official episode of our podcast about High Energy Marketing. And today we’re going to discuss Search Engine Optimization or SEO. First, a little housekeeping. Find us on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Where else do you listen to podcasts, Spotify? Just give us a five-star rating leave a review, and let us know if you’re listening and enjoying the podcast that really helps get the word out there.
Joe, do you want to hit us with a quick inspiration minute before we get started?
Joe: Yes, thank you, Tami. Here’s my inspiration for today: create a vision that changes. Do you have a crystal clear vision and your life? Do you know where you want to go and what you want to do and who you want to become? The reason why most people don’t have a clear vision is that maybe they created a vision in the past. And you were let down, you failed. And you figure out what’s the point of creating a vision that might one day change. If you feel like a failure. Often people will say it’s better not to have the vision, to begin with. Because then they feel like oh, I won’t fail.
The anticipation in our life is what brings us excitement. You want to feel excited about something that you look forward to. You also don’t want to feel the dread and the pain of expectation and not getting what you expect it to get. What you feel that maybe you’re entitled to your ego will scream, it’s not fair, I earned this. It’s mine, I was expecting this. And you end up taking it personally. And it makes you anxious that someone is taking something from you. Sometimes you even think maybe that you’re being punished. The only thing that is punishing you is your own mind, your own ego is punishing you into thinking that you’re being punished.
No one is punishing you. No one is even considering you right now. Because you’re the only one that is aware of your thoughts. And you’re so busy focusing on your ego instead of the big picture. So here’s what I tell you to do. Create a vision that can change in a powerful way. Realize that whatever you write now, may change in a month and two months, and three months, but at least start rowing in some direction. And if you do that, you will grow your business, you will improve your life. And you will feel that excitement again. You will dare to dream again.
Tami: Thank you, Joe, let’s jump right into it for we have a couple of questions for you. How do you rank highly on Google?
Joe: The way that you rank highly on Google is by using a term called S E O search engine optimization. SEO is a popular way to get traffic to your website without investing in advertising. Search engines want to find valuable content on the internet for users that are on the search engine. So if you produce value, and the Internet recognizes that as value by being on your website by being mobile friendly, by having links to it, and the search engines will rank you for the words that you optimize for, and you will get traffic.
Remember that Google wants you to optimize the keywords on your website because you’re actually helping the robots find high-quality content for the users think about that. Users are only going to keep going to Google if Google provides quality information. That’s what leads to success for Google. So it’s really important for you to consider SEO as a viable campaign for your business. And then how do I start an SEO campaign, SEO is also known as the organic, natural search engine results because you don’t have to pay to rank. So the way that you start your campaign is first, you have to identify the keywords you want to rank for. Keep in mind that if you’re not intentional with SEO, and you don’t have a strategy, you’re gonna get really, really, really mixed up.
You’re not going to be sure what keywords to even pick, and you’re gonna get confused. So it all begins with the end in mind, what would you like to achieve? And based on what you want to achieve in your business, that’s how you pick your keywords is any traffic, good traffic? Is all traffic, good traffic, but not all traffic is created equal? Because let’s say you pick a keyword that gets a lot of traffic, but it’s not related to your business. You want people that are looking for puppies to come to your personal development seminar, like what how is it relevant?
You need keywords that are relevant to your business so that people have an intention and they come in also, you don’t want to ruin the search engine by just ranking for keywords to just get people’s attention. That’s called spam. You don’t want to be a spammer. So I really want you to think about the fact that not every type of traffic is the right type of traffic. I once believed that it was the case. And I started a celebrity blog, posting trending topics and we got tons of traffic to the blog. But nobody wanted to buy anything. Because those people just wanted entertainment they were looking for products and services, not all traffic is created equal.
The key is to think about the person that’s searching the key term and think about the problem they’re trying to solve and understand how your website, your resources, how your products and services, and your marketing are actually going to help them solve that problem. And what tools can I use to help with my SEO efforts, there are hundreds of tools out there that help you with SEO, the ones that are offered by Google is called Google Search Console. That’s the first one that used to be called Google Webmaster Tools. The other one is Google Analytics, you can install that on your Google. And you want to also consider using third-party tools like SpyFu, to spy on the keywords that your competitors are using or SEM rush. And if you just search top SEO tools on Google, you’re gonna find the top SEO tools that are available, I highly recommend you spend some time doing some research before you start an SEO campaign.
Tami: And what are the different types of SEO traffic?
Joe: There are many different types of SEO traffic, including traffic that comes into your website, but also traffic that goes to your YouTube channel traffic that goes through your directory listings like on Google Maps, there’s traffic that goes to other properties that you might have that exists like social media channels, think of yourself as a brand that has many different assets all over the place. And you want to make sure that all your assets are SEO optimized, not just your website, not just your landing page, think about all the different types of traffic that you could be getting to your website and to all the ancillary properties. So if I’m running a great SEO campaign, should I bother with PPC Pay Per Click advertising? If you’re running an SEO campaign, and you’re doing, for example, onsite, SEO, or you’re optimizing your website, and you’re doing offsite SEO, which is you’re getting links from other websites to your website, you’re doing technical SEO? Which is the technology that’s on your website? And is it loading fast? And does it work correctly? And is it mobile-friendly?
If you’re doing all the different types of SEO that exist out there, and you’re doing it not just on your website, but also on also social channels and other properties and on your podcast, and on your YouTube channel, and so on. If you’re doing it correctly, you still are going to want to do PPC, because PPC, as we said in our previous episode can help you test keywords quickly to determine if they’re valuable keywords, you want to invest a month, or two months, three months, a year, two years in SEO and then go back and that keyword doesn’t even convert, you’ll know right away with PPC throw $100 at it. And you’ll notice if there is any traffic for that keyword.
Why are you going to rank for keywords that have no traffic? So it’s good to do research with PPC and then if you see it’s converting and it’s a good keyword, then you can do a long-term SEO strategy, which actually takes time. And what if I’m running a great PPC campaign? Why do I need SEO, I personally ran an SEO campaign for a luxury watch business and oversaw a team of people who helped me rank for his top major brands. And the reason why I invested so much money in SEO is that I saw how much revenue he was generating for those major brands using PPC. So as a result of my becoming number one for those keywords. Using our SEO campaign, we produce over $5 million in revenue in just one year. But it did cost $15,000 A month was it worth it?
Of course, it was worth it. They also had to have good pricing on their website, they also had to have good customer service. So SEO is not the end all be all you got to combine it with other marketing efforts on set. When you get someone from SEO, you spend money in SEO, somebody comes to your website because you optimized it then you invest it in writing blogs and articles and creating links and technical SEO and all the things that go into SEO. And if someone comes to your website, if you don’t have a really good lightbox, and a really good way to capture the person’s email and email automation, well, then you just wasted that user because he came and then the user left you won’t be able to capture the user, you want to learn how to decrease the bounce rate.
There are a lot of factors that go into SEO. And if you want to read more about this, you should definitely check out high energy marketing, our book where we discuss this in more detail. But I want you to know that it’s not as cumbersome as people think it’s fairly simple. The key is SEO will give a business eight to one return on investment over a long period of time. So you need to have a part of your marketing mix. In order for you need to be successful. Google has a lot of resources online about SEO and even has guidelines that you could read at Google Search Central. They keep adding great information that helps you stay on top of the trends that are happening. You can even use Google Trends to find the keywords that are trending on Google. So if you need help with SEO, our team has done SEO for over 1100 clients and we’d love to chat with you about your SEO project. Just in general realize that SEO is not magic anyone tells you that has a secret sauce or pulling one over your head.
SEO is a science, there’s a process for ranking, you can reverse engineer, you can reverse engineer the way other people are ranking on Google. And you can see exactly how you can rank for almost any keyword. No one owns a monopolizes a keyword on SEO Sandy, when PPC, there’s something called ad rank. There’s a formula that goes into ranking on Google, on AdWords. And even on social media, when you learn the algorithm, you realize how not complicated it is that it has factors and there are obvious things. Like for example, we had a client, who was like, Oh, we’re not ranking for any keywords. I looked at their website, and they had something called a robot that text files. And in that robots dot txt file, it’s at do not index my website. How are you going to rank for a keyword? When you literally told Google not to index your website on the search engine, I know how much passion you’re hearing right now, because I’ve been doing this for a really, really long time. And I know the pitfalls that people do. So if you’d like to have a conversation with me or my team, we’re happy to chat with you. Look at your website and see what you can do better to take your life and your business to a whole new level, using SEO and other marketing tactics.
Tami: Thank you, Joe. That was amazing information and amazing passion. We hope everyone listening got as much out of this as we did. In next week’s episode, we will be talking about the most popular social media platforms, make sure to hit that subscribe button and catch the next episode.
You can follow us on Instagram at @AjaxUnion and Joe on all social media platforms at Joe Apfelbaum and follow him on LinkedIn at Joelinkedin.com. If you didn’t catch that, check our description for all of our social media links. Ajaxunion.com/podcast is where you can find more information about this podcast.
If you have any questions, shoot us an email at amazing@ajaxunion.com. And our music is by Michael Suarez. This podcast is produced by Sarah and Shannon and edited by Sami Mititelu. Thank you so much. We’ll catch you next time.
