 It's great to be here in Waukesha this morning. Thanks for attending. I'm going to jump right in as I have a decent amount of slides. I want to make sure there's time for questions. The title of the talk is Digital Marketing Strategy and SEO, kind of weave my way through a lot of different areas. I'm going to spend a good amount of time in the front end to talk about some technical SEO things, some on-page work, a lot of set it and forget it, kind of initial optimization things. I'll post my slides. I'll tweet them out, and I'll send them in to Scott as well. But again, I appreciate you having me and looking forward to it. Some of web strategists at Orbit Media in Chicago, a lead organizer at WordCamp Chicago. I hope to see everyone down there, April 29th and 30th. I also work on startup weekend as well as a couple different meetups in Chicago. So digital marketing points, kind of like on and off page SEO, content marketing, conversion optimization. And what I like to call Analyze, Plan, and Execute is this ongoing loop I think all digital marketers should be doing. And it's something I'll touch on a lot throughout the presentation. If you have a burning question, you can also stop me. Feel free. But we'll leave time at the end to do that as well. So jumping right in on page SEO, I think a technical audit is a great foundation. You don't have to be overly technical, but it's a great foundation to analyzing an existing digital strategy as well as creating your own. I think when you don't create the presence from right out of the gate with all the social media accounts, the website, kind of the whole kit and caboodle, you sometimes inherit things. I can't believe they did this. I can't believe they didn't do that. And so really developing a template, I think is a great idea. But these are kind of the top eight things that I like to identify with SEO. It's actually, I just want to mention one person, Gloria Antonelli. Many, many years ago taught me a lot of what I know about SEO and helped me work on a job that I was underqualified for. So oh, a lot to her. It's very nice of you to help me so many years ago. OK, so sorry. Jump back in. I just had to say hi. So SSLs, subdomains, redirects, mobile sites, canonical tags, robots files, XML site maps, on-page tagging and schema. Those are kind of eight big buckets. Not total complete, but if you're doing that, you're well on your way. So I'll jump into SSL certificates. I'm going to kind of buzz through a lot of this of a lot of slides. HTTP versus HTTPS. Everyone knows about SSL certificates. If not, you should. Google is actually changing the way they wait those for SEO, as well as what shows up in the browser. Recently, there was an update to Chrome where they actually say the word secure soon, and it also will say unsecure. So you can have a great web presence. And if you're not securing it with SSL, just you lose domain authority. You lose trust with the user. Of lots of hosts out there are integrating free SSL certificates into their platform, because RapidSSL is the free one. And that can be installed on any server as well. So that's great. It's a ranking factor since about August 2014. Something to think about is making sure you're forcing SSL, not having a duplicate content issue in Google, as well as submitting both the HTTP and the HTTPS version of your site to Webmaster Tools, which has now been renamed to Search Console. Also, another common miss is integrating your Search Console into your Google Analytics. All these are free, set it and forget it actions, but really give you a lot of data that's merged various query reports and things like that. So definitely you want to do something you want to do. Something I found out the hard way is when you do install an SSL certificate, sometimes you need to do a fine and replace of certain URLs. Or the thing that got me was to share this functionality. There's a secure protocol. It's just a different syntax in the URL. Again, it's just something you're going to want to check. Once you do that and you launch your site with an SSL certificate, especially in Chrome or Firefox, you can click on the upper left-hand corner. It'll say, site is secure, except for some images. And you can just troubleshoot through that. A lot of hosts, technical support, chat support, will help you through that if you're not 100% sure. Again, securing images, you can do that with a fine and replace. So subdomains, subdomains versus subdirectories. It's a very common issue. Whether you've gotten into a third-party platform with WordPress, like maybe a HubSpot or Marketo, marketing automation, they want to make it real easy for you to create landing pages or create forms. Always opt to embed those versus using a hosted subdomain. I mean, I got caught in a bad spot where I had a website and then I had blog dot. If you're going to use a third-party tool and not WordPress blog function or any kind of other third-party landing page tool or whatever third-party tool for the matter, you're always going to have that installed on a subdirectory if possible. So big difference between blog.website.com and website.com.slashblog. I mean, ultimately what you're doing is you're dividing the domain authority. So if you have two websites, that doesn't give you the combined power of having one main domain where everything runs into exact match domains. Just one-page websites just doesn't have the same authority that it used to on the web. So I'd put all your eggs in one basket and try and drive traffic and drive links, push everyone down that digital sales funnel from email, social, all the way to the website, and ultimately to a conversion, a purchase or contact form fill out or a phone number. I've also seen sitenameblog.com. Again, totally different third-party tools like blogger. Again, ultimately, you're dividing the domain authority. So redirects, very, very important as well. Often this is just a missed thing in whether it's a relaunch of a website. You have acquired another company and you want to maximize your investment by redirecting those links. It's so important that this is done correctly and there's no do-overs. Once you lose that domain authority, it's gone. So these are some of the common status codes. Obviously we want to see 200 when you use tools like I really like Moz. The free version is very powerful. They've got a great toolbar in your browser, also free. But ultimately when you run a crawl report and you're looking at those statistics, you want to see 200s. If you have web pages in a scenario where you've got a very high-value blog post or content page and you want to update it, ideally you want to update that same page. But if you want to write the 2017 version of a 2010 post and maybe you're using dates and months in the URL, to make the content more evergreen, you'd want to create the new post and then 301 permanent redirect to the new post to maintain that domain authority in Google. Does that make sense, everyone? Great. A 302 temporary redirect, I always say caution. There's just no real good use case for this anymore. But gone are the days where people are developing on live websites. There's staging environments, local environments, whether you're using GitHub or your own version control or a server press, a great products that allow you to do development offline and then push live and have a seamless launch. 400s are client-side errors. A 404 page not found. Very, very important that you redirect those pages if they're high value or let them die off. One I think big miss in SEO and just marketing in general, digital marketing in general, is the 404 page. So if I get to a 404 page on your website by accident, if you don't serve something up for me to find my way back to a place, again, ultimately, we're choreographing a user experience to have an action. You fight this war on three fronts, I always say, in search. To show up in search, to get clicked on, but then when they're on your website, whether it's the home page, an interior page, or a blog post, you still haven't gotten an ROI on that until they actually convert. So again, the 404 page I think is a great opportunity, a mistake happens, or there's a page that's indexed that hasn't been redirected. Edit that standard 404 page and create a gateway. Here's my most popular blog post. Here's my best page, an additional menu. A lot of times it'll carry header and footer styles, which generally has navigation, but again, I think if you put a little effort into that, set it and forget it, I think it's an often missed opportunity, 500 server error, something I generally don't deal with, I talk to support, so it's always easy. Mobile sites, so responsive, mobile first, adaptive design, ultimately it's like one site to rule them all. Gone are the days of M dot, mobile dot, when mobile get-in happened and when mobile became a thing, there were lots of companies, again, third-party tools that would say, oh you don't have to redo your website, we're gonna mobileify it, if that's a word, on a subdomain and it was great, it was out of the box, really no work to do. Sometimes you're maintaining two code bases or through a dashboard or maybe it's just automated, but ultimately, going back like four or five slides, you're dividing your domain authority. There is a way to utilize that, maybe you've inherited a client that the redesign of a truly mobile first site is six or 12 months down the line through the use of a canonical tag, you can designate M dot's main canonical domain as maindomain.com. So again, there's ways to mitigate things like that. So people think they have mobile websites often or maybe it works on your phone a little bit, but unfortunately Google is not a democracy, it's a dictatorship, so what they say goes, so I like to use the Google mobile test. If it passes the mobile test, Google is seeing it as mobile and then I personally believe with a new website, you submit your site map, you set your analytics up right and you're waiting, you're waiting, you're waiting to be indexed, sometimes seven to 10 or 20 days, I think, but once you go live, submitting to tests like that that Google has, I just, I really hope and believe and feel that there's a connection to that. Okay, you pass the Google mobile test on Google's website that cues you up for indexing and kind of puts you ahead of another site that launched on the same day with the same code base that didn't pass that test. So these are just little tips and tricks that I think help move that average towards 100%. Again, making use of the canonical tag, you're avoiding that duplicate content issue, not dividing domain authority and again as of April 21st, 2015, that's a major ranking factor. So a canonical tag, doing good on time. Okay, it's like an official or ordered designation, I think that's like the Latin, that's an example of the tag. And so it's something, there's various checkers online, but the way you would see that is if you're, in the m.situation, m.yourdomain.com was indexing Google, if the canonical tag's been used properly, you're going to then see the index URL as the native www or maindomain.com and not m. So that's kind of how you would know. There's a lot of free checkers like I mentioned out there, but you'll see different results from different things and a lot of them are just failing the tests automatically so you buy their product. So that's just something you need to worry about. I mean, that's manually added through the head tag. And I think there are plugins that you can do that with, but you don't have to be a developer to do these kinds of things. Self-taught in a lot of ways. So you find the head tag, you find the opening and the closing and you insert it through there. You can do that through the editor in the admin dashboard of WordPress. You don't have to connect via SFTP or FTP to do that and get really technical and kind of get out of your comfort zone. And then again, that tag speaks to the automated crawlers and it ultimately passes m.yourdomain.com or whatever that subdomain's domain authority to the main hub domain. Often we'll move clients off of things like a hub spot or maybe their blog is on blog spot and they're not utilizing the blog function of WordPress. So that would be another situation where we would do that. So the robots file. As a SEO nerd, I love looking at these. They're publicly available of any.com or domain slash robots.txt. And so you can view them. There's a lot of interesting things that go on. You think of superpowers like Amazon or eBay, whatever these sites are that have really interesting ways of using the site map. I think some of those are risky, some are not. They're also creating websites with hundreds of thousands of pages on there. So sticking with the stock robots file, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's great out of the box with WordPress. And ultimately you wanna make sure you're not disallowing the backslash because ultimately that's disallowing your entire directory. So big, big issue. There's that with the robots file and then there's within the WordPress admin, a certain hosts will by default keep that box checked that says like discouraged from search engine. So that's something you're gonna wanna make sure that you're aware of. And I'm a big fan of free SEO tools. There's a lot of great free tools out there in the WordPress community. I personally really like Yoast. I've been getting into the premium version of that which costs some money and it's a great value but ultimately the free version is great. And so when you activate that, when you go live, that's kind of like your double check. All the tools I mentioned by the way are totally unaffiliated with me. I just, things that I like and use. So again, you're gonna wanna make sure that that file is appropriately set up and then ultimately it's a set it and forget it type of situation. So moving into site maps. HTML site maps are kind of gone. A lot of companies still use them. We use them sometimes. But it's kind of a high level view of a website's kind of information architecture. So I believe an argument could be made that with good navigation, you don't need to see that. But for me, a lot of times, if I see an HTML site map, I'm gonna use that instead of the search bar which I think is fine. But another little trick that is very often unused is there's a setting in Google Analytics to, it's basically a listening tool. It connects analytics and the search queries to your search box in WordPress or whatever CMS you're using or website. And so if people are searching things on your website, you have that group of people that are gonna search for everything and not use navigation as good as it is. Then you're gonna have people that are using the search bar because they can't find what they're looking for. And so when you start seeing, you're an automotive parts dealer and one of your biggest sellers is mufflers. And you are getting all these, you have that tool turned on in Google Analytics. Again, that's all free. You have that tool and the people are searching muffler, muffler, muffler. You're seeing a decrease in muffler conversions. What does that tell you? Tells you they can't find that on your page. So that would tell me redo navigation, add a call to action for mufflers. Do what you can do and help the people not need to search for something because site searches often doesn't work that well, especially out of the box if you're not modifying it. And then XML site maps, which are, again, it's a technical piece of SEO, but you don't have to be technical to use them. Again, going back to the Yoast tool or there's lots of other free plugins that will automatically generate your XML site map and automatically update it. And so that's not something that users use. It's for the search engines to see your data and ultimately, what does that lead to? Hey, I have a new page. I'm telling Google that, Bing, whatever search engines are crawling your website. And then I say, oh, okay, they've got new content. And oh, they're publishing great content seven days a week. Maybe I'll crawl them more. You know, a typical crawl rate is every seven to 10 days if you're not putting a whole lot of effort into your site. But obviously we wanna be crawled all the time. So think of a site like Wikipedia constantly being updated from around the world. They're being crawled in near real time all the time. And so the first step that the crawlers are gonna go to is that XML site map is that's kind of the key to the city. Doing good on time. So on-page tags and schema. Are people familiar with schema, schema.org? So it's been out for a few years and it is, again, very often overlooked. So schema, structured data, if you go to archive.org, it doesn't have a great user interface but it's an open source project and it's what Google subscribes to. So it's definitely something you're gonna wanna understand. On-page tags goes a little bit further kind of for the beginners in the room. You're talking header tags, title tags, H1 and beyond. I always like to think about that as like a detailed outline going back to high school and college writing. It's a great way to architect a page. What is my page about? What's the thesis? Generally something around that is gonna be your H1. Your H2s, main supporting topic sentences. I always compare this to writing. Thesis statement H1, topic sentences H2 and then nested under each of those H2s, H3, H4 and beyond of those supporting details. That doesn't mean you need to have that for everything but again, when you structure your page like that, it's good structured data for the search engines. It's a great writing template for you to kind of cover all your bases and then ultimately you're gonna culminate with a call to action, maybe embed calls to action in between as well. Really make dynamic page content and she'll touch on it in some other slides. Again, meta tags, meta description, very important. That's gonna pull from the meta description to the Google search results. So you know, you have your title and then you have your meta description. Again, I'll repeat like the various tools I use and you're using like an SEO plugin like Yoast, you will have by default, if you don't add meta description, it'll pull the first like I think 160 characters, 155 characters from your page text. So it's kind of like a fail safe backup if you can't launch with every page optimized. But again, it's a relevant sentence you're gonna wanna include in there. Meta keywords, not really looked at as a ranking signal. If you have them on your website, I'd make sure they're relevant. I wouldn't worry too much about them. I don't think you need to remove them unless maybe your code base is bulky or you're using a framework or a page builders. Then I would remove everything I can that's not absolutely necessary. Alt tags, again, I can't believe how many sites I audit and how often this is overlooked. Alt tags are to allow individuals with vision issues or blind users to have a screen reader read what that image is. It should be short descriptive. It's an SEO opportunity because you wanna be descriptive. Generally gonna put maybe a secondary tertiary keyword into the page. So if your main keyword or main focus on the page is mufflers, maybe you're talking about auto parts, car auto parts. It would be a good description if it's applicable for that. I believe it's a pretty significant ranking factor as it's kind of an equal opportunity, American with Disability Act, a compliance. We're working with some banks and universities and apparently this is a new thing for lawyers to go after banks, universities. Supposed places of equal opportunity for accessibility, that would be the baseline of what they would look for, but then accessibility is a whole nother animal and there's great websites that test for that and things and those are really interesting and fun sites to work on because you have your standard user, your standard mobile user, but then I'm creating this for people with vision issues and very colorblindness. So I find that really interesting, but yeah, if you're working with any banks or universities, this is something I would get ahold of immediately. There's a law firm in Illinois that's just suing everyone and unfortunately freelancers can get caught on the hook for building a website, maybe you didn't have a contract, maybe you didn't have insurance. These are things that when you're a freelancer, you're getting started or you're kind of a smaller business, these are kind of often overlooked. We're relationship people, we trust people, but I always, it's like trust but verify. You can use things like rocket lawyer, contracts online, something basic like a release. Have people release your liability. You should have no liability for a website that you build and launch for a client if you're kind of meeting all the expectations of the contract. This is how I just wanna show you, I'm actually not wearing the Fitbit, but this is the real use and how rich snippets and schema.org can win. So if you see on here Fitbit, Charge, HR, it's something I bought, these reviews, four and a half stars of over 17,000 reviews, product details, nice, neat information. Of course you'd expect to see a Best Buy, of course you'd expect to see an eBay, but live healthy stored, no idea who that is, but because they used good on-page tagging and schema, they were able to show up not only in the search results, not only in the third position, but in the knowledge box. These are higher opportunity conversions and I bought it and I saved four and a half dollars, but as an SEO, I think it's great one, but that's how you win, that's how you beat the giants and the behemoths, because believe me, they're not trying to help you out by allowing these search results in there, they're gonna do everything they can to fight back, but again, this is a great opportunity and again, it populates this data into the search engine result pages, rich snippets, something I'm getting tons of requests for is rich pins on Pinterest, Twitter cards, and Facebook integrations. These are again, three, a pixel per network, one small line of code that you insert generally in the head of the site and it can allow you to rank higher and kind of jump up the chain in the search results pages. Some additional on-page points, site speed, it's extremely important. It's often set it and forget it. There's a great talk later today by Zach. He's an e-commerce whiz, he's all about page speed. It's something that I like to focus on a lot as well. More often than not, you're on a shared host, you're paying $3 a month to any number of hosts out there and that's great, they serve a purpose. You wanna start playing in the real SEO world, you need to have good site speed. So again, there's Google's page speed tool. I use this tool called gtmetrics.com, it's also free, Noddle and then Pingdom, I believe has got a good tool as well, but it does a page speed test, it gives it a grave, then it shows you what the issues are. Again, you could be a developer and take care of the really technical stuff. If you're not a developer and you still wanna work on this, things like image size. Clients will send you a four meg image for the hero image. Maybe it's a hero slider and there's four of those. That's 16 megs just by simply using, I think free image size or imageresizer.com. I use Photoshop and I export for the web and the picture looks the exact same, it's just a 10th of the size. Making use of a CDN, a lot of managed hosts have this free built in. I'm using Cloudflare a lot lately, it's free, they have a free version, they have free SSL. I think the CDN is free, I use the CDN through the host, I think it's free and if not, that's a very small amount per month, but Cloudflare is outstanding, I can't say enough good things about them. Utilizing, again, a little technical tangent, but utilizing the CNAME, which allows a managed host, you point to your managed host and then around the holidays or around various times a year, there's these massive denial of service attacks. Your website is probably not the direct target, they're targeting data centers or DNS providers. This free version of Cloudflare will help mitigate that attack. If you're under direct attack, you can log in, click, I'm under attack, they'll meter your traffic so your server doesn't crash this, so a little side note, but I can't say enough good things about them and I wish they were paying me, actually. So, and then pay attention to the text to code ratio. You know, it kind of greater, less than 25% is a good area to hover in. Things that you'll see common that are stuffed into a page, be like inline CSS, combine that into a style sheet and try and avoid doing things like that. Crawlable errors, this is something that you'll see in Search Console or Webmaster Tools, they rolled out the new name several months ago but not everyone's portal changed so some are still seeing it as Webmaster Tools, some are still seeing it now as Search Console but that will indicate what those errors are. And as I get into kind of the process, you don't have a process to monitor and redirect. If you get a 404 and it shows up and it's obviously an index page, if Google's saying that, did you mean for that page to die? And if so, why? Create a redirect. Now, you don't want to get redirect happy and have hundreds of redirects. Now, redirect the valuable pages. There's a reason why they're indexed, there's a reason why people go to them and you don't want to just lose that value. So, some off-page points. Inbound links, very, very important. People call it inbound marketing, content marketing, I mean, ultimately, links and link building, PageRank is the crux of the Google search algorithm. Larry Page, PageRank is a Stanford computer science graduate thesis, a great read, like a 50-page PDF. You can download that for free off the internet. But ultimately, Web popularity, it's about traffic but it's a popularity contest. Think of high school politics. It's like, that's the popular person, that's the popular person and that's the in-group. Well, if they're talking versus some quiet individual, who are they gonna listen to? It's the same thing on a website. Your domain authority plays, it has many different factors, good content, links, all those. But ultimately, inbound links and high value inbound links of high domain authority and high PageRank are like, hey, popular, I'm popular, look at that other popular site. Think of a lawyer, a doctor, for say, if the Mayo Clinic or the National Institute for Health, NIH.gov is pointing to Bob's law, or Bob's dot medical practice, this guy's an authority, this girl's an authority in that field, so I think that's very important. Do you have a quick question? A PageRank, like Larry Page. So just Google like PageRank, Stanford thesis. And so Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, his last name, but it's a good read. Really, really, I like that. So again, monitor links, there's this disavow tool. I've used it once in the five or six years that it's been out and it was for a link that I tried for six months to get rid of, because it was irrelevant and I thought it was hurting the page. So I'd be really careful about that. Social profiles, obviously, they're very important. Maybe there's a lot of businesses that don't see value in Facebook and Twitter and things like that and that's okay, but just simply setting up the profile, having a header image, you don't have to tweet all the time, you don't have to post all the time, once in a while is great, but that link back, even if it's not listed on your site with social links, I find it to be important. Building out your content relationships. The social media is an I scratch your back, you scratch my back kind of world. So scenario would be, we're writing a high value blog post about pay per click, let's say. And I want to get a good quote from someone because ultimately, who doesn't wanna be interviewed? Who doesn't wanna be quoted in something? Hey, you know, Alyssa, you're an expert in pay per click. Can you give me a quote from my article and can I make you look good on the web? Well, who says no to that? I've never had anyone say no to that. So what's great is you're gonna create this high value post, you're gonna have a link or you're gonna have a testimonial quote from a credible individual and then you've created this I scratch your back, you scratch my back kind of situation. You're gonna publicize it on social media, they're gonna retweet, they're gonna post, they're gonna publicize it on their website. So you just created this two way reciprocal relationship where everyone wins, you feel good, they feel good and you're ultimately gonna gain value out of it. So who doesn't want that? It's a great thing. And then submit and update relevant directories, WebMD or whatever, there's industries have these directory domains. I generally wouldn't pay for very many of them. You don't really need to buy them. But if you're gonna, there's ones for lawyers and doctors they answer questions for free and then they get badges and their account inflates in value and it doesn't cost them anything. So those are great things. People often ask me about DMOZ, that directory, it's like an old AOL directory, very, very powerful directory, I think the oldest on the web. You submit, don't worry a whole lot about it because the editors of each sections are volunteers and they're often competitors in the space. So people will say I've been submitting for years, no I never get in, I submitted two weeks ago and I'm in. It's just one of those things, it's nice to get in but don't overly stress yourself. But that's just a nice little single marker and SEO that I always like to point out. So I'll touch on content marketing. We actually wrote a book on it, it's in our fourth version. I'm gonna give two copies to the first two questions that we ask but something we really focus on is I think that's where SEO, which is a real long game, is one and is the cornerstone of a digital marketing strategy. Again, a cohesive integrated strategy of digital marketing is very, very important. We've talked about your optimized website, you're enhancing that with social, you have your content creation plan. What is that plan? Do you posting five days a week low quality articles or maybe we should post two or three days a week high value articles? We're seeing hockey stick curve growth, six and 12 months out on regular blog posts when there are 1500 words or more. Now I know people have said for years 300, 350, 500 words. Where it's at is 1500 words, 1500 to 2000. Is everyone reading their articles? Probably not but that's okay and if they are that's even better. Having calls to action throughout the page are important. We like to have three or four lines of text, maybe a graphic, maybe a video, maybe a testimonial, some social proof, calls to action all throughout the page and you have these longer scrolling pages. That's how people are viewing websites now. Again, you'd enhance that with social media, send that out in your email marketing, post about it on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, whatever networks are applicable to you. One thing with social media posting I think is often overlooked, especially if you're a web based business, you're maybe you're B2B, you could have clients all around the world. If we're looking to gain clients or market share in the East Coast or the West Coast, they look at social media at different times. So scheduling something in the prime time in your area is great but use like, I think it's like Edgar, Hootsuite, so many free tools out there. They have paid versions. The free is good for most of us. Use those free versions and repost on Twitter, repost on Facebook five times throughout the day, 24 hours a day because how much more effort does that really take? None. Maybe you get unfriended or unlike from your friends or family from so many posts but things happen. Marketing automation, a little bit higher barrier to entry with this. Things like Marketo come to mind. That's a pretty expensive platform but talk about drip email campaigns, although I didn't just say that. I don't promote that company a lot. It can kind of get sucked in and then it's hard to leave that company when we're WordPress people so we want to stick with WordPress. But yeah, marketing automation is great. If you've got a high volume lead machine and your leads are going into your CRM or Pardot's a popular one, it's an integration with Salesforce. Salesforce owns them. But ultimately you can assign your leads through your CRM. You can push them to different departments. You can automatically email them and put them into a drip campaign. You can create landing pages and embed their forms in there. So I think marketing automation is great. There's not as many tricks nowadays with SEO. There's no real shortcuts anymore. There's follow the best practices and work really hard and marketing automation is a lot of work. And then again, as I focused a lot of the time on is auditing. I think it's really, really important. There's often big misses out there that you could be the hero when you find a new client, when you point things out and then you change the trajectory of their analytics curve. You take them to a peak from the valley that they were at. So now what's your current state of affairs? What are your keyword rankings? What opportunities are out there? There's a lot of low hanging fruit. One thing that I dive really deep in when I do consulting is keyword rankings, low hanging fruit opportunity. Really quick, I'm oversimplifying this. I use various tools out there. One of them is like SEM Rush. I'll pull the keyword list. I'll sort it by ranking from one to wherever that is. Then I'll pull out the branded keywords because you should rank number one or number two for your name of your company. And then I look at things in position nine, 10, 11 and I see those are great opportunities. You're ranking for a keyword that, oh, that actually doesn't even appear on your page or it's not in the title tag or maybe you misspelled it or maybe it's only in the page once. Use that keyword, again, I'm oversimplifying this a little bit but use that keyword a couple more times. Make people look at that page and say, oh, it really is about mufflers, not mufflers in oil or not car repair in general. And I promise you you will see rankings climb on that low hanging fruit, going from position one on page two to position 10, nine or eight on page one. I mean, how many people besides SEOs like us actually go past page one or even get below the fold? So every position move, you're drastically increasing your chances of being clicked on in search. Again, fighting that three battle war to get a conversion. What are the, is the indexability of your pages? Again, these are important things to think about. You know, really maximize the value of content. It's quality over quantity. Now, if you're gonna spend an hour writing a mediocre article at 750 words, spend two and write it at 1500 words. Write one less instead. Use your time wisely and put out really dynamic, awesome content. Exploit successes, you always wanna measure successes and failures. Exploit those successes and adapt and modify and minimize the misses. You know, you gotta be nimble. I always say analyze, plan and execute and then analyze, execute, analyze, execute constantly evaluating and course correcting. Some of these, some of the key takeaways here would be improving usability, searchability and inexability, increasing conversions. Again, whether that's sales, whether that's a lead call, lead form, whatever that is, and it's a process loop. Analyze, plan and execute. It's conversion optimization. I think I touched on a lot of this stuff already. Page layout, calls to action. Is your website main color warm? Well, if your main colors are warm, your call to action button should be a cold color. It should be changing. People scan a webpage in the letter F. Top, left to right. Come down a little, left to right and then down the left side of the page. Our eyes are trained to find that anomaly. So, a bunch of cold colors, all of a sudden a hot color. Boom, that would be your call to action color. You know, what is your intended audience's action? You need to create a choreographed experience. An investor versus a B2B client versus a B2C client, they all want to see different things and you have to choreograph that user experience to make them take the action that you want them to take. Until there's a conversion, you've got no ROI. Again, analyze, course correct your plan. So again, lots of on and off page information, add in your content work, your keyword research, then you know what content battles you really need to fight. Find influences in your space, share, guest posting. Hey, Alyssa, John, Bobby, you're an expert in this field. Can you write for me? I really want to showcase your knowledge. Who says no to that? Again, guest posting, I think it's so important. I think that is the true SEO nowadays. Just a couple more, going a little long. Create that action plan. What's the short, low hanging fruit, the immediate changes, and then what's the long term plan? Slow and steady wins this SEO race. Your content and editorial calendar, both digitally and offline, maybe you're doing radio, TV, or banners. Make sure that's integrated. I've had clients who've paid thousands of dollars for a banner on the highway with a link.com slash whatever, and they never communicated with the digital team and their banner that costed thousands of dollars is going to a dead page. I mean, that's a miss. So that should be one calendar. Create a 12 month view every month, analyze, and then course correct or continue down that path. If you're not constantly testing and checking, where are you in the SEO world? As we know, we get credit for a lot of things, the first ones to be blamed, and you just always have to be on the offense with SEO. Then execute, analyze, course correct, plan, execute. I can't say that enough. Prioritize roadmap, kind of already gone over this. And then that's it, events in Chicago. Run an advanced WordPress meetup. We've got a content conference coming up in November, and thank you, I appreciate your time. Sorry for tailing along. I think we have like eight or nine minutes for some questions. Can you go back to science? Yeah, right, what was that? Oh yeah, yeah, and I'll tweet these out. So yeah, go ahead, Gloria. So bless you. I think for me, I use like a staging environment. So I always make sure if I'm working on a site, I have a backup. So I push the staging or pull a backup copy. I gave it an example of the tag, but ultimately it just needs to reside in the head. The head section, head, open tag, closed tag, slash. You just need to insert it there, and if you don't feel comfortable working in the server side of things, you can navigate to it through the admin editor. It's like it's appearance editor in the WordPress admin. I'm sure there's a tons of free plugins where Google WordPress plugin, insert code in head, and you can include it like that. Right, so I always say people who make those promises are doing something wrong, and people don't really do that anymore, there's not a whole lot of manipulations. But what I say is this is what I've done for clients in the past. Maybe I hope to have something in that vertical to show them, but the analytics don't lie. Make sure you're making use of Google Analytics notations. It's missed often on the timeline. There's a little down arrow and you just add a notation, relaunch site or optimize site, optimize these pages. And then I kind of measure, meter their expectations. Here's the low hanging fruit. This is what I would expect, rankings to increase. You have X amount of traffic on this page already. With some more calls to action, optimizing the content, adding some more relevant phrases on the page, driving them to that conversion, I would expect you to have a higher conversion rate. These are things that you have to feel comfortable saying and doing and know where your skill set is or not. If you're kind of more beginning on this, down this path, I would say things like, we're using all the best practices. There's no silver bullet in the SEO world, but here's what we do, here's how we evaluate it, and here's how we course correct and how we constantly manage it. I mean, people who do SEO work and I've done it before on a monthly, ongoing basis, retainer, whatever that is, it's really hard to show month to month gains. So this is a hard space to work in, but I just would make sure what you're promising is kind of not generic, but open-ended and just be very open and honest and transparent with what you're doing and what you expect and why. I got a book for you too, if you wanna come up and grab also. I also have business cards, I'm a big fan of the community and questions and helping, so anyone wants to email me, no strings attached, I'm happy to talk to anyone if they want, do kind of brief discussions on things. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, so I think that's, this is like that Fitbit example. So the rich snippet of 4.5 stars or product details, brand type function feature, max battery life, those are schema on the page and Google is automatically pulling that schema to populate the search result. So these sites would not have populated with this information if they didn't have that. They're doing a lot of work with recipes and things, cook time or the basic schema that you should all be using is business address, business phone number, URL, things like that. That's so the search engine can digest it well. And I haven't found a great automated process for this other than doing it by hand. I think Raven Tools makes one. I don't know if that's paid or not, but I'd also verify it. Google's got a rich snippet tool checker in like the webmaster tools free area. Just reading schema.org, you're gonna get a lot of value out of that too. So I think it's kind of a moving average. It's not very black and white. People ask this question a lot with related to LinkedIn or social networks, medium. Can I repost my blog posts or my content page on this article? The most important is that whoever wants the most value is posting it first. So if you're the main company and you're posting these pictures and then your distributors, like we have a client that distributes stuff to like Home Depot and Lowe's and stuff. So they have this same issue, but ultimately they're getting great value and they're not e-commerce, they're just kind of a brochure site. So you don't really have that issue with images. And if you wanna differentiate it, little things like making the file names unique, stuff some keywords into the file name, maybe make the alt tags unique, little things like that are more than enough. But I wouldn't think to see that as a huge duplicate content issue. Not really anymore. I mean, I think people used to think that and Twitter. I just don't like the way they look. For us, for me personally, and the way we look at things, again, I've said this so many times, you're fighting this war for people to find you in search, show up in search, and then take an action on your page. If someone gets to your website and sees a Twitter feed or a social media icon, that's a leak in the funnel. So they're gone. They're going to Facebook, they're not coming back, most likely, or Twitter. So that's why we put social media links in the footer now. And we just don't use feeds anymore. I mean, we recommend them to be taken off. I don't really see a lot of value in it. I would always lead people back to the exact page because when someone searches for something, they want that something, not your home page. Really, when you're landing on a home page, is direct traffic, a referral to the home page, or a branded search for your name, and even then you might be getting the about page. But the more clicks you make someone do, the more action you make them take, the lower the conversion rate is just statistically. So the path of least resistance. Yeah, when they sign up for the event, redirect, have home page navigation and your thank you page or something like that. There's always a way to accomplish what you're trying to do in a kind of a roundabout way. Do we have time for one more if anyone's got any questions? Oh, go ahead. Any questions? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you want to use it naturally. So when I talked about like, H tags and kind of creating like your detailed outline for page content, plan it out. Is the title tag, I think title tag, H1, things like that, I wouldn't start every sentence at the beginning of every paragraph with the keyword. Going back to like cars, you got mufflers, car repair, I'm sure there's other terms that mean muffler, you're the expert in that field. So yeah, I mean, three to five times on a page of 1,500 to 2,000 words is not too much. No, because there's just not, there's keyword stuffing, but there's no like, this is keyword stuffing, here's the line of keyword stuffing, you're on which side of it. It's really, you know, if you're writing good compelling content, you're not keyword stuffing, right? But then create a better page than them and you'll see your ranking go up. Did you have a question? Yeah, yeah, you mentioned Yoast tool, it's kind of got a wizard in there that says, you know, use more words or not used enough, use too often. So I think that that's a good kind of double check as well. Go ahead, we'll take these last two because I think that's it for us, Ty. Yeah, I mean, that's what we were, he just asked kind of a similar question. I create good compelling content, unique content and I think I kind of have a litmus test on my own of what's too much or not enough. And so there's just no definitive amount. I mean, it's usually pretty obvious when you're using too much. Last question. You can use the keyword a lot on various pages of the website, but what is each page specifically trying to rank for? Is it guitar maintenance? Is it guitar tuning? Is it guitar learning, teaching, selling? There's a great tool free, answerthepublic.com. It's a UK-based tool, so make sure to switch it to US. But if you put in keywords there, it will show you lots of prepositions and questions, how this, what that, and I find that to be really great for creating additional content. Answerthepublic.com and make sure to switch the search parameter from UK to US, it defaults to UK. Sorry, I ran over. I've got cards up here. Please don't hesitate to reach out. That guy who asked the second question, come grab your book and thank you very much.