 Hey, it's Landon McCarty with Securities and Marketing. I wanted to do a video on search engine optimization. I want to do a little bit deeper of a dive. I've done several SEO videos in the past. I had a good conversation last night with a genius SEO guy that I highly respect in the space. And we were kind of talking through some things, just kind of being marketing guys, discussing the ins and outs of what I've learned, what they've learned. And the one thing that I found was that everybody kind of has their own different flavor, but I will tell you that search engine optimization has changed vastly over the last five or six years. What I want to do is kind of give you an overview to make sure that you kind of know what search engine optimization is, how to actually go after those keywords that you want organically, and then really just kind of build towards getting an organic ranking on Google to try and get that traffic that you don't have to pay for per click or pay for by leaving the social, et cetera. So the first thing I want to do is just kind of break down what I would call like a content first. What I'm gonna say is content first, SEO strategy. Now what I mean by that is, is I believe that your website content is the chassis at which your search engine optimization is built upon, meaning I don't care how great your external links are, your reviews are, your conversions that you're getting through AdWords or whatever you're getting, that does have a factor in your domain authority. If you don't have a lot of educational, unique content pages on your website, you're not gonna ever be able to be ahead of someone that does and also has those things. So the first thing I want you to understand is that content, website content, is highly important. Now, what is website content? Well, website content would be the individual pages that are on your website. So I've done videos on the past, on this on the past, talking about foundational content versus supplemental, et cetera. But one of the things I want you to understand is that you really need to be working towards a large website from a content perspective, from a page number perspective. So one of the first things that we do whenever we go and do an analysis of a competitor and try and figure out what they're doing to get so many day in quotes a day, I know a Medicare prospect right now that's getting 200 quotes a day from their organic SEO. Now they've been doing this for years, but that's a huge number. I think they told me 2,000 policies a year is what they're getting from their organic website just passively. Those numbers are bonkers, right? So obviously, if we can understand and correct that code then it's a big, big part of it. So content is the chassis of your SEO. Now, there's other things that aren't gonna matter, but the main thing with content is that it's unique and that it's structured the correct way with Google Search Console and that your pages are structured the correct way. You've got all your page titles set up, all your meta description set up, all your H1 set up, your keyword integrations, et cetera. There's lots of ways to manage that, but just make sure that's key. So every page in your website needs to be structured correctly from the metadata perspective. And then once you get a content strategy where you're creating content, there's other things that we're all noticing as SEOs out there that are really affecting the overall organic listings, absolutely. One of those things is just videos, okay? One of the things that I am seeing more and more and more and more is that those websites that have highly integrated videos along with either transcripts below the video or actual blog posts with the video embedded, that matters to Google. If you've noticed, Google has actually pushed organic listings sometimes below the recommended videos. Why do you think they do that? Well, let's think about it for a second. If you're Googling a keyword on Google and there is a video that explains that keyword better than a website would, then would Google rather give you the video or someone randoms website? Well, of course they're gonna try and give you the video because it makes sense for the user, but it also gets Google paid. Think about it. Every eyeball that goes to YouTube to look at videos on their actual platform is a potential eyeball to advertise to for their impressions. So what Google is doing is actively moving up different queries, search queries, based on the nature of the search query. If it's very informational and there are videos that are tied to that, they're giving you those recommended videos above even the organic listings, which is crazy. Like that's something I didn't even see coming two years ago. So I've done millions and millions of dollars of search and optimization across different industries. And now that I'm in one specific industry, which is the insurance industry, I'm seeing the video is making a big difference. It really is. So that's one of the things I wanna talk through. The next thing that I wanna talk through is inbound links. Now, this is a interesting conundrum, okay? Because Google has stated that they don't want you to buy links. They don't want you to engage in link building services. But there's two main things that you gotta pay attention to when it comes to link building. One, the domain authority and the content of the website that's linking to your website matters a ton. Getting a doggy daycare website to link to your life insurance page is not gonna help in any way. Getting a medicare.gov link to your website will matter. I mean, that's huge, okay? The thing that I don't love about working link building into SEO strategies is one, unless it's a major SEO strategy, then you wanna do that. But for basic SEO strategies, linking isn't controllable or sustainable, meaning I can't guarantee myself X amount of links for X amount of budget. So it's difficult for me to really put resources towards it because I've had clients and projects where we've tried to build links and we've done like hours and hours and hours and hours of work, and we only got one or two links done. And it's hard to quantify that as a return on investment. So it's typically been something I've tried to stay away from. Not to say that inbound links aren't important, but it's something that's, it's difficult to manage. But if you can get inbound links, of course they help your domain authority, especially if that inbound link is a relevant website to the content that you're trying to drive, right? That's the key. So inbound links still work. Now I will tell you that six, seven years ago, the link wheel and link pyramids and all that stuff, that was how you did SEO. It didn't really matter about your website as long as other websites were linking to you as an authority, Google would give you that domain authority. That's not the case anymore. And just think about it. Would you rather go to a website that has a bunch of links tied to it on the backside or would you rather go to a website that's educational, informational, answers the questions that you're looking for for that particular viewing session on the internet? You know the answer to that. So does Google. So they're optimizing the back end smoke and mirrors away from search engine optimization. That's why I still believe content first strategies are highly important. The second thing that I'm noticing that's working out for SEO big time is reviews. I had a client bring this up to me yesterday and reviews, believe it or not, do provide a somewhat of a link but there's systems out there where you can actually get reviews. And reviews, let me try and explain this. Whenever you're looking at search engine optimization, you're typically doing things that are helping the search engine robots crawl your website and rank where you deserve to be ranked based on content, based on domain authority, based on all the metrics that are involved on getting on the top of the list. But you also have to tailor to your users, your actual people that are looking at your website to get information and potentially opting in in the form of a lead. So one of the things that reviews does is it really heightens the engagement of the user because it adds social proof to your overall domain authority but also the individual that's looking through that. If they see that 14 people in the last 22 days have given you positive reviews, five out of five stars, then that's absolutely gonna be a factor for the user to determine if they're gonna opt in or not. But what is interesting is, is that we're finding also that reviews actually help on the organic SEO side as well as the user experience as well. I had always really kind of been under the impression that reviews were mostly user experience and less search engine optimization. And the algorithm I'm seeing and based on what colleagues are telling me is that they're actually merging the two together. So, but what really ends up being the truth of search engine optimization is really just building a resource for people to educate themselves on, whether it's reviews, content, videos, other websites that are linking to it as an authority as well. That is how you win the game in 2019, almost 2020. So with a good search engine optimization plan, you shouldn't like never, ever, ever do those 199 SEO bullcrap deals. All they're doing is they're taking 200 bucks a month for five months until you realize it's not working and then you cut it, but you've paid them $1,000 and you just cut your losses, do not do that. To do SEO the right way in 2019, you have to have unique custom content written by human beings. You can't even really spend content. You can't figure out a way to bring in a bunch of content that's already written, not gonna work, it's gotta be custom and unique. You gotta try and shoot and work towards videos and you gotta try to get to the point where you're actually soliciting reviews, whether that's through an email sort of acquisition after the customer signs up with you. Hey, how did we do? Would you mind filling out this review platform? Whatever, even going into some sort of paid service that would help your reviews, would be something that you could think about to help your overall organic SEO. So those are the three things that I feel like have been supplementing the content first, but I really believe that your website content is the chassis that your SEO is built on. And as long as you can focus on those three things, you don't have to do all of these three also by the way. This is something that you have to do usually internally. It's difficult to have an external company produce videos for you because it's usually your content that needs to be on that video. But typically this is where the SEO company can thrive. That's what we focus on. A lot of unique custom content. And then coach on the reviews, coach on the inbound links, coach on the videos and just kind of provide some insight on what that looks like. So we obviously do SEO for insurance only. The interesting part about SEO is if it's content first, that means you need to know what the heck you're talking about Medicare. We spend all day long talking Medicare, final expense, life insurance, health insurance, long-term care, disability, all these insurance is all we do. So our copywriters only write for insurance so we kind of know what infographics to produce, what content to write, et cetera. So if anybody hires an unspecialized marketing agency anymore, you're silly because you need to be starting to find just like lawyers are doing. You don't go find a general attorney if you're a criminal case. You go find a criminal lawyer. Well, I'm starting to actually refer other industries to my colleagues and they're starting to refer insurance people to me because digital marketing is becoming such a huge part of people's marketing budget. And I used to own a Jack of all trades marketing agency. And if I was competing with myself 10 months ago, I today would just, I laugh at how I would approach an insurance prospect because it's so different than how the general world operates from a digital marketing perspective. Please, please, please. Even if you don't hire security marketing if you're insurance, hire someone that specializes in insurance marketing because it's a big difference between how the general, the general world markets, that's the truth. So I hope you guys found some value out of this content. I try to kind of have these videos be very educational focused. My goal, I've always said this if you guys follow our content, I wanna help you guys understand what is North. There's so much garbage information out there that is just like people chasing rabbit trails that just don't even make sense. People that aren't experts in anything trying to give advice, it's just bonkers. So what I hope this video can do is give you understanding of how SEO works in 2019. And you know what guys, this is gonna change in six months also. It's gonna work more differently every six months Google updates, every more than six months Google's updating how they are tracking websites, et cetera. So I would highly encourage you guys to take this model, run with it and really don't listen to any of the buy links and buy this or blah, blah, blah, that just doesn't really work anymore. It's gotta be content first, you need content. And in order to even get to that point you gotta have a website, which we also can build as well. So hope you guys found value in this today and we'll see you again on the next time.