 started. How's everybody feeling? All right. How's everybody feeling? Yeah, there we go. All right, it's Sunday afternoon. We just had lunch. We're going to wake it up a tiny bit before we get started just because I'm about to download a bunch of information in this presentation. So a couple things I want everybody to know. If you were a pre-camp, you already heard this, but I'm going to repeat it anyway. For today's presentation, you will be able to go to that link that's on the screen right now and download it. You won't remember everything I say. Don't try to. You can't write down everything I say. Don't try to. Really just absorb whatever you can. And I always feel like whatever is sticky, whatever stands out, that's something you should investigate further as a strategy that you might be able to actually implement yourself. Right? So I know this weekend we have people of all skill levels. So if there's something that you don't understand, that's okay. Save that for another day when you can dig deeper. And because I'm a teacher, this download of this presentation is basically like an e-book. It has a ton of links, a ton of stuff you can keep reading because I always like to give homework. So you have this e-book to take away later as your homework to dig in deeper to the things that really resonated with you. Right? So today's presentation is called intent plus usability plus backlinks equals SEO in 2018. And the reason I'm talking about this topic today is because I have been in search engine optimization since 2003. My very first business was an SEO company. And the first two years I was in business, I got laughed out of the room for two reasons most of the time. First was everybody said no one will pay people, especially not writers, to do stuff that has to do with Google. That's ridiculous. So anyway, ha ha, 15 years later. The second reason I got laughed out of a lot of rooms just as a side note is because I was a woman. So just saying ladies, kudos. We're still here a long time later, even though a lot of people said this wasn't our sphere of things. So why I love talking about SEO is because I'm completely self-taught. I was a biblical literature major. The only class I ever took was MS-DOS for computer classes in college. There was no internet when I was in college. So I'm just a communicator. I love communicating. I find technology fascinating. I love connecting with other people. So in order to understand search engine optimization, it's not really about having a technical background. It's about really exploring all the opportunities that you have to connect with people. And one of the things I think is going on in the search engine industry is that there's a huge shift of mindset right now. So how many of you have been to the other SEO classes this weekend? Awesome. All right, so just so you know as a professional, what Rich and David talked about was amazing and totally on point and super exciting to see people talking about it. But I think overall in our industry we have this big shift in our mindset. So what we're going to do in class today is zoom out a little bit to that 50,000 foot view and talk about some things that I think have to do with changing the way we think about search engine optimization. And if you can change your mindset about it, you're going to be better at executing an SEO campaign and actually getting results. But a lot of people are dealing with this sort of antiquated mindset around what it is. So there's a few things I want to talk about just in regards to search engine optimization and what it really is and the things that you need to be aware of that have changed in the 15 years that I've been in this career. One is web accessibility. How many of you guys have studied something along the lines of web accessibility? All right, awesome. So web accessibility and SEO, they go hand in hand. As a matter of fact, I would claim that web accessibility is actually the origin of SEO. That a lot of the things that we started to use to optimize websites for marketing and sales actually originally started out as features inside of websites and inside of Google's best practices and inside of code that would actually help people access the internet. So if you look at a website called web aim, it's web accessibility in mind. They say web accessibility and SEO are both about getting relevant content to users. Accessible content and search engine optimized content are both machine readable. Search engines and assistive technologies such as screen readers are quite similar. So really what we see is we had all these things for web accessibility, then the SEO industry developed and then we started taking all those features and making them about marketing so we started to abuse them and do things like keyword stuffing. And what we didn't realize when we were trying to trick Google into thinking we were awesome is that we were actually giving people with disabilities a horrible experience on the internet in a lot of ways. And so they kind of clashed for a long time and now we're coming back around to what I think is the right perspective, which is everybody deserves to have access to the information on the internet. And actually search engine, the opportunities that you have to better format your website for search engines are actually just to make your website better in general. There's no tricks. There's no games. There's no way to get to the top if your website sucks. So seriously, like it's not about finding the trick. If your website deserves to be at the top, it gets to the top. And if there's other better websites than yours that deserve to be there more, they get there instead. So unfortunately there's no way to game the system. Everything that we used to do to game the system is now pretty much going to get you blacklisted on Google because they're like, stop gaming the system. We don't want crappy websites at the top. We want the best websites at the top. So that challenges us all to raise our game when it comes to SEO. And I think actually create websites that are amazing and really help people. The other things you want to understand, and especially I'm going to talk a lot about Google, but they're the leader. So I think they have to be kind of talked about as the people that are forging the way forward. One of the things that they implemented in their search engine was semantic search. Essentially, semantic search basically allows the search engines to understand what words are statistically associated together and what kinds of topics are related or correlate. And they do this in all sorts of different languages. So essentially, a good example of this is over the years before 10 years ago, if I was going to optimize somebody's website for family lawyer and family attorneys, I had to create different pages that were optimized for the phrase that had attorneys in it and the phrase that had lawyers in it. Well, when semantic search became the norm, essentially the search engine is smart enough to understand that most people searching that stuff know it's the same thing to them. Attorneys, lawyers, whatever. So when you search for those phrases now, you'll see websites that have phrases like, let's say you type in family attorneys, the results in Google will actually say things like family law, family lawyers, divorce lawyers, all these related terminologies. So the algorithm got smart enough to put these things together and not just in English and lots of other languages. The next step was really machine learning. So if you don't know this, basically, artificial intelligence runs everything at this point in the game. So algorithms are AI. They're learning on their own. We don't have to teach them things anymore. And search engines aren't just Google and Yahoo and Bing. They're Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. So we basically got this core technology that's now the undertone of everything. And so we no longer have to teach the algorithms how to perform their tasks. As we search stuff on different platforms, the algorithm learns from our behavior. And it just results based on what it learns. So again, in the old days, when there was sort of a more manual approach, we could manipulate things more. But with AI involved in the situation, they're learning as they go along. And so it's just important to understand that this has really changed how we understand SEO. Because we're not dealing with a static algorithm that's just this technology that's the same every day. We deal with a technology that literally learns every second at a pace that none of us could ever keep up with. It can crunch the behavior of millions of people and draw conclusions from it instantly. So this has just dramatically changed how we do things. The next level of this is that Google has something called RankBrain. RankBrain is the name of the AI that's used to process all their search queries. And essentially, if RankBrain sees a word or a phrase that it's never seen before, doesn't really understand what it means, it makes a guess and it tries to give you things that it thinks are related based on whether or not you click or look at different things. It decides whether or not it was right. And it learns from that. And so it's constantly adjusting and filtering. And especially now that we can talk to our phones and talk to our search engines, we don't just type in one or two words. We ask Google, like, whole questions, right? That song about summer time from the 80s with the guitar. And then Google magically figures out what the heck you're talking about. What? Yeah, that's AI. It's amazing. And it's, again, completely changed the way that we view search engine optimization. One of my favorite quotes, Rand Fishkin, if you don't know him, he's one of the SEO leaders in the United States. I adore him. He's not only smart and funny, he's an amazing person if you ever get to meet him one-on-one. But he always says, if you've been stressing about how to optimize your SEO for RankBrain, here's the news. You can't. So move on. Right? Again, we're talking about something that learns the same way we learn and it can learn even faster, so we can't manipulate it. We have to sort of let that go. So a couple SEO myths that I want to actually bust. One is actual rankings are the most important metric to measure SEO success. False. Zero. No. Rankings are going to change depending on where you're standing. Literally. So when I get at the top of Google, when I'm in West Asheville versus East Asheville versus North Asheville versus South Asheville, it's not the same. There's no number one. Number one doesn't exist anymore, right? It's arbitrary. So really what we're looking at is organic search traffic. If you're doing SEO and you're doing it correctly, you should be seeing your organic search traffic go up. That's the number one metric that I care about for my clients. Now of course after that, we want that organic search traffic to convert into sales and leads, so they have to become something to be valuable. But that first sort of level of success is, are we getting more of that traffic? The second myth is SEO is a service that can be done once. We've already heard this this weekend, but of course all of us who work in this field have heard, well Sarah, can't you just SEO my site for like 40 bucks? Like no. Like it doesn't work that way. Because the algorithms are always learning and always changing, there's new businesses starting up every day and there's millions of websites being built all the time. The truth is that it's an ongoing process. It's a campaign mindset. It's where you're never going to stop. You're going to every month be working on how you improve your website. You're also never going to do your SEO in like one week. That's crazy. A lot of people that I teach DIY WordPress to, they're like, well I'm just going to spend next week working on my SEO. I'm like, okay and then next month another week and the month after that another week and 10 years from now every week between now and then. And so that's the reality. You can't look at it as something you get to wash your hands of. You don't actually get to wash your hands of it. And then SEO is a singular service a professional can provide and this is actually I'm going to thank Rich because this slide got added right before I came up here from a conversation we had earlier. SEO is no longer this like standalone static service. Right? So when you ask somebody to optimize your website and actually increase your sales or your leads and make your business grow, what you're actually asking them to do is a mixture of content marketing, public relations, blogging, email marketing, social media because all of those different services actually contribute to the authority of your website. So because authority now means so many different things, the usability of your website affects your authority. Right? So essentially because of all those things it's no longer where you just go and you're like, well I'm just going to hire somebody to do the SEO. That's if they're selling you that I'd be scared because I don't think it can work honestly and it's harsh to say that because some of my favorite people in the world operate from that mindset but again I'm going to challenge today that we have to change our mindset about it. That it's not the sort of one-off thing that we can sell by itself because it includes so much other work. Right? And we're going to go into that more as we go along. So the first thing I want to talk about is that intent. So intent is the first piece of this formula. Connect with people's motivations and intentions. How many of you got up today saw something on your phone or your computer that you didn't care about and were like, yeah! Another thing I don't give a crap about. I love it when the internet does that to me. I love seeing tons of stuff in my email like spam and things I don't need. I love seeing stuff on my Facebook that's an ad from somebody I don't like. Anybody in here enjoy that? None of us do. So nobody else on the planet does either. Right? So the goal of really making the internet a better place and I'll tell you this is one of my new things for the last year. I'm always using hashtag make the internet a better place, right? Because as humans we tend to get amazing tools and then use them for stupid stuff and I think we got the internet which is this amazing tool and we should use it for awesome things. We need to check ourselves on our motivations and part of that is understanding that people want to see the things that matter to them that meet their intentions and meet their motivation. So if you can create a website that delivers what people really want and need your website is going to do better overall in the search engines. So the first thing to think about is what is search intent? Search intent is really the reason anybody conducts a search. So do they have a question? They want an answer? Are they looking for a specific website of a company that their friend recommended? Are they searching because they want to buy a pair of shoes right now for this awesome party they're going to next week? Do they want to go and figure out what movies are playing? Do they want to go and see what the schedule is for word camp Nashville on a Sunday, right? We have an intention behind everything that we look for on Google. So to rank higher and increase your organic search traffic you have to kind of identify what the post and page are for. What is the intention that you're trying to match or connect with? Right? So the easiest thing to think about is your contact page. The intention of somebody going to your contact page is to contact you or to find out how to contact you. Right? So you're going to build a page. It's really easy for them to do that. When it comes to SEO we wouldn't expect for the contact page to show up in Google ever unless somebody was literally typing in like how to contact JB Media Institute. And then maybe my contact page arrives because it aligns with the intention of the person, right? So this is where we have to get away from any vision of keyword stuffing because we can't just have a contact page and then shove all our services keywords on there and think that Google's going to show it up for anything. Google's really just like the AIs in there going, wow I learned that you're an idiot who doesn't care about what people want. Right? So that's literally what's happening. So you don't want to do any more of that trickery where you're trying to squeeze things in where they don't belong. What is the purpose of the page? Are there keywords that align with that purpose? Do those keywords and the purpose of the page align with the intention of the people that are actually searching for stuff? Right? So a lot of the research we do in SEO is to identify this search intent. Search intent kind of comes in three buckets. Informational and Investigative, Navigational or Transactional. So these three buckets include tons of stuff but it's important to think about your audiences and at least drop them into these buckets. Sometimes people are just researching things. They want answers to their questions. They want to learn more about a topic. That's informational investigative. That's when I'm typing questions into Google. Right? That's when I'm just looking for information. I might not be ready to buy at that stage. Navigational intent means I already know your brand. I'm actually looking for you. Every morning, yesterday and this morning and on Friday because of WordCamp, every morning I've gotten up, clicked on Google and said, WordCamp Asheville schedule and it brings up that page with the schedule on it. So literally that's me doing a navigational intent. I just need this information. I know it's on the internet. Google, please go get it for me. And then transactional intent usually means that people are ready to buy or hire or something of that nature. So what we see is that these intentions are then reflected in the actual keyword phrases that people choose. Right? So if I'm ready to buy a product, I might actually type into the search engine. Like I always use the example of dresses. When I go searching for dresses to buy online, I don't just go in there and put in like women's dresses. I go in there and I'm like, women's dresses, size 20, black, sexy, cheap. And I was like, whole long list of things that go with what I'm willing to spend my money on. If I tell Google all those specifics, it will bring me a bunch of black dresses in my size that aren't that expensive, that are kind of fun and sexy. It'll literally do it for me. So this is where that intent that people have literally translates into how they talk about it. And that's why you do keyword research. Because what you're understanding through the keyword research is how people talk about things. And when you see how they talk about it, you can start to understand the intent behind what they're doing. Right? So if people use words like buy or deal or sale or any of that kind of stuff, or even sometimes they'll put in a product like, you know, sketch or sneakers online. Right? That means I'm looking to look at that product online and possibly buy it. Right? So we have to link these things together. All of this comes down to listening to the people that you're trying to connect with. Right? So I think it's incredibly important, especially for any of you that have customers already and clients already, or if you're a web designer developer and you actually already have clients and customers who are trying to reach out to the public, you have to have this conversation about really listening. Keyword research is one aspect of listening. But I think you can do really simple things. You can create a form using a form plugin on your WordPress site that you just have on a page that's maybe not open to the public in your menu, but it's something you can send to your existing customers or people who've just purchased or worked with you. You can send them a form and say, hey, answer these three questions for me. And it can be simple things. Let's say I'm redesigning a website for a client. Sometimes we'll send their top 20 customers a three-question form that just says, do you like the website? Yes or no? Is it easy to use? Yes or no? Are there things that you'd like to see on the website that aren't currently there and then we'll have like five or six features for them to choose from that we're considering adding? And even in just a small sampling of people, we start to see if there's anything people really care about. Or we start to see if the current website literally is just sucks and it's not working. If that's the case, then I feel like in our redesign, we have to put more energy into it. If people say, no, I don't like the website and no, it's not very easy to use, we're going to have to make sure that we're solving those problems when we spend time and money on that redesign. You can read your own reviews or read your own feedback from customers. So sometimes people are reviewing you on Google or Facebook or LinkedIn or any of that stuff. Sometimes that's a great way to listen. Go back and read things. Where are you winning? Where are people complaining? Don't feel bad about it. Just learn from it. Like literally, I think every business, that's what we should be doing is learning from the feedback. Sometimes it's things we can't fix. Some because of our policies or however we do things. Sometimes people are crazy. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about legit feedback. Then you can also use SurveyMonkey or Google Forms. If you want to do something even simpler, well, they'll compile all your data for you and give you some information about how people responded. Both of those things are free and they can be basically easily sent as links. Google Forms can be embedded into your WordPress site. It makes it again really easy to get people to provide their feedback. The next part is intent plus usability. Great usability creates engagement and conversions. I'm going to be honest about two things. As a web designer developer, because I'm self-taught, the first five years I was an SEO professional who knew zero about web accessibility, which I then learned was super inappropriate and wrong and I have corrected my course. I'm also somebody who didn't study usability. I studied design and development, but I didn't study all the UX stuff that's out there. Unfortunately, now we have to start looking at that. We have to start paying attention to it. Usability affects a lot of things, not just SEO. It's basically the customer experience. You need to understand the needs and the values, the abilities, the limitations, the expectations of the people who are coming to your website. It's not just about knowing what they like. It's really knowing what they like and don't like, what they're good at and not good at. Sometimes if your audience is less technical, we have to think about how that means your website has to be simpler and easier to use. If my audience is all web designers and developers, maybe I can have a more complex website, but they have more knowledge and more experience using the internet on a regular basis. Something that simple can help make decisions. I also think in order to have a really solid usable site, you need not just a deep understanding of the website goals, but the company or organizational goals. Especially as a designer developer, I can't just know what the person wants the website to do. I need to understand their business. I need to dig into that. In the very beginning of my sales process, I have to ask those questions. What do you expect the website to do? What role is it playing in your business? Is this something where you're expecting people to just go and learn about you, or are you trying to tell me that like 90% of your new customers are going to come from this website? Because if this is supposed to be the generator of all your new business, I've got a very different project on my hands. Then if you're already out there networking, shaking hands, and just telling people to go there to learn more, that's a totally different sort of purpose or role that the website's playing. There's a few things for SEO that I put on the usability checklist. Some of these, if you've been through the other classes, you've heard it. It's pretty standard. But page speed. So Google doesn't rank websites, it ranks website pages. So why don't we just like digest that? If you walked away with nothing else today, that would be my most important thing. Google does not rank your website as a whole website. It ranks every page of your website. So every page on your website is a doorway into your website. People can enter your website through the about page, through the services page, through the product pages. They don't have to go to your homepage first. So we have to get away from thinking of, well, people are going to the homepage and then through the website. Oftentimes, if your site is actually doing well on search engines, they're not entering through the homepage. I have multiple clients where a page other than their home page is the number one page. Because it's the one that ranks the best. So really, it's not just about the website speed. It's about the different pages of your website and whether or not they are loading fast. One of the things that I do oftentimes with new clients is I'll go into their analytics, I'll look at their organic search traffic, and I'll click on landing pages. And I can see which pages are getting the most organic search traffic. I'm then going to prioritize testing those pages first to see how fast they're loading. Because they are already ranking somehow, they are already getting the traffic. I want them loading as fast as possible. Okay. So I've put in some tools you can click in, click on to basically test your site speed. There's also some great articles that I've included here. If you want to learn more about this, Google's done some great studies. Mods.com, which is an excellent SEO website, also has done some great studies about what this means. So if you want to get into the technical end of this, you can. One of the things that Google, and if you're not following Think With Google, I would really suggest it. They are doing a ton of studies every week and launching them. I love their newsletter. But basically what they're seeing is as page load time goes higher and higher, the bounce rate increases. And so essentially, like the longer your page takes the load, the more people just leave. And what they've basically said is by the time you get to about eight seconds, it's almost like 20 percent, you lose 20 percent of the people for every second after three. So it's like at four seconds, you've lost 20 percent. At five seconds, you've lost 40. At six seconds, you've lost 60. At seven seconds, you've lost 80. By eight seconds, everybody was like, bye, especially on mobile devices. So this isn't going to be true of every single person's website. This is a massive average that they've created for studying different websites. But I think it's important to understand that once your pages are loading at like six seconds, eight seconds, 10 seconds, or I see a lot of sites that are loading at 12 or 15, you might not be losing all of your traffic, but you're losing a piece of the pie for sure. Like some amount of that pie is disappearing while they wait for it to load. The other thing that you can think about is that above the fold matters. So on any screen, whether it's your phone or your laptop, when you first land on a website, whatever's in the screen is what we call above the fold. I think it's incredibly important that there would be a really strong call to action in that space, and that we stop trying to do things like have sliders and carousels, also rotating stuff, and we really simplify to what is the number one priority on this page, put it directly at the top. And so you see things like the logo, the headline, the call to action, maybe one visual, and then the menu. The menu bar is going to show. So those things I like to strategize really clearly on different pages that are going to rank high or pages that we want to rank high to make sure when they hit that page, they instantly have a next step, whatever that is. I don't care if the next step is click here and it rolls you down the page to something else. Totally cool. But it's like you've got their attention in a different way once they've clicked once. Once they've clicked once, they've made a different investment, right? So it's important to get them to do that. So make sure your call to action has plenty of space, and then like I said, if it's looking great on your computer or your tablet, also look at your phone, make sure it's showing correctly on all the devices because you might need to tweak what shows on phones and tablets if it's pushing things too far down the page, right? So sometimes we have this beautiful photo, but then when I go to the phone and look at it, it's sort of skewing things. I have to make sure it's adjusted right and it looks correct. That leads me into responsiveness and mobile friendliness. So again, you can test this to see where your website's falling. Page speed obviously is built into this partially. But what I want us to think about is in the WordPress world, it's not just about your theme being responsive or mobile friendly. It's actually about whether or not the version that's showing responsively actually still prioritizes your calls to action. So a lot of times if I'm DIYing something and I put in a theme, how it looks on my laptop or my desktop is great, when I look at it on the phone, the call to action that I wanted at the top is now bumping to the bottom. And I'm like, uh-oh, well I don't want it all the way down there, right? So sometimes I really have to work on that. Some themes are going to be better at that than others. So some themes kind of have a rhythm whereas you build out the pages, like Divi's a good example, I'm sure some of you have heard of it. It does a good job sometimes. If I know how things kind of work in Divi, how it will adjust when it goes into the mobile version, right? But there's lots of themes that it's just like it's unpredictable. And so we actually have to get in there and sort of customize some things as the developer, because we want to make sure that the most important clickable items don't get pushed to the bottom from the theme default when it responds. Also think with Google's shared some things, so fewer images create more page conversions when it comes to mobile sites. So they've done a few different tests about this. The more images you add, of course, the more potential you have for like loading the page slow. But again, we don't need to overdo it. In America, our brains, especially if you're marketing in the U.S., our brains are super overloaded. We get about 8,000 marketing messages a day, and that doesn't even include like the stuff that we actually looked for and cared about. So essentially we just, it's easy to overwhelm, especially American consumers. If typically, actually, if you study neuroscience, if we see more than three things, we're like, ugh. We're like, I have to choose between five things right now? I do not have time to think about this. All right, like once we're past this, this, or that, we all just check out. So having too many competing call to actions, too many images, too many things moving, it almost instantly overwhelms people. So we have to start simplifying, I think. Like I said, I'm a big fan of getting rid of sliders and carousels because when you study usability, basically the average click-through on a moving carousel or slider is like 0.5%. That's depressing, considering the number of sites that have that built-in, that we're not getting that conversion out of something that we really want to. So it's important to think about how we can simplify those things. And then if you want to get a little technical, and again, David Zimmerman talked about this, but canonical pages. So canonical pages, if you have, let's say, a mobile version of a website and a desktop version, if you have, in WordPress especially, we run into some issues when you have archive pages, like you have category pages and you have all these things built into the blog, you really want to make sure that you've set those canonical pages so that there's no confusion with Google which page is sort of the original page. This can happen on bigger websites as well when they have like search bars and you're searching through categories, and then it brings you a page with all that category information on it based on what you searched for. Again, if we haven't said this page is the original page, it's the one that deserves the effect that deserves the authority, then we sometimes run into problems. And there's lots of different ways that you can handle this, both DIY or if you're a developer designer, it's pretty straightforward. But the key is you want to avoid any sort of duplicate URL issues. The good thing is the Google Search Console, if you're using it, will alert you to some of these things, and it actually has a setting in there for you to tell it a little information about the canonical URLs of your website. But this is something, if you're not a designer developer, you need to talk to your clients about, and I think if you are a designer developer, you need to start paying attention to this when you're building a site just to make sure these problems don't occur later. This is part of the cleanup that I do as an SEO person, usually after the person's had the website for a while, and it's not performing exactly how they wanted. They'll, I'll notice some things that are being duplicated and we just have to go in there and correct. Schema markup is another thing David Zimmerman basically discussed in his class for developers. Again, I'm not going to go into this too much because we're in an all-user session. But schema is definitely something to think about. It's basically a markup or microdata that you can add to your HTML. The Google Search Console will also help you test this if you add it. If you're really not into backend stuff, then this would be a little harder to do. I will say from a WordPress perspective, the plugins that they've created for schema, if anybody wants to tell me one that's good, please feel free. I hate all of them. I've tested five of them and I literally hated all of them. So I'm not going to suggest that you use a schema plugin for WordPress. We just don't have one that I think is actually really good at adding the more advanced stuff. I think it's better to work with a developer on that. But schema basically covers a number of different topics. I've put in the link so you can look at it. Not everybody needs to care about this in my personal opinion, especially if you have a smaller website. I don't know if you have to spend a huge amount of time worrying about this unless SEO is a top priority for you. But there are certain types of products and services that can really benefit from this. So if you have a physical location, you can benefit from this. If you're getting Google reviews, and that's a big part of your strategy, you can put information into your website so that the star ratings display on your Google result. That can really increase the click-through rate on your result. So if you're selling certain types of products, like I know if you're an author and you have a book, there's a way to add schema in about that book. If you were producing a movie, you could add schema about the movie. So again, you have to look at the checklist and really decide if it's worth implementing or not. You have to think about the size of your site and decide if it's worth implementing or not as well. And finally, just don't guess. Just test stuff. Has anybody in here ever used Hotjar? I know it's been talked about this weekend. Do you guys like it? Hotjar? Yeah, so Hotjar is my personal favorite. It works really well with WordPress. You can use it for free and do at least your home page or another important page. You don't have to pay till you're using basically, like we want to do every page of your website. But it basically does heat mapping, click-through tracking, all sorts of stuff to show you. Are people actually looking at the stuff that you think is most important? Are they engaging with the buttons that are most important? And so literally for those of us who are working in design and development, it's funny, but it's like I can prove or disprove whether my own design is good. And I have to get over whether or not I have feelings about it because it's not about me. It's about the people visiting the website. Who cares how much I like it or don't like it? I mean, unless I'm your customer and I've got like $2 million to spend to get you to your goals, pretty much I have to care about how people actually really interact with the design. So sometimes I've built websites and I come back a year later and we do some testing and I have to change stuff. And it's hard for the clients sometimes to accept that I built something that I thought was pretty good and now I'm recommending that we redo certain things. But there's no way to learn it till you learn it. Like there's no way to really see how people are reacting until they're reacting. So I think utilizing these types of things are great. Crazy Egg, Lucky Orange, PT Engine, and Clicktail. All of them are similar to Hot Jar. They all have free and paid versions. I think the decision of what you use depends on what it is that you really want to track. And also I would test out the back ends. I love Hot Jar. Not everybody thinks it's as intuitive as I do. So you might want to try Lucky Orange and it might be more intuitive to you. So there's no right or wrong on which tool I'm recommending. It's more what's going to work best for you. So finally, I want to give some attention to earned natural links, which is the third part of our formula. Intent plus usability plus links. So how many of you have engaged in keyword research, keyword content development, or something related to the content marketing piece in SEO? Can I see a bunch of hands? All right. So like a handful of people in here. How many of you have also spent time on link building or creating links to the website as well as part of your SEO strategy? Awesome. All right. Great. So most of you understand the relationship. I feel like there's an over... There's too much of a focus on the keyword content piece, just in the general public with SEO. We talk all about content marketing. Just keep pushing it out. Do your keyword research, stick them everywhere, right? But we don't really talk about the fact that if nobody links back to your website and says it's good, you've literally missed half of the formula of good SEO. So I can write like hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff with good keyword content. It can even be great content. It can be super useful and awesome. But if I don't get any links to my website, I'm never going to increase my organic search traffic. I'm just going to be like wondering why my content marketing doesn't do a better job when it comes to SEO. Now the content marketing might be driving traffic in a different way, but it's not going to be increasing my organic search traffic. And that's because if we don't increase the links, which are basically other websites slash people saying that your website is awesome by linking to it, if we don't do that, we're just missing a huge part of how Google especially defines authority, right? So we have to think about this. And I'll tell you, as an SEO professional, link building is terrible. It's the worst thing to ever have to do. It is like the longest of the long games. There's no immediate gratification. As a matter of fact, that's why I link it a lot of times in public relations. Public relations, I have a friend who's in PR and she's always like, yeah, for every 200 nos that I get, I'm lucky if I get one yes when I'm pitching stories. And I'm like, yeah, so that's basically how building links works. I can ask so many people and nobody responds and nobody cares. I can do all this work and only get a tiny result. So it has to be something that becomes really consistently built in and you're just going to be chipping away at it over time. And so there's a number of different things. We used to call it link building, but now link building is actually all this other stuff. And link building actually directly connects in to the usability piece. So not only do we want to have links where people, where it points at the website. So it used to be this big, I was like, just get as many links as you can. In the early days, you could just go buy them. You could buy like 500 links a month for $250 from a bunch of crappy link farms built in India. And it would work scarily enough. That was the frightening thing. It actually worked. And what happened was Google said, this is wrong. They were like a million links from bad link farms from companies that are basically just selling this service. So they're building a ton of websites. It wasn't that they were doing anything underhanded. They were actually doing a strategy. You had a lot of companies that were outside of the U.S., they could build a lot of websites with links that basically then when you paid them, they would put your website as a listing onto their website and they'd put it on like 10,000 pages. Right? And so you would get this massive influx of links and it would look like authority. But basically what Google said was we realized this is sort of a trick. This isn't really helping us improve the quality of what's going on. And so they basically said, not only do we want to see links that point to your website, but we want to see that people click on those links and actually go to your website. And if they go to your website, we want to see that they spend time on your website and look at multiple pages. Right? So essentially they might go to your website for an average of three minutes and they might look at four pages in that three minutes. The more that you increase that, the better. And then if people actually buy something or convert and complete a form or maybe watch a video or something that you've set up in Google Analytics as a conversion, that means that link is even more powerful. Right? Because now it's driven traffic. When the people got to your site, they liked the site and then they liked the site so much that they actually did something. So understanding what a quality link is has really changed. That's why we now say earned natural links. They're not links that you bought from a company. They're not links that you paid somebody for because paying somebody doesn't mean your website's that great. It just means that you bought them off to say that it is. So they've really kind of focused in on this. There's a number of strategies that go into building links to your website now. One is local SEL. I'm not going to dig into this too deep because again, Rich did an awesome class on this. I've put in some basic things everybody can do. So if you want to claim your Google My Business and verify your listing there, it's really valuable to do it. I've put some links in there, but Google My Business is really important for listing your company. You can show your physical address or you can say that you have a service area. I think you're going to basically compete better in the local listings if you have a physical brick-and-mortar address. So for those of you who have a storefront, an office, a salon, clients that have brick-and-mortar locations, I think Google My Business takes a top priority. If you're a home-based business or you have an office where you don't want people to do it, you can set that service area and still really communicate with Google about who your business is. And when people type in your brand name of your business, that Google local listing will come up and it will have your hours, your website, directions, click-to-call, all those things. So I think it's almost good for anybody to use. Make sure that your name, address, and the phone number are the same everywhere. Make sure that what you put on Google is the same as Facebook, is the same as your website. So I think it's almost good that Google My Business is the same as Facebook, is the same as your website. And try to make it an exact match. And then local citations are also, Google My Business is like sort of the main local citation you can do, but there's a ton of other citations you can get as well that include things like Yelp or TripAdvisor or even being listed on things like if you're a restaurant, you can be listed on things like Urban Spoon, right, which is specifically for sort of foodie people and local listings of different restaurants. All of that stuff, when you build out those profiles, you're getting links. And there are places that potentially people are going to engage as a community, right, like TripAdvisor. There's lots of people on there engaging with the listings there. So that link becomes somewhat valuable, especially if people start to click on it. I've put in some really good links to places you can go to find local citation ideas. So if you're thinking about adding this into your own work or even convincing clients to do it, you want to have like a strategy for what you're going to sell to them. And so you can't just be like, here, I'm going to charge you this and then I'm going to do your local citations. You want to really say, like, this is what I'm going to do for you because it's kind of a rabbit hole. It's endless. You could charge for 10 hours and do 20 hours of work easily. So you have to kind of make a plan and have like a package that you can sell that you think might be helpful. It also changes region to region. So even though people in the southeast are using Yelp to list their businesses, the truth is when I go to the west coast, more of the public uses Yelp on the west coast than they do on the east coast. The east coast, we use Google a lot more. We really do. We just go direct to Google for a lot of things. So a lot of times too, when you live somewhere, if you really investigate what people are using in your local region, you'll see that things are sometimes like local citations can be more popular in certain cities than others. They can be more popular in certain regions or states than others. So you'll see that the Moz list is actually separated by location, right? And so I can go in and look at locations and see what popular sites should I be looking at if I'm in that area. And then there's a few sites that'll help you do this work that are pretty affordable. Moz Local and Bright Local are my two favorites. They just actually have some tools. If you're an existing business, you can put in your name, address, and phone number. It'll scrape the entire web and find everything that's incorrect or inaccurate and come back to you and say, you have all these listings. Here's the ones that don't match. And so you can go back and make sure that everything matches correctly and that Google is seeing you consistently. Google gets really judgy when your business is listed a bunch of places and basic things like the name, address, phone number, or website link are like not the same. It's just like what kind of company has five different phone numbers? Like what kind of company has so many addresses that we don't know where to send people in the directions, right? So when they see that inconsistency, it just starts removing you from the rankings because it's confused. And it feels like your information's not accurate. That's why we want to make sure there's consistency there. Online public relations, which is funny. I teach a class on this, but let's be real. It's actually just public relations. Because if you're doing PR and you're not using digital tools, I think you're pretty out of the times. So it's really important if you're doing PR, media outreach, every newspaper, magazine, journal, blog, publication online that has a big following, if they cover your business or a client's business, ask them for the link. They do not just put the links in there because they care about how well you're doing. So you have to say, like if I have the citizen times here in Asheville, call me and say, hey Sarah, we want to interview you about a business topic. Awesome. I go do the interview as soon as we're sitting there with a reporter. I'm like, hey, can you make sure you put a link to my website in the article? Is that allowed? Can you guys do that? Because if I don't ask, they're not going to put it in their list of things to do. Some publications will say no, but they're just not going to allow it. But I want to ask every time as much as I can. And this also goes anytime I'm guest blogging, I'm being interviewed for a podcast. I'm talking to an influencer about how we can partner up and promote a client or a student, something like that. Essentially what I'm going to be doing is like, so how can we link back and forth? How can we make this happen? Because if I get a link from a really high-profile publication, that link can be worth like 50 other links at once. Right? So again, links are judged by quality. And so if I get a higher quality link, it's actually going to have more of an impact on my authority than if I just have like my cousin, you know, John, who's a plumber out in Chandler, and he's like, I'll link to you because I love you. And I'm like, cool. You know, he links to my website. That's sweet. That's not actually increasing my authority that much because he might have a website that not many people are going to. It doesn't get that much attention. It doesn't really drive traffic. It's just kind of a link that exists. Right? That doesn't have the same weight or authority. And then from there, we get into partnership and influencer marketing. And as a small business expert, I really believe in this. I really believe that when small businesses come together and work together to promote themselves and link back and forth to each other and promote each other in each other's newsletters and talk about each other on social media, we can actually together increase our own authority. So the best example I have of this is I've worked in the wedding industry a lot, a lot of wedding industry professionals. You'll have a photographer, a person who makes the cakes. You'll have somebody who organizes the wedding. You'll have somebody that's doing the dresses. You'll have somebody that's doing the flowers. You'll have a little group of those people that are kind of like networking together. They're a little partnership team. And I've seen this from everywhere, from they're all blogging about each other and linking to each other's websites. They're all featuring each other in different newsletters throughout the year. And they're all going on to each other's Facebook pages, their business pages, and liking and commenting on each other's posts to try to increase the reach and exposure all across the board. So partnership and influencer marketing are related. Anytime you're making that relationship with somebody, you can work together to push your content out more and get more authority. It's especially good in influencer marketing to find an influencer if you want to work with somebody that's on the rise, right? So they're not the top dog, because it's going to be really competitive to get their attention. But you find somebody else that's got a decent following that's really active and they're really actually consistent. So they're posting on their blog regularly. They're updating their Instagram regularly. You can sort of find those influencers that are on the up and up. And a lot of times they're really open to more partnerships, right, and linking back and forth. And you guys can rise together. You can help each other get more authority, more recognition, more traffic, and in the end grow your businesses. Video is also another opportunity that you have. If you're producing any videos on YouTube or Vimeo, I would definitely suggest you use keyword research to come up with video content ideas. You use those keyword phrases as the title and in the description when you put the video up online. You take the video embed code and you put it on a page relevant to that topic. And you even include a link in the video description on Vimeo or YouTube that points back to the page that you've optimized for that topic, right? So again, we're creating this consistency where the page is about this topic, the video is about this topic. It's on two separate year website and YouTube, but the keyword theme is consistent, right? The cool thing about YouTube is if you embed YouTube, every time somebody watches it on your website, it counts as a view on YouTube. So you're actually, the more people watch it on your website, the better the video does on YouTube, right? So you're actually seeing this like double exposure if you do it right. So use this opportunity. A lot of times I see businesses, they've done some videos and they're just like sitting on a YouTube channel that nobody goes to and the title of the video is like xyz24.mp4. And I'm like, we could use this. Why is this not on the website? And don't just make one video about your brand. Make different videos about your services. Make your FAQs into videos. Come up with some creative things where video will be really useful for people. And then just to clarify, social media doesn't actually really affect your search engine authority. There's no direct relationship between these things. Just because I have like 250,000 followers on Facebook, doesn't mean my website's doing any better in Google. But there's a few things where they correlate with each other, right? So when people on social media know my brand better, they search for me in the search engine more and I get more traffic to my website. And especially if they click over from a Facebook page and they're interested in something, they stay on my website for like five minutes, which in the internet is like a million years, right? If they stay for like five minutes, that starts to improve my authority. Although the fact that I'm on Facebook and they're coming from Facebook is not really the reason. It's just that I'm getting more traffic to the website. That traffic is staying longer. It's more deeply engaged. That improves my authority. Social media also can increase your brand recognition and lead to more PR coverage. And when those PR people come knocking, you want to ask them for that link. So I want to go ahead and open up for questions. I know we've got just a little bit of time. Is there anything specific? Yeah. Thank you.