Transcript
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Hello, my name is Cody Wise, my company is sharp tech media. And this is the Small Business digital marketing and branding trends podcast episode three. And today I wanted to talk about small businesses and how small businesses can get more traffic and improve their SEO, we get asked a lot by by small businesses that either don't have a big budget to hire us or maybe are just starting out, but you know, definitely want to work with us. It's just not the right time. And we kind of get asked like, what can I do, you know, on my own to kind of get started on increasing the traffic to my site and, you know, starting to claim my SEO footprint and get going with some SEO tactics that I can do on my own and what we always tell our clients is content. You know, you can always build more content on your website and supporting content. is really is really valuable and is often overlooked by small businesses so on. By supporting content, I mean, content that doesn't necessarily isn't necessarily your money pages, like on any website, you're going to have a variety of pages that you either are designed to get you calls are designed for the customer to buy something from you give you their information, name and email, or do some sort of other action that leads to revenue. Ultimately, ultimately, that's why we have websites, as small business owners, this is to help help us build revenue. But aside from these money pages, is what we call them in the industry. You also need supporting content and that's that's content that's helpful to your user. That helps them make informed decisions and helps educate them about your product and service and helps them better understand why they need you. And a lot of times, clients tell us well, you know, I don't really know what to do. In what content to make, and what I always recommend, is take 60 minutes, take a deep dive into your niche as if you were a beginner, like go and go to Google and type the most broad terms that your customers might search that will give an overview of your industry. So say, say you were, for instance or realtor. You know, you might go into Google, if you're looking for additional contents or on your site, you might look like how do I how to buy a house or buying buying a house, a really broad, not very specific search query. And what's happened is the first 10 results here you're gonna see some ads up top but really the first 10 main results you're going to see are going to be related to that phrase, and you will probably get some good tips, you know, some some checklists, some things that other people have written about, you know the topic about buying a house but what you're also going to get is just absolute gold at the bottom of the search results. And it's these bunch of keywords at the bottom of Google pages. And they're called suggested searches. And basically, these are other keywords that other people related to this search have searched. So this is important for a couple of reasons. First off,
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these other
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terms that are at the bottom of the page might be things that you haven't thought of that are related to your your industry or niche. And the other thing that's important about that is these are things that people are actually searching. If people weren't searching them, they wouldn't be asset suggested search. So it can oftentimes, you know, taking 60 minutes and making these broad searches and then clicking the suggested results.
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And then also,
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you know, examining other websites in your niche you never want to like plagiarize content or steal content, but it can oftentimes be an inspiration to to build content of your own and can oftentimes, talk about points in your niche that you points In angles that you never thought of, and it can, it can really help you build a lot of content in a hurry. And it doesn't, it doesn't take much time to get an exhaustive list of content, I mean 60 minutes, it doesn't sound like it doesn't sound like much time. But when you're actually like doing a search and going down the
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rabbit hole of,
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of searching, you know, these broad terms and then checking each of the related searches. And then each of those related searches are going to have additional related terms and searches. You can get a good list of 100 or more topic ideas in that 60 minutes. And our clients who have done the exercise frequently tell us wow, you know, I got 50 topics or I got 100 topics and, you know, the thing to remember is in the industry that you're in, you're likely what we call topic blind. You you work in it every
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day. You know, you know what, like the back of your hand
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and things that Your lay person may search will seem like so ridiculous to you. Like, I know there's there's plenty of times when we're working on when we're working on like user interface projects for clients. And we will have the page laid out what I what I feel is perfectly. And we'll have all the inputs, all the forums, everything like that. But occasionally, there will be a button that seems like to everybody that has looked at it. You know, me, my team, our UI people. Everyone that has looked at it, it seems obvious what the next step is, it's to click this button. But there have been times where we haven't actually said click here, and people don't actually click the button, something that anybody in the industry, or anybody who does this for a living, it looks at this sort of stuff, knows that the intended action is to click this button to go to the next step. But because we're dealing with people that you know, are or lay people, and they're, you know, they're not experts. In what you're doing, oftentimes they don't know what, what the next step is, or they don't know these topics.
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And
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we see that a lot in a lot of professional services. We have some. We have some accountant clients, we have some real estate clients. And we have clients in a few other professional industries that, you know, we've kind of once they've done this exercise, they've been like, yeah, you know, I was really topic blind, because I'm in the trenches every day like, I don't, I don't think like a lay person should think searching my services. And that's something that is really important to kind of get into that mindset so that you can really maximize the traffic you get to your site. It's not, it's not always what you think people are searching, you have to actually get in the mindset of the people searching for your business. And another exercise that is really helpful that I learned several years ago, and we kind of we kind of call it around the office. We kind of call it asking old Or a young person. And what it is I was working on a project for a client, I wanted to make sure that it was optimized
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for
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people actually coming to this client's office. And I thought the page was great and everything. And then I just figured I got this crazy idea. I was like, Well, I'm gonna ask my mom, you know, if she was because it was, it was a client in an industry that, you know, she was to kind of the target audience, and I kind of asked
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her, you know, what's, what would you search
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if you were interested in in potentially using this client services? And the first thing she said to me was, was interesting. She said, Well, well, you know, if I was interested in actually ready to hire him, you know, how do I get to? And that actual phrase, you know, it wasn't, wasn't directions to or, you know, directions to the office. It was how do I get to Well, sure enough, when I actually want to actually searched that in Google, you know, Google translated that to directions to but it was a Really interesting thing because it was
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the term
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was just obvious to her, like, how do I get to something that she would Google. But I had never thought of people searching that way. It was a completely different, different style of searching and it was more conversational. And this this was several years ago. Now, it's extremely important to be conversational in your content because of the emergence of voice search. I mean, there's a lot of topics where the more conversational you are in your content, the better you're going to rank for for voice searches, the better you're going to rank for. A lot of the newer query related features that Google has a lot of the people also ask and, and the questions that pop up a lot of those can be directly influenced by having conversational
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content
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and answering questions. You know, like if you were, say, for instance, you were a web designer and, you know, one of the common questions, we get How much does the website cost? I mean, the The answer is, is that it varies. But having that in having that in a piece of content, how much does the website cost and then answering it, we've actually been able to pop up in the search for several different queries,
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with that exact
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with that exact method, just being conversational in your content, it's,
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it's just important that you get you get into the
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mind of the searcher, because the searcher is ultimately the reason we have websites. And the reason we have all this content, I think that's something that small business owners kind of lose sight of, is you're not really making the site for you, you're making the site for your end user, and ultimately to make revenue off off your end user. And so actually taking a look at at different topics and then also different angles. Of those topics, like going back to the you know buying a house or how to buy House example. You know, there's several different I mean, if you if you Google that there's several different things that will pop up in the suggested searches there is you know types of mortgages there is what is closing costs, there is a number I searched it not too long ago, there's a number of things that will pop up in the, in the suggested keywords. These are all topics that you can make entire sections of your site around, I mean, you can have an entire section of your site around mortgages. If you are a realtor, you know how to qualify for a mortgage, you know, what you should what type of mortgages are out there, you know, an entire section about closing costs and entire section that covers escrow. You could have an entire section that covers home inspections. And then within those sections, you could have, you know, probably five or 10 or 15, maybe 20 articles, each of those sections. And then I mean, you got you got enough content to really start branching out and really start Start getting more traffic because, you know, you may not in each of these sub sections of your website, they may not give you 10,000 visitors a month. But once you start, you know, pulling in an extra 50 visitors here, an extra 200 over here and you, you start putting out this content, it starts ranking pretty soon you can start looking at a serious amount of additional traffic coming to your site and any additional traffic is is a huge bonus. And it's something that you can do. I mean, there's there's an entire you could spend, you know, a month learning technically, how to SEO and optimize your content to rank as high as it possibly can in the search engines. It's there's a huge industry that covers technical SEO. But the fact is, is is for a lot of our clients and a lot of them who have come to us with small budgets, and have not really been ready to hire our services, but ask us you know what they can do when we tell them you know, go out and And set up a bunch of content and really kind of explore your niche, a lot of them have come back and their stuff eventually ranks just because they have so much of it. It's well themed, you know, they go into each one of those sections of, of searches and do you know 510 15 articles on it. And it's it's stuff that they can literally talk about all day long. I mean, they know these topics inside now. So writing the content, or having a writer write it is no problem. Getting the content out there is the most important you can always go back and fine tune and SEO it and everything later on, but actually getting the content getting it up on your site. And progressing that way will get you closer to where you want to be in terms of getting more traffic and improving your SEO. And it's something that you can do right away. I mean, you don't you don't need a big budget. If you want to cut out all the cost. Just write the content yourself. Post it on your website. I mean, it's it's easy nowadays because most websites are Content Management, have content management built in either WordPress or another content management system. And so most business owners can publish the content and just kind of be on their way. And it's something that definitely at the beginning of your SEO journeys, we highly recommend. And that's, that's really kind of what I wanted to cover today is just some some simple tips, and some simple ways to really dig into your niche as a lay person, and really get a lot of ground covered. Because, you know, for every website that builds a lot of supporting content, there's 10, others who just have the basics, you know, just have a homepage about contact, and then their services pages, and that's all they've done. That's it. So the more content you build, I mean, in the eyes of Google, if all things are created equal, and you're the same age you have, you know, same amount of exposure and backlinks everything and you got 10 times the content of this other sight, you're going to ultimately rank higher.
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So might as well might as well get started early.
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And give yourself the best chance of ranking in the future and get a bunch of traffic in the meantime. And yeah, I think that basically basically covers it. I hope there was some good tips and that you got something out of today's episode. I think will I think we'll wrap it up there and I look forward to having you listen to the next episode. Bye for now.
