Search Engine Optimization Should be a Priority for Every Business, with Tim Stoddart

This week, Copyblogger partners Darrell Vesterfelt and Tim Stoddart returned to talk about the importance of SEO and opportunities for today’s content marketers.

In this conversation, Darrell and Tim get back-to-basics to discuss the power behind search for businesses.

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In this episode, Darrell and Tim talked about:

• Why it’s a mistake to ignore the basics of SEO
• The importance of establishing yourself as an authority
• How to set yourself apart from your competition through positioning
• Tools that any good SEO needs to utilize
• 3 fundamental things you can do to make Google love your website
• Commonly undervalued strategies for building your backlink profile
• Keys to proper site and content structure for optimal SEO
• Location-based search and Google My Business for beginners
• And a teaser for a free SEO training by Copyblogger

The Show Notes

• Copyblogger’s Free SEO Training
• Backlink0 Article
• Darrell on Twitter
• Tim on Twitter

Tools Mentioned:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Google My Business
• SEM Rush (7-day Pro Trial)
• Ahrefs
• Yoast

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Read the Transcript

Darrell V.:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Copyblogger podcast. This is Darrell Vesterfelt, and today, I’m super excited that we have Tim Stoddard, my partner in Copyblogger, and we’re going to be talking SEO today. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Stoddart:

Thanks, Darrell. Glad to be here. Hey, everybody.

Darrell V.:

So, Tim, before I met you, we met in the fall of 2019, SEO was something that I had put at the very bottom of my strategy list. It was something that I wasn’t thinking about for myself, for my business, for Copyblogger, for my agency clients. It was just something I wasn’t thinking about anymore. I was thinking about moving into these new mediums, different social media platforms, going deeper into email segmentation. And the more that I’ve talked to you, the more I’ve realized that was a massive mistake. And I think that I’ve moved away from SEO because it just felt like an antiquated way, an antiquated strategy, almost.

And when I’ve met you, I have been schooled very much so that that was a huge mistake. And so, I’m really excited because SEO seems to be a topic that isn’t talked about as much as it used to be. And I think it’s something that’s really, really important and something that we, at Copyblogger, are going to be focusing on very specifically, something in my agency I’m going to be focusing on very specifically. And it’s something that I know that you think about every single day. So, tell me why that was a mistake to stop thinking about SEO over the last five years.

Tim Stoddart:

Well, first, I would say that you certainly aren’t the only person to be in that mindset the way the internet marketing is so quick to change, and you have to always be adapting to new strategies. It’s very easy to get pulled this way and pull that way and see people having success with this new social media platform or this new cutting-edge strategy. But the biggest reason that people need to take search and SEO seriously is really just a numbers game. Last time, I checked like 70 something percent of all traffic that goes to websites comes from Google. The power behind Google and the power behind search is just more, it’s just bigger. There’s more traffic there. The numbers are pretty clear about that.

So, aside from all the higher end things that you and I have talked about with things that we’re going to talk and get into like search intent and how understanding the behavior of a traffic and have a such a high correlation between the conversion rates, even before we get into all that, it’s just a numbers game. Google has the most traffic. It’s the biggest, most powerful company that there is. And if you can establish yourself as an authority on Google to the point where Google trusts you enough to send their users to you for answers, it can completely transform your business. And I don’t say that in trying to hype it up, I say it from personal experience. I’ve seen many businesses completely transform overnight simply by doing a few critical things well to put themselves in a position to own some of that search traffic.

Darrell V.:

Okay, so let’s start there, some of the basics. What are some of those things that we should be focusing on from just a basic ground level as we’re thinking about search and SEO for our businesses?

Tim Stoddart:

This is a great question to start because where people want to start is that they just want to get started working, right? They want to start putting content on their website, they want to… It’s very exciting to think about how much search traffic can come to your website. It can grow your business. But before you even do that, the place to start truly is with research. One of the fundamental aspects of search, and one of the messages that I’m really excited about to teach people through the audience, through Copyblogger, is the importance of defining who it is exactly that you are targeting.

So, in the eyes of Google, Google doesn’t necessarily like big websites that are about everything. What Google likes is people that specialize in certain industries and certain topics, whatever the case may be. The best way to establish yourself as an authority in search engines is to pick something that you are going to say, “I am the guy, I am the gal that is the authority in this topic.” So, that starts us off of at a pretty broad generalization. And the finer tuned we can be within our business, the better. So, what does that mean? If we get even more specific, how can we specify what it is that we’re trying to do? We can do it through location.

Let’s make an example that you’re a web designer or you’re a freelance photographer. Well, what are you going to try to rank number one for the keyword freelance photographer? That’s very, very difficult. But using our city as an example, you can put yourself in a position where you try to rank number one, number two, number three in Google for freelance photographer in Nashville. Maybe even freelance photographer in East Nashville get even more specific because the reality is that there’s enough people just in my neighborhood in East Nashville that are looking for freelance photographers every day, that if you can, again, put yourself in that position to be an authority, you can use your phone and the clients that you will get through phone calls and through inbound leads on your website, they will definitely come in.

As I said in the beginning, knowing exactly what your audiences and exactly the people that you’re trying to target, if you can define that in as specific medium as possible and you talk to those people and those people only, the leads and the phone calls and the new business will quite literally just start pouring into your business.

Darrell V.:

Okay, so I like the idea of location. What other ways can I get specific or set myself out? And I think what we’re talking about here is like drilling down in niche even further than just saying a specific business type. How else can I get more specific?

Tim Stoddart:

Well, the other common example is through industry. So, using myself as an example, and this, again, is a very specific example. But when I started my own marketing agency, we worked very specifically within a healthcare industry. So, we didn’t want to just be a marketing company that would work with any client. We decided from the very beginning that there was a particular clientele that we were going to work with.

So, I spent about a year, maybe even two years, writing this content to go after this specific client. We’ve worked with behavioral health centers, we’ve worked with hospitals, we’ve worked with a couple STEM cell clinics and physical therapists. So, if you use that example, now what we’re doing is we are establishing ourselves as experts in healthcare marketing as opposed to trying to establish ourselves as experts in just internet marketing. Because that’s, using that example particularly, the industry of internet marketing is one of the most competitive keywords in the world basically.

How many searches for internet marketer are performed a day? Thousands, at least. But if you can define yourself and your identity and your business into a very particular niche industry, then, again, you’re starting to find battles that you can win. You can compete against other agencies that are going against a similar niche as opposed to trying to go against everybody.

So, the real key summarizing this whole thing is the place to get started is to just define your audience. Are you going to try to be the best freelancer in a particular location, the best company in a particular niche industry? All of those decisions are very, very important to make and to plan before you actually get started on facilitating the work.

Darrell V.:

One thing I think about when you think about niching down, whether you’re a freelancer, or an agency, an individual person, or you’re just writing about a particular topic, is the downtown theory. So, I am a blank down one more. I am a blank who blanks. I am a blank who blanks for.

And that downtown strategy, you can get really clear about understanding your niche and getting a lot more specific when you do that downtown strategy. It’s just another simple way of like, you’ve got to go two layers down to understand, to get really good understanding of what your niche might be in a particular market.

Tim Stoddart:

I like that. I never heard of that.

Darrell V.:

Okay. So now, we’ve got an idea of the audience, or at least like how we’re going to position ourselves for the audience, where do we go next? How do we know what to do next or where to go from there? How do we know that we’ve selected even maybe a good niche or audience? It’s going to be worth our time because I can maybe imagine that… I get really excited about understanding a specific niche that I want to position myself to, but maybe it’s not even worth going into because there’s not enough searches or not enough traffic on a search for what I’m thinking. Is there a thing that we do next to understand if what we’ve decided on even works or matters?

Tim Stoddart:

Absolutely. So, if the first step that we took was conceptualizing, taking a step back and making decisions on what we’re trying to do, the next step would be to practically perform some of that research. So, it’s very difficult to be a good SEO without some particular web tools. We’ll go through some of those tools. I’ll give some of the pros and cons in each.

The first two that any websites should have, regardless of if there are SEOs or not, is just Google Analytics and hook up Google Search Console. It used to be called Webmaster Tools. Now, we call it Search Console. So, Google Analytics will give you a basic understanding of your traffic, the user behavior of your website. It’ll give you a good understanding of things like time on site. It’ll specify how people interact with your site.

But Google Search Console will be able to identify some of the relationships between how people got to your site in the first place. So, that’ll tell you what the keywords are that they got. That’ll tell you if there’s any broken links on your website. Because things like site health and clean link structure is a point ranking factor for Google. Google Search Console will tell you things like if there’s any 404 Errors. All of this stuff is really important to know and to understand.

So, the first two tools I would definitely recommend is Google Analytics and Google Search Console. They’re free. Google tells you basically, I would say, 70% of the stuff you need to know in order to make good decisions on what kind of keywords you’re going after.

The second two tools I would personally recommend, and there’s a lot of them so these are just the ones that I’m most comfortable with, but I’m happy to give guidance and advice on other tools, are S-E-M-rush or SEMrush. So, quite literally the letters, S-E-M and then rush.com. And another one called A-H-refs.com. So that’s A-H-R-E-F-S.com. Those will give you a deeper understanding.

So, for instance, in SEMrush, I can type in a keyword and I can see how many searches a month people insert that keyword into Google for. I can also see what kind of websites currently are ranking for a particular keyword. You can see things like what kind of keywords does my website rank for now? And you can also see the competition of keywords. So, again, using the specificity of an example, the more specific you get, sometimes we call it long tail, the more long tail you get with a keyword, the less competition there’s going to be. So, with SEMrush, you can make decisions on, “Okay, here’s a keyword that makes sense. Is there enough search traffic from that keyword for me to actually spend the time to write content around this keyword?”

Darrell V.:

How do I know what enough is? I like that you’re saying that’s like, “I’ll know what enough is,” but give me some ideas of what would be worth my time when I’m doing a keyword search to know if it’s worth my time to keep exploring there, or if it’s too small and I should look for something different.

Tim Stoddart:

Well, really great question because that’s going to depend from business to business. So, anything over 50 searches a month, I think, is worth considering. Anything less than that, you might get a hit to your website every now and then, which in the scope of a year might turn into some business. My general rule of thumb is if it’s got 50 searches a month, I’ll consider going after it but I wouldn’t go after anything more than that or less than that. Excuse me.

Darrell V.:

Awesome. You’re saying all these tools, Google Analytics, Search Console, SEMrush, which I’ve used a little bit before, I think they have a free account or a very inexpensive account where you can do limited number of searches, Ahrefs. So, how do I use this tool if I have my niche? How do I use these tools to understand this next idea if this niche or keyword that I’m searching is enough? Can you go a little bit more specific about what I should be doing with these tools if I’m just getting started?

Tim Stoddart:

Absolutely. So, if we’re getting into what should we be doing, we need to give a little bit of a crash course on how exactly Google works. So, without getting too complicated, because SEOs have a bad habit of making it too complicated, there’s three things that I say we need to do. The first one is site structure. So, that simply means is it easy for people to get to the content on your website? And if it’s easy for people to get through all the pages on your website, it’s easy for Google because Google has little robots that crawl websites. So, if your web pages are too deep, then that means that people can’t find them easily and that the information is not accessible. So, side structure is important.

Number two is good content. You’ve got to remember people go to Google because they have a problem that they need an answer to. That’s really the fundamental reason that people go to Google. They have a problem and they want to solve it. So, if the content that you write is written in a way and format it in a way that you can easily solve people’s problems, then Google will reward you with that because their priority is to solve their users’ problems. And if your content does that, then obviously they’re going to put you at the top.

And then, the third criteria is backlinks. And we hear about backlinks a lot, but a lot of people still have questions about what a backlink is. So, the best way that I have found to define what a backlink is, is it’s a source. When we were all in high school or college and you had to write papers, you had to source your material, you had to source where you found particular facts or particular quotes from, and a backlink is really like that.

So, if I’m writing a piece of content on my page and I find a statistic that I pulled from another website, then I want to link that page, which I found the statistic on my piece of content so that I am sourcing where I’ve found that information from. So, when Google sees all the links that go to our page, they say to themselves, “Wow, this person wrote content that was so good other people use that to source their own information.” And so, the more links you have pointing to your site, the more Google sees you as an authority because you wouldn’t get linked to unless you were writing things that was worth being cited.

So, those three criteria are the fundamental aspects of SEO, good site structure, good content, good backlinks. And if you can use the tools to figure out exactly how to format your website in that way, that’s how you will win. That’s how Google will reward you.

Darrell V.:

That’s really interesting about the backlinks. I’ve never thought about it that way before, Tim. How do we go about getting backlinks to our site, especially if we’re getting started? I don’t even know where to begin. I think back in the day when I first started blogging, I would do guest posts on other people’s sites. Are there other strategies to think about when building a backlink structure profile for my site?

Tim Stoddart:

Absolutely. And backlinks are definitely the next step in this conversation because I mentioned SEMrush and personally, again, this is just my preference. I’m sure other people have different preferences, but I like to use SEMrush. It’s more of a keyword research tool and I like to use Ahrefs as more of a backlink research tool.

So, getting backlinks is an art as much as just a science. It’s hard to compare it to things like advertising where you’re just studying the data and then making decisions. With backlinks, there is an aspect of like salesmanship, I would call it, where if you see an opportunity, you just have to talk to people and network and figure out how to get a link on a site.

But some easy steps that I would suggest to someone just getting started is if you have a competitor, let’s use the example of you’re a freelance photographer in Nashville. If there’s a competitor who’s also a freelance photographer in Nashville and you Google them and they’re coming up higher than you, well, I would research your competitor’s website in Ahrefs. I would look to the websites that are linking to your competitor and then I would just reach out to them, send them emails, give them phone calls, see if there’s a way that you can get mentioned on their site. Maybe some of those links include local business directories, maybe some of those links include local media outlets.

I know Nashville has five or six local event websites where they mentioned local businesses and they write stories about the people and the restaurants and what’s going on in the town. You can definitely reach out to those media outlets, see if they’ll write a story about you. So, you have to conceptualize this in a way.

The trick is to make it so that the links are natural. If you start trying to manipulate Google into getting links so that can mean anything from submitting spam links in comments of blogs. If anybody has a blog reading this, I’m sure you know how many of those spam comments come in with these very, very strange links to them, that would get you penalized in Google’s eyes doing things like that.

You want to build your backlink profile naturally. You want to build it in a way that would appear like this media outlet is writing a story about this photographer because that is a good story for the media outlet to present to their audience. If it comes back as unnatural, Google is really, really smart and their algorithm is very intuitive, so they’ll know that you’re trying to trick them.

But the first step that I always tell people, again, just summarizing, is if in SEMrush you have a good list of keywords that you want to go after, the next step would be to research your competition, see what websites have linked to them, have written stories about them, and then just approach them, approach them directly, and try to get links from those people as well.

Darrell V.:

Interesting. I think it’s so simple. I’m even struggling to think of what to say to that. It seems so simple, like, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense.” Are things like guest posting and being on other people’s podcasts, is that still a strategy that works for getting backlinks?

Tim Stoddart:

Yeah, podcasts are absolutely a great strategy. And guest posting is still a great strategy as well. So Matt Cutts, he’s basically the head of spam at Google. His job is to protect Google to make sure that they’re always presenting the most relevant information. He has sent out tweets and press releases for, I don’t know, it must be the last six years about how guest posting is a bad thing.

But what we’ve seen is that when you’re consistently guest posting and your links aren’t contextual, but rather you just have a ton of posts where your link is in the author bio, I would be apprehensive to do too much of that. So, there’s a little push-pull there because there’s other benefits to guest posting on other websites aside from getting your link in the author bio. But that’s one of the things that can get you in trouble as well, trying to make sure your link is in the text of whatever guest posts you wrote. So, yeah, guest posting is definitely still something that I recommend. However, be mindful that you’re doing it for other reasons aside from just getting the backlink.

Podcasts are a great way, especially in the show notes because for that same reason. When we publish podcasts on a blog, the show notes are usually within their contextual, they’re within the body of the content. Some other great suggestions would be local business directories. They still really, really work. Some of them are spammy, so use your judgment. I mean, your Boulder is a great example, the site that Brian has mentioned a couple of times. That’s a local business directory that has great information and great resources. So, if your town and your neighborhood has a directory like that, I would approach them as well and try to get a link.

Darrell V.:

Super interesting. How do we know if a business directory is spammy or not?

Tim Stoddart:

Another great question. So, my favorite tool for spam is Moz. It’s M-O-Z. They have a free extension on Google Chrome, it’s called the MozBar. What it does is every time you go to a website, you can click on the Chrome extension and it’ll tell you things like the domain authority, which is basically a metric that we use to determine how many links are pointing to that site. It’ll tell you the page authority, which is a metric that we use to determine how many backlinks are pointing to the specific page you’re looking at. And then it’ll also give you a spam score.

If there’s a spam score of like 1, I would still be a little wary. But if a spam score of 1, I would use my judgment and see, and try to determine if it’s a real person actually running that website as opposed to just a bunch of bots filling in information to try to trick the search engines.

But ultimately, the answer to that question is I prefer to use the MozBar. Their spam score is pretty accurate and does it very quick. You can just click it right away and it’ll tell you what the score is.

Darrell V.:

Interesting. Okay. So, we’ve talked about understanding the niche, researching, defining down into our downtown industry strategy, our location. We’ve talked about some of the web tools and understanding the amount of search that’s happening around those keywords. We’ve talked about backlinks.

I want to dive deeper into site structure because that’s one of the three things that you had mentioned too that we haven’t talked more about. But what do I need to be thinking about other than what you had said previously of, if it’s easy for a person to find and go through your site and browse through your site, that Google will also be easy. Is there anything else we need to think through from a site structure standpoint that we should either change about our site or think about as we’re architecting our site?

Tim Stoddart:

Yes. This can get pretty abstract so I’m going to keep it simple. The most important thing that I would talk about with site structure is to understand that the links on your navbar, the pages on your navigation bar, and the pages on your footer, those are site wide. So, in the same way that we have a backlink, which is a link from someone else’s website that points to your website, internal links are also important.

So, an internal link is, for instance, if I write a blog post and I link to another blog post on my own website, I’m linking internally to my own website. So, when you think of it in that way, the pages that are on your navigation bar, those are internal links that are on every single page of the site.

So, let’s imagine that your website has 100 pages and you have a page on your navbar, that is going to have 100 internal links pointing to it, and that’s an important factor as well. Even within your own website, you have a lot of links pointing to a specific page, Google is going to recognize that and they’re going to say like, “Okay, we’re funneling all this traffic to this one page through internal links. This must have some relevancy.”

So, the easiest tip I would give for someone that’s trying to incorporate site structure into SEO is think of what your money pages, think of your sales page. Think of the page that everyone’s going to come to when they want to buy your product, when they want to call you and hire you for a service. Maybe that’s an about page, maybe that’s a page that you designated using this photography example again, maybe that’s the page where you SEO’ed as best as you can for freelance photographer in Nashville, and put that page on your navigation bar because you’re going to tell Google that this is one of the most important pages on your site. And if you do that, if you do it right, you’ll boost that page up a little bit more and your conversions will increase as well because that’s, again, as we call it, that’s your money page. That’s where people are coming to because they actually need your services.

Darrell V.:

That’s super interesting. So, talk about content on site too. Is there anything that I need to think about as I’m writing content or creating content for these big SEO pages, these money pages, or are there just blog and random content on the site? What position or what role does content play in all of this?

Tim Stoddart:

Content plays a huge role. We are going to… I don’t know if we’ve announced it yet, so this might be a good time, but I’m going to do a free SEO workshop on on-page content, how to format your content properly on your website so that it’s most appealing to Google. It can get pretty in depth if anybody’s interested.

Brian Dean, he runs a website called Backlinko. He just wrote a really, really, really great piece of content that talks all about on-page SEO, how to format your content properly on a page so that it appeals to Google.

There’s a couple simple tips that I would give right away. First off, assign a keyword to a page. Google likes to tell people that their algorithms understand synonyms, and even if you don’t use a keyword, they can basically get the gist of what you’re saying. However, you got to understand Google, it’s still is a robot. The more straightforward you are with telling Google this is what this page is about, the better. So, pick a keyword, assign a keyword to each page.

There’s a great tool called Yoast, which, again, I’m going to mention in the free workshop that we’re doing. But Yoast helps you assign a keyword to a page and then format your page properly so that you’re just spoon-feeding Google the information. You’re telling them quite clearly, “This page is about freelance photography in East Nashville.” That would be step one.

Step two is to get a little bit of an understanding of tagging. So, within each webpage there are certain tags that that Google uses, again, to just get an idea of what this particular page is about.

And then, three, there’s some speculation here because nobody’s really sure how much of it plays a role. But spend a lot of time on formatting your content so that you present your information in easily digestible chunks. If you notice on Copyblogger, we go straight to the point in our content. We present our content in short, chunky paragraphs, information that’s really easy to digest because you got to understand on the internet, people rarely read entire articles, but rather they scan.

So, if you use your headers properly, if you use your bullet points properly, if you know when an information is worth driving, when a piece of information is worth driving home and you know that particular sentence should be bold, those kinds of things do play a role because they increase the time on-site. And when Google scans all of your user behavior, they know this page of content is answering people’s questions. It’s solving people’s problems. It’s ironic because through writing content for the user before you write content for Google, you’re actually appealing to Google in the same way.

So, the third quick tip with that is keep the reader in mind. Try not to get too techie. Try not to get too robotic with your content thinking how’s Google going to read this, how the search engines are going to read this. Still make sure you’re presenting your content for the reader first. And in doing that, you will also get rewarded.

Darrell V.:

Are there any things to think about as far as length of content?

Tim Stoddart:

Yes, it’s hard to say. Generally speaking, you will almost find lengthy pieces of content to rank higher. With that being said, there’s plenty of examples of pages that are very short in content that Google has just decided, “This is still the best answer.” However, I would still always recommend at least 1,200 words.

On my personal blog, I rarely publish a piece of content unless it’s over 1,200 words. That’s the case because in abstract questions, I think it’s good to present that much information and to go into detail again to appeal to the reader, but also it’s good because it gives you enough space to really tell the search engine that this is what this piece of content is about and you can use that length to specify the exact problem that you’re trying to solve.

That’s super interesting. Tim, this has been super helpful so far. What I want to do last is talk more about location because that feels like, if I’m hearing you right, a huge opportunity for anybody who’s trying to get business. I’m thinking freelance writers, designers, developers. And I hadn’t even thought about that before, but can you dive a little bit more into what we can be thinking about with location-based SEO and search that we should be thinking about or that could help us drive more traffic. Like, if we’ve never done this before, what are some next steps for us to take advantage of this idea?

Location is one of my favorite topics to talk about because location-based search, we call it geosearch, is the biggest opportunity right now on Google. The fact of the matter is that if you’re trying to rank a blog post, that’s still going to be pretty difficult even if your website is pretty powerful and even if you’re a great writer. There’s just so much written content out on the internet that it’s competitive. It’s, by no means, impossible, but it’s still competitive.

However, if you’re a local business owner, let’s use an example of a contractor. I think contractor, whether you’re a painter or a plumber or whatever, there’s so much opportunity to get new business locally, especially through Google My Business. We call it GMB. So, we all use it every day and we don’t appreciate it enough just because our cell phones, and searching for businesses through our phone has become such an everyday part of life that I think we have failed to appreciate just how powerful it is.

So, breaking down GMB quickly. Google basically has their own business directory, same way that yellow pages is a business directory. So, when you submit a local business to the Google My Business directory, to the GMB directory, those are that little square with the map and those little pins that you see when you’re searching for a restaurant or when you’re searching for a contractor, or even just yesterday, I was searching for a car wash place that I needed to find. So, we call that the Local Pack.

If you’re in the top three for whatever it is that your business is, you’re going to be displayed on that mobile search. So, to get your business in the Local Pack, man, I’m telling you, it is so powerful because, again, everybody started observing their own user behavior now. If you notice in those GMB listings, there’s that call button right there so you don’t even have to click through to a website anymore. If you find a local business and it says, “This is 2.2 miles away,” it’ll give you the link for directions, it’ll give you a link to the website, and then it’ll give you that little button that says Call. So, just imagine if you’re a local business owner, how many phone calls you would get if you were able to get your GMB listing in that Local Pack.

So how do you do that? Well, the first step is positive reviews. Absolutely, five-star reviews, even four-star reviews, a lot of them, that’s a huge ranking factor in how Google displays which listings are going to be in the Local Pack.

The other thing to do is to really put your best foot forward in your listing. So, that means, I think you get 700 characters in the business description, use them all. Put some keywords in there, put lots of photographs in there. Just think about the last time you were searching for a new restaurant. What did you do? You looked at the reviews, you look through the photographs, you hopefully saw some smiling faces in there that made it seem like the restaurant was a really fun and a great place to go to. You looked at some of the pictures of the food. You looked at the business description. So, treat your GMB as though it’s a website within itself, as though it’s like a piece of art within itself, and if you put as much information in there as possible, you put great photography in there, you have a lot of reviews.

And the last thing, the website that you link out to in your GMB, if Google recognizes that as they’re going authoritative website as well, those three things combined, that’ll get you into the Local Pack. And if you’re a local business and you’re in those top three, man, I’ll tell you, your phone is just going to start blowing up. You’re going to get so many phone calls and so much new business. It can transform your life and your company.

Darrell V.:

That’s super awesome. Tim, tell us more about the free workshop that you’re teaching because I think you’re going to go a little bit more in depth on some specific strategies that you can do on your website. So, tell us a little bit more about the free workshop.

Tim Stoddart:

Yeah, this is going to be great. We’re going to start incorporating some live video into Copyblogger. We’re going to give actual interactive live workshops where I’m going to teach how to format your content on page. So, we’re going to do an on-page SEO workshop. I’m going to teach you about the tools that I use. I mentioned a lot of them in here.

Tim Stoddart:

One of them is going to be Yoast. So, I’m going to teach you how to use Yoast to really assign a keyword to a page and to go through it. I’m going to teach you a little bit how to use SEMrush to see if a keyword that you’re interested in is even within reach or has enough search volume behind it to even go after.

Tim Stoddart:

And then, we’re going to basically go through a page together. We’re going to look at a page that is ranking well on the search engines and we’re going to go through all the different variables that has made this particular page worthy of being at the top of the search results. So, the goal of this workshop is just to give everybody a really good understanding of what they need to do when they are writing content on their website to format it properly so that it can rank in Google.

Darrell V.:

I’m super excited about the workshop. I think it’s going to be a huge help. I love the fact that we’re incorporating interactive video. So, Tim, thank you so much for, one, hosting that workshop for teaching us what you know on that. If you’re interested in signing up, you can just click the link in the show notes and you can sign up for that at no cost, absolutely free. The workshop will be between 60 and 90 minutes long. Tim will actually be teaching live, sharing screenshots, and really walking you through everything that you need to know.

Darrell V.:

But Tim, also, thanks for being really generous with your time today sharing about SEO. I know that we’re going to have more conversations throughout 2020 about more advanced ideas around SEO as well, so thanks for being with us today.

Tim Stoddart:

Oh, my pleasure. And like you said, we’re just getting started with this. People are very interested to learn about search. I think people, like you said in the beginning, have written it off a little bit. Like, it’s something that is not worth investing their time into. And my hope is that through me teaching some really, really simple tactics, you can see that there are opportunities for every business. We’re not trying to get millions and millions of hits a traffic, although obviously, that would be great. What we’re trying to do is appeal to our customers. We’re trying to answer the questions that people who are searching for exactly what it is that we offer will have. And if you can do that, people are going to find a lot about it on this, I know it.

Darrell V.:

Awesome. Thanks again, Tim, and we’ll see you next week, everyone.

Tim Stoddart:

See you, guys. Thanks, Darrell.