SEO. Small Business Success Podcast:

Transcription

1 Small Business Success Podcast: SEO The SCORE Small Business Success Podcast features interviews with the best and brightest in the world of small business, covering topics such as business plans, financing, marketing, human resources, SEO, social media and more. In this podcast, SCORE mentors chat with Scott Gonnello about SEO. * Scott Gonnello is a consultant, author and speaker specializing in search engine optimization, also known as SEO. His clientele ranges from small startup businesses to large global companies such as Victorinox Swiss Army. Scott's latest book is Common SEO Mistakes Basic Edition. Scott looks at 25 basic search engine optimization mistakes that can kill your business. His knowledge and ability to explain SEO in non-technical terms to the average website owner is what makes him one of the best SEO consultants in America. Scott, what is SEO? Scott Gonnello: Well, search engine optimization is a lot of different things for different people, but basically, it's taking your website and making it more efficient and more optimized so it communicates better to the search engines. There's dozens of ways, hundreds of ways to do that and depending on what industry you are, where your location is, what products you're selling will depend on how you go about optimizing your website. Basically, it's making the website communicate in a way that helps your ranking and your placement on the search engines. What are algorithms? Scott Gonnello: Algorithms are what the search engines use to choose whether your webpage is going to show up in the search engine and, if so, where in that search engine results. The good news is you might make the search engine results, the bad news is you might be on page 500. Algorithms are basically little pieces of code that choose whether your page is usable or not. It might is the content well written? Is there enough content? Are there links? Are there pictures? Are the pictures using the proper alt tags? Are there more people going to this site or are they bouncing off that page too quickly? There's all these different codes that the search engines use to decide where you're going to show up, if you're going to show up. What's an alt tag? Scott Gonnello: The ADA requires that all images have an alt tag or alternative text, basically. What it is, is a description of that image. The blind in America or around the world have computers that talk to them. If they hover over that picture it talks that description that you place in there and tells what it is. It's also very searchable. If you don't have an alt tag, you're not getting the best of the SEO techniques that you could be using. Why would SEO be important to a business? Scott Gonnello: Well, first and foremost, the top page of let's say Google, the search engines, is the best place to market bar none. The old days of spray and pray with hundreds of thousands of viewers or readers or whatever, it doesn't work anymore. This here, is people are looking for you and if your page shows up, you're in the game. So, it's important to show up on the top page if you want to succeed in business because that's where everyone is going. How do you get to that top page? Scott Gonnello: A lot of work or practice, practice, practice. Getting to that top page is different for everybody. Everything is relative in the search engines. Getting in the top page in let's say Sarasota might be easier than getting in the top page of Manhattan for the same product. It's relative to where you are, who your target market is, what you're selling, what's the competition, what's the baseline for that industry, that location. It's a whole bunch of different things that go into effect about how to get there. Your book, why did you write about the mistakes?

2 Scott Gonnello: I talk to a lot of businesses around the world on a regular basis and I found myself answering the same questions over and over and over. These are common mistakes that companies make when I review their sites. Their basic mistakes, these are the basic 101 mistakes that you shouldn't be making that everybody should know about, but yet large companies are still making them, even small companies. It was just easier for me to document these and whittle down from about 100 that I was coming upon all the time and put it in a book that's easy to read and easy to digest. The 25 basic ones are ones that if you clean them up on your website or if you can identify them and fix them, you're going to see some great results and it's been proven over and over. What's the number one mistake that you find people making? Scott Gonnello: That's hard to answer because everything is relative. In Manhattan it's much different than in Sarasota. Because everybody is now an SEO expert or a web developer because it's a tough economy and people want to make extra money and there's no real guidelines for SEO, it's hard to decide if they're good or not. What I've been finding with a lot of companies that are paying for SEO is they're missing the most basic tie-in to the search engines: an XML site map. This is when you produce a new page, a new document, a new image, new content, whatever, it notifies the search engines, calls them in and makes them look at it and if they like it they'll index it and throw you into the search engines. This is like an electrician wiring a house but not knowing he has to tie it all in to a circuit breaker or a panel. This is, I think, as a base foundation is one of the key tie ins is making your XML site map is working, make sure it's submitted to the search engines and make sure you're communicating with them every time you do something new. Is that something that the common person, the average person can do or do they need to have an SEO consultant to figure out what an XML map is and submitting that? Scott Gonnello: Again, it depends on their knowledge of the websites. Most software these days have a plugin for the XML site map. You need to plug it in, activate it, do a few things and then it's working. Depending on the software you're using. If you're using WordPress it's very easy. If you're using Joomla or Drupal or some of these other software, it's a little bit more difficult. What search engines are the best that you've come across? Scott Gonnello: The only one you should really be concerned in is Google. They own more than 70% of the market share globally. It's the number one search engine. In the work that we do, we look at the search engines coming in. Yahoo might produce 1%, 2%. Bing, AOL, some of these other smaller ones, 1% at best. If you can get on Google which has much higher standards and get on to the search results there, you're going to get on to the other search engines. When we do work, we don't really necessarily go too crazy working with the other search engines. We do the work, we submit it to them but all of the optimization we do is based for Google. Is Google's market share increasing or staying flat or decreasing? Scott Gonnello: It depends on different markets, but for the most part they've got a lock on the search engines and from day to day it can go up or down. It's still, by far, the best place to be. How does someone learn about SEO? Scott Gonnello: That's the challenging part. Part of the reason I wrote the book was when you read a book about SEO, you go out and you learn something and you go and you do it to your site. The problem is, with the 200 algorithms that Google uses, 10% are changing every week so 20 of those algorithms are brand new each week. Today that was written 3 months ago could be totally false now.

3 I found the mistakes never change. It's rare that if you're spamming, that's a mistake that's never going to go away. It's easier for me to teach people of what not to do initially to get going than it is to try to tell them something that doesn't work today. What kind of scams are there out there? You hear a lot about SEO scams. How can you detect that? Scott Gonnello: If somebody s you out of the blue and says, "We can do your SEO. This, this and that," and you look at their address and it's a Hotmail account or an AOL or a Gmail or Yahoo, stay away. If somebody is sending you unsolicited mail, stay away. You should talk to other businesses that are doing SEO through other companies and find out. You should get multiple quotes, have different companies look at it. In this day and age, you can literally set up a website, buy a domain, put the website up and be online within 24 hours or less. Fred Dunayer: It sounds to me like it's almost the same as website designers. In other words, you will get solicited by people, as you mentioned, that are just trying to make a few extra bucks that may not really have the experience that's necessary. Would you suggest that when you go to get a website that you should look for a full featured firm that includes SEO experts in the web development process? Scott Gonnello: Absolutely. Here's one of the things I see a lot lately and again, I put this back to the economy. Most businesses are desperate to survive in this economy. You've got a lot of scam artists out there that take a website theme out of the box with Latin so it looks like its content. Fred Dunayer: Ipsilorum Scott Gonnello: Exactly. You click on the bottom of the client's webpage to see who's doing this and it's an out of the box website with Latin all over it. Obviously, they're not a legitimate firm. They look it and they can act a part, but they're not. Web developers are coming out of the woodwork. Craigslist, all these s and post cards and letters and phone calls. Be careful. I want to get back to you said that 10% or about 20 out of 200 variables are changing on Google every week. That would mean the whole thing would be new in 10 weeks. Scott Gonnello: Right. Is that about right? They must have some of the same ones that are there. Do they tweak them? Scott Gonnello: It could have changed 200 times in 10 weeks but it's not necessarily going to give you much different results. Part of what Google does is it keeps off companies that don't belong there. In effect, if you're doing something wrong and you don't realize it, you could be hurting yourself without even knowing it. Think of an algorithm as some dice. If I roll three dice and say, "What are the algorithms?" Well, it's a number one, a number three and a number five. It's easy to understand that. I throw 200 dice and say, "Okay, what's the numbers? What's the combinations? By the way, some are red, some are green, some are white, some are brown. Some have letters, some have numbers, some have symbols." You have to try to figure out what those are. It's almost impossible because as you're getting close I can flip them 20 more over and it puts you back from square one. Let's just make it a very simple example which is just false I'm sure. Let's say you have blue backgrounds and the dice or the algorithm is for blue backgrounds. That's trending right now. Let's take that number one which is blue and they turn it to number two which is kind of a grayish blue. It's still the same algorithm but it's just a little tweak to it. They're tweaking these algorithms because they don't want the spam companies to get close to understanding what that is.

4 Here's something interesting about the algorithms: Google has different departments so this department might be in-charge of six different algorithms. This department might be having 10 and only those departments know those combinations. Collectively, even Google doesn't know what the full combination is. Sounds very complicated. Scott Gonnello: Yeah and it's meant to be that way, which is why they're so successful. Wow. Is the idea to have more of those dice, theoretically, in your site, if you go from 10 to 20 then you're doing 20 things right? Assuming maybe you're hitting it by luck but you're getting 20 down that are working well and then if you go 30, is that better yet? Is that the idea? Scott Gonnello: Absolutely. Here's the deal: we don't know what those algorithms are. We don't know the combinations of the dice, if we're going to use that example. Google likes expert sites. Do it right. If you have to look over your shoulders because you've got some trick that you read about online and you're trying to trick the system, you're going to get caught. Their algorithms are very smart and take care of that. What I always talk about is having a good foundation, good communication to them, good quality content. What grade level are you writing at? If you're selling a sewing kit and you have to have 29 years of college of schooling to understand that, it's probably not good content and you're probably going to lose points for that. If you have a good foundation, good quality, good images, good content, good examples, good linking to other sites and a whole bunch of other foundational items in your website, you're going to do pretty well. It reminds me of school. Google is the teacher and we're the students and we're trying to pass and a lot of us are failing. Scott Gonnello: Right. You could be very successful one day and the algorithms can change and all of a sudden you're off that spot. Fred Dunayer: I think you make a really good point though is having that foundation of good information on the website and it's to service the customers, not to service the vendors. The example I have is I had to buy flooring so I'm looking through different websites to see where I can buy flooring. The first listing on Google was a website that taught me all about wood versus laminate versus whatever other materials are made and I ended up working with them and buying from them and Google helped me to choose the website to go to because of these algorithms. Scott Gonnello: Right. Google helps you more and more to the point where you don't even have to really think that hard to find it. You'll notice when you start typing in a search it shows you a bunch of examples what other people are looking for, what's trending. You can just click on it and go from there. You're right. People want to be educated. They want quality. They want to be clicking on the right expert site. If they had a bunch of scam sites or just junk sites on the top page, you'd be Yahoo, Bing or AOL. Let's talk about social marketing for a moment. Is that SEO? Scott Gonnello: Part of optimization is driving traffic to your website. You could do Craigslist and drive traffic to your website. Technically, that's search engine optimization because they're finding you in the search engine and you're optimizing the work that you do to increase traffic on your website. So social marketing, social media, when done right, can be very effective. Having said that, I see too many companies running to get on Twitter and Facebook and all these other social media places when they really shouldn't. Meaning, you have a client in California that sells metal, pallet racking, staging, conveyors, it's not a real sexy product. Having a Facebook page, that they demanded they wanted to have a Facebook page, and they had more than 13 employees and family members and they still couldn't get more than 13 likes on their site.

5 Yes, social media can be very effective depending on relative to what your selling, what your products are, what you're trying to get found for. Not everybody is going to benefit with social media. Fred Dunayer: Your social media connections, are they involved in any of the algorithms that Google is using? Scott Gonnello: Yeah, that's a great question. Google+ came out initially to try to compete with Facebook and that didn't do too well. If you notice now, at least in today's environment when you're doing a search, they'll have a link for their Google+ page, right? Wow, I should have a Google+ page. That's a good way to find out what social marketing effects you should do or efforts. You should have a Google+ page. You should tie it to your Google business page to get on the map, to show up in the search engines on a map and on the results. What I tell customers is do some searches for your products. If you don't see Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or any of the others, you shouldn't put too much effort there. I'm not saying you shouldn't do them, but when somebody comes to us with a budget and says, "Here's my budget," I'm not going to push them down a path that's not going to produce for them because I'll lose them as a client. What about YouTube? I've been told that that's where it's going. You need to have YouTube videos and that'll help you in search. Scott Gonnello: When done correctly, absolutely. Google is the number search engine in the world. The number two search engine in the world is YouTube owned by Google. A lot of videos are being pulled up on phones and put into social media feeds and embedded into your website. Yes, if you can do some good videos and put them on YouTube, you should have a YouTube channel. What's nice about that is you can embed the video into your website and have your own commercials or videos or instructional videos or whatever without real weight of a video into your software because it's an embedded code. How does Google know when they're looking at a video with their spiders, their research tools that they use, what it's saying? Because my understanding is that they can't really decipher an audio or video signal. Did they transcribe those YouTube videos? Scott Gonnello: Google won't tell you or YouTube won't tell you what they do. If your title is very descriptive and it's what people are looking for, that's one point. If your description has that phrase that people are looking for, that's another point. Google can actually read images so if you have words on your video, there's probably a good chance there reading that as well. If you look relative to different spaces when you do a Google search, sometimes you'll see video popping up. In a way, to make their search results more pleasing and more expert for everybody, they want to have a nice variety of content on the top page for the viewer, they will throw videos in there. When you see that, look and see what that video is about, how it's titled, what the description is and try to match that for your industry. What about free websites and SEO? Scott Gonnello: Nothing's free. They may say it's free. Time is money. The challenge with a free website is it's a mess, one-size-fits-all. You're getting married, the bride is not going to buy a one-size-fits-all wedding dress, right? Every business is different. The challenge I think, right off the bat, is visually you're stuck with a cookie cutter style website that doesn't have search engine capabilities or has very limited capabilities because you know that by them saying, "Oh, you want some help in the search engines? Buy some of these packages and we'll help market you," because the site doesn't work.

6 The other challenge I find is when you scroll down to the bottom you're advertising their web software. "Get your free website right here," which tells me, when I look at a business, if they don't care about their business enough to do a professional website and they're doing it for free, then their products and prices should be a lot cheaper. It goes against your brand, it goes against your reputation and they don't work in the search engines. Period. Who in a company should be doing the SEO? Scott Gonnello: If you're going to do it within house, and I've talked to large companies. In fact, when I first met with Swiss Army I told them flat out, "You should have somebody internally doing this. It should be the center of your business universe," so to speak, because when it's done right it can increase your sales and increase your traffic and increase your products. Everything gets better when SEO is done right. If you're going to have somebody within the company do that, you want to make sure you're not hiring somebody because they have a Facebook page or they have a Twitter account and you think that's everything you need to know. What you want to do is find somebody that's part of marketing that can understand the SEO and maybe send them off for a course or two to fully understand how to do it or bring an SEO company in to train them, coach them and let them do it. You really should understand that SEO is marketing. Showing up the top page is better than any paid advertisements you can do. Fred Dunayer: It seems then that perhaps you would want to bring that SEO expert in at the time that you're designing a webpage. Scott Gonnello: Absolutely. A lot of the things we find is they go out and they have somebody from Craigslist who can get a free WordPress website, pay $40 for a theme and put it together for their company for $500 and say, "We'll get it set up." Then we go in and we have to change it, we have to update it, we have to modify it because it's just out of the box and it's not set up properly. Yeah, it's cheap and you get what you pay for but it can cause you in the end of it's not done right. Hiring somebody to do SEO in-house can be a good idea if you have a good budget for it. Sometimes working with an SEO company is actually more cost-effective. You're not paying insurance, they're not calling in sick and vacation days and you're dealing with a company that does SEO for a living. Fred Dunayer: Without getting into your fees for example, but what should a small business expect to pay for this kind of service? Scott Gonnello: Again, relative to their location, their industry baseline, the products, the competition, what I find is for our company we won't take a job under $500 a month. Each company is different so at that level, it gives us enough room to do different things, to try to get some better results but anything less than that you're just treading water. Fred Dunayer: That's interesting. You raise an interesting question. So, SEO is not something you do once, it's an ongoing process? Scott Gonnello: Correct. That's a good point because the way search engines work is with that XML site map that we talked about earlier, that calls them back when you do something new. If you're not doing new things on a regular basis, they're not coming back to see you out of sight, out of mind. Google thinks, "If you don't care about your website, why should we?" Is there a certain frequency that they're looking for like weekly update or daily update or monthly update or does it matter?

7 Scott Gonnello: It does and that's relative to the industry. If your competition is out there doing a blog every three days, you want to be doing a blog every three days. Do you use any specific templates or software as a base, as a foundation that you build from when you help a customer out? Scott Gonnello: I think, again, in this economy companies are looking to succeed without spending that much money and WordPress fits that really well. It's a free software. You do have to know how to tie it in and design it and put all the right tie ins and make it look and work really well. I do like WordPress. We do other software as well, customer software. We can do customer plugins for that software to get to some more bang for your buck. WordPress generally is a good software to go with. Having said that, everyone is a WordPress expert. Go on Craigslist you can buy somebody's service for $500 and get a website. Just because it's free and just because it's very powerful doesn't mean it's going to work 100% for you all the time if it's not set up properly. What makes up a team? In other words, would you want an SEO person and a website developer together? Would you want a third person in there doing something else? How would you develop a team to do SEO and to improve your web presence? Scott Gonnello: There's different companies out there. There are web developing companies that really don't know much about SEO and they don't want to know SEO. They want to design websites and they're very good at what they do. A lot of times we get that business for the SEO because they don't have somebody in-house to do that, they don't want to take up the time to do that and they don't understand it as much as they should. Then there's SEO companies that do not build websites. They only do SEO. Once your site is done you contact them and then they go through the process. What we do is we build websites that are tied into the SEO market and search engines and we do SEO with that to maintain it or, for a lot of companies, we build in the website, set up the way it should be and then we show them how to use it themselves. Fred Dunayer: Maybe off topic, but is a graphic artist part of that team? Scott Gonnello: It can be. A lot of companies have their own graphic artist. On the side their doing their logo, their layouts, their brochures. We can incorporate that into it or we have graphic artist that we work with to design the site that they like. Do the graphics affect the SEO? Scott Gonnello: The graphics help the SEO if they're tagged properly. If the graphic is titled properly so it's searchable because people search for images. If your title of your image is a searchable phrase that people are looking for, you can show up, they click on it, go to the website. Pretty isn't necessarily going to bring in more traffic as much as the images being tagged properly. Scott Gonnello: Correct. The name, the URL, the alt tags and if it's a really bad graphic, here's where the SEO part comes in, somebody goes to the site and looks at it and says, "Ooh, looks like a fourth grade science project," and then they bounce out. That affects your numbers because people go and they leave without seeing your site. It does have a place in the whole scene. Your book is about mistakes. Let's talk about some more mistakes. What would you like to tell our listeners in terms of the biggest mistakes that people make maybe what to shy away from or what you recommend?

8 Scott Gonnello: I started the book out with five of the mistakes titled under attitudes. Your attitude about your website. Your attitude about SEO. Websites really are and should be the center of your business in today's market because that's what's going to get you on the top page of the search engine where all the money is. If your attitude is, and I hear this a lot, "Well, we have a website. I don't really know a lot about websites. You know it's out there. It's okay," that's a bad attitude. That's a huge mistake because your competition is all about, "Hey, check out our website. Check out our specials. Check out our competition, how we're beating them," and all these great things that they can market. If you have a bad attitude about your website right off the bat, you're probably not going to do that well in the search engines. SEO skepticism is another big thing. People are like, "I'm not going to pay at the top page." Well, you are. You're going to pay in time. You're going to pay in money. You're going to pay in services of some sort to get there. Time is money, especially in the business world. If you know how to get there on your own we say go for it and we'll help you if need that help. We can coach you, but it's important to get there. You have to understand that if you're spending money on TV, radio or newspaper or yellow pages, that doesn't work as well as it used to. You're spending a lot of money for nothing. Everything on the web stays forever. Look at all these pictures that surface. They will be out there forever, right? Once you do an ad, let's say a new page which could be technically an ad, that's out there forever to be searched. It's a much better investment to do that. Fred Dunayer: It's funny, I was watching an episode of The Profit on CNBC, I highly recommend that show, and one of the business owners was very proud of the all the money they've put into print advertising and very excited to be in the yellow pages. Marcus Lemonis, who's the host and investor, was really having a hard time getting through to this business owner. Times have changed and that's not where you spend your money anymore. Scott Gonnello: Right. It's true. The old way was spray and pray. You had not have a huge demographic market and hope that some people actually see your ad and hope out of that bunch some of the people need your service and hope out of that bunch somebody does something with that little three by three printed ad. That was called broadcasting and narrow casting is the way it's been going for the last several decades. Let's talk about paid ads online versus organic. Can you comment on that? Scott Gonnello: Sure. When a new site is built and it's not in the search engines just yet, a lot of companies will do Adwords or Pay Per Click. It can be effective for some businesses and not so much for others. Here's one of the things: only one out of seven people will click on an ad. Those top three or the right hand column and now I'm starting to see them at the bottom as well. Only one out of seven will click on them and here's the dirty little secret: a lot of times, it's your competition clicking on it because they know if you have a budget of $20 a day that might be 12 clicks and if they click 12 times, they refresh their screen and re-click it, you might be done for the day. Can you get your money back? Sure. If you go through a process and request it. It'll take 30 days to get paid for that day, but you're gone for the day. Is it a good investment? For some industries yes it is, but not for all. What I try to do with those clients is I say, "Let's put half that budget into SEO and get you found organically," which is seven out of eight people will click organically. You're still paying whether it's pay per click or SEO but you're getting a much better return on your investment and a lot of our clients will give us a little bit of that budget, let us go to work and once they see it working they end up getting rid of that other budget for pay per click. Is there a way of knowing that your competition is clicking on your links? Is that what you're saying? Scott Gonnello: Yeah. In the analytics of your ad words you can see where they're clicking from, the location, some IP addresses, that type of thing.

9 Scott Gonnello: Right. You'd see the same one popping up over and over again. Then you might deduce that it's your competition. Scott Gonnello: Sure. You look at how fast you get clicked off and you look at the bounce rate. They go to your page and leave. They're only on the page for 10 seconds, 3 seconds. Those types of things. NOTE: Google can now detect and eliminate this practice Wow. Do you get involved with that too in SEO like, I don't know what you call it, is it site mapping where you look at see how long someone stays on a specific of particular page and where they go throughout your site and then make recommendations on the site itself? Is that part of SEO or is that something different? Scott Gonnello: Analytics is a huge part of SEO. It basically tells you who's coming, when they're coming in, how long they're staying, how many pages they're seeing, what's the top landing pages. All this data that you can look at, what phrases are they using to find you, all this information that you can use as marketing, as a way to help market your website better to the audience to help fine tune it. We're seeing a lot of bad search engines that are hitting sites and doing 100% bounce rate. There's one in particular that's hitting the sites 30 times a day with 100% bounce rate. Some companies will say, "Wow, look at your numbers, they're huge. We're getting so many hits a day," but if you look at the analytics, most of it is not good traffic. You need to find ways to keep those companies from hitting your site so you have more accurate numbers. Fred Dunayer: Obviously, with the book that's got 25 mistakes we can't cover all of it in today's session, but is there one thing you'd like our listeners to come away knowing and remembering? Scott Gonnello: On the book, I can't say the name of the company, but we fixed just three of the most basic mistakes on there and it brought a loss of 60,000 visitors a month and turned it into 100,000 new visitors a month. If you look at the products they sell and the average page use and how many out of that, conservatively, what that relates to dollar-wise, it's probably about $120 million a year for that company. If you're looking at three of the most basic mistakes that Google actually tells you, "You should fix these," and they don't tell you a lot, you think the mistakes aren't that bad, trust me, you can do a lot better by fixing those mistakes. Fred Dunayer: Scott, how can our listeners get your book and how can they contact you? Scott Gonnello: The book is on Kindle or the Nook. You can go to Barnes Noble or Amazon.com and download it. Just type in common SEO mistakes or you can search for Scott Gonnello and the books should show up. You can download it and you can write a review and it actually puts your website in there on the review of what you're reading about and how it affected your site, to get some little extra advertising. Scott, can spell your last name? Scott Gonnello: Sure. It's G-O-N-N-E-L-L-O. Well, thank you Scott for enlightening our listeners on SEO and thank you for being a guest on Been There, Done That. Scott Gonnello: Thank you, Dennis. Thank you, Fred. Fred Dunayer: You're welcome. Thank you. Fred Dunayer: You've been listening to the SCORE Small Business Success Podcast Been There, Done That. The opinions of the hosts and guests are theirs and do not necessarily reflect those of SCORE.

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