034: Paul Lee – Can I Do My Own SEO For My Business?

Title: Paul Lee – Can I Do My Own SEO For My Business?

Guest: Paul Lee

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them.

Peter: This week, my guest is Paul Lee. He is our SEO expert. Today, we’re gonna talk about, can I do my own SEO? So Paul, what is the answer to that proverbial question?

Paul: Yes, but you probably won’t. That’s the answer. I know so many businesses, I’ve talked to so many businesses, so that was what they started with. They said, I can do my own SEO. I can do this stuff.

Do I even need pros? I can do a little research, I can read a few articles, might even subscribe to a few tools or ranking and tracking services and And those sorts of I’m doing SEO, right? I don’t need the other guys.

Peter: Let’s back it up a second here. So first of all, just for the listeners that may not have a clear understanding of what SEO is, would you define what you mean by SEO?

Paul: Sure. SEO is just sending the right signals to Google so that Google can rank you properly in response to a customer query. So somebody’s looking for a pizza near me. You want to send the right signals to Google so that if you’re a pizzeria that you will show up hopefully at the top of that list. And so SEO is just the sending that understanding what Google wants and sending them the right signals so that they can rank.

We know that that is what drives traffic to your website and it’s what drives sales, of course. So, obviously it’s a huge thing and people think and they know it’s important, but they think I could cut it a little bit, I can save a little bit. I mean, everybody wants to do that. Every business is looking out for their bottom line and wanted to do that, understand, but they often find that they run into problems when they try to do it themselves. So,

Peter: definition of SEO is search engine

Paul: optimization. Yes.

Peter: But you really should call it geo or Google engine optimization.

Paul: Yes. Because Google now is basically the default search engine. I mean, Microsoft and Yahoo still exists in different countries. It’s different, but especially in America, Google is king. So we need to speak Google’s language and give the Google what Google wants.

Peter: Yeah, when people ask me what is SEO? I say it is ranking on Google. How are you ranking and how to improve your ranking on Google?

Paul: That’s basically it. And you look at your stuff and you look at your page and you look at your content and you say to myself, why will I hire somebody to do this? Because obviously a lot of companies spend a lot of money on SEO and it’s, but it’s one of those ones that you say, do they have to? And the answer, mean, there’s always something you can do yourself. I mean, you can do your own accounting if you want to, you know, not sure I recommend

Peter: it. Hell no.

Paul: Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good idea, especially around tax time.

Peter: So let’s go through, you’ve kind of laid out a list here for me of some things that, really what are the downfalls in particular of trying to do SEO yourself or what? And I would say that up until very recently, my own company was very guilty of this as well. So what are the things that you see? You’ve got three things here. Let’s go through that list.

Paul: Okay, yeah. So I think what we obviously want to see SEO properly like context in your business and so people will try to do it themselves but unfortunately even if they do it for themselves for a little while for a month or six months or something eventually they sort of it turns into a source of guilt rather than a source of sales and that’s not right. So here’s the reason why it does that. It’s difficult to do consistency. Consistent behavior is the key to SEO.

It’s about doing things consistently. So for example, know you need more content on your website. So you’re going to say I’m going to write blogs. I’m going to write them myself. I’m going to save some money and I write myself.

I am actually obviously the expert in my business. And of course you are when you’re a business owner. So you think I’ll write it myself, but then you don’t write it as often as you thought you were going to write it. And then, you know, a month or two into it, you think, oh my gosh, I haven’t written an article in weeks. And then, and then you start saying, you know what, let’s ask your web developer to take all the dates off of the blog articles on your site, because you’re so far behind that you just, it’s just embarrassing now.

It’s just a source of guilt.

Peter: Right. So you look on your site and like the last blog posts that you added as content was six months ago.

Paul: Yeah. And unfortunately, I mean, we’ve talked to businesses, you know, we look at their blog and it’s the last post is from 2017. Yeah. But it’s something that’s difficult to pull off consistently. Whereas an SEO pro, their job is to do that consistently.

That’s what they, you know, they write the content when it to be written, the posts get updated when they get to, need to be updated. You get reports when you need to get reports, it’s consistent.

Peter: So in a sense, it’s sort of like you’re the accountant or the bookkeeper. You’re just making sure that what needs to get done gets done on time.

Paul: Yes, exactly. So the that’s other connected to that is longevity. Because not only do you need to do it consistently, but you need to do it consistently over a long period of time. You know, SEO is definitely a long game. It isn’t something that you get into and after a month or two, you hop back out.

You need to consider that you’re going be doing this for a while. So not only do you need to write two blog articles, but you need to write two blog articles a month, you know, for a year and then for the foreseeable future. And, you know, you start looking at that and you think, okay, well, actually, maybe I need help with that. Can you write 24 articles in a year? Know, can you, but that’s just one thing that SEO’s do.

Know, we’re also checking for checking backlinks, trying to reach out to other sites to get links. We’re doing other things, you know, to look on the web page itself to optimize it and optimize titles and all that. Are you going to do that consistently and over a long period of time? If you’re not able to do that, you probably should call a pro.

Peter: Consistently and then main that over the long run. What’s interesting is if you look at the numbers, we’re on a mission to do one piece of new content each week on our site in addition to social media posts. And we’re trying to do that three, four And times a you add it up, we keep it at work. About five months into it now, we’ve been very consistent thanks to our marketing director, Emily, who is a taskmaster, make sure everybody stays on task. But we’re already seeing some results of the fact that we’ve been doing it consistently for five months, once a week.

Our site is starting to rank better in the Google rankings but then over the course of the year, we’re gonna end up with 52 pieces of new content on our site which is not only helping our SEO rankings, probably even more importantly, it’s helping our customers and people who are visiting our site because they got a referral, finding a lot of good content to read and it helps our authority as well. So there’s like multiple benefit. The longevity thing is really one of those, it’s a sprint or it’s a marathon, not a sprint really makes sense.

Paul: Absolutely. I was thinking as you were saying that it’s providing those extra resources and all that stuff, which does help with the rankings, but this is probably a subject for another podcast, but SEO is about more than rankings, it’s really about sales. And so you’re making conversions, you’re making things that are attractive to customers that are answering their questions while you’re also getting material that ranks. So you’re doing all that stuff, but you’re also if you’re not paying it, if your eyes aren’t on the ball, if you didn’t have say an Emily as your marketing director, making sure that that stuff happens, then you know, if you’re running your own business, you’re putting out fires, you’re making your salespeople happy, you’re making customers happy, that’s the most important thing. So you’re doing all that stuff, but is your eye on SEO ball?

Probably not. And if you don’t have somebody that you can say they’re making sure that happens, then you’re gonna have those kinds of things, then balls are gonna get

Peter: Right and then I think you’ve got one more item here that I thought was super important.

Paul: Yeah, attention to detail. So your SEO specialist, your professional help that you know, what they’re trained to do and what they do on a consistent basis and over a long period of time is make sure that not just that stuff gets done, but all the right things get done and they get done right. So that attention to detail is what really makes effective SEO. They look at the content on your page, the code behind your page on your website, the links, the titles, the descriptions that you use, the captions for your photos, all that stuff’s got to be right. It needs to be right consistently and it needs to be right over years, ideally.

And that’s a lot. I mean, that’s a lot of stuff to kind of pay attention to notice. And it’s in a place, in a situation where the rules of the SEO game are basically being changed at Google’s whim. So Google changes you know how they treat certain behaviors or things that were acceptable three or four years ago now will get you a penalty and you’ll and your rankings will drop. So you need to have people, SEOs who are paying attention to that stuff.

It’s their job to know to know the best practices, to know how to speak Google’s language. You know, if you did some research and you started doing SEO and then you never really looked back at it after two or three years, you would be headed in the wrong direction and you wouldn’t know it because the roadmap changed. So it’s that attention to detail that is another valuable thing of why doing it yourself. Yeah, you can do it. And if you want to put the time in it, you want to put the attention and you have that eye for Yeah, you know, it’s just not a fit for most people.

Peter: Well, and the other thing is that, you know, like you’re saying it changes, things change. And I know from working with you that you spend a lot of time researching and staying on top of everything. And if I’m a business owner that’s doing trying to run a business as well and serve my customers, it’s going to be, you know, mean, this takes a lot of time. I mean, you have a passion for it, great, but you know, if it’s just sort of the side thing that you’re trying to do in addition to everything else, you’re not going to be able to keep up with all of the changes that Google throws at everybody.

Paul: Absolutely not. I mean, it’s hard enough for us as professionals to know. And because not only does Google change things, but they don’t tell people most of the time when they change it, you have to deduce that they changed it. And so, you know, people are looking into this stuff, researching, like basically almost private investigators to figure out how to speak what Google wants to speak. And Google keeps changing it.

Well, again, if you’re not on top of it, you are going to miss it. The price is really high because, I mean, as we said, the stakes are, you know, the SEO drives sales. If your SEO fails, if your SEO, what you did, you know, six months ago or two years ago or whatever didn’t work. And now you’re missing out on all these opportunities. You’re missing out on traffic.

You’re missing out on eyeballs. You’re missing out on customers is what really matters. And so the penalty is high, know, it’s not just that you failed in some sort of a vague task, this is money, you know.

Peter: Yeah, they’re going to your competitors, right?

Paul: Exactly, that’s right, that’s exactly right. You know where they’re going. Yeah.

Peter: Well, are great points, Paul. I really appreciate it. So we do have a special offer. We do have a free SEO audit If businesses are interested, we’ve got a URL set up, bizmarketing.com/seo. And there’s a form there you can fill out and Paul will conduct an SEO audit for you.

It’s not our full, we do have a paid SEO audit that we do as well. This one is a little quicker one but still nonetheless will give us and you a great idea of how you’re doing with your SEO. So it’s great sanity check for businesses and no strings attached. We’d love to have you as a client but if you just want to get the audit and just see where you’re at, that’s fine with us as well. So go to bizmarketing.com/seo and sign up for your free audit today.

Paul, thanks a lot for your time. I can’t wait to talk about some more SEO topics real soon.

Paul: Sounds good, Peter. Thanks so much.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.