044: SEO Hot Takes With SEO Expert Paul Lee

Title: SEO Hot Takes With SEO Expert Paul Lee

Guest: Paul Lee

Peter: How you doing, Paul?

Paul: I’m doing good, Peter. How are doing?

Peter: Great. Looking forward to this conversation. So this is gonna be a different type of podcast, more of a a conversation with Paul. I always love chatting with you. We have a weekly scheduled call.

We don’t record them usually, but they are very entertaining. So I figured we’d share some of our, weekly fun with the, the folks listening to our podcast. Couple topics we wanna cover today. One of them is, SEO, search engine optimization versus Google Ads. We also wanna talk about how long SEO takes to rank a site.

And then we’ve got a little bonus tip with respect to ranking for terms that are not on your website and the implications of that.

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: SEO or Google Ads, which is best for growing your business?

Paul: I think it’s a topic of, you know, it’s kind of like the wrong question. It’s an understandable question. Clients come in and they say, one should I do? This or this? Usually dig in and you find out the answer is probably.

It’s not an or question. It’s an and question. It’s an and situation. You want to use the right tool for the right job. These are very different tools.

So if you’re talking SEO, you’re talking something that is long term, that is kind of a slow burn, that’s going to be something that you are continually sort of plowing into and establishing your authority with Google, establishing your trust, building those kind of networks of links, all those things that go into SEO are long term. And eventually they pay off over time. Whereas, you know, Google ads, we could be running an ad in thirty minutes for something that should be running today, you know, tomorrow, and you could be building an audience and you could be reaching people, but you also have to keep feeding it. You stop it, it stops. That’s the nature of it.

SEO has a little bit more momentum and rolls down, but it takes a while to get going. So those are two different, totally different

Peter: So one of the things that I think about when I chat with my clients is owning the search results page for their own brand. One of the things that we advise clients to do, for example, and this is this goes to your point of Google Ads and SEO, is it does make sense to run paid search ads on Google for the brand of your business in your area. When people are searching for your name, you wanna be the first thing they see. And what we’ve found in highly competitive industries are competitors running ads against your name. So that’s one sort of aspect that I always think about is branded search.

And I always tell my clients, you wanna own that search results. You wanna have as many links on that page that you actually can control, whether it’s your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn profile, your website, obviously, but that’s not the only thing to think about. Your Google My Business profile and the ad that shows at the top of the page. And if you do buy that search term for the name of your business, generally speaking, you will be the number one search result because Google does understand that. And you don’t even pay a whole lot of money for that either.

Paul: Yeah. So Those those are not usually very competitive bids that you’re because it’s so specific to a specific brand. I have seen times where it’s not even just where they buy your competitors buy an ad and they leapfrog you in the results on that results page. They actually address you as our competitor. Like, why are you searching for this guy when you could have me who’s better?

Peter: Now they have to be careful because naming a trademarked name in an ad is forbidden. Yes. And that will get banned, get you in a whole lot of trouble. But a lot of companies don’t go to the trouble of trademarking their name either.

Paul: Right. Exactly. Exactly. So they’d have they have no recourse for to to defend that. So it’s it’s interesting to see.

I mean, that’s obviously kind of a cutthroat move, but business is cutthroat sometimes. So somebody’s gonna do that. So if you don’t bid on your name, if you don’t lock that down, somebody is gonna go up there. The way Google works now, of course, there’s the search results, but above the search results are ads.

Peter: Yeah. Especially on desktop, yeah.

Paul: Yeah, on desktop, for sure. And also depending on how competitive it is, it could be one ad, it could be three ads, it could be, you know, it just depends on how competition is going too. So even though you’re ranked number one, you might be pushed down three or four spots. And the reason organic results. There’s to get those ads.

The ads do other things too for you. I mean, you’re able to say, Hey, we got a 20% off sale for Black Friday or something. It’s a timely message. SEO doesn’t really allow for that. I mean, obviously we can bring you to a website, but there’s no way you can have an SEO campaign around Black Friday.

It doesn’t work that way. It’s more evergreen messaging in SEO. And in ads, can say, I’m doing this specific thing, and I and and I’m targeting this specific area. You have more control. But there’s a really there’s like my favorite thing about using ads, digital ads, Google ads, or Facebook ads, or whatever with SEO is it’s almost like a hack.

Because in the past, Google would tell you what people were searching for when they went to your website, and then they turned that off. You can’t see that. You can see it if you’re an advertiser. You can see what people searched for and why they got shown your ad and then who clicked on it. So you can see all that information about why they were shown the ad, what search term triggered the ad, which ones get the biggest click through rate, which ones get the biggest conversion rate after that.

You get all that information, which is massive for not just SEO. I mean, it’s it’s it’s huge, resource for SEO, but also just your marketing in general.

Peter: Yeah. And if you’ve got somebody running Google Ads for you today, if you’re a business, I would highly encourage you to ask them to review a search term report with you and sort the search terms by the frequency of the click or the cost, the overall cost, not cost per click, but overall cost. And even looking at the cost per click because occasionally we’ll go in to a client’s Google ads account and we’ll see, for example, we have roofing companies and we learned this one a long time ago. There’s a company locally that’s a roofing supplier. So if somebody is searching for the name of the roofing supplier, you don’t want to show up because you’re looking for consumer consumers are not looking for the name of a wholesale supplier.

They’re looking for an actual roofing company near them. So we actually took the name of that company. We noticed it was showing up in the clicks, and they were paying for a click for the name of this wholesale roofing supplier. So we put that as a negative keyword in their, Google Ads. So that that was interesting to see that.

That’s just a little bit of a side note there. But, again, if you’re spending money on Google Ads right now, you should absolutely look at your search term report and provide it to your SEO, supplier, or they should be pulling it. If you work with one company that does SEO and Google Ads, that’s the best of all worlds there because then they have access to that report themselves, and they can see what people are searching for and understand what articles to write, for example.

Paul: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. You see there’s a lot of interest in some some topic, then you can start beefing up your content in that area, And you can start you can see where you, you know, where you might be falling short. And it’s yeah.

You’re catching it with ads, but let’s do it with organic because someday you may wanna turn the ads off. You may wanna not wanna, you know, float those all the time. You may want to adjust them very much seasonally so that you, you know, have heavier during the certain times of the year or whatever. But SEO kind of continues to roll, you know. And so use the right tool for the right job, and when they do that together, man, you see massive results, and it’s not just that you’re spending more money and therefore getting more traction, you’re spending money smarter.

You know, you’re putting money into the right places so that you get better traffic, better leads, better conversions.

Peter: Right.

Paul: That’s all.

Peter: One one one thing that I just thought of, Paul, was, something that recently happened to us with bizmarketing.com. We had a blog post that I wrote went viral, and we were having up to 600 people a day, and it’s still very popular. Visiting our site just to read that one article, we ended up ranking number one on Google for a particular topic. And we were we run Google Ads. And when I say Google Ads, we run paid search ads and we also run Google remarketing ads because we had the remarketing ads turned on and we were using the Google Analytics pixel, or the cookie.

We were able to tag all those people that came to that article virally. Now they’re in our audience pool for Google ads, and now we can run display ads back to those people. And we know because of the topic that they were looking at, we know a lot about those people. We know something about those people. We know their business owners and that sort of thing.

So I’m really excited to be able to turn that on and run that. And I know that there’s a lot of businesses that if they’re doing SEO and they’re getting some viral responses, they might not even want to run paid search ads. They may just wanna run remarketing ads or retargeting ads. Obviously, it depends on your field. If you’re in the medical field, you’re very limited, and very restricted.

But otherwise, there’s a huge opportunity there that a lot of people don’t know about, and it’s, generally speaking, a lot less expensive to run those types of ads on a per click basis than paying their search.

Paul: More efficient. You know, you’re dealing with people that know you a little bit already. So they’ve established some level of trust and they have an interest in what you’re offering already. You know that. You know?

So it’s you you you’ve eliminated a lot of that kind of stuff in a fluff that isn’t gonna actually contribute to your bottom line. These are people that are already part of the way down the funnel, as they’d say. So keep talking to them. It’s a no brainer, really. But what happens is, like you said, most people a lot of people aren’t aware of it.

They’re it’s not that that they think it’s a bad idea or anything. They just didn’t even know it was possible. Again, talk to your guy that’s doing your the gala’s doing your Google Ads. Talk to the people that are doing your SEO. See what they can do.

And if they’re not doing that kind of stuff, then, you know, shop around because I I think there are people who are using it smarter, and and then you could find those guys.

Peter: I wanna get Paul Lee, the SEO expert, to make my website rank number one in my area for a particular thing or just show up on the search results in page one, maybe show up in the Google map listing three pack, which is the little three three or four local listings that show up on the Google search results page. And I’m going to hire the company biz marketing to do the SEO. How long is this gonna take? Go.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, patience grasshopper. You know, it it takes a while because it doesn’t, you know, I love the old joke. There was the guy that says, you know, first you must learn patience.

And he says, yeah, patience, patience. How long is that gonna take?

Peter: So,

Paul: and obviously everybody wants this stuff to work, you know, they want it to work.

Peter: Sure.

Paul: So I know business owners, they ask me that question, we just smile because we just, we know what we want. We want this thing to work. It does take some time. I think there’s a good reason for that. And I think that I mentioned it in the blog article, we talked about this, and you can go read for more details in the blog.

But one of the things is I wouldn’t have it any other way. If you could, in a week, sit down and game Google in such a way that your site could rank number one out of nowhere, then Google wouldn’t be a tool worth using, right? I mean, it would be a useless, you know, resource because people could if they could game it that easily, if you could just punch a few buttons and post a few things in the right place and buy some links over here or whatever, and then all of a sudden, poof, you’re there and you leapfrog everybody, then Google’s not worth using. And they know that. So that’s why they spend so much money, so much time, so much resources on making an index that is useful.

So it’s gonna take some time because they need to see that you’re doing the right thing consistently over time. If you’re just able to just wave your fingers and your magic wand or whatever, say the incantation and you rank, then it’s not worth it.

Peter: Or it’s a very specific term that is very rarely searched. And I have seen that happen because we recently launched a brand new website for a client and it was number two in the organic results within three days a very specific set of terms related to So that was some branded, it was a brand new website.

Paul: Yeah. And the index responds quickly, especially in branded terms. It does bring on new websites quite quickly. Generally, that’s for a specific, you’re what talking about is for a specific brand or something. Or in the case of like the, you mentioned the viral article that you wrote.

Yeah. You’re answering a very specific question, and if you’re the first one to do it, or one of the first ones to do it, you’re going get a big leg up. I’m talking more about for your whole site as a plumber, or your whole site as a roofer, or as a dentist. To get that to move past all the other dentists that are in your area, there isn’t a way to just snap your fingers and make it happen. So it’s a process that takes I mean, Google itself tells you that to give your SEO specialist four to twelve months.

What we usually see, usually there’s some things that have been done incorrectly or not done at all, and kind of low hanging fruit, as they say, we can grab that stuff, we can do those things fairly quickly. You’ll see a bump, up fairly quickly. That almost always happens. And then it’s a slow climb from there. And you’ll see it gradually, but it starts to gain momentum.

And we do see results between four to twelve months is the consistent, things that we see in our business.

Peter: I know that, one of our clients is a chiropractor in a particular market. That particular case, their competitor has their name, has a name of the city. This particular client does not have the name of the city. So it’s made it rather difficult. How long did it take to, in that particular case, if you can recall, to kind of really get into the competitor spot in that market for chiropractor?

Paul: So, in that particular case, we probably were there, it was about four to six months. I think it was six months for sure. We were we were in the one and twos, and and they do go back and forth. It is tough to to you know, when your competitor has the name of the city and you’re trying to rank number one for searches that have the name of your city in it, which are great terms to rank for, obviously, because it’s a lot of search intent. They’re looking for a specific place.

So you do want to rank highly for those. You’re at a disadvantage when you don’t have the name of your city in your business name because not many people can do

Peter: None of the URL necessarily. You’re talking about the actual name of your business.

Paul: Exactly, the name of the business, totally different. So it’s a bit of a challenge, to be honest with you. And we were able to get into that one and twos within six months. Yeah. And we’ve consistently since then, you know, we’ve been And the other guys are making an investment in SEO too.

That’s the other thing that affects these timelines is what are your competitors doing? So you mentioned getting into a specific space with a specific word, and if nobody else is there, bang, you’re in. But if somebody is there and somebody is spending money every month on SEO and you are as well, and another guy is as well, another guy as well, it’s gonna be tough to crack that top 10. Because if there’s 10 guys spending, 10 marketing budgets that are going towards this thing, then you’re just one of those 10. So it means that it might take you a little longer to make progress.

It means that progress might be a little more gradual, a little more slow, but it also means in that particular case, you better spend because if not, you’re gonna get crushed because you’re against 10 businesses that are all spending money. So yeah, that also affects the timeline. Who’s your competitors? What are they doing?

Peter: Right, well, and then there’s all kinds of ranking factors. We go into those in other podcasts and articles. For example, you know, we talk about reviews, online reviews and the value of those that boils down to the frequency, the rank, the rating and the recency of the reviews. So it’s, or when I say the frequency, I mean the total number of reviews you have plus your overall rating plus how frequently you’re getting. If you had a 100 reviews from five years ago and then no new reviews for the last five years, Somebody that got the same number of reviews, but had it evenly spaced and had five positive reviews in the last month versus year zero is definitely going to rank better than you.

So there’s all kinds of details need to be be covered. But again, that that’s going to be a factor of how long this tanks. But I think you really answered the question. Google answered the question, like you said for themselves, they say that, four to twelve months. So I think that’s good.

There’s one other thing that I was thinking we should cover as kind of a bonus topic is this idea of ranking for terms or company’s desires to rank for a term that doesn’t even show up on their website. So let’s talk about that a little bit. What’s going on there?

Paul: Yeah, so that’s one of those interesting things that comes up occasionally from a client. They’ll say they wanna rank for this particular term, and our research will come back and say, when we’re doing keyword research, we’re like, we need to make sure that we’re owning these terms and these are the ones that people are searching for the most. And they’ll say, well, we want to rank for those terms, but we don’t want those terms to show up on our website, which is a head scratcher for me. I guess it’s to make it clear here, there’s no way to rank for something that doesn’t appear on your website. Back in the day, there was these things you could kind of hide stuff, you know, people put into the list of keywords, Google actually trusted you to give them a list of keywords.

They realized that that was foolish. Why would you trust people to do such things? People did the crazy tricks where they put a whole bunch of text all in the color of the background.

Peter: Yeah, so if you had like a white background, they would put it the white text, the color of the text, the font was like white. Yeah. So you couldn’t Yeah. Yeah. Then and then that became like a negative.

Right? If Google saw you doing that, they would say,

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely you’re you’re down the garbage shoot at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory with that one because you’re out of there. So they they they they they got rid of all that stuff. Google got smarter. The the the index is much smarter than it used to be.

And so all that stuff means that you have to actually provide information about that particular topic in order to be considered rankable by Google. I mean, that seems like an obvious thing, but the reason why businesses will say, well, the what we wanna rank for is kind of boring, and we wanna say it in a more zingy kind of a marketing kind of a way. It’s too this is it’s too blunt to say it that way, and it makes our page sound sort of dumbed down. If you’re, I don’t know, I’ll just make up a random example, but if you’re running your business that does clinical trials for medicine, and you’re like, I don’t wanna say clinical trials for medicine or clinical pharmacology trials, those are kind of boring terms. I wanna say like helping you get your drug to market faster.

Well, that’s cool, but nobody is searching for that, nobody. They’re searching for phase one clinical trial or something like that, vaccination trial. That’s what they’re looking for. So you have to say that. So you’re a roofing contractor, then say roofing contractor, and that’s fine.

Unapologetically, it’s great to be a roofing contractor.

Peter: So Right.

Paul: So that’s that’s what you wanna do. You wanna put yourself out there that be who you are.

Peter: You could use your remarketing ads to highlight that benefit.

Paul: Oh, Yeah. And I don’t I don’t mean ditch what the marketing guy came up with because it’s probably smart. It’s probably great stuff, and it probably moves the needle maybe when they’re there

Peter: Yeah.

Paul: To on the site. It may be like, Oh yeah, I understand why these guys have an advantage over somebody else, or why this may solve my problem better than another thing. That’s great, and it needs to be on the page, it needs to be there somewhere. It’s just you have to also be blunt in order to get Google’s attention as we’ll get because that’s gonna get the customer’s attention to come to your website in the first place. Then you convert them.

Peter: Paul, this is good stuff, man. Let’s do this Sounds more

Paul: good to me, man.

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.