096: SEO In 2024 – The Untold Story with Paul Lee

Title: SEO In 2024 – The Untold Story with Paul Lee

Guest: Paul Lee

Peter: My guest today is Paul Lee. He is an SEO expert and he is the owner of Leeway Creative, an SEO agency and creative and marketing agency. Today we’re going to talk about SEO. That’s really Paul’s passion and what we interact with him a lot on. He’s done some other podcasts with us in the past.

Today, the topic is forget page one, the untold truth about SEO and actual sales. Paul, what are we talking about here?

Paul: We’re talking about that we need to recalibrate the way we think about SEO. This has been something that’s been gnawing at me for a while. When when I got into the SEO game, everybody was really into rankings. How are we gonna get to rank on page one? And where where do we rank?

And, of course, that’s that’s still the driver for a lot of people when they talk about SEO. They talk about where do they rank. And I’m trying to get people I just realized that ranking is so much a it’s a part of it, but it’s not the whole story. And in fact, increasingly, I’m convinced that it isn’t even the most helpful thing that we need to be focusing on. So I’m trying to blow people’s minds a little bit here and get past where do I rank on Google and start thinking about it in a new way because I think there’s a there’s another way that’s a lot more helpful and that’s gonna help get move your business forward more than a ranking.

Peter: K. Let’s dig in. Why as a business owner shouldn’t I be caring as much about my rankings on Google?

Paul: Ultimately, we’re still going to rank on Google. We still want that to be the case, but it’s a lot of people who take that as this the measure of their success though, and that’s what I have a

Peter: problem with. Okay. I see what you’re saying.

Paul: Saying look, we rank here for this. We rank number one for this. We rank up top five for whatever. Yeah. But do you rank for number one that nobody searches for except for you when you’re doing this search to check how you rank is Oh.

You’re not moving anything. You’re not moving the needle. You’re not selling anything. You’re not making any new appointments or new clients or new customers because you are just ranking. That doesn’t necessarily help.

Then there’s a question beyond that of, okay I’m ranking for even for things that people might be searching for, but they’re maybe not the right people that are searching for the right things to actually buy my stuff. So now they’re not becoming I’ve got this vanity metric. I’ve ranked. Yay. Somebody helps you do that.

That’s fantastic. But the ultimate measure of it is not if you rank. The ultimate measure of it is did you sell anything?

Peter: Did you sell?

Paul: That’s where we have to get to.

Peter: Did you get appointments?

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. That’s true. Is your parking lot empty outside?

Peter: Let’s boil this down into some examples. What would you say about that?

Paul: There’s a few things that I wanted to bring up. One is that landscape of a Google search engine result page, s e r p, you’ll see that acronym used a lot, SERP. I don’t particularly like that acronym because it just sounds goofy, but the search engine result pages have changed over the years, and so Google came out in ’98, ’99, something like that, and it looks radically different now than it did back then. Right? So we know that.

Peter: That was before Google was a verb, and that’s when Microsoft Internet Explorer existed as a browser.

Paul: Yes. If you I don’t know if you can actually hear the modem noise when you look at this picture.

Peter: In the old I’m feeling lucky button.

Paul: Yes. I’m feeling lucky. There’s nobody feels lucky anymore. So this is Google in its purest form. It’s just basically just here are the results to your search.

Here’s a list of things in order that we think that you’re are helpful. Most helpful things at the top. That’s easy to understand, and it’s easy to see. Okay. I need to be at the top of that in order to get more traffic.

How do I do that? And that kicks off the whole SEO, like, lifestyle. Right? This is what this is where the business is born is to figure out how to get to the top of those lists, but the lists don’t look like that anymore. So let me show you what they look like in 2023.

At the top, we have all these ads. At the side, we have maybe a a knowledge panel that shows pictures from the business or information about their hours and things like that.

Peter: Could be a Google business profile.

Paul: Yeah. And down here we got a map with at least three things, sometimes more. The next thing below that would be things like people also ask. They might be Google image searches, YouTube searches. I’ve seen excerpts from Twitter, all sorts of things, and then, only then, you get down to the actual research results.

Peter: Traditional organic search results.

Paul: It might sometimes three pages down of of I mean, you know, a screen scrolls down until you get to that. In some ways, that is just going to dilute the, value of being number one. We we know that for the instance. So and that SEO has become not just getting to the number one, but also trying to figure out how to make sure that you are in the map, how to make sure that you are Right. The knowledge panel when you can.

If you can get your FAQs into the people also ask.

Peter: Or you’re in ads as well. We’re not necessarily saying that you have to do ads, but Yeah.

Paul: But I mean

Peter: But they definitely It’s a powerful tool if you link it together with SEO.

Paul: Absolutely. Absolutely. So the whole point there is just to say that things and the value of number one is a little bit diluted by that. Now there are other things that you can get out of it, like if your site ranks well in maps, then it’s gonna be actually more valuable because you’re up near the top than you are than you would have been before. So there’s some good things about it.

But Mhmm. Overall, you were saying it was it’s it’s diluted. In fact, Google is trying to what they call zero click visits. So if you can ask a question, it will just show you the answer. For instance, how tall is Mount Everest?

Google just shows you the answer. They don’t send you to a website to tell you the answer to that. They just show you the answer.

Peter: Yeah. And I would add that we’re sort of in a we’re about ready to see some major evolutions here with with AI.

Paul: Absolutely. Yeah. There are gonna be earthquakes of changes as far as the way people interact with the generative search capabilities, and they will this will actually even be pushed further down. What it means is that we have less we can draw a less clear line between rankings and value to the website. So we have to start looking at things that are fuzzier.

And so what I would suggest is that and I’m almost to the place where I would like to change the term search engine optimization to something like organic conversion optimization. What I’m saying, conversions are the goal. That’s what you want. Rankings are a reviews. There’s many other factors that are along the road to ultimately getting organic conversions.

So that’s people that are looking for you, they find you on the web, and they become a client, customer, they make a product inquiry, they buy something in your e commerce store, they actually convert. So we can tell when we have things properly set up, we can say, okay, you have 30% of your traffic comes from organic and 50% comes from ads, but 50% of your leads come from organic, and 30% come from ads. Like you can see

Peter: Yeah.

Paul: The splits and you can see what’s doing well, what’s underperforming, what’s over performing, and we get to this place where we go, oh wow, what matters is conversions. This also changes the way what we do. This also changes the way we as SEOs approach your content because now what happened in the past is that some people would get things to rank, but it’s not it wasn’t helpful rankings. It wasn’t help anybody that was that was moving towards actually buying something or becoming a customer, and I’ll give you I’ll give you a funny examples, a couple of these. I think we’ve discussed this before, but I used to work with a website not on their SEO, but worked on, and they had written an article about how to tell the difference between sheep and goats.

What’s the difference between sheep and goats? Now they were, in the food industry, and they thought this, I don’t know why they wrote it years ago. Yeah. I don’t know why they wrote it, but they did. And for some reason, Google loves that article.

And so probably there’s some essay that’s assigned in fourth grade somewhere that’s what’s the difference between sheep and goats? And these kids search for it, and they find this article. They get thousands, tens of thousands of page views on that article every month. Not a single one of them is interested in what they do. I could say, wow.

You’re ranking number one or in the top 10 or whatever for this question, where is sheep and goats? But it does you no good because

Peter: That’s we have a similar situation on our website. I wrote something about remarketing ads, and which is a way that somebody visits your website, we plant a cookie on their browser, and then we show them ads as they surf around the web. It’s been around for a long time, and I was explaining the value of it, and I used the phrase or I used something from the movie Christmas Vacation and jelly of the month club, and it was my reference was it’s the gift that keeps on giving, which was what, cousin Eddie said when Clark opened up his his annual what he thought was his annual bonus check, and it was it was a certificate for jelly of the month club, and it was cousin Eddie that said, hey, Clark, that’s the gift that keeps on giving. Yeah. If you look that up on the web, we rank like number two for that, which is so random.

We get We get website visitors traffic for that, but it’s useless. I do see some other tangents related to this. Let’s say that we did have a page that ranked well for a search term that we wanted to rank, for example, and it so we’ve got the rankings, and it’s not turning into conversions, which is kinda what you’re talking about. What is the content that’s missing on our website that people are, once they do get there, are gonna find helpful in order to rank. And I think I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but I think that’s one of the conversations that needs to be had with business owner.

Paul: Yep. Absolutely. You’re right you’re going right down the right path. Once you start thinking down this path, you start looking at your content in a different way. So you start looking at the messaging on your website in a different way, and you’re saying to yourself, what am I meeting the needs of the people that are actually looking at my website?

Am I and where I’m not, how why am I not? What can I add? And where I am Mhmm. How can I make it even better? So where you’re saying, okay, you’re really you’re a law firm, and you wanted to draw business owners because kind of defense of businesses, and that’s what you do.

You wanna write about from the perspective of a business owner, not puff pieces about just sort of legal things that are for the general public about, I don’t know, the agent where you can get a driver’s license or legal ramifications of

Peter: Or some crazy judgment that was Yeah. Made in some Yeah. Stupid case.

Paul: Yeah. And you could you could go slightly viral in a sense on this. You become you’ve written about a a very niche small thing that so that you become, you get your rankings for that. You might even get some traffic and could get a lot of traffic even. But if they’re not the kind of people that want to buy your services, then all you’re trying to do is wasting your web server’s resources.

Peter: You actually could turn off your real buyers too.

Paul: Absolutely you could. Yeah. Absolutely.

Peter: They’re like, somebody sees this and this law firm is writing about some random case. I don’t think I want to work with them. I don’t think they’re Yeah. All that serious.

Paul: I’m looking for people that are gonna go kick some butt is what I’m looking for. If I’m looking for a lawyer, I’m not looking for so I think that’s one of the things I we we need to get the peep to to help us. It helps us reframe our mind and our thinking to say, okay. My content needs to align with what I want people to actually do and how I want to actually move them along in this process. What questions are they asking that I need to answer?

What kind of concerns do they have that I can allay or that I can sort of short circuit before they even bring them up and say, okay, we know you’re thinking about this, so here’s the answers for that. The more you show that you’re responsive and that you understand where they’re coming from, the more likely they are to then convert. So your search stuff is just the entry point. But then once they’re on your site, how are you giving them the right kind of concept there, giving them the right kind of pathway and journey? It doesn’t help if you jeez.

I I did a search engine, web audit for somebody, and they didn’t have a contact page on their website.

Peter: Donald Miller tells a story about doing a website audit for somebody, and they said he looked at their website, and he said, I’m gonna tell you to do one thing to your site, you’re gonna pay me $10,000, and it will pay for itself immediately. Uh-huh. And they said, alright. He said, you don’t have a buy button on your website.

Paul: Yeah. Exactly.

Peter: This kinda comes full circle though, honestly, because I believe that if you’re doing this, you really have to dig into the details to do this right. But if you do that, I am under the belief that Google will actually reward you for that.

Paul: Absolutely. And that’s the thing that’s that’s funny is that people the guys that wanna game Google, want the guys that wanna sort of trick it into giving them good all that stuff, it works for a little while maybe, and then it and it fills things What has been proven to work over and over is to do what Google wants. Not because just Google’s the big gorilla, but because Google is pretty in touch with what people want. It’s asking for these things not because it is arbitrary or autocratic or any of that kind of stuff. It’s asking for these things because it knows that’s what users want to see.

Peter: Yeah. There’s a there’s a whole area in Google Ads, search ads called landing page experience.

Paul: Yeah.

Peter: Your keywords are ranked based on the landing page experience. That’s one of the rankings that Google uses to figure out which ads are even going to show when somebody searches for a particular thing, and if your landing page experience is not good, well so they’re looking for things like page speed, but also relevance to the search. Yeah. So you could try to buy traffic to a page or to a website that does not have good experience for the user that’s really answering their questions and leading them down the path they want to go, Google over time, it’s not even let those ads aren’t even going

Paul: to rank.

Peter: Real simple things to do is services pages. So when we do a Google Ads for a roofing company, they may have a gutter service. We’re gonna land people on the gutter page, for example.

Paul: Yeah. And it makes sense for for Google because Google rewards that, but it ultimately makes sense because it’s more likely to convert they don’t have to go hunting around for where’s the stuff about gutters because I can’t see it. If you send them to the gutter page, then they’re going to have no excuses. There’s there’s all the information about gutters.

Peter: Right.

Paul: There it all is. And I think that’s where we have to start looking at some other metrics besides just rankings. And and when we do reporting to to our clients, we talk about the the share of organic traffic, and we talk about how much time they spend on the site and how many pages they view because there’s more engagement generally, and engagement metrics are super helpful. And the other thing is because Google has recently added those things as ranking factors as well. So the longer people spend on your site, the higher your site will rank, the more people interact with your pages.

Peter: How does Google know how long I spend on a web oh, wait a minute. I guess they know everything. Everything. Because everybody’s running Google Analytics.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

Peter: So they have the data.

Paul: Yes. They know exactly what it is. So they know that people on average spend so if they have website a and website b, which have basically similar content and are some distances from them, but will people on the visit website a spend three minutes per per visit, and these people over here spend one minute, they’re gonna give the three minute guy, he’s gonna get preference. He’s gonna rank higher. He’s gonna get more traffic.

He’s they’re gonna funnel people to because they think people vote with their feet and with their clicks and with their eyeballs. That’s how they that’s how they vote. So we have to think about things like user engagement, number of pages viewed. Are those things increasing over time? How do we increase people staying on the site?

How do we increase interlinking

Peter: Well, it’s like

Paul: so that they’ll have more places to go.

Peter: It’s like when you embed a video on a page, most people are lazy, therefore they’re gonna watch the video.

Paul: Yeah.

Peter: And if you’re gonna watch a video, a minute and a half video, ninety second video, that’s gonna be you’re gonna spend more time on that page than you would if you read the page. Absolutely.

Paul: I’m a I’m this is one of the things I’ve learned years ago was that everybody is not me. Right? So we have to learn that as marketers and as just as people. Sure. Everybody’s not me.

I’ve never bought anything from the home shopping network ever. I can’t imagine I would ever do it, yet they sell millions of dollars a day and it’s a fine business and people that buy from there are fine, but I just have never done it. If it was up to me, if everybody was me, the home shopping network wouldn’t exist. But it clearly is success. I have to get rid of this idea that everybody’s me.

When I look at the video videos, I mean, personally, I would rather read it. Please put a transcript underneath it. That’d be great for me. But because I I I can’t stand if I do watch it, I watch it at, like, double speed because I wanna just get to the point. And I can read faster than I can watch the video.

But everybody isn’t me, and and a lot of people, especially younger people, they watch the videos. Watch the videos on the page. It’s easy. It it be we should be creating more stuff that brings people to the page, but here’s let me explain it in a video, and then we transcribe it underneath, which has incredibly juicy keywords underneath it. We need to come at your content and things from different angles, and I understand that sometimes you need to say Merry Christmas to people and things like that.

But always have a a thing, a pathway for them to get from there to becoming a customer. Always. And that’s what you have to we have to think about to get back to the thing we have to get back to the ultimate goal of SEO isn’t just to to rank. Rank for ranking’s sake does not do anything. It’s ultimately is to attract and convert the right audience.

That’s what we wanna do. When

Peter: we say convert, as we talk about in the one page marketing plan, step four and five on phase two, which is after they know who you are, so they’re basically on your website, how are you capturing their interests? So they might not be ready to buy today. What are you doing to capture their interest? And then you could nurture their interest over time and then convert them. So I would be looking at not only how many leads were generated, I would also be looking at how many people were added to our list Yeah.

Paul: For example. Yeah. Absolutely.

Peter: As a success fact.

Paul: You can we can you can define conversions in in whatever way fits the business. Right? So so for some people, that was that absolutely would include subscriptions to newsletters. Other people, it’s downloads of a product that, free product that gets them in the foot of the door that says we’re now experts so that we can, and it’s not just contact forms and actual appointments made and things like that. So there’s lots of ways to look at conversions, and you can even look at conversions from a engagement standpoint.

So you can say somebody spends more than five minutes on the website, that’s a conversion. You could define a conversion, and so you can we can actually set those up to where you actually can keep track of heavily engaged people and what are we gonna do.

Peter: Count those. That’s great. Where do we go from here, Paul? What’s next?

Paul: I think for some people right now, they’re probably saying to themselves, hey, I don’t even know where I rank. Or they maybe they’ve been like, hey. I rank I I check it myself, and I rank number one for whatever, but I don’t actually see anybody coming from that. Can somebody help me with that? Can somebody figure out where the disconnect is?

And that’s where we come in. One of the things that I want to be able to do with people is to offer a free fifteen minute just ask me anything. I’ll take a look at your website. I’ll give you feedback. Whatever we can do those fifteen minutes is yours for free.

And then we could see if there’s an, usually a lot of these things are I would say, they’re obvious if you know what to look for. You shouldn’t feel bad if you’re like, oh my gosh. And I okay. The guy that didn’t put a buy button on his website should feel bad. But most of these things are things

Peter: Hey. There’s no people look still.

Paul: Yeah. So Okay. So that that’s my offer is free fifteen minutes of SEO consultation.

Peter: Great. And We’ll have links for that associated with this. If you wanna check out Biz Marketing, we’re at b I z m k t g. Paul, this is a great conversation. Look forward to another one very soon.

Paul: Sounds great, Pete. Thanks so much for your time.

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.