Category: SEO

Best SEO Tips in 2021 Featuring Steve Wiideman

I interviewed Steve Wiideman for the Best SEO tips in 2021 and he delivered some incredible content I'm happy to share with you.

(Be sure to read my blog The Reason Why More People Aren’t Entrepreneurs here).

At A Glance

∎ Learn the magic of SEO after Google's Hummingbird Update

∎ 3 principle-based factors on using Google to increase your sales

∎ BONUS: Get access to a $599 SEO course for FREE

Best SEO Tips in 2021

Trevor: I'd like to hear your thoughts on SEO, with some specific questions I have there. I've SEO'd my LinkedIn profile. It has gotten me a lot of business doing that.

Because people search LinkedIn for stuff and people don't realize, uh I guess I should say business owners don't realize how valuable SEO is on all platforms. Whether it's LinkedIn, or their website, or their YouTube videos or whatnot.

If you could share, maybe top 3 tips for folks that are doing SEO themselves or maybe what they should look for if they want to hire someone that does SEO for them.

Optimize LinkedIn & Identify What Search Results You're Pulling

Steve: Sure you make a great point with LinkedIn. Optimizing your LinkedIn profile is fantastic. But when you optimize all of your social media profiles it can help you with your online reputation management as well.

So when someone does a name search your social profiles are there not just on page but off page getting some links to those profiles pages so google feels that’s the results are the most relevant searches for your name.

Do a google search with your name in quotes and see what appears for your name. Figure out which of those things you own and control and optimize the heck out of them.

Drive links to them from blogs, your friends blogs.

Isolate those things you don’t want to appear so you can get those removed or buried and then isolate things that are neutral that you don’t control. So you know in the mix of things here’s what I control.

Here’s what I can’t and that’s ok and here’s what I want to keep an eye on to go away.

Google SEO Tip #1: Solving for the intent of the user

Do I have the most relevant page to solve what people are looking for?

Steve: This for Organic SEO - a principle based approach:Not just the key words - key words died in the Hummingbird update from Google in 2013

It's about solving for the intent of the user now.

What is it they really want?

They searched for title tag principles because they are trying to get their click-thru-rates up in search results. But what do they want?

Higher CTR? Or Higher keyword rankings?

So when you solve for what they are actually looking for...If someone is searching for cheap flights...ask:

What is it that they really want to do?

They want to save money, they don’t want to pay baggage fees right? They want value.

When you answer what your users really want thru survey:

Through customer support, intake calls whatever you need to do so that your page really solves what your customer wants this takes it to the next level.

Rank Brain - the other big update that sits on top of Humming Bird is trying to understand the meaning of words.

You do need to emphasize search terms that have high search volume when you launch a new page because Google is going to crawl that page, identify those phrases and test you in the search results for them.

Long term it’s how users interact with your listing. So you can hack your way to the top with key words but if other pages are doing a better job of solving what users are looking for and provide more of a delightful experience, long term your rankings will go away.

So that’s #1 looking at your on page, being the most relevant and doing a search for the keyword you want to appear for.

• Study the top pages

• Study the on page

• Study what links are coming into those pages

• Study how many people have curated or quoted from the 1st paragraph on that page

• Use this data to inform on how to optimize your page

Google SEO Tip #2: Optimize Your Off Page Results for Google

Steve: Google in particular started with an algo Larry Page coined as Page Rank. It isn’t where you rank on the page but the algorithm that crawls thru the net looking for info to understand what pages have what meaning and are a good match for a phrase someone searches for in the search results.

They are crawling thru links to get to pages and those links count like votes. Like a sign above the door that says what’s behind the door, so before you walk thru it you read the sign and go oh, this room must be about kitchen.

So google reads the text in the link, then read the page and says oh this page being linked to must be about this topic.

Then they crawl analyze the page for titles, headings, the URL the page name.

They look at all these hidden factors and based on the on page and off page this page might be a good match for this search term.

I’m [Google is] going to test it and 1 out of 100,000 times people are searching for this term if it does good I’ll show it twice for every 100K then every 50K.

Then more often you can see this in Google Search Console

It all stems from how often they hit your page and how many other websites are linking and mentioning your website and your content.

This is just organic results, not Google maps, not video search, we’re talking about specifically Google web search (Google depending on your industry having about 80-90% market share is the search engine we want to pay the most attention to).

So those 2 are 2 of 3 principle-based factors.

1. Am i improving the relevancy and helpfulness of my page over time?

2. Am I improving the visibility and mentions of my page over time?

Google SEO Tip #3: Search Appearance & User Behavior Signals

Steve: And the 3rd thing is search appearance and user behavior signals - how users actually interact with your listing.

And in many cases you can almost eliminate everything on page and off page if you’re already ranking in top results If your page is the most helpful - it will stick there at the top.

It’s really around the user signals that tells Google and other search engines that this listing is the most helpful so I’m going to leave it there on the top until they start choosing another listing more often and staying on that listing.

So our goal is to provide a really click enticing, helpful, maybe really rich result by using some of the different technology available maybe using some reviews to the page so you get stars in the search results.

Maybe having some FAQs section at the bottom of the page that will show up in the search results if you use that FAQ market.

Maybe it’s putting some mark up around your video or images so they shows it as a thumbnail in the mobile search results.

It’s making your listing really stand out so it’s not just 1 of 10 listings that have just a title, description and a URL but instead you have some really rich content in the search results.

Trevor: So it’s using these tools to appear more valuable at a glance.

This speaks to value based marketing,versus hard pitches, deliver value first to engender reciprocity to be viewed as more helpful and enhance word of mouth digitally.

Steve: Now we’re talking about attribution and the whole buyer's journey and you’re right there are some biz owners that get myopic of driving people to just sales content:

"I want to make sure my sales pages are #1 don’t waste your time with all this fluff marketing content just get my personal injury or car accident lawyer page #1 that’s all I want."

But the reality is you can’t make that happen without some of the marketing content because that marketing content attracts links and it helps your wholistic SEO and builds authority if your short summary of the page, that long form:

• How to

• Where to

• Why

• What is

• Strategy

• Tips

• Advice

• Checklist type content...

When it’s out there and it gets linked to that can support that sales page that you want to perform that you want to rank.

So it’s hard sometimes convincing the leadership team that we need to create a really strong content marketing strategy around what our customers are looking for before they are ready to hire us.

Maybe even doing some industry content where we get other sites in the industry to reference some data some case studies some research we did that isn’t already available online.

So I think you’re right I think it’s understanding that buyer journey and addressing each phase of it when the user isn’t at the point of making a purchase or ready to make a decision yet.

Trevor: This would align with influencer marketing and getting shoutouts from people that are already established and things like that.

But I mean this is why you have a blog - you develop an audience you provide all this valuable content.

And it serves a secondary function:

So when you’re giving away information and there’s not a sales pitch there maybe there’s a link where hey if you want to find out more feel free to enter the funnel, essentially, without saying those words.

What also helps with that [content marketing] is: it’s a pre-qualifier.

You don’t have to get low quality leads because people are coming here they are attracted here by the content.

Instead of someone that just saw “hey this is for free” let me click on this. It’s a free deal! And then you get everyone that wants the freebies instead of the people that are more invested for a longer CTV for the lifetime journey of the customer.

Steve: It can be a huge win.

With Meineke car care centers, we did this thing where we didn’t necessarily want our best evergreen content on the blog but that’s where they put it.

The blog for me is about industry news, having a voice in conversations that are happening right now what’s new with the company.

It’s really time sensitive and will get buried in RSS feeds over time.

I like to nest up the content that’s more evergreen that will be just as helpful 3-5 years from now under its appropriate silo.

So I can get those really competitive pages to rank well so I’ll nest them in a URL that’s a sub page of that main page and I might use the blog to link to it so those sites that do take RSS feeds and publish that.

If they consume HTML you might get a link back from it. So it’s still worthwhile to mention in a blog.

So with Meineke they did use the blog. We did one every Tuesday we came up with a list using Conductor Searchlight keyword.

We came up with a list of all the different keywords we thought people were looking for.

Every Tuesday we launched a How-to.

• How-to jumpstart your car battery
• How-to check your engine oil
• What’s the difference between standard and synthetic oil

We did this every single Tuesday.

Every post was optimized to rank with unique pictures we took on sight, sometimes videos, a step-by-step it was a really strong campaign and a lot of that content is still up if you want to look at it.

After 5 months we attracted over 500,000 visits.

I think the most visits we had was was during Coachella which was when people were looking for how to jump start your car battery which I thought was really funny.

So anyway in doing that, what was neat about that campaign wasn’t that we drove that much traffic and earned 200 links to the site in the process.

But because everyone needs an oil change and they did at the time every 90 days they were able to use re-marketing.

So for everyone who visited the website we were able to remarket to them with ads you know $14.99 oil change coupon or something.

So not only did we did we attract links, drive traffic to the site, build brand awareness get a lot of those featured answers that now appear in voice searches since Google Assistant will use featured answers in 70% of its results.

We were also able to drive some of that traffic back to the website using retargeting from Facebook, from Google, from Bing and from there continue to build our list.

We were able to almost quadruple the volume of visitors that are coming to the website just by creating that value that you were just talking about.

Trevor: It sounds like you have enough in your brain to build a course. Do you have a course in SEO?

Steve: Yes

Trevor: Where can people go to find out more information?

Steve: I’d like to give everyone free access to it if you want?

Trevor: Sure!

Steve: It’s at academyofsearch.com

What I decided to do 3 years ago which is actually one of my own personal dreams is to teach. I started teaching at Cal State Fullerton, UC San Diego and Fullerton Community College.

At Cal State Fullerton I was teaching a class on strategic SEO.

I took a lot of that course content that inspired an SEO course we have at Academy of Search - like a 6 week program - it’s a $599 course but your listeners can access it for free.

Just use SEOSTEVE and they can get free access.

Trevor: Is there anywhere else people can go to find out more about you and your services that you’d like to give a shout out to?

Steve: Sure I’m actually all over social. My handle is SEO Steve. But if I’m not responding quick enough our team - we have a team of 9 other search geeks like me, no sales people we just love to help. Especially small businesses, we don’t work with a lot of small businesses.

So any help you need as a small business is all free and something we do to try to help the business community.

Just use the handle the Wiideman pretty much anywhere.

Instagram, Facebook all over the web. If there’s anything we can do to help to solve for a problem, a page isn’t ranking, a competitor is doing something spammy you know whatever it and you’d like us to take a look please do that we like to help wherever we can and hopefully build some great relationships.

Who knows maybe one day you’ll be the next digital marketing manager at the next Sketchers and you’ll remember us.

Trevor: That’s such an awesome thing you’re doing for small businesses there.

Steve: Thank you.

Have you used SEO before? What were the results? Comment below!

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5 Quick SEO Tips – How to Increase Your Search Rank Result

SEO basics: Five tips & best practices to consider for your website

SEO explained

Here is an SEO starter guide for those who want the benefits of search engine optimization without spending hours googling and guessing. Let's get started!

Provide useful product or service information

Step 1: Discover What Your Audience is Googling

If you don’t know what your audience is googling you can’t optimize your site, so here is an easy way to find that out.

Imagine you are one of your customers, and start entering in search terms. It seems pretty easy but you’d be surprised how many people don’t experiment with googling things first.

Use short and meaningful page titles and headings

Let’s say you own an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. Now imagine you’re in San Fran, you’re hungry for some pasta or authentic Italian pizza - what would you google?

* Italian restaurants in San Francisco
* Bay area Italian food
* Best Italian restaurant in the Mission District

You now have some of your first search terms. Are these the best search terms with the highest search volume? Maybe, let’s do some more research.

Include details about your business

a) Find The Commonly Used Keywords For Your Business

Searching Google for Italian restaurants in SF produces many results:

Glancing at the search results you can see key phrases used, “Italian restaurant” and “San Francisco” as well as “Italian food.” The reason why we’re seeing this is because websites are using title tags to rank in search results.

We can also see Italian restaurants appear in “best of” lists for more than one website, which may be a good idea to include somewhere on your website, if you’re the owner of an Italian restaurant.

Check image and video tags

Search engines might not always interpret images or videos in the same way people do, so it’s important to use words to help the search engine understand these items. Make sure you adjust the "alt =" text of your images to reflect the keyword you're targeting.

Use descriptions that your potential customers can relate to

b) Find Out New Ways Your Customers Search for the Same Topic

You’ll want to use a Keyword Explorer tool, there are a few free ones on the net, or you can pay for one on sites like SEM Rush, ahrefs, and moz.com I believe offers a free one after you create a profile on their website.

This is where you'll discover more keywords, rated by their search volume and a few other long-tail keywords which consist of entire phrases versus just one or two words.

Knowing these gives you the sense of how people are searching in different ways for the same thing.

c) Research Related Subjects & Themes in Your Niche

You can increase your search rank results by blogging about topics in your niche, increasing the amount of keywords your site ranks for.

But, this won’t be any good, if you’re just guessing and writing content. I’ve heard of more than one person that complains, “Well I’m producing tons of content but nothing ever happens!”

That’s because you need to produce content that is optimized for search engines based on what words your customers are already using.

Going to forums, Quora, Reddit, Facebook groups and finding out what phases your potential customers are using is a great way to create a word bank to fill your blogs with.

Another pro tip is to find pain points and solve them on your website or IRL for your Italian restaurant in this hypothetical example.

Eg: people complain there's no seating at other Italian restaurants - you add an outside patio area and mention on your site, "Unlike other Italian restaurants that don't have seating you'll always have a spot in our new patio area.

You can even subscribe to podcasts by authority figures in your vertical and write down keywords you hear coming up again and again.

Step 2: Optimize Your Website Pages for Search

Make sure your website looks good on mobile and use the data you’ve found from the previous steps in this article to add those keywords and long-tail phrases to pages on your site.

Always start with a keyword phrase at the beginning of paragraphs and in titles or headings on your website.

You can use free and paid plugins on WordPress to optimize your site even more, like the Yoast SEO plugin.
Step 3: Create Content With Search Intent in Mind

There are 3 main search intents when folks are googling:

Navigational: They’re looking for a specific website, e.g., ‘Italian restaurant’
Informational: Looking to learn more about a specific topic, e.g., ‘Italian restaurants in SF’
Transactional: They’re looking to purchase a specific product/service, e.g., ‘book a table in San Francisco’

Typically, informational searches rank the highest with Google - but research your field and back it up with proof.

Step 4: Design Snappy Clean Short Website URLs

Google’s bots crawl website URLs in addition to content on your site. That being said, you want to make sure you get this one optimized from the get go without changing
it later.

The simpler and topic-based URL you have, the better SEO results you’re going to get. This means no long numbers in your URLs, but short URLs that have a major keyword in it will work best.

eg: /italian-restaurant-SF

Step 5: A Few Bonus SEO Tips

Make sure your website loads fast, and install an SSL certificate, which means your site has an HTTPS instead of HTTP.

What's your niche? Comment below!

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How to Use SEO to Drive More Sales

One of the pain points small to medium sized businesses have (& even Fortune 500s in some industries) is not understanding what SEO is, and feeling it’s too technical.

Search Engine Optimization is in essence, how to get your website to rank on google searches when your prospects are searching for your product or service.

BUT there are even more benefits to keyword research that will be revealed below.

Keyword Optimization in a Nutshell

Let’s first get clear on the specifics of what SEO is:

Search Engine Optimization discovers which specific terms potential customers search google with to find a service or product.

How money is made through search terms is by including these same search terms on your website. This gets your website ranking higher on Google search results.

But – you need to know the exact phrases as well as words, and that’s just the beginning.

Beyond SEO

Finding those keyword terms is absolutely necessary to get your website content to rank higher on search engine ranking pages (SERPs). Also, you’ll want to be on page 1 of Google for search term search results because people rarely look beyond page one.

Yet, there is a level deeper you’ll want to go for maximum benefits:

Customer intentions when googling. When you know why your prospects are searching for things as part of the customer experience you expand your opportunity for upsells & downsells as well as where and how to build out new products and services.

For more info on how to improve your business by understanding the customer experience read this metrics blog here.

Making keyword research a regular habit you do for your business helps understand how your audience views the world, which enables your messaging to be more on point with better customization and personalization. This generates better trust in your business too!

Have you ever made a content map? I linked a nice Hubspot article to the words ‘content map’ to peep, it’s great to map out your blog content & social media posts ahead of time.

Integrating SEO into how you map out your content calendar will boost your business presence online and up your game by a whole bunch, as more of your audience will read your blog and consume your content when it is already planned with SEO in mind.

Bullet Point Your Search Terms

Step One: Brainstorm Likely Terms Your Audience Searches For
Just start thinking up the type of terms your audience may search for when looking to hire your type of service or buy your type of products, when Google searching.

It can be helpful to role play what you would do if you were a customer, or what you already do personally, when googling for a product. Write down those search terms. If you have a team, get their thoughts too. Think of how your customers may phrase things.

Step 2: Validate Search Terms With Reality
Go on Quora, google your keyword term plus forum or blog or articles and you’ll find where online conversations are happening about your topic. This will get you the exact words your customers are using.

For example, if you run a podcast or marketing firm search “podcast+board” or “marketing+forum” or vice versa, and you’ll find forums and bulletin boards where folks go to find more info. It’s a great place to get your finger on the pulse of current trends.

Pro-tip: Look at Wikipedia, enter your search terms, and look at the table of contents on articles that pull up. This will get you some new search terms that be even more clutch.

Step 3: Google Autofill Hack
This is a nice little hack even millionaires I work with in eCommerce didn’t know about until I taught them! Go to Google.com and enter in the first word of a keyterm — don’t type in the full phrase though let Google autofill the rest.

This is the genius of it, Google will suggest the most popular search term combos that people search for. This will advance your search term list with real results you aren’t guessing on but have in specifics.

Bonus: Google Search Console
Stroll over to the Google Search Console to see the keywords your website already ranks for. Google will also give you the heads up if you have broken pages and/or links on your site, or anything that prevents them from properly indexing your webpage on search engines.

The Genius of Long-tail Search Terms

At this point, if you’re following the steps outlined in today’s blog, you’ll have quite a few search terms written down from:

√ Your brainstorming
√ Role playing as the customer
√ Your teams ideas on search terms
√ What you find on forums and boards in your industry and
√Google auto fill suggestions

To be effective you’ll want to have four to six baseline key phrases.

Ex: Marketing, marketing strategy, marketing plan and eight to twelve long-tail phrases.

Ex: Marketing plan template, Marketing help for small businesses, Marketing ideas during covid.

Baseline search term phrases are just that, your baseline. Start with these, put them on your landing pages, even in About pages if you can.

Use one phrase for your home page and the other phrases should have landing pages or whole sections of your website dedicated to these terms.

This empowers you to earn rankings on search results on Google. But make sure when choosing baseline key words to include relational search phrases in addition to the main one.

What I mean is this, remember when we talked about intention and the customer experience? The plain picture search term of say “marketing” will have higher competition than a less-than-obvious search term that denotes the experience your customer has on the customer journey.

An example of a key word phrase that reflects intent would be “get leads for my business” instead of just “marketing.” It’s a more specific intention which separates the people who may also be marketers from your customer base, that you actually want to reach.

As you may have noticed, the second phrase is a long-tail search term.

The long-tail search terms are fantastic on clarifying the customer’s intention, like the “getting leads for my business” above. You can even make certain weeks in the month themed for specific long-tail search terms you want to split test for SEO generated traffic on your site.

Sounds pretty dang useful right?

There are a few tools SEO experts recommend using I’ll mention as well.

SEO Tools Experts Use

√ Google Keyword Planner

Try and use your twelve to fifteen search terms in the planner’s keyword suggestion tool, and peep the ad groups Google suggests to piece out and label what you see.

You can find terms related to the ad groups, and view the estimated search volume for each term and the suggested bid — keep in mind it’s an AdWords tool made mainly to sell more ads.

Keep your perspective balanced here, as search volume is just one metric. Search terms with a lot of traffic don’t always help, but when you marry this to the bid price, you’ll notice high bid price means higher conversion values.

It isn’t a hard fast rule, but you’ll begin to see that bid price fluctuations are a vital sign when diving in to the research. Ideally, you want to mark and edit your search phrase with a combo of search volume and bid price. Try to find the mid point.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now – it’s understandable. You can stick with all the advice given before the Tools section here and still come out on top, better than before.

Here are a couple of other tools SEO experts recommend:

Yoast Suggest
Google Trends

TLDR Cliff Notes Version: Yoast is a free WordPress plugin (with advanced options on the paid plan), it alphabetically lists related search terms from Google, and Google Trends is gold for seeing a timeline of the popularity of a search term.

Google Trends is key if you plan on running Amazon or Shopify eCommerce businesses, as you can see spikes, dips and plateaus for search terms ( = buying habits) of a product you’re evaluating for adding to your shop.

What are your favorite key takeaways from today’s blog on SEO? Comment below, thanks.

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