Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #14: How to Do Great SEO for an Existing Audience

Chris Raines: Hello there, hey. I'm getting a little aggressive with my, throwing the ball in the air.

Michael Utley: That's for you, Ariana.

Chris Raines: Yeah, Ariana puts our videos together for us. Okay, welcome to episode, what are we? 14 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast.

Michael Utley: Yes.

Chris Raines: Hope you're doing well. Thank you for listening or watching, if you're watching on video.

Michael Utley: I'm Michael.

Chris Raines: This is Michael, my name is Chris.

Michael Utley: Me.

Chris Raines: We're the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. We're going to talk today about something a little different.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: How to do, I can read the title, how to do great SEO when your primary objective is to serve an existing audience.

Michael Utley: Yes.

Chris Raines: So Michael, when we talk about SEO and marketing--

Michael Utley: We're always in this world of lead gen, but there's a whole other audience of people we should be helping.

Chris Raines: Yeah, so we're going to talk about that today. Now, this is mainly applicable to what we would call B2B businesses with a small number of customers.

Michael Utley: Yes.

Chris Raines: So think about--

Michael Utley: Which is a lot of who we work with.

Chris Raines: Exactly, so this would be a hospital holding company.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: That really the people that go to the - now obviously people visit the hospitals inside that. They have their own websites and their own systems.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: But the holding company.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: It's just basically a place for investors, for potential employees and current employees.

Michael Utley:

Another example of companies we work with that fall in this category is private equity companies.

Chris Raines: Private equity.

Michael Utley: That are not really interested in their phone ringing.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: But they want to make sure that if they have a conversation with somebody and they want that person to reach out to them, that they're able to find their website, I mean.

Chris Raines: Yeah, because they know they have a list of 100 potential customers.

Michael Utley: Yeah, sure.

Chris Raines: There are businesses like that. These are the 100 customers and we're going to make a crap ton of money on each of them, if we land them.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: We've got them in a spreadsheet. We've got it out. So you don't really need lead gen. You know who they are, you're going to go after them.

Michael Utley: But you don't want to come across poorly online with not managing and having a competent online presence.

Chris Raines: Yeah, so let's get started on things you can do if your website exists in that category of, not necessarily lead gen, but wanting to have competence and professionalism and findability to a smaller number of people who already know you.

Michael Utley: Yeah, and actually, one more thing is by way of introduction is a good exercise to do, is you're getting into this is to make a list of who your audiences are.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And to determine where they are in a spectrum from internal to external.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: So think of the spectrum this way. If lead generation is an area of activity that you want to have happened with your website or your online presence, that's a purely external focus.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: You're trying to find somebody who doesn't know you. And then on the other end, you might have an intranet. You might have, heck even a password-protected website.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: That is just 100% by definition internal audience. Well, guess what? There are a lot of audiences that are between those points, business partners, investors, employees all those are different groups, and oh, job seekers, that was the one I was looking for.

Chris Raines: Oh, yeah.

Michael Utley: Job seekers are not necessarily a purely outside audience, but there's somewhere near the end of the spectrum around new customers. So a lot of times, the job seeker is the only external audience that a company has. And that's okay.

Chris Raines: Yeah, next thing you can do when you're looking at your website for serving existing audiences is, weather. . .[Create] a "weather report" on change[s] in searching. [inaudible 00:03:36]

Michael Utley: Yeah, so this is item number one. So yeah, here's what we're saying. So, okay, so let's get into the items. Item number one, an SEO "weather report" every month for your business. What this means is, have either an agency like us, or a designated person in your organization (if you do this internally), who, every month is able to identify and articulate what has changed and the outside landscape of online marketing and how it impacts your business. We didn't make this up. I know I saw this on Twitter, got this from somebody. But we call it an SEO weather report. And Chris, in 2021, GoEpps is going to be producing one of these every month and publishing it on DodgeballSEO.com.

Chris Raines: Okay.

Michael Utley: So yeah, I just announced that. So we're going to be publishing a monthly weather report so you can use, heck, you can use ours. But what this is, is just taking responsibility for knowing what's happening out there. You have to know a little bit about SEO. And I would say that there are not a lot of good resources out there for what I'm describing. So we're going to try to fill that gap. We find that a lot of the SEO information that's out there, search engine optimization, information that's out there is way too technical, way too detailed. And isn't boiled down to, what does it mean to me?

Chris Raines: It's for the practitioner.

Michael Utley: It's really more than for the practitioner. And so what we're going to be doing starting January 21 is publishing a monthly statement of, hey, here are the three things that happened this month with BERT at Google, with changes in the search engine results page at Google, just the top three things probably. And then here's what you need to do about it.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: So yeah. So number one, monthly weather report.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Number two, scan your site and correct errors and missed opportunities. So there are various tools out there that you can scan your site for both missed opportunities and technical errors that might exist. We like SEMrush. I know you use SEMrush a lot.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: I use SEMrush. We've used Raven Tools a lot in the past, shout out to Nashville-born Raven Tools.

Chris Raines: Raven Tools is good.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: But it's good to have. So Michael, give me a couple of things that this might honor from a technical errors perspective.

Michael Utley: Yeah, so this is a good basic thing to have happened. You're not trying to be the biggest and the best in the world in search engines. You just want to make sure that you're not broken.

Chris Raines: It's getting your oil changed.

Michael Utley: Yeah, this is the scan of the website that's going to tell you, hey, you got five broken links. Hey, we found a page with a broken image. You've got a meta-description on 15 different pages that is, character for character, the same text. One you have 15 pages with the same description? They're probably different. Make those descriptions unique. You've got five pages that have content, that's so small that search engines don't even know that they've got a confident handle on what that page is about. They're below the minimum content.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: These are things that a scanning tool can pick up.

Chris Raines: Do it once a month.

Michael Utley: And again, if this isn't something you're doing in house, check in with us, we do this stuff all every day for people. This is the step we'd use. You can check-in and get help.

Chris Raines: Yeah, and I look at this as changing your oil.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: You miss one old change, it's probably not a big deal.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: But you miss enough of them, you're going to have real problems with your engine.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: So that's basically what scan site is. Michael, you got the next one here. It's about content production.

Michael Utley: Yeah, this is pretty short, but don't let your content production ever grind to a halt. A lot of companies use their blog posts and their content areas on their website as, and like news or media or press as a place to go and put something, a dumping ground, when they have something to say. We actually recommend for any website, if you just want to be discoverable on the internet, you need to be sending a signal to search engines that your website's changing. Your blog and even teasing that blog content on your homepage with little introductory blocks of new posts is a good way to signal search engines.

Michael Utley: Hey, we're alive and kicking. We're not a 10-year-old website that's not relevant and staying up to date. But no, we're refreshed and up to date. I recommend having an editorial schedule where you're planning 12 months at a time, a minimum of two new pages of content, whether it's blogs or other types of content per month. So don't ever let that content production grind to a halt. And those would be pages with a minimum of say, 500 words, hitting at least one every couple of weeks.

Chris Raines: Yeah, it's important to create that freshness. The next one here is, know your search console data and how often you're being indexed. So Google has a tool called Google Search Console.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And if you own a website, you can install this tool. And it's really your information feedback from Google that tells you, if you have any indexing problems and how often your site is getting index among other things that it can tell you. So you really want to go in and make sure that the content you're producing updates you're doing are actually getting index, because it doesn't really help you at all, if it's not getting index. So this is really outside my area of expertise, but there's a lot of things that can hurt your indexing technical problems with the page where Google choose not to index page.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: And things like that. So, Michael, you might want to add more to this, but right.

Michael Utley: Yeah, I'll add a couple of things. So one there is, remember this is different than Google Analytics.

Chris Raines: Right. [crosstalk 00:09:06] it measures how Google is scanning and cataloging and indexing yourself.

Michael Utley: And it works with Google Analytics. There's some things that can help you from Google Search Console, that we used to get from Google Analytics like keyword data. But you want to have both of these things set up and running. And the example, the case study that we talked about, I think is a really good one. Say you have a website and you add an FAQ. You have some really hot button issue where your customer service team is receiving a lot of inquiries. And you rotate that in to create an FAQ on your website to try to cut down on those customer service inquiries. Well, if your website's only getting indexed every 48 hours, you have a natural delay in the hot topics that you want people to be able to find because you don't just want them to be able to go to your website and do a search and find the help they need. You want them to be able to go to Google too and find the help they need.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: People are using Google to do deeper site searches because Google is often better than your own site search.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And so it's a habit. Not even if you've got it buttoned down in the site experiences or the search experience is really great in your website.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: People are still used to it being bad on lots of websites.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: So you want to make sure that anybody who's looking for a specific technical problem or a certain piece of contact information or how to do a certain task with your company or your service. I'm thinking about--

Chris Raines: I'll give you a software.

Michael Utley: I'm thinking about a software company that we work with. This a real example. I'm thinking about my head, is supposed to thinking about somewhere else. But yeah, so tightening up the timeframe by forcing or requesting 24-hour indexing is a good way to shorten that distance, to tighten up that loop between you and your customers. So when you're really focused on creating a great experience for an existing audience, don't make assumptions about, well, it's on the website. There's also this stuff outside of the website for being discoverable, that you can actually control better now with Google Search Console than we've ever been able to control before with Google.

Chris Raines: Yeah, that's good. Next, know what keywords people are using to find you. Michael, I'll let you take this one.

Michael Utley: Yeah, I love this one. So we've got a routine that we do where if a company comes to us and says, hey, we're not really trying to get a lot of website traffic. We know that marketing is usually about travel. We just want to make sure things are working. We just want somebody to help us keep the lights on. One of the things that we'll do, by way of analysis in order to accomplish that, is we will take the keywords that people are using to find their website, not the keywords they want to appear for.

Michael Utley: That's a different set of keywords. And that's important to you. That keyword research for SEO is important. These are the keywords people are finding to actually discover you. And this is enlightening. And what you can do is take, say in a month you have 100 of those keywords that people use to find you, you might have four or five different subject areas that they could be sorted into or clustered into. So then you've got essentially four or five clusters. And then what you really need to do is make sure that for those clusters, you're thinking about either the other keywords or the content that's needed for those clusters.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: What happens when you go through this exercise is you inevitably find a cluster that you're underserving in terms of having adequate content on your website. So when you know what the clusters are, these are essentially either your audiences or clusters of your subject matter or a hybrid of those two categories of clusters. People are looking for us for this. We need people to be able to find information on this. There may be four or five of these things that are just perennial topics that you need to be really discoverable for.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: So yeah, fill in content gaps for your clusters, for the keywords people are using to find you.

Chris Raines: Yeah, our next one here is continue to manage your offsite directories and citations. So we call these maps and apps.

Michael Utley: Yeah, maps, and apps.

Chris Raines: So what this means is various sites that are built to be an index of business, an obvious example of something like Google My Business.

Michael Utley: Yes.

Chris Raines: Which is Google Maps, same thing.

Michael Utley: Yeah, and which is a map and an app. But it's also a website and an app.

Chris Raines: Exactly.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Another example of [this is] Yelp, and there are countless industry-specific directories and the thing you need to make sure you do here is make sure all of your information is current and up-to-date and matches.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So Google doesn't like it when you've got all kinds of citations and links and directories pointing at you. But this one has your old address, this one has an 800 number, this one has a local number. You need to make sure that all of those are matching and uniform.

Michael Utley: Yeah, same business hours, straight address, stated service area, what types of services you offer at your physical location? Is it walk-in or virtual only? All those different things. And if you need help on this, just check in with us.

Chris Raines: Yeah, and that's just a typical website health thing that you can undergo at a regular interval. Just keep track of all your citations.

Michael Utley: It's good SEO if you're doing lead generation, but if we're on this spectrum, this end of the spectrum where we're trying to nurture an existing known audience, it's a good factor in professionalism.

Chris Raines: Yeah and last one here Michael, is use best practices for user experience and heat maps.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So this is pretty cool.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So what do we mean by heat maps and user experience?

Michael Utley: Yeah. So, and we're not talking about simulated heat maps. It's really important to use real data, but there are a number of different tools that we use and like everything we do check in with this, you need help on this because this is what we do. But you can actually install software on your website that will look at how users are interacting with your site and help you understand where they're going. And essentially where they're clicking and moving around on each page. And it's presented in the form of a heat map, an area that, it's a graphic, that's red and hot in certain places or darker and blue in certain areas to say, no, nobody's looking at this.

Chris Raines: HotJar is probably one of the most popular and pretty affordable.

Michael Utley: Yeah, and so you'll see a lot of focus on phases, but also it shows us people looking for phone numbers. If they're going to header or footer, or it's they're just looking for a phone number, let's put the phone number in the header.

Chris Raines: You can see click maps. So what you might find is, if you have an element that looks too much like a button, you might see that a lot of people trying to click it.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: And are being successful at getting where they want to go. So you see a lot of things and you can even do screen capture records. So you can record actually real live sessions on how people are interacting with.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And so you can see them maybe get frustrated because they're looking for something, they can't find it. And then they eventually go to the search bar.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: A lot of times. . .

Michael Utley: The last resort, the search bar is the last resort, yeah.

Chris Raines: So how often people go to the search bar is a lot of times you can, if they click around, click around and then go to the search bar, you can see what they search for. Oh, we need to make that more findable.

Michael Utley: Yeah, that's right.

Chris Raines: So all kinds of things are really interesting things you can find by observing how people interact with their site. So that's great for obviously, if you've got existing set of customers, you want to make the experience for them as fluid and as friction-free as possible.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So HotJar.com is a great resource for that.

Michael Utley: Yeah, good, great.

Chris Raines: So I hope that was helpful. It's a little bit of a different episode in terms of most of what we talk about is lead generation and showing up in searches and winning your audience. But these are really great practices to deploy, if you have a smaller set of known audience members that you're trying to serve.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: I hope it was helpful.

Michael Utley: Awesome. Yeah, thanks. All right.

Chris Raines: All right. See you on the next one.