The battle of who’s going to be on the first page continues for all business owners. Just imagine how much reach and possible sales you’ll get when your website shows up on the first page of a Google result. This is is absolutely possible but requires time and a lot of steps to achieve.
In this week’s episode, we are joined by Lois Wyant. Lois owns JFT Marketing which specializes in growing businesses through effective digital marketing. She stressed the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase businesses’ visibility and potential sales. She mentioned 6 important tips that can improve SEO.
Listen to this episode of Rocky Mountain Marketing and learn more about the secrets of SEO for FREE!
Visit Lois’ website: https://jftwebmarketing.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/local-business-marketing/
Katie Brinkley 0:02
Hi friends. I’m Katie Brinkley, and you’re listening to Rocky Mountain marketing. This podcast is all about helping Colorado based small business owners, entrepreneurs, realtors and professionals discover the strategies and systems that take their marketing to all new heights. Let’s dive into today’s episode. Welcome back to this week’s episode of Rocky Mountain marketing Today, my guest is Lois Wyant. Now, Lois has always planned on having her own business. And it’s just that her path has changed along the way. For the past 30 years, she and her husband have had a very successful portrait studio. And that’s where she really started focusing in on the marketing. She went from the direct mail pieces before computers to creating websites for not just themselves, but for other photographers. She loves learning and continues the direction of marketing that they now have J F T Web Marketing. And today, we’re going to do the Google. We’re gonna talk Google today. Lois, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Lois Wyant 1:09
Well, thank you for having me, Katie, I like that we’re gonna do the Google.
Katie Brinkley 1:13
Well, because it is everybody wants to rank on the first page, they all want to be at the very, very top of the list. And without ads, and without the right strategy and backlinks and SEO, it’s pretty darn hard to do that. So I’m so thankful that you’re going to come in and and give us a tutorial on Google and all the things that go into to helping your website rank and get higher and get that visibility. But before we dive into that, I want to talk a little bit about you tell us where you grew up, and what life was like growing up?
Lois Wyant 1:45
Okay, well, I grew up on the west side of Indianapolis, I went to at that time was the second largest high school in the state. And so my class was 164, which nowadays, that’s not a big deal for a lot of high schools. I was the very shy, quiet person. And I hated it when the teachers called on me. And so think about this math class. My name is Lois. Okay, so in math class, it would be like a sudden shock. If somebody were at the teacher we’re talking about, okay, which, which denominator is the lowest? You know, what I like? I don’t know the answer to that. I thought about that. Know, but I was the real quiet one, and then had a real epiphany, my senior year and decided, you know, I’ve got to make something happen for myself, and I got maybe overly active. In school, I joined clubs on being president and vice president and secretary of clubs. And I just really enjoyed the last year and also through college. It just I changed my thought process and how I wanted to be. So that was a big change for me.
Katie Brinkley 2:58
Let’s dive into Google, let’s dive into how you can optimize your website so that you can show up in search. That is the million dollar question, how can I show up in search? And I’d love it. If we talk just a little bit about some of the basics now driving traffic to your website. That is what we all want from spending time of even having a website? How important is it to have the right SEO, in your website so that you can show up a little bit easier?
Lois Wyant 3:33
Well, I think that a lot of people get caught up on the SEO part, which it is important. But I think that the very beginning section is you need to first make sure you’re following the Google rules, right? Because Google owns the game board, if you will. And so if you’re not following the rules and getting to go and Park Place the right way, then they’re not going to lift you up in the search rankings. So there’s six points that Google makes public that’s important to them. So we go through those first. Yeah, let’s do it. Alright, so when Google makes a really big change, they give it a really cute little animal name. Okay, so Penguin, Panda, hummingbird. So these are all been really important changes that they gave warning us that like, Okay, this will happen in two months. And that gave us time to like, prepare for it. So one of the most important things is that your site needs to be mobile friendly. Okay, but not just, oh, I can see it on a phone. Alright. It has to be Google standard mobile friendly, which is a little different. All right. So Google actually has a link and I’ll share these links with you put them in the description. Google has a link where you can go in and put your url, and it’ll tell you if it meets the standards of being Google mobile friendly. Alright, It’s just it’s things like the content is large enough to read the buttons are big enough to touch, the structure still remains well, and different things like that, that if you have, especially Kevin older website, you would want to make sure to check it. Because just because you can see it on a phone doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the right format. Alright, so that’s, that’s the number one important thing. And that’s because that 75% of us are now searching for things on our phones. So Google says, This is important. This is where they’re looking for everything. This is our priorities to get ranked on the first page. The second most important thing is how fast is your site loading? Alright, this is emphasized, again, because we’re searching so much on our phones. And Google has said that if you don’t match our speed, we’re not going to put you up. Because if people have to sit there and wait for imagine have to wait for two or three seconds for your site to come up,
Katie Brinkley 6:01
how dare they,
Lois Wyant 6:05
then we can’t rank you up on the first page, because you’re not fast enough. I mean, we don’t want people to go off of Google because they can’t get your site loaded. So that’s the number two thing and there’s some certain things that can be done. There’s some plugins that can be added to a website, because the number one problem with websites that make it slower are photographs or graphics images. Alright. So there’s certain plugins that will compress these images, there are certain website or excuse me, the certain plugin that will load the content first. And then while the image is loading, it’ll show content. And then as you scroll down, then the images show, so it’s kind of a delayed load, if you will. But what happens is that it’s meeting then Google’s speed, so that your site could still rank. Okay, the number three thing is a few years back, Google said, hey, no duplicate content. When people come to your website, they need to see original content, because they had certain situations where people were copying or duplicating other sites that were already on the first page. So now Google is checking for, if you would say it correctly, they’re checking for plagiarism. Alright, you haven’t write your own content. So that makes it a whole news series. You know, it’s like when you go in, and you’re like, oh, what should I write about? What should I do and things like that did require some research, because you should definitely go in and write content about things that people are writing about or searching for. They want to make sure you’re writing things that people are really interested in. Alright, number four, this was one of those fancy named animal named items, reviews, right? Google decided a few years back that if you’re not getting reviews, then you’re probably not open. So and they have made sure that it’s very clear that you cannot reward or pay or do anything like that anybody to leave a review. So it needs to be a very authentic real review. Alright, so because we’re there had situations where you know, somebody had 50 relatives is, hey, go leave a review for me. Yeah. So it has to be very natural and real reviews, and the with reviews, you want to make sure that you have a process or a system to ask people to leave reviews. So some people have a hard time with that business like, well, what if somebody is unhappy, and they leave a bad review? Well, that kind of makes you look like a real business, it’s very unusual that somebody would have just like complete five star review, there’s got to be somebody that you’ve not pleased. So you need to have a system where you’re asking people to leave reviews, and Google likes to see a range of three to six reviews a month. So that’s a lot of reviews, it is a lot of reviews. Yeah. And people have said that if they go in there shopping for a company, and it looks like that, that business hasn’t had a review in like three months, then they don’t really trust them, because that means somebody hasn’t been happy enough to leave a review. Now, on the other side of that, you have to take the situation that probably approximately 80% of the people that you make unhappy, are always there to leave a review. But 20% of the people that are very happy with you will not leave a review. So it’s a point of, if you just ask, especially the people that you know, are happy with your business, they will leave review. They just don’t think about it because they’re just happy. So if they’re unhappy, they think, oh, I want to tell everybody good. If they’re happy. They’re like, Oh, I’m happy. They don’t think about oh, I want to tell everybody. Yeah, so if you ask the happy people, especially to leave Review, they will do that.
Katie Brinkley 10:01
Yeah, I love that. Well, and it’s similar with podcasts, too. I mean, podcast reviews. And ratings are huge for getting found for listeners and getting more people to listen your show. So
Lois Wyant 10:14
everyone right now we’re asking everybody watching Katy show you
Katie Brinkley 10:19
exactly please like comment and review the show. But then that’s true too with with reviews, I had no idea that was three to six a month. I mean, now, for a lot of businesses, like yours truly here or real estate agents or brokerages. That’s one of the things that you might not be having three to six reviews a month. So that’s kind of a hard goal to achieve. Now, I know that you weren’t, we only got through the top three things that Google rules for rankings. But I want to talk a little bit more about this reviews before we continue on. So you you mentioned have a system in place to get reviews. How do you set up a system to have reviews, I know I have mine, I have my G page set up that automatically got but if somebody is like, wait, what’s Katie talking about with the G page here? Just walk us through maybe how to set up a good system to try and get those three to six reviews a month? All right.
Lois Wyant 11:16
I have three ideas. Okay. All right. So let’s say you’re a service business, we’ll go with that for now. All right, maybe as the service person is leaving, they give somebody a business card that says please share your feedback and tell us how we did with like a little bit later link maybe to their Google page. So if somebody has something in hand, and they like sit in on their kitchen, or they sit it somewhere, then they’re like, especially if you made them happy, you know, they’re like, oh, yeah, they did a really great job. You know, I want to even add, like a little perk in there. Like, say, I went to picture heater says, oh, Katie, I’m hope everything goes well. And I hope that if you in, if the service will that you’ll please take this card and leave us a review. And if you could mention me, I’d really like that. So now I’ve made a personal request to somebody, please leave a review and mention me. Because we built this report while we were here. And you know, you like me. So it was like, oh, yeah, you know, I’m gonna pay to do that. Yeah. So that’s, that’s one option. So you could make like a little business card and just have the service person. And maybe you’re giving the service person a little perk, you know, every time their name is mentioned in a Google review, they get an extra bonus or
Katie Brinkley 12:36
something like $5, Starbucks gift card or something. Yeah,
Lois Wyant 12:39
yeah. Okay. Now, the second option is you could actually, after the job is done, you could send the company a postcard, or sorry, you could send the customer a postcard. So there again, the postcard just says, we checking to make sure everything went well, it’s important to us that our service members do an excellent job, would you please give us your feedback, and with a bitly link to their Google review. Now, obviously, if the service person comes back to you and says, Man, that person was hard, they chewed me out that you don’t want to send them a postcard, but you’re making an effort to tell people that their input and their their review is important to you. Alright, so third option is if you have like an email system, you could have it set up where like, maybe you have an automatic email system, and you can go ahead and put them in so that maybe two days after their service called they get an email, so then they can get there. Again, it’s just a personal request to leave a review.
Katie Brinkley 13:40
I love those three ideas. And you know, one of the things that that I do is I have in my after, like at the end of a contract or at the end of a, I work with a lot of trainings. And so at the end of our training sessions, I will include the link to to the review. But those are great ideas for people that are have the brick and mortar businesses that are out in the field that are having that face to face customer interaction. So I love those examples. Let’s dive back in to the other three ways that Google’s rules for rankings.
Lois Wyant 14:12
Okay. So all right, we have
Katie Brinkley 14:15
some dumb mobile friendly. Okay, whoa, duplicate content and reviews. Oh, in the fast speed. So yes, we’re down to the last
Lois Wyant 14:23
two. We’re down last two. Alright, the next one. The next one is really hard. I had to you’re honest with you. The next one is so hard because Google said that if your website gets a lot of traffic, we’re gonna rank it up higher. Now, here’s the problem with that, right? If you’re on page three of Google, you’re not getting any clicks. Nobody’s searching on you. Maybe if you’re on the top of page two, you might be getting a couple clicks, but 90% of the people are clicking on the people that are on the first page. So it’s kind of like a you’re banging your head against a brick wall? Because how are you going to get the traffic to your website if you’re not on the first page of Google? So I guess you could make sure all your relatives visit your website once a day. Alright, so let me explain this. All right, there’s a difference between black hat, grey hat and white hat SEO. Black Hat is the people who choose to try to figure out all the roundabout ways to outsmart Google. Okay, and just a really hard one. White Hat is the person or the company who does everything strictly by Google rules. And the gray hat is the one who goes mostly why happen every so often might try to do something that’s not unethical or anything like that, but just uses other systems to help work with the system. All right, so this is a gray hat. suggestion. All right. So I have found and I’ll share this with you, too, I have found a program that is like an app, and you put it on your phone and your computer, it’s best to have it on at least three items. All right. And what this app does, it’s connected with everybody else’s phone and computers in the country that is on this app. And what it does is it goes to your website, you tell it specifically what page you want it to go to. So if you’re trying to get a specific page, let’s say you’re a dentist, and you want to up your rankings for your wisdom teeth pulling, you put that page into the app. And what the program does is it sends a click to your website on there. And then it visits like one or two other pages and ends on contact page. And Google’s algorithm that’s telling Google that this person, if you will, visited this page, looked around for other things, but then went to the contact page, because they contacted you. Alright, that flows with Google’s algorithm. So what this does is that since this is on a network of different apps, it sends somewhere in the range of about 250 to 300 clicks to your website. So that then gives you that juice of website visits. So that Google like, oh, look, people are looking for this. Yeah, yeah. It’s like, oh, look, they got to earn 50 clicks this month on wisdom, teeth pulling, you know, people, they must be popular in this area. And then what you do is that, like, if you’re on page three, and that moves you up to page two, then once you get into like page one, you just cut back the number of actual clicks that the app is visiting, so that the regular people who are searching because now you’re on page one will create the natural clicks. Whew, that’s a little trick to get clicks to your website.
Katie Brinkley 18:06
Yeah, well, that’s a very handy trick. I think that given a lot of great ideas there. Now, the final rule from Google for ranking,
Lois Wyant 18:17
okay, that is backlinks. So Google says that if people are sharing links, which would become a backlink to your website, then the content that you’re sharing must be important. So and those backlinks can be to blogs or social media, just any form of backlink press releases are a great way of creating backlinks. And often people say, Well, how many backlinks do I need, and there’s some different programs that you could actually go in and find out what your competition is doing. And so you need three backlinks more than your competition. So if you’re wanting to really know how much work do I need to put into this, find out what your competition is doing? And do three or four more links more than them so that you look like you’re just as important or your content is just as significant as your competition?
Katie Brinkley 19:14
Oh, I love that. And now so if someone’s listening, they’re like, whoa, wait, this kind of makes sense. So with backlinks, you mentioned blogs, you’ve mentioned having a new press releases. Now if they’re saying wait till I backlink on my website, or do I backlink on somebody else’s website explained backlinks on where you actually put them, okay.
Lois Wyant 19:35
You can link within your website so if you have say you do a blog post on one of the main pages about one of the main page topics you can backlink to that that’s interlink, which still helps, but what you want is a backlink from something that’s not your website. So, you know, do a share a post on Reddit or different Things of that nature so that you get that type of backlink.
Katie Brinkley 20:03
Yeah, I’ve found that for my blogs, I do it on medium. So just another way to try and get good stuff out there. But there’s so many rules and restrictions and tricks of the trade to help you rank higher on Google. And like you said, throughout the show numerous times, if you’re not on that first, or at least at the top of the second page, you’re probably not going to get clicked on this is a very important part of your online strategy for how you show up on Google. And it’s something that I think a lot of people might say, Well, I have a website, and having a website versus having a website that works for you are two different things.
Lois Wyant 20:46
That’s true, it’s, it makes a really big difference. I mean, you could have a beautiful website on third page, and an E, and so so website on the first page, but the first page person is going to get the business. So and if you, especially if you really follow these aspects, you can get into that three pack, you know, so if you don’t know what that means. So at the beginning, usually, when you do a search on Google, the top are ads. And then right underneath that is a little section where it’s a map with three businesses, they get 80% of the clicks. So if you can get in the three pack, then that’s the Super goal, but being at least on first page, gives you more exposure.
Katie Brinkley 21:29
Now, before we finish up, I want to ask you a few questions. So first question is, is there any piece of advice that you would give to somebody? If they say, okay, oh, us, you convinced me, I need to pay attention to my website. I don’t even know where to begin, what would you say to that person that’s ready to go out there and take action right now,
Lois Wyant 21:50
I would say that you really need to first off, find out if your site is mobile friendly and fast enough. Because I would hate for you to go and do a lot of work with content and different things of that nature, and find out that your site’s not mobile friendly. So it’s, it’s not, it will not be on the first page if it’s not mobile friendly, or fast enough. So those are the two things to really start with. And it may put you in a position where you have to do a new website, or you need to do an a different WordPress theme or whatever type of site you have. But those would be the first two things, you’ve got to make sure that it’s mobile friendly and fast.
Katie Brinkley 22:33
Well, Louis, this has been such a great conversation. Where can we find out more about you and your business online?
Lois Wyant 22:39
Well, you can look for j as in Jack F is in Frank T’s and Tom web marketing. So J ft. Web Marketing comm or find me on the social media says Jeff T web marketing.
Katie Brinkley 22:51
Awesome. Well, thank you again, so much for coming on the show today.
Lois Wyant 22:54
Well, thank you, Katie. It’s been a pleasure.
Katie Brinkley 22:57
Who we there are a lot of things you have to do in order to rank on Google. It’s not just by having a pretty website. Thank you, again to Lois for coming on the show today, because there’s so many things. And I love that she said the very first thing you can do to make sure that you can have even just the opportunity is by making sure that your website is mobile friendly. That statistic of 75% of people looking on their phones googling on their phones, it makes perfect sense now that I think about it, but at the same time, I’m like man 75%, you have to make sure that your website is Google friendly. Now. I also like that she mentioned the backlinks having the backlink for your social media, for your blog, for your podcast for your YouTube channel. Using all of those options to send traffic from your LinkedIn post over to your website from sending them from your Facebook post over to your website that is going to be beneficial that’s going to help you so a statistic that I came across before is that Facebook is one of the most indexed pages websites of Google. So if you are posting consistently to your Facebook page, and backlinking to your website, it’s only going to help you when people type in your name. It will search Facebook for that phrase too. So great ideas from Lois today. I can’t thank her enough for coming on. And if you’re ready to move forward with paying a little bit more attention to your website, make sure that it is optimized for you. Start with making sure it’s mobile-friendly. Make sure that you have a fast open speed. And lastly, post to social media link to your website. Take that opportunity from Facebook LinkedIn from YouTube to send people back over to your website and that will just help you rank higher over on Google’s thanks so much for listening to this episode of rock came out in marketing. As always, I’d love to hear from you. You can visit my website at www.nextstepsocialcommunications.com. Connect with me on LinkedIn or check me out on Instagram. Let’s keep taking your marketing to new heights