Search Engine Optimization: How to Rank Number One on Google
– Google has like 98 to 97% market share. Search engines is still like
the number one traffic source. So if you're neglecting
SEO, you're leaving a huge piece of the online
marketing pie on the table. – Today, I'm very excited
to be joined by Jeff Oxford. If you don't know who he
is, he's an SEO expert. He's CEO of 180 Marketing, a search engine optimization agency, focused on helping e-commerce businesses drive more organic search traffic.
Jeff, how are you doing today? Welcome to the show. – Doing good, Mike, thanks for being… Glad to be here. – I'm super excited you're here, Jeff. Today, we're gonna explore how to rank in Google search using SEO. And before we do, let's get a
little bit of your backstory. Like, how in the world
did you get into marketing and search engine optimization? I would love to hear that story. – So it's kind of funny actually. I fell into the family
business without meaning to, so my dad had a marketing advertising, doing lots of branding, logos, brochures, all the traditional stuff. Even his dad did like old things with typography and letterhead. And I thought, I don't
wanna do what my dad does.
I want to go my own way. But around when I was in
high school and college, this SEO thing, and marketing
was shifting towards web, and he had the capabilities
to make websites, but he didn't have the passion, or really care to learn
about this SEO stuff that everyone's starting to talk about. So he said, "Hey Jeff, I know you're playing video
games at your computer anyway. I know you're pretty technical. Can you go figure this SEO thing out, and then maybe do it for my clients?" So that's how it initially started. It was just like me going
online, reading resources, trying things out. – How long ago was that?
Just outta curiosity? – Gosh, this would've
been back in like 2009. – Okay, cool. Keep going. – Yeah, so just trying to, trying to help him out, and something about it
just clicked in my brain. It was almost like a video game, where I know if I do X, Y, Z, I can see my score at the end of it, and in SEO, your scores are rankings, like how do you compare versus the people you're playing against.
So it just really resonated with me, and I've been hooked ever since. – So tell us a little bit
about, over the last few… Bring us up to the present now. Like, talk about what you
do, who you're serving. Just give us a little bit of that story, because it's fascinating to
hear that you started as, working for dad, and as a gamer, and starting to figure out that, but somewhere along the line, you decided to start a business, right? So tell us about that, and kind of bring us up to
the present with the story. – So I started learning about SEO, helped my dad out, like I mentioned, and then I realized there's people making a lot of money
online with passive income. The big thing is Google
AdWords, and AdSense, and how I can create a blog. You put some ads on it, and this field is making some good money.
So here I am in college, looking for ways to get
some passive income. So my roommate and I, we started a blog. It was a fantasy baseball blog. I didn't know anything
about fantasy baseball, I just knew about the technical stuff and how to make a website, how to do SEO. I let all the content to him, and within a few months, we were able to make a
pretty successful blog that I think was getting
over 10,000 visitors from like, when we started
three months later, it was hitting like 10,000
a month just from SEO, but AdSense doesn't have the… It doesn't pay the most across
all those 10,000 visitors. We only got like a hundred bucks
that we had to split 50/50. So I'm like, "Okay, this
model isn't as lucrative as I was hoping." And so I found like, "Oh,
there's people that are drop shipping products and you know, you're gonna get way
more bang for your buck, and way more revenue per visitor if I go into drop shipping." So I taught myself how to
set up an e-commerce site.
I used OpenCart. There's a free e-commerce
platform back in the day. And here I am, you know, a college student looking for some extra money. And I'm trying to think like, "Okay, what kind of
products should I sell? What's something that you
can't easily get local, you can't just go to
the store and buy it." And there's a popular drinking
game called beer pong.
So I decided I was gonna
sell beer pong tables. So that was my first step
into the e-commerce world. I had a website called Beer Pong Stadium. I don't think it's up
anymore, I sold it eventually. But yeah, we drop
shipped beer pong tables, and we were ranking top three for pretty much every beer pong
keyword you could think of. – So, okay, but somewhere
along the line you're like, "Okay, I think I can make
a business out of this," so tell us about that story. – So here I am doing consulting. So there's a key event that
happened that made me say like, "Okay, enough with this
passive income, side projects, let me just go all in on the SEO side." And what that moment was,
is my next e-commerce. So I sold the beer pong site,
got some extra money from it, and I went into 3D printers.
So I was drop shipping 3D printers. Each of these would cost about
$3,000, and higher margins, I thought I'd get still… Like, lots of people
were searching for it, not much competition, so I thought I was in the golden industry. First month, I made
about 30,000 in revenue, but don't get too excited, because I found out that
almost all those purchases were done fraudulently with stolen credit cards.
– Oh, no. – So the next month after I
had paid all the manufacturers, after all the product had been shipped, all those sales were just
taken outta my account. And here I am at like age 24,
and it completely bankrupt me. It took me to the negative. So I realized in that moment,
it's like, you know what? I really enjoy this SEO thing. I love doing SEO for e-commerce
sites and SEO in general, but I don't know if I really wanna learn everything there is to have a fully established
e-commerce business, and learn about fraud
protection operations, customer service.
So it was that moment, that really heavy hit to my
bank account where I'm like, "I'm just gonna do SEO." And that's when I started 180 Marketing. So this was back in 2013. – Okay, and tell us, kind of
bring us up to the present, what is 180 Marketing doing today, now almost 10 years later? – Yeah, we're coming
up on our 10 year mark, so it's pretty exciting. But what we do is we do e-commerce, we do e-commerce SEO as our specialty. But here's the thing, if you can do SEO for an e-commerce site, you can do it for pretty much any site. You know, e-commerce sites
just happen to have a few more nuances and challenges
and technical issues, mostly because they're
usually gonna be larger. You can deal with an e-commerce site that has thousands of products,
lots of category pages. There's more moving parts, which can open up more technical issues. But a lot of e-commerce
sites also have blogs.
So the types of SEO we
do also works very easily on a simple content site. – So I found you because Steve Chou from My Wife Quit Her Job
and you had worked together, and I had heard you on his podcast, and you ended up doing some work for us at Social Media Examiner, and ultimately did some training
for us inside our society. And we were super impressed with you. And I thought to myself, "Well, let's get Jeff on this podcast," because the fact of the
matter is that lots of people that are listening to this show don't just do social marketing. But there are some people
that are like, "SEO, search engine optimization, why?" So let's address the skeptics, like why, as we're recording this in late 2022 and publishing this almost in 2023, is search engine optimization
still very important today? – So like right now, as of today, SEO is still one of the largest
traffic sources on the web.
I mean, you have social
referral traffic, email, like there's so many ways to
get traffic to your website, affiliate, whatever it might be. Still people going to search
engines, mainly Google. Google has like 98 to 97% market share. Search engines is still like
the number one traffic source. So if you're neglecting
SEO, you're leaving a huge piece of the online
marketing pie on the table, and not taking advantage
of all this traffic that you could be getting. – And you know, SEO
doesn't just have to be for like e-commerce products, right? It can be for your sales pages,
for whatever you're selling, like your events, like in our case, or it could be for your blog posts. In our case, I mean, any written content that you
wanna rank number one on, you can follow what we're
gonna be talking about today, and you could drive a lot of traffic.
And one of the key things
that I think the reason why social marketers need
to pay attention to this is because on the social platforms, it's getting harder and
harder to get organic traffic off of the social platforms
directly to your website. As a matter of fact,
it's almost impossible, because Facebook, LinkedIn, dot, dot, dot, fill in the blank, Instagram, they make it very, very hard for you to drive traffic to your website. And when you post those posts
on the social platforms, if you can drive traffic, it's gonna be for a very limited window. We're talking about if
you're lucky, a day. The benefit I think of
possibly ranking in search is that you can bring traffic over and over and over and over again.
And you also have search intent. Why don't you talk
about that a little bit, 'cause that's a unique advantage, right? Like when you see something
posted in the social platforms, you're interrupting people, but when they're actually
searching for it, explain why that's so important. – That's exactly it. If you can look at a keyword
and by analyzing a keyword, you can get a rough idea of what's that person searching for. So if someone searches best gaming laptop, it's pretty clear that they're a gamer. They wanna purchase a laptop, and they're looking for, they're doing some research to see what are the best laptops out there.
So we know what that
person's searching for, we know how likely they are to search. Now, compare that with someone searching, what is a gaming laptop? Well, it's pretty clear
they're not in the market. If they don't even know what it is, they're probably not in
the market to purchase. So we can kind of look
at the keywords to see what's this person likely gonna be… Like, where are they in the
customer journey buying cycle? Are they in the awareness stage? Are they in the research stage? Do they have their credit card in hand, and are they ready to pull the trigger? That's one advantage that comes with search engine marketing is
you get a lot more insights, where if you look at referral
traffic from like Facebook, Instagram, some of these
social media networks, typically the conversion rates
are gonna be lower on average just because you might
still have those people that are looking to make a purchase, but you're also gonna have a lot of people that might not be in the market
for what you have to offer, what you're selling.
– Yeah, and you know, we recently had Brett Curry on the show, and he's talking about
Google Performance Max, which is Google's solution
to make it really easy to drive traffic to your website across all of Google's properties. This is kind of like exploring
the organic side of it, right, which is,
"Wouldn't it be awesome if with the right techniques,
you never had to pay any extra money, and you could
just have that traffic coming as long as you are able to rank." And I think that's a huge
reason for a lot of people to listen to what we're
gonna talk about today. So let's transition into
introducing what your strategy is for ranking inside of search. – Yeah, so you know, I've
been doing this for 10 years with 180 Marketing, and we try to be as data focused as possible. So whenever we have a successful
campaign, we ask ourselves, "Why was this successful?" Whenever we have a campaign that doesn't meet our expectations, we
say, "What was wrong with it? What could we do better?" And from this kind of
constant process of evaluating over a decade now, we've come up with, almost like a formula, like a repeatable process on how we can consistently increase rankings, drive traffic for our clients.
So we call it the 180 Playbook. I'm sure there's lots of
different ways to do SEO, and people have their own approaches, but this kind of takes a
lot of what's out there, simplifies, and puts it
to like a start to finish linear process that works really well. And it's something that we've
had a lot of success with for our clients over the years. – So if people follow this, and we're gonna break it down
here in the next few minutes, but if people follow this formula that we're gonna talk
about, this 180 playbook, what could they achieve? Like maybe you have a
quick example of someone that you could talk about.
I know this isn't what we
originally prepared for, but what's the upside
to something like this? – Well, I'll give you an example. So you mentioned Steve Chou. We did some work for his site,
and his traffic has more… You know, he's already a very
established content site, but his search traffic's more than doubled since we started working together. He also had another website,
bumblebeelinens.com. We were able to quadruple
his search traffic in just six months.
So that was a pretty
remarkable case study. So SEO, it's true, SEO
typically is a more long term marketing channel. You know, if you're doing like
paid social or paid search, like you snap your fingers,
within a week or two, you're gonna know how effective it is. With SEO, you're looking at
more, like a longer timeframe. But you know, we've kind of found what some of the shortcuts are
to get your results faster, and it doesn't have to take a year or two, sometimes you can get
some really good results in just three to six months.
– Awesome, okay, let's start talking about the very first stage, or the first element of your 180 playbook. Where do we need to start? What do we need to know? – So before you start kind
of really diving into SEO, you gotta make sure you have
a good foundation in place, and that's where technical SEO comes in. So the very first part of
what we do for a website is we evaluate the site's technical SEO. Now, technical SEO can
be kind of service level, or go as deep into like
server settings, code, and all this stuff. But I'm gonna kind give you
the summarized short version. So in the world of technical SEO, you wanna make sure that
your pages load quickly. You wanna make sure that you
don't have slow load times. So, you know, Google rarely announces whether or not something's
a ranking factor, but they've specifically said site speed is a ranking factor.
So make sure that you
have quick load time, content delivery network, caching, whatever you can do to speed up your site. Few other things would just be like- – Let's pause on that for a second. – Sure. – There's a lot of people
listening right now that might use WordPress
for example, right? Because almost like 43% of the world is built on WordPress, right? And some people have WooCommerce who are selling products on WordPress. So let's talk about CDN. For people that don't know what that is, it's called a content
delivery network, right? And it allows your pages to be distributed all over the world, right, so it loads a lot faster
where everybody else is.
But you also mentioned caching. Is there any particular things
we need to be thinking about for those of us that are using WordPress that can help speed up the website? – So if you're on WordPress, there's a great plugin that
does a lot of this for you. There's a lot of 'em, but the one I recommend is W3 Total Cache. It handles your compression,
it handles your caching. You know, without getting
too far into the weeds, if you can just remember W3 Total Cache and look it up and install it, it's gonna handle sort
of the more complicated technical stuff for you, make
sure your site's blazing fast. – Now why is it that this is so important? – So Google's goal is to give people the best search experience possible.
They want people to search a keyword, click on the, ideally, the
first and only listing, see what they need, and
they're happy with it. If Google notices people visit a page and they're not happy with it
and they hit the back button, they keep hitting the back button, they're not finding what they want, that's an indicator to Google that they're not doing a very good job in providing a good
experience for their searcher. So Google wants to make sure
the page you're landing at not only answers your question and provides a good user experience, but they also wanna make sure
that it's not gonna slow down, it's not gonna time out, there won't be be issues with it. 'Cause you know, here we are in 2022, people have short attention spans. I'm sure we've all been
on a page that's loading, it's taken too long,
we hit the back button. Google really doesn't wanna
rank those kind of pages. – Just a couple of
resources that I've used. I've used this great
thing called GTmetrix, which is like metric with a
X on the end instead of CS.
And what I love about
that tool is it allows you to just make a change,
run a task instantly, and then see whether it made a difference. Google also has their own page speed tool. I don't actually know how to find it. Do you know how we… – Google PageSpeed Insights. – Google PageSpeed Insights, yeah. And what Google will tell you is the mobile versus desktop experience. And it's really hard to get
it really fast on mobile, isn't it, right? – They're very hard graders. – Yeah, so is your advice try
to get it as good as you can, but don't like go nuts over
trying to make it perfect by Google's standards.
– That's exactly… Google's a really hard grader, you know. I'll put it this way. There's plenty of sites
that rank extremely well, and they have medium to poor scores on Google PageSpeed Insights. So don't think just 'cause
the color's not green that your site's not fast enough. Google PageSpeed Insights,
that'll give you some great tips and actual recommendations on what to do. But if you want the true test, go open up a incognito tab in Chrome, run your site, and just
look at it and be like, "Is this sufficient, or is it too slow?" That's the ultimate test, 'cause that's what users
are gonna be seeing. – Okay, so we've talked about page speed. What else do we need to be thinking about when it comes to technical SEO? – A big thing of technical SEO is just duplicate content issues. So basically what that means
is if you have an article, don't copy your article multiple times.
Sometimes content management systems will do this on accident. Make sure you have one URL
for every piece of content. Again, for content sites, it
won't be that big of an issue. But an example of a
duplicate content issue is, let's say you have a category,
let's say you have a… We'll stick with the
example of gaming laptops. Let's say you have a category page, it shows all these gaming laptops that someone could purchase. And then you go to filter
the page alphabetically, and you filter it again by highest price, and then you sort it. There's all this
filtering that you can do. For a lot of e-commerce platforms, every time you modify that
page, it's generating a new URL and a new URL, and
Google thinks it's like, "Okay, it's another
page, it's another page, it's another page," when in reality, it's the same page with just different URLs. So you wanna make sure
your pages like that are set up properly, where
Google's not indexing multiple URLs for the same page. You end up with a situation where all this content's
competing with each other, Google's not quite sure which
page to rank, so as a result, none of the pages ranked
nearly as good as they could.
– Some people right now might be thinking, "Well, we've made copies of the page, and slightly altered the
headline to try to rank in SEO." Is that not wise? Do you recommend we avoid that? – So it used to work really well. You go back five years, you
could get pretty far with that. It's becoming harder and harder now. So I'd be somewhat surprised if that's still working really well, if the content's like mostly identical. But let's say it's still working. I mean, there's kind of
two ways to approach this. You could say, "Hey, it's ranking well. If it's not broken, don't fix it." Fine. There's an argument there. On the other side, it could be like, "Well, do we wanna be more futureproof? When's the next Google update coming?" A lot of people have been
slapped on the hand by Google a few times, and once you
get your hand slapped, you don't wanna experience
that pain again, so you play it safe.
So I think you can make
an argument either way. If you have a business that's driving significant amounts of
traffic and revenue, I always recommend taking the safer, more futureproof approach,
because we've seen Google updates take websites down by 20, 30, 40, sometimes 70 or 80% traffic, depending on how severe the issue is. – Okay, so the first
part of the 180 playbook, the first of four parts, I
believe, is the technical SEO. Now, let's explore the
second part of your strategy. What do we need to do next? What do we need to explore next? – So once you've… Now let's say your site's
free of any technical issues, everything's looking good. The next step's gonna be going to content. So you wanna make sure you have enough… You have the right content you need to target all the necessary keywords. So this is where keyword
research is very important. You kind of wanna determine
which pages do you need.
So if I'm a laptop drop shipping site, if I sell laptops online, I could do keyword
research and I could see, "Oh look, there's people
searching laptops for gamers, or laptops for students, or
laptops for programmers." Whatever that might be, I wanna make sure I have
a page for each of those. So step one is do your keyword research, see what people are searching for, and you can see the search volumes. There's lots of great data. You can get some keyword
research tools out there. And then once you've kind
of found those pages, you wanna build them on your website. So there's thousands of people
searching for gaming laptops, so I would definitely wanna make sure I have a page like that on the site. So the first part of the
content bucket would be identify what your
customers and your audience is searching for, and make
sure you have that content on your site.
– Okay, so when you say content, let's just clarify what this means. This might be an article, or is this like a page with
a product on it, or both? – Yeah, great question. So it could be either. It really depends on what the keyword is, and kind of a little hint, or
a little hack you can do here is let's say we did our research,
and we said, "Okay, look, there's a lot of people
searching for gaming laptops.
Do we create a category page
with all of our gaming laptops? Or do we create a blog post,
more of like a listicle roundup of the best gaming laptops for 2022?" The answer lies in Google search results. Take that keyword, search into Google, see what kind of pages
are ranking on page one. Is it mostly gonna be category pages? Is it mostly gonna be blog posts? Whatever is dominating on page one, that's the type of page
that you should create. So my guess is you'll probably see… It could be more of a category page, but we do see Google
starting to favorite content more and more, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's mostly gonna be these, you know, best gaming laptops of 2022 type posts.
– Okay, you mentioned that
there's some tools that you use or recommend that people use. Tell us about what tools do
you recommend to go out there, and what are we looking
for with these tools when we're using these tools? – So I'll give you the free approach. If you're just trying to… You don't want to jump head in, you just kind of wanna play around. Neil Patel actually
has a really great tool called Ubersuggest. It has a free version, a paid version, but you can actually get pretty far with just the free version. You can enter your keywords,
you can see search volumes, and kinda refine your keyword search. – Wait, wait. What are we looking for when we're… – We wanna find keywords that are relevant and have high search volumes. So relevant, have high search intent. So if I'm… Going back to this example
of a laptop drop shipper, I want to find keywords where I think someone's
likely to purchase. So I wanna find those, I'm
looking for gaming laptops, laptops for students, all
these different variations where I'm pretty confident that they're looking to purchase a laptop, or they're researching what laptop to get.
I'd probably stay away
from, at least starting out, I'd probably stay away from
like, what is a laptop? What are the parts of the laptop? That doesn't tell me that
they're really interested in purchasing just yet. Now, those types of pages
can have other benefits, which we can talk about later. But if you want the
best bang for your buck, and you want kinda the more
short term approach with SEO and results, it's best
to focus on keywords that have a high search intent that matches whatever you're offering. So if you're a lawyer, and you're… Lead gen, you know, same thing. Look for people searching for
best personal injury lawyer, anything that gives you a sign that they're looking
to hire your services, or they're researching for
your types of services.
– Okay, so you suggested
Ubersuggests on the free tool. What's the paid tool
that you would recommend? – The paid tool would be either Ahrefs, that's A-H-R-E-F-S dot com, or Semrush, S-E-M-R-U-S-H dot com. Both tools are pretty comparable. My personal favorite is Ahrefs. It has pretty much everything. It has a really good keyword tool, where you can see the keyword difficulty.
You can see related keywords. You can plug in a competitor and see every single keyword
a competitor's ranking for. So it gives you a lot
more data to play with. – I think they have a free version too, because they were a sponsor of this show, and I think they have a free version that's got quite a bit of
stuff built into it as well. – They do have their
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which I…
If you're looking to start
just dabbling in SEO, highly recommend it, it's completely free. Basically connect, you
kinda log in and verify with Google Search Console. And then what it's gonna
do is Ahrefs will share all the data they have
on your site with you, so you can see every keyword
your site's ranking for. You can see every single
back link going to your site. You can track your rankings, you can… It'll give you some even free audits. So if you're looking for the 80 20 on how do you get the most SEO value with the least expenses or time, I'd say Ahrefs Webmaster Tools will be the first thing to do. – Now there are plenty of people that wanna try to rank
for very popular content, and the struggle is that
they're never gonna rank, because they've got really
sophisticated people that they're competing against, right? Like we deal with this
at Social Media Examiner, we're up against these software companies that are just constantly
updating their articles, and making the content absolutely amazing.
So do you recommend, if
you're just getting started, not to go for the ones
that have the most… I mean, you probably ought to
look at the search results, and if the content is amazing, and you can't outdo that content, you might want to pick
something that's less searched. Is that fair? – So you're totally right. Most of the time, the
highly searched keywords are more competitive, 'cause
more people are going after 'em and you have what's called
like a long tail keyword, or a more… It might be more specific. So for example, buy lap… Or just the keyword laptops,
it's probably gonna search tens of thousands of times a month. Super competitive, good
luck ranking for it. You can go a little more
longtail, or less competitive, like laptops for gamers, or then you can go even more,
like PC laptops for gamers, or Intel PC laptop. The more specific you get, typically the less
competitive it's gonna be. So that's generally true.
However, there's always
gonna be exceptions. There might be some keywords
that competitors just overlook for whatever reason that
have high search volume and aren't too competitive. So you really need a tool
like Semrush or Ahrefs. I mean, again, Ahrefs is my favorite and I'd recommend that one, just to… They have a metric to set to address, what you mentioned, Mike, which is just gonna be how
competitive is this keyword, what's the keyword difficulty, and how likely are you to rank for it? – What about the content
itself ought we keep in mind, because it's not just any
content that will work, right? – Yeah, so it's… The number one answer is you wanna solve the searcher's user intent. Like why did they search that keyword, what are they looking for,
and how do you give them what they're looking for
better than anyone else? If you can do what I just
said, you'll rank very well, and you'll outrank most
of your competitors.
That's the most fundamental thing. Like, sure, it's important to
avoid duplicate content issues and have good technical
SEO, insight, speed, and some other things
we're gonna talk about. But what SEO really comes down to, if you just simplify it, it's giving people what
they're looking for better than anyone else,
and if you can do that, Google's gonna reward you, and you're gonna rank really well. So if it's a category, well,
we'll start with content.
This is probably gonna be most simple. So it's a blog post. Whatever someone's looking for, you wanna solve their search
intent at the very beginning. So someone's searching for… Let's say someone's
searching for like a recipe. Maybe we've all searched for recipes, where you have to scroll so far down past all the story
about how they made this with their grandmother,
and all the things, and finally you find the recipe. So that doesn't always work the best. What works the best is
whatever they're looking for, give it to 'em right front and center, and then expand on it
below, whatever it might be, whether it's a recipe, whether it's a how to article.
You wanna solve- – This is fascinating,
because I'm starting to notice with some of the bigger publications that are running news articles, they use bullet lists at the top that tell you exactly what it is, and then they have all the content below. You would think that would hurt, because people will leave
the page very quickly, right? But why does that help with SEO? – It's very fascinating,
because we've always heard that if someone clicks on your site and hits the back button, or
if you have a high bounce rate, like how are you supposed to rank well if you have a high bounce rate? People are leaving your site in floods, and that must be a good signal to Google that you don't deserve to rank there.
Well, here's the thing, Google's not concerned about
people bouncing off your page. They're concerned about
people bouncing off your page and then clicking on another listing. So for example, if I was searching, how tall is Michael Jordan? And I click on a page and
it says, Michael Jordan is, you know, six foot whatever, I don't have a need to
click on other pages.
I'm probably gonna bounce,
I won't go to another page. My question has been answered. So that was a successful search for me. However, if Google sees
I clicked on a page, I hit the back button, I click somewhere else and I stay there, that is an extremely strong ranking signal that the first site
should be ranking lower, and the second site
should be ranking higher.
– Okay. That's really, really fascinating. So what I'm hearing you say is, if you can give away the answer early and still have more
rich content for people that want to go deeper, Google's gonna track to see whether or not they go back to the search
page and click on the next one, but if they don't, and they
go on to some other thing, they're gonna take that as
a fulfillment of the mission of the search query, and they're
gonna credit that to you. And what I'm hearing you say is you'll make it up in volume, right? You'll get a lot more people, because Google will rank
you higher on the page, and as a result, you
will get tons of traffic.
Some of it will go deeper, and ultimately convert into what you want. Fascinating. There's so much more
that I could ask here, but I know we gotta go on to the next one. So let's talk about the third
part of the process here. – Yeah, so let's say, so
kinda just a quick recap. You fixed the technical issues. You figured out what your customers or audience is searching for. You created those pages, you made sure those pages
solved for the intent, that you have enough content on the page to fully answer whatever
they're looking for.
You have a really
comprehensive page with images, multimedia, it's formatted, it's broken up with
headings and subheadings, and just looks really good. Okay, now you're ready to
move to the third stage, which is page optimization. So we've identified the
keyword gaming laptops, let's say that's what we wanna rank for. So we'll start with what's
called the metadata. There's something called the title tag.
So if you use Chrome, whatever
you see in the browser tab, that's pulling from what's
called the title tag, it lives in the source code of the page. It's also, if you search
a keyword to Google, you have those 10 links on page one, and each one has a little header, that's also pulling the title tag. So it lives in the source code,
shows up in your Chrome tab, shows up on Google search results. And this is one of the most
important ranking factors in Google. So if you wanna rank for gaming laptops, you're gonna wanna put that
keyword front and center, intact, exactly at the
beginning of your title tag. – Okay, wait, wait, hold on, just to be clear. So the title tag is not the
title, or it is the title? – I wanna make one distinction between title tags and header tags.
– Okay.
– If I visit a page, there's gonna be that heading
at the very top of the page that says, you know, best
gaming laptops, right? That is the header tag,
also known as an h1 tag. You can have kind of
subheadings and whatnot. So that's headings, and
then what I call title tag, or meta title, or SEO title, that's what lives in the source code, and doesn't have to be
displayed on the page. It can, but it's gonna
be in the browser tab. It's gonna be what shows
up in search results. So there's two different things. The SEO meta title tag, and the h1 heading tag
that's shown on the page. – Okay, so what I hear you
saying is the actual title tag, which is hidden in the source code, right? – Yes. – That needs to be starting with whatever the search phrase is that you're trying to rank for.
– Whatever you're trying to rank for. – And can you put more than
one thing in the title tag? – You can do like two. I recommend probably
don't want to go past two, 'cause it's just gonna
look too keyword focused. Maybe we all remember
the days where it's like gaming laptops, and then the pipes, and then like best gaming
laptops, and the pipes, and the buy gaming… That doesn't really work any well, and kind of going back to
what we were talking before, with like how users
engage with your website, click-through rate in the search results is an extremely important ranking factor. If you have a really captivating title tag and meta description, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
If you have a really
captivating title tag, like you see best gaming laptops
for 2022 for every budget, and it really resonates with the searcher. If Google sees more people
are clicking on that page versus the competitors, that
alone can help you rank. In fact, there's been
some case studies where, you know, Rand Fishkin,
who's a very prominent SEO would speak in front of
thousand people and say, "Okay, everyone take out your phone. We're gonna search this keyword
and click on this listing." And people would do it, and
by the end of the seminar, the listing they all clicked on would move up towards the
top of the search results. – Okay, so just to be crystal clear, the title tag shows up in search, not your h1 tag, right?
– Yes, correct. – That's an important distinction, right? So you can have a very
different h1 tag, which is the, for lack of better words, blog post title than you do the title tag.
– Yes. – And a lot of people
probably make them the same, and that's not necessarily wise, is that what I'm hearing you say? – You should keep 'em the same, like the easiest route
is to make it the same, at least for content.
Like if you have a blog
post, best practice, just keep it the same. For if you're an e-commerce site, maybe you have a category page, maybe your category page
heading is something like, you know, best gaming
laptops as low as 499. You might not wanna have that on your actual category page itself. You might have like gaming laptops. – A couple clarifying questions, this is the copywriter in me that wants to ask this question. Sometimes you can put the
word first, and then a colon, and then a catchy headline. Like for example, search
engine optimization, colon, how to rank on Google, right?
– Yes. – Or you could say how
to rank on Google, colon, search engine optimization.
If you're trying to rank for
a search engine optimization, my gut tells me that you put
that first, is that correct? – Your approach is perfect. I use colons too. I love the approach. If I'm trying to rank for
like how to make a TikTok, or like, how to create a TikTok video, at the very beginning of my blog post, I'm gonna put how to create
a TikTok video, colon, ultimate guide, definitive
guide, step by step tutorial, whatever it might be.
So a good title tag has the
keyword front and center intact, and then add whatever you want afterwards to make it captivating and compelling. – Yeah, and if you really,
really, really don't like the way it displays on the screen, then that's where you could
change your h1 headline to actually be a little
more compelling, right? – That's exactly it. – Okay, perfect. So outside of title tags, what else do we need to be thinking about with the page optimization stuff? – So we talked about title tags, we talked about header tags, then there's what's
called a meta description. So if you search a keyword in Google, you have the name of the page, and then there's those two lines
of black text underneath it that describes the page. Now most people in the SEO
will kind of gloss over it. They don't really spend
too much time on it, and part of that is because it's not a direct ranking factor. You could put your keyword
in your meta description a bunch of times, or not at
all, won't make any difference.
But where it can have a really big impact is on click-through rates. So if anyone who's listening,
if you've run paid ads before or even with paid social ads, for example, you've probably seen firsthand
how really well written copy can have a huge impact on
your click-through rates in your traffic. Same thing applies to SEO. Meta descriptions are
basically ad copy for SEO. So even though it's not
a direct ranking factor, if you have really compelling copy, you can get more people
clicking on your listing versus your competitors
and drive more traffic. – Yeah, and you know,
this is copywriting 101, but maybe what they will
achieve by clicking, right? Like discover how blank, right? Or by the time… Something along those lines, fulfilling the promise of the headline I would imagine is important
in the meta description, right? – Yeah, you can tease the problem, agitate the problem a little
bit, preview the solution, just do whatever you need to
do to get them to be like, "Okay, I need to click this to figure out how do I solve this problem." – Earlier, you said, we
mentioned header tags, but I don't know if we
did mention header tags.
Is header tags the same as the h1 tag, or is this something totally-
– Yeah, the exact same thing. – Okay. So what about Rich Snippets?
Talk to me about that. – So Rich Snippets, again,
if you search a keyword, maybe you're searching for products, and underneath some of the pa… Maybe you see on Amazon it
has like the star rating, the price, the manufacturer. Maybe you're looking for recipes, and it says like how long it takes to… The star rating for the recipe, how long it takes to make,
and what ingredients. Those are called Rich Snippets. It's this extra little snippet of content that goes in the search result to give you more information out the page.
So if you have an e-commerce site, this is extremely important
to put on product pages where, you know, you tell search engines what
your product pages are about. If you have a recipe site, you
wanna have the recipe markup. If you have a blog, they even have one for how to pages that will kind of break
it down step by step, to give you more real estate
in the search results. How you implement it is a little
more technical and nuanced, so I always recommend
looking for a plugin. Like Yoast SEO if you're on WordPress is a really good plugin to
kind of help you get started with some of these Rich Snippets. So that's probably the
best place to start. And then once you get… One of the benefits of getting
this type of thing set up is it might not have a… It's not like having this
markup's gonna necessarily give you better rankings, but if you're ranking number three, but you're the only listing
that has these star ratings, or whatever, and stands
out, it's very eye catching, You're gonna get a lot more clicks.
And not only will that drive more traffic, but as Google sees you're
getting more clicks than the sites around you, they're gonna slowly move
you up in the search results, and that can have an impact on rankings. – Okay, so just to clarify,
is Rich Snippets the thing where they show a section of
your content at the very top above everybody else, or is that something totally different, do you understand me? – That's called the Featured Snippet.
– Okay, so can a Rich Snippet
become a Featured Snippet? And if it can't, then what's… Describe what a Rich Snippet displays, does it display more information
in the search results? – So yeah, I'll make a… So what we were just talking
about was Rich Snippets. You have a site ranking, and there's that little
line underneath it, maybe it's the star rating of the product, maybe it's the ingredients
and instructions for a recipe, maybe it's a date and time for an event, whatever it might be. Featured Snippets is where Google tries to answer a question for you
without you having to click.
So if I were to search,
how tall is Michael Jordan? Chances are there's gonna
be a little two sentences, Michael Jordan played for this team, he is six foot seven or
whatever, however tall he is. And it's gonna bold the
part that I'm looking for. So that's Featured Snippets. Featured Snippets is Google
trying to answer the question for you to save you time, so you don't have to
click website to website. – But you can't… They choose, it's not like- – Yeah, you don't specify that. They choose. Now, there's ways we can influence it, and we can get into that
if you'd like, but yes, Google chooses it and it's not, there's no markup we can do to- – How can you influence it? Of course, everybody
wants me to ask.
(laughs) – So the best way to infl… Like if I wanted to… Is there any… Okay, let's say how to make a TikTok. Like if I wanted to get
the Featured Snippet, I'd have a page all about making TikToks. I'd have a heading. So you know, it could be
an h2 tag, or an h3 tag, but I'd have some heading that
says, how to make a TikTok. And then immediately, the very next character, word, sentence is going to answer that
question in a very concise way. So it would say like, there's three steps to
make a TikTok, colon, and then use a list item, like one, film, come up with your storyboard, or whatever, two, film your video, three, upload it. You don't wanna add any fluff, you don't wanna tell any stories. If we're purely playing
the game of getting Featured Snippets, you
just wanna have a question answered immediately as concisely
and thoroughly as you can and then expand on it.
So obviously, like… – Okay, quick question. Can you put that at
the end of the article, or does it have to be at
the top of the article? – It's more likely to be triggered if it's towards the top of the article. It's still possible at the bottom, but there's a prominence factor. That can be- – And my guess is this is
probably why these publishers are doing what we were
talking about earlier with these bullet points on news items when you see it, right? Because they're trying to become… They're trying to become
the Featured Snippet inside the news- – They're trying to become
the Featured Snippet, and also they're trying to
solve user intent right away. Like they want to give someone
what they're looking for. So yeah, but creating that
question answer connection is really helpful. So again, have your question
in the form of a subheading, and then right away,
answer it very concisely, and have a concise answer.
So many questions have nuances. So whatever nuances there are, explain after your concise answer. – Okay, we're talking
about the 180 playbook. We started with technical SEO, then we went into content, and then we went into page optimization. Now, what's the next step? – So the last portion of this, which is one of the most
important is link building. The strongest ranking factor, or one of the strongest
ranking factors in Google is how many other websites
are linking to you? Think of it like votes of trust.
If a website's linking to you, there must be a reason for it. You must be really awesome, you must have some brand recognition, you must have something
good, whatever it might be, there's a reason another
site included a back link from their site to your site. So just to clarify, if I have a website, I had a whole bunch of
links to all my pages. That's not really what
we're talking about. That's an internal link. We're talking about external back links. This is other websites
that you don't control linking to you. So Google, like I said, they're very kind of hush hush about what their ranking factors are, but they've even confirmed that back links is one of the top three ranking
factors that they look at. So we know that this is something, and we see it time and time again. Anytime there's like
correlation studies done, we see the sites that rank the best are the ones that have more back links.
For those of you listening that might kind of have some experience with SEO, and hear the term
authority, or domain rating, or domain authority. These are all kind of referring to- – Now real quick, do we mean back links to any page on the site, or do we mean back links to
the specific page in question that we're trying to get optimized? – So there's kind of two impacts to this. So like for example, amazon.com ranks on
pretty much everything. They could have a page
with zero back links, but they're gonna rank so well, 'cause their domain as a whole has gathered so many back links that they might not need back links to this one specific niche product. – Got it. – Because the product's sitting on it, it's still gonna rank well,
but maybe you're just a, maybe you have a Shopify
site, and maybe you're not… No, I mean, if you have a Shopify site, not even in the same ballpark
as someone like Amazon. It's still very possible to outrank Amazon by building back links
directly to your page.
So if I have my Shopify
drop shipping site, I'm selling my gaming laptops, I wanna rank for gaming laptops. I wanna build as many back links to my gaming laptops page as possible. And if I do that, I can
still outrank Amazon, even though they're this behemoth with a very authoritative domain. – Okay. When we were preparing for this, a couple of ideas that came
up with is blogger outreach, guest posting on other blogs
that have a high authority, product review outreach,
scholarships, giveaways, and content marketing. We only have time for one. So I want you to pick one of these, and let's just talk
about this for a minute that you think is valuable, that maybe anybody could consider doing. – I'll give, it's kind of one quick one that someone can do now,
then we can dive into one in more detail. So quick and dirty one, it's
called HARO, Help A Reporter, you can go to helpareporter.com. – Help A Reporter Out, yeah. – It's free. You sign up, and basically you kind of, you just pick which niche you're in, and you're gonna get journalist pitches straight to your inbox
that you can respond to.
So this is a great way of getting some… Get some press mentions, get some really strong
back links that can help. So that's your kind of quick and dirty tip that you can implement right now, and start getting some back
links from strong publications. – Okay, so just to be super clear, HARO was funded by Peter Shankman, used to be Help A Reporter Out, maybe it's now just helpareporter.com, and you can go there and there's always… You can get a, I think they
have a twice a day newsletter, or now it's a website. And you can be sourced, and
in exchange for being sourced, you can ask them to link
back to your website, right? – Yes, they almost always do. If they want a quote, they're probably gonna link back to you. – Yep, okay, cool, and
then you have another one.
– And then the most
common is guest posting. Basically what this is,
you find relevant websites, relevant blogs, you offer to write a
guest post on their site. Now, guest posting has been abused, and anything that's been abused is kind of under more scrutiny. So if you're guest posting
on sites that are irrelevant, that's probably not gonna help, 'cause the site's not gonna be relevant. If you're guest posting
on a low quality blog that doesn't really have
any editorial control, that's really not gonna help either.
What you wanna do is find
like real publication, the real blogs in the industry that people are actually
reading that write good content, that have good editorial control, and build relationships
with those bloggers. Tell them why you should
be able to write for them, your experience. Maybe if you've written
blog posts on your own site, link to them as an example, and propose some topics
that you think would be good for their blog. And if you really can provide value, and you have true
experience and expertise, a lot of times they're
gonna say yes to you.
So that could work really
well as kind of a very… It's not the most scalable, but it's the most consistent way to build back links to a site. – Well, and I kind of feel compelled to talk about the scholarships example. I think in this example you
were talking about possibly reaching out to universities, because they have really high authority. Is that right?
– Yes. So basically how it works
is you create a scholarship, you create a page on your site
talking about a scholarship. So, and we usually recommend offering 500 to 1000 dollars for a scholarship. And don't worry, it's not
500, 1000 per university, it's just one time, 500, 1000. And you can promote that one scholarship to hundreds of universities
and financial aid websites. So like you said, these
universities are very trusted, very high authority. They might not be relevant, but because they have so much authority, that can still send some good
SEO signals back to your site. – Okay, Jeff. A lot of people are like, "No, don't stop. This has been solid gold." Thank you, first of all, so much for answering all my questions.
We could have gone on for another hour. If people want to discover more
about you and your company, or if they want to connect with
you on the social platforms, do you have a preferred social place that they connect with you,
and what's your website? – Yeah, so I'd say social media. Don't look at my Twitter,
it's kind of embarrassing. I think I tweet like once per year, but you can go to, you
can find me on LinkedIn. I do use that, so just add me. Happy to connect with anyone listening. And then also our… You can visit our website,
it's just 180marketing.com/sme. And yeah, that'll take you to our website. You know, again, anything on the website goes to me directly. So if you just wanna say hi, or let me know what you thought of this, I'm more than happy to hear from you guys.
– Jeff Oxford, thank you so much. And folks, I'm gonna
try a little experiment. I'm gonna title this
Search Engine Optimization, How to Rank Number One on Google. Let's see if I can actually
optimize this entire article for Google. That would be super exciting. Again, it was 180marketing.com/sme, if you wanna check out
Jeff's amazing work. Jeff Oxford, thank you
again for coming on today. We're so much better because of it. – Awesome, thanks for having me, Mike..
