Embark on a journey through the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization with Garry Grant, the CEO of SEO Inc., a leading firm in the SEO landscape. Tune into The Thrivetime Show Podcast as Garry Grant imparts invaluable insights in the eagerly awaited episode “Everything You Need to Know About SEO,” airing on Monday, January 7.
In this must-listen episode, Garry doesn’t just skim the surface; he dives deep into actionable strategies and proven methods to enhance your digital presence. Whether a small local business or a sprawling enterprise, you’ll discover how to propel your search engine rankings and streamline customers’ paths to find you online. Garry Grant, the CEO, will be covering SEO, SEO services, and Local SEO Services.
SEO Inc., under Garry’s leadership, boasts an impressive track record of boosting online visibility for a plethora of esteemed clients, including iconic names like 20th Century Fox, SC Johnson, and WeddingWire, to the more specialized needs of SMBs across the globe. Their expertise in navigating the digital space has earned them a coveted spot in the industry, making Garry’s appearance on the podcast a golden opportunity for listeners to learn from a true maestro of SEO.
In a candid conversation with Clay Clark, the former United States Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year, Garry sheds light on the intricacies of SEO. Clark, a powerhouse of entrepreneurship with six multi-million-dollar companies to his name and accolades that include being a contributing writer for Forbes, brings his wealth of knowledge to the table, facilitating a dialogue that’s both informative and inspiring.
With the backdrop of Clark’s unique perspective as a serial entrepreneur and the hands-on experience of fathering five children, this episode promises to be as engaging as it is educational.
Mark your calendars for an episode that could redefine how you approach SEO and online marketing. Stay ahead of the curve by learning from two of the industry’s most experienced professionals. Don’t miss out on this treasure trove of SEO strategies and insights—your pathway to making your business visible and unmissable in the digital realm.
On iTunes or Spotify
When you listen to the episode, you’ll get answers to some of SEO’s most essential questions, such as:
- Why business owners must approach SEO with a keyword strategy, choosing the keywords they want to try to rank for before they get started
- Why it’s essential to dominate the search engines with both short-tail and long-tail keywords
- Why small business owners should focus on local keywords rather than national ones
- How long can it take you to get to page one, and what kind of results can you expect once you get there
- Why you can’t just buy 5,000 articles and land on the first page of the search engine results overnight
- Why article spinners and computer-generated content doesn’t work
- Why will you need to pay anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 a month to work with a firm like SEO Inc., and how anything less like hiring your friend to build your website on Wix or hiring a firm from India for pennies on the dollar will waste money and negatively affect your business in the long run
- Why you need Google reviews
- Why copying content from other websites is a big no-no – and it’s not just plagiarism and copyright issues.
- Why what your website looks like and updating it more than once a year matters more than you think
- Why you don’t want to handle SEO in-house
- The difference between search engine optimization and search engine advertising
- And much, much, more.
Garry is honored to join the ranks of some of the biggest names in search and business. Check out the episode – you’ll definitely learn something. Even if you consider yourself an SEO pro, Garry offers a ton of in-depth advice and perspective that could have you ready to make changes to your website while you listen!
To contact Garry Grant, please use the following link.
SEO Inc., the Premier SEO Company
Transcript of the Podcast:
Transcript of the Podcast:
On today’s show, one of the world’s top search engine optimization experts. Mr. Gary Grant, the CEO and founder of S E O inc.com. Again, Gary Grant, the CEO and founder of SEO Inc.com. Hops on the show to teach you everything you need to know about search engine optimization. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, but this show dies.
Two men, eight kids co-created by two women, 13 Mo Thai million-dollar businesses, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the Thrive time show. What from the, from the bottom show, he started from the start from the, from the nation. I am fired up for today’s show; you better be fired up because today will be a game-changer for many people listening out there.
Do you know why we are fired up for today’s show? Mm, probably because you, uh, just burned some opinion wood. Uh, no, but we really should be here in just a few moments. It’s going to have to happen. I’m going to bring this up here. Um, we live in a world Z of many internet charlatans. No. Now the word charlatan means, uh, again, the word charlatan means a person falsely claiming to have special knowledge.
A fraud is a fraud. Many people say, well, I, I have a laptop, uh, check, check. I, uh, have, uh, bogus claims check. I know where the coffee shop is check. And I got a couple of photos of myself with a celebrity. Therefore, I’m an internet wizard, right? I’m a wizard. Right? You got a picture of myself with, like, uh, you know, a Maro Brodrick, right?
Remember him, right him. I’m going to Florida with him, and I’m cousin, twice removed from somebody else. And then I’ve got a laptop.
My Matt wand is my laptop. But see, on today’s show, we’re interviewing a guy by the name of Gary Grant. He’s the CEO of SEO, Inc. And, uh, Gary, by the way, welcome on to the show, sir.
Speaker: How are you?
Garry G: I am doing so awesome and happy to be here with you guys and all your listeners. This is just going to be mind-altering, mind-bending money, making an idea show, I think. Okay. So, Gary, we’ll go ahead and wow. The listeners out there, a little bit of name-dropping. Who are some of the companies you guys at SEO Inc. have worked with over the years to help them dominate search engines?
Well, you know what? After 25+ years of doing this, I’ve seen every kind of business vertical. I’ll keep it short: PGE Pacific Gas and Electric is the largest energy company in the United States, SC Johnson. We did all 17 of their brands, like Tide and Glade Windex Pledge. Uh, we’ve done 20th-century Fox. We’re the guys behind Avatar Wall Street 2, The Planet of the Apes, and vegas.com.
My glasses.com 1-800-DENTIST and it goes on and on and on. Wow. Did you say planet of the apes, uh, the planet of the apes? Uh, yes. That was a fun project. That’s impressive to me because, see, that’s the first movie I’ve ever seen that I can relate to. Yeah. When I was a kid, they had a deal for a dollar.
You could see all five. It said it was gone eight for the day when I was a little bitty boy, really went in for the day. It was a dollar. It was a cheap babysitter for my moms. She was like, yeah, dollar seven hours. See you later. Exactly. Now we’re in a world where many people have monkey brain Gary, where people cannot stay off their smartphone long enough to, uh, what to, to, Hey Gary, what’s up or, to learn something.
Um, you have focused on this search engine game for a long time to become an expert. So, how did you first get involved in search engine marketing? Because you’ve stayed focused on this idea for so long. You’ve fought the natural desire. Everyone has to have a monkey brain.
How long have you focused? How did you first get involved in search engines? How long and how long have you been doing this? Okay. Uh, that’s a great question. And you know what? One of those holy grail moments was when the clouds parted, and this ample light came down. I used to be a web developer in Los Angeles and created a lot of great sites.
You probably heard of them. Charlie’s Angel Hollowman, Blair Witch, some talk show, radio hosts, uh, Rush Limbaugh, a bunch of those, but I just finished doing Blair Witch, and Artisan came to me and said, Hey, we have an idea for this great site. So we worked on it for a year. It was a million-dollar budget. I created the site.
It was all in a flash. Remember those days when Flash, yeah, Flash was a great product. But I was done with the project, delivered it early, and they said, Gary, thanks a lot. We just sold it to Sony for 13 million. And thank God we did because the site can’t rank on the search engines. And there it was, he came down from above and said, Gary, that’s the holy grail.
The reason. You could spend a million dollars on a website; if it’s not visible, it’s worth nothing. Gary. I had a mic for our guests without their permission. Well, we have audio of what actually happened at that very moment. Do you want to hear the audio?
From what, what year was this? Gary? It was 1996 or five. No, either way. We didn’t, we didn’t, we do Mike everything, but sometimes we fail to **** it Z, but this is the audio it’s, it’s fantastic.
Your mic technology, even back in the nineties, Gary. This is the man upstairs. I’m not going to say this is the voice of God necessarily, but the voice of the man upstairs.
And I do want to clarify that if you build a beautiful website, a beautiful, incredible, massive, gorgeous website that no one can find. It’s like building a billboard in the woods. And as the man upstairs, I’m communicating to you via CB technology, technology, technology, technology, Gary, is that kind of what it felt like at that moment?
It, it, uh, almost the same way.
Yeah. I still have goose Cris every time I hear that. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Okay. Now. Okay. So, I have many questions we’ve gathered from the Thrive Nation that I want to ask you. And then, I will have the Z ask the follow-up question on behalf of the entrepreneurs who go; I need to know what you’re talking about.
Ha ha. So when you optimize a website, Gary, why must you decide what keyword phrase in step one? That your website is about what one keyword phrase your website is about. Okay. That’s incredibly important. People need to understand the importance. They put all this garbage in the titles, all the trash in the meta information, and on their page, you have to focus.
So I will give you an example, and you’ll know who they are.
So let’s say your company does carpet cleaning. So you’re going to, of course, use carpet cleaning. If you’re a local business, some of the new voice searches, like, uh, carpet cleaning near me, carpet cleaning, California carpet cleaning, where I live, and LA or San Diego.
So it’s not only that, it’s also finding the keyword. It’s making sure you pick a keyword that is being searched or how many people are looking for that. I’m going to give you a quick fact. So carpet cleaning is just that one generic term, 102,000 searches per month. Yeah, a 102,000.
All right. Now, let’s look at this carpet cleaning near me. What do you think of those searches? It would be about 3,800. That’s the potential that you could have coming to your website. Now, at number 3, that would be perfect. A hundred percent, but let’s take that for example; here’s another weird fact about carpet cleaning, California position10.
Now, why would carpet cleaning near me and carpet cleaning in California have such a vast difference? And why would carpet cleaning near me be higher because people are looking for more relevant results? You have to think about what a user’s doing. I wouldn’t type in corporate clean in California because maybe it’s some guy up in, uh, way up in north Cal when I need somebody at my house.
So, you have to be strategic when picking that money and making keywords. Makes sense. Okay. I’ve got it now. Now we’ve done that question. Now we come over here, the old, the old dudes, that old God that we’re, you know, that, uh, we just figured out how to turn our computers on messing your phone mess with, you know, trying to figure this stuff out.
We’re always calling Apple to get an appointment to come and figure out how to do this. You threw out a term in there. You said meta the META. What? That, what the, what the, Hey yes. What the, what is that? Is that like a medical term? Is that like a medic? Is that like a medic that you mean the medic tab?
That, like the medic tab, like the,
Oh, okay. META tags are like the code behind your website. So your website looks all pretty, and if you have a building, it looks all pretty. So, how do you run that building where you have electric wiring in it? You’ve got plumbing. Uh, all those things that go in the background are the same as on a website to get it to work.
Gotcha. That’s no; that may make sense now. Now, this is, this is one thing I want to make sure the listeners get out there. If you are going to hire your firm, Gary, Gary, you tell me if I need to be corrected. Okay. You, but you have clients that pay you an average right now. Uh, you have some clients, small businesses, that might pay 2900. a month, but you have accounts that will pay a hundred thousand dollars, around 50K per month.
What’s the most amount that one might pay per month? Like a hundred thousand dollars a month to be top in Google. Well, what’s the most serious? What’s the actual number, Garry? Yeah. Uh, I’ll say an average, an average is about 8K. Um, but you know, some of the small businesses, I’m really sensitive; you know, I’m an entrepreneur; you guys are both entrepreneurs.
So I try to help everybody, even if they can’t afford my company, I will give them beneficial information. But some of the big dogs are playing. Yeah. Uh, well, about 50K to 80,000, how could somebody afford to pay you? Why would somebody pay you guys $50,000 a month? How could it change somebody’s life if they reach the top of Google?
It is exponential. It is hard to put in words when I see clients get those top results, like, we did Frederick’s the Hollywood, uh, which was one of my favorite accounts, by the way. Uh, Victoria’s Secret Victoria’s Secret was always in those top positions, and we got Fredricks in that position and moved out of Victoria’s Secret. Fredericks goes to Number One for lingerie and **** lingerie.
And it exploded the revenue 30 times, 30 times. Incredible. Wow. Yeah, 30 times. And they were a multimillion-dollar company. That’s amazing. Again, you’re out there, and you’re saying, why do I need to learn about optimization? It can change your life. And Garry, one thing I’ve noticed is that many businesses go to a conference, and they need clarification.
Many business owners attend a conference and need clarification because the guy gets up there. The presenter talks about short-tail keywords versus long-tail keywords. Can you explain the difference between short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords? Sure. You know what? I don’t even have to go to a conference to be confused.
Sometimes, it just naturally happens every day, except when it comes to this long tail. Here’s the perfect example. A short tail is that money maker, the real big one, the national keyboard like I will keep using this one repeatedly. Everybody understands carpet cleaning. Okay. So, a long tail is carpet cleaning near me and stain removal experts.
The short tail is a more succinct, brief description. And a long tail is many words in there. So, like flowers, I need to find red roses near me. So that’s the difference. Okay. So long tail versus K short tail keywords, we’ve covered that we’ve covered, why search engine might, might cost people much money.
We’ve talked about the value of dominating a major keyword. Garry, I want to ask you this. Why would, if someone’s out there, say Dr. Zelner has a new venture he’s involved in and wants to dominate?
Why would he want to focus on a local keyword? Versus a national, can you explain, uh, help somebody like Dr. Z, who’s an entrepreneur, multiple businesses? Why would he want to focus on a local word versus a national word? Sure. So let’s say, Dr. Z, how are you today? Are you feeling good? I’m feeling great, buddy. Okay. So let me explain to you the theory if you are a local business and have one store location. You’re located wherever you are; if you go after a national keyword, this is a problem.
So if you’re a dentist and say, I want to go after that keyword dentist, the competition will be incredible. And guess what? There may be Wiki articles or really powerful sites. The Wall Street Journal, talking about dentists, web MD. It’s almost going to be impossible to get that keyword.
And guess what? Google’s smart. So if you type in dentist, they will use your location to pull up more relevant information, especially with this machine learning that’s going on; computers are getting smarter. Um, so you want to focus in your area because you want to avoid a guy calling you for teeth cleaning in, uh, Oshkosh, you know, wherever you like a person right near you to get in and earn the business.
But let’s say that Dr. Z let’s say Dr. Z has a new company or a brand he’s working on, and Z wants to take it statewide. Can you tell him how much it would cost if he wants to be statewide dominant for a new product? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I sit down with everybody. I speak with everybody since I’ve been doing this so long and seeing so many different types of business verticals; I sit down, I say, okay, Dr. Z, what do you want to accomplish? Tell me, what’s going on with the site and goals? Oh, I don’t have enough business. I don’t have enough foot traffic. I need to get more leads off the website. I need to get more phone calls. So I define. What are your goals, and what matters most to you? Then, I structure a strategy based on that.
It’s straightforward. He’s in California. He wants to dominate all businesses in California. So, I will go after some generic terms because California’s a big state. And then, I would define that by localities. For example, I have a franchise company all over the US. So, how do you focus on that?
So what I do is on the main corporate site, I focus on generic keywords, and then with all the franchisees, I concentrate on geo-targeted or location or regional keywords. Now if I, uh, let’s say that I’m out there and, uh, uh, you know, I am Z’s marketing guy, and Z and I are talking, and Z says, Clay, no matter what we have to do, let’s get to the top for like you do auto auctions.
Z.
Do you ever want to take your auto auction across the whole state, or will it be in Tulsa? What do you think? Yeah, I’ve got some expansion plans that I’m, I’m thinking about doing, but, uh, it, you know, that’s, it’s not a retail establishment, so it doesn’t have to be, you know, that’s, I, I would instead take the money and spend it on other businesses that I own to get them SEO.
You know, it doesn’t have to pop the front page, however. It does for listeners out there that for listeners out there who don’t know what he’s talking about; his auto auction sells to used car dealers, and you have to have a used car dealer license. So it’s B2B. And so it’s not; I’ve got business to business, business to business.
I’ve got about a thousand guys. I reach out and touch on, and you know, your optometry clinic, let’s say you want to take it across. That’s different; you never do that. You know, go to Oklahoma City. Yeah. I don’t know. That’s a good, good question. I thought my kids were getting licensed and joined the practice.
That’s what we’re talking about. So, let’s say that you sat down with Dr. Zan. You told Dr. Z. Here’s what we need to do, Garry; how long would it take to get Dr. Z to the top of Google search engine results? Assuming that there was no limit on the budget. Like you could spend whatever you, you know, whatever was available.
I have always asked you how long it would take to get Dr. Z to the top of Google for the whole state; he’s already at the top for Tulsa, but how would you get to the top? How long would it take to get to the top for the state of Oklahoma? Uh, that’s a great, great question. I get that asked all the time to me now in the background.
I think how competitive it is and how many other people are competing. I look at his competition to find out what they’re doing versus what he’s doing, but here is the answer. I tell everybody it’s at least three to six months. To get authentic traction going, mm-hmm, and get good results.
And the reason is it just takes time to build out the website, create all the on-page SEO, bolster your content, and then amplify that, or push it out through all your social media channels, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, uh, and, and, um, Twitter. So, to get there, I don’t want to give you false expectations for three to six months.
Sure. That seems fair. Now, Marshall, you work with many business owners who, uh, ask, you know, SEO search engine optimization, related questions, and we have one of the gurus of search.
There is a Gary Grant, Bruce Clay, and then everybody else. There are only a few other search engine optimization wizards with as much of a resume as you have.
What question would you have for Gary about search engine optimization on behalf of some of your clients who ask these questions daily? Yeah, so I have some clients that want to get to the top of Google, and they see sites that are performing so well. And so they’ll say, you know, I don’t want to create the content myself; this site’s performing well.
Can I, you know, copy the content on their site and post it on mine, or can I, can I, you know, hire somebody to write the content for me? I mean, why can’t I duplicate content from other sites around the web and compile and make a big aggregate site for search engine optimization?
Okay. Well, you know what I would tell you, wait a second. Did you guys hear? I hear police sirens. Oh my God. I just got a letter from a lawyer because you’d violate copyright infringement laws, DCMA, digital, uh, DMCA, digital millennium copyright act. So when you put up content on your website, You immediately own that.
All the images, pictures, and content are your stuff. You own it. It’s copyright; it’s on your website. When somebody steals that and scrapes your site and duplicates that just for the quick run, you can send Google an instant removal of the content, and you can go to their hosting provider if they refuse to do it.
And by law, they have to comply with this copyright act and pull them down. Now, I will tell you something: this is interesting, and it goes along with that question. Our site is www.seoic.com. If you guys want to check this out and type in www dot SEOInc.us, that’s the guy who stole my site. Oh, it’s a guy.
Yeah, he duplicated. So, I have a process going on right now. I just contacted their hosting company, and they should be down within a day or two. There it is. Well, hopefully, he is getting many leads here before you take him down, right? Yeah. You know what, that’s a fraud, you know.
And there are a couple of programs you could use for your listeners. One is called Copyscape. And what you do is you put your website in there and a and different pages of your website, and it scours the internet for people using your content. It will come up with, like, they’d copy 10%, or in some cases, a hundred percent of your copy.
As a matter of fact, the funny story is that I had so many steal my site, and they were in Japan, and it had the About Us page. And it says our CEO, Garry Grant. And I was like, wait, what? They left that in there. They were so bad at stealing the content. They left my name on that page. Gary, I want to ask you some more challenging questions from our listeners.
There are many listeners out there who are saying; you know what? I’m an attorney. I’m a spine surgeon. I’m a dentist. I am a lawyer. Therefore, search engine optimization does not work in my industry. Can you please debunk this myth? Oh my God. You know what? So, I’m going to put it into perspective.
When was the last time you used the phone book? Uh, I used it every day. I’m a very loyal person. I believe in the brand. Uh, never. I like reading it. Never. Yeah. It’s never, never, never, you know what? Consumers these days want information, and they want to consume it, and they want the answer right now.
I need to find a dentist as my tooth is hurting. I have to find a dentist right now. The search engines and the use of the technology are nothing that compares to zero, nothing, money mailers. One. I throw those packs out. I don’t even read it if I want something. I want instant gratification. Now, I don’t want to go through all these companies to find a plumber or a dentist.
Now I’m going to give you some facts. This is outstanding. We have, we have several dentists as clients. I have one paying almost 5,000 a month, and you’re like, oh my God, 5,000 a month for a dentist a year. It’s a lot of money. Yeah. That is a lot of money. But get this: here are the results—a 739% increase in organic traffic.
Wow. 800%. Yeah, 826% in the overall amount of keyword ranking and 166% in local organic traffic. That’s what you want. Here’s the big point: I already here comes drum roll. This is the money. Here we go. 30. 30% increase in revenue. 700% return on investment. This doctor had to open a whole new facility because he was overloaded.
He had to get new doctors. He had to get new employees. Is that credible? So tell me it doesn’t work? No. Okay. Okay. Here’s where it gets a little weird, Dr. Z; please chime in and hit the odd alarm. If you want to here. Whoop, whoop, Z. How long have you been an optometrist? 26 years.
If you had to spec 27 20, I’ll give you a moment to think about this briefly. Okay. If you had to think about, and you go, guys, somebody’s going to ask, you want to know how many patients your clinic has seen over the years. I’m going to keep up some music. Okay. Think about it; do the math real quick.
You know, how many patients do you think, how many patients do you think you have seen in those, what have the offices seen? Yeah, the offices. No pressure. We want, we just just think about it. Do the math roughly. Um, let me get a little calculator. Yeah. I’m going to guess it to be Garry.
He’s doing the research here. We’re doing some square root of nine here. Average travel, the square root. Think it: how would you say closer to a million than not? Amen. Did you wait a second? Did you say a million? Mm-hmm yes. Uh, chop. I put me, should I put my finger in my mouth? Like a, well, chop 1 million.
He just said a million. So yeah. Do you know what they say? See you, bro, to get that booty leg down, smack them. Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Cause, so you’ve had over a million customers that you’ve worked with over the years, but see, uh, Google reviews were not a big thing until Gary. When did Google reviews start to be a big thing?
Google is getting, getting objective reviews from real customers. Uh, I, It’s great. It happened within. Uh, I’m not going to pinpoint that. Yeah, more importantly, over the last five years, it’s become more and more critical. So Z, if you had, let’s say, an objective review from at least a third of your customers, it could be possible that right now, you would have 300,000 reviews. Still, most of your, uh, customers have come over 20-something years, 27.
So now, here you are, 27 years in, you’re 53 years old, 54 years old. You’re closer. You’re packed in all this. How much does it irritate the crap out of you? The young whipper snap, like Oxy fresh, let’s say. This guy’s got 140,000 reviews, Jonathan Barnett with Oxy Fresh. And you’re like, you weren’t even born when I was doing anybody.
I mean, buddy, how would, does this irritate you that, that you, that you started your business in a Prego review era? Well, now that you say it like that, the next time I see you’re going to punch him, I’m going to throw punches. Yeah. Just walk up and find the throat, and then go. Okay. Now we’re, we’re squared up now.
This is good now, okay? SEO that. Okay. SEO that, but seriously, it’s funny, but okay. Listen, here’s the deal about it. Yeah. The game keeps changing, and you have a step on the times and mean, I can remember what the big deal was to have the biggest ad in the phone. That was the. That was the boom. I hate to take the shadow to a dirty level, but you got a picture of all your staff.
He’s good. He is looking good. What’s that? That’s Doug over there from the, oh yeah. He’s in the lean grinding department. He is so thick that you, Tammy, I will hire a few more pretty ***** coming into the pictures. So we look even, is that dirty? That’s I don’t know. Is that possible? Is that called marketing?
What it doesn’t, I don’t know. And then you were, you were like, you’re like, okay, I did a half page this year. I’d better be the biggest one in there. Right. And some dude did a full page and was like, are you kidding me? Did anybody ever do a double page? Two pages me with the yellow page guy? And this is, this is the audio of you talking to the yellow page guy.
You said, say, here’s the deal. I want to be on the entire page on the yellow page. I want to be first. And I swear if you don’t make me the whole page, you might wake up with a horse head in your bed. If you’re not first, you’re last; now, I will make a deal. You can’t refute it. Let me tell you, and I need a thing. I was going over there to the shoe carnival, and I bought you some concrete shoes.
I know. Do they fit? I don’t want you sleeping with the no good fishes. I talked to Sneaks. I spoke to Sneaks, who told me you would sell with the whole page out. Is that right? Take the ad. Leave the gun. Okay. So the point is we live, yes. What is the? There was a D; there was a different time.
There was a different time. It was a different time, was a different time. Now we’re in a world of gathering Google reviews, Garry, for somebody out there that says, gosh, I can’t collect reviews. And I’m a lawyer. So, no one even reads reviews. I’m a dentist. So, no one even reads reviews. Carrie, why does every business owner that you’re helping to optimize their website?
Why do they need to participate with you and get reviews? Okay. I’m going to tell you exactly how I search. If I’m looking for a product, I’ll give you some examples. I’m looking for a product. The first thing I do is look at the product name and then type the reviews after that. Do you know why? Because if the guy has three reviews and they’re five stars, and there’s another guy with 2000 reviews with a four and a half star.
Where are you going? I will go to the guy that’s most reviewed because you would think that that’s the best product reviews, third-party referrals or testimonials, or, uh, agreeing that your business is excellent. Now, I’ve seen some unbelievable reviews if you’re a dentist. The guy horrified me; it was the worst experience ever.
He pulled my teeth out. I was in pain for weeks. he screwed up the, you know, saying after, do you think you’ll ever go with that guy? No. No. Out of curiosity, I wonder why he’s so bad. I want to go check him out. See, unless, unless you’re like Bill, unless you’re like Bill Murray out of that movie with, uh, you know, where he likes paying, you know, Steve, Martin’s a dentist and he is like, oh yeah, he wants that pain.
Yeah. That’s the guy. That’s my huckleberry. I like little pain. Chuck, you had a *** question for Gary. Yeah. Hey Gary. I was wondering, we’ve been talking about content and all these things, but I was wondering, is there a certain way that you’re supposed to name photos on your website? Is there a way that people need to do that?
Yeah. There is, and there are a couple of good reasons for it. I’d say the most important reason is probably for people with, uh, disabilities and also search. So, let me go into both aspects, right? So, people with disabilities they’re they have programs called adaptive software. So, let’s take an example.
My daughter is blind. So when she goes to a website, if it’s full of pictures, it doesn’t tell her anything. She doesn’t know what to do. Boom. You lose her user. But more importantly, if you make your site more accessible by even naming the pictures that describe what it is, you could put keywords in there.
Guess what? When somebody types an image for teeth cleaning or teeth whitener, boom, that image could come up and say, oh, this is from Dr. Korian. I’m going to go to him. Well, you probably won’t wanna go to Dr. Korian, but you know what I’m saying now? Uh, target, years ago, I think if, I think you’ve learned the story.
But Target.com was sued over not having alt tags on their shopping cart. Do you remember the story? Well, I certainly do because they called me, really. Wow. Tell us the story about the story that I know. Okay, everybody, sit down, get the marshmallows out, and gather around the campfire because this is precisely what happened.
Target called me. Uh, well, first off, my daughter searched on target. She spent 45 minutes on the website and went to check out. It was impossible. There was no way for her to check out if you couldn’t see, and, you know, you had a mouse, uh, you were able to check out and finish and complete your purchase. Now imagine that if she’s sitting there for 45 minutes, she can’t get out of the house, and you can’t buy things like everybody else.
It is not a good thing. So Target called me up, and there was a guy from, uh, Berkeley that, uh, sued them because the site was inaccessible. So I’m on the phone with them, their whole, it, people are there, and they said, okay, what would it take for you to fix this? Problem. We don’t want to pay you to come in, but can’t you write us a white paper?
And I said, sure. So, let me analyze the site. My, it’s funny because my daughter, uh, spent 45 minutes on this site, and she couldn’t order anything. So I said, I’ll write you a white paper. It’ll be about 20 K., And it’ll be able to fix everything on the site, including the checkout. I already knew what the site needed because I, you know, did a quick review when my daughter couldn’t search.
So they said 20 grand for a white paper. You know what? We don’t have the time or resources to invest in that we can’t put our. Um, team up for that. I don’t know when we do that; you know what? That audience is so small that we’re not going to attack it. And I said, yeah, but you’re missing the big picture.
You have to do that as part of the w C a G, which I’m on the board for. Oh, with the w three. Yeah. With the w three C, you know, I’m not going to throw them under the bus and report him. But
however, I said you have to do that, but even more importantly, fixing the accessibility of your website will make it rank higher.
And they were like, we don’t really care at this time. And I said, well, you know what, if you don’t do this, you’ll lose a lot of money. Yeah. And Bruce Sexton Jr. Sued them. And I believe he was, I think he was a student. He was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. And he sued them. I guess if I’m wrong, correct me if I’m wrong.
I believe he won 6 million. That is exactly right. 6 million. Do you know what the sad part of the story is? What’s that target called me up? Target called me up. And they said we’d like to have that white paper. I said, really? It’s now 40,000. Oh. And they, they, yeah, they did it anyway. They got me so upset that they didn’t want to do it, but you know what Clay’s going on there? Have you guys heard about this?
The um, accessibility. Trolls. Yes. Yeah. They’re out there. And they’re looking for these more significant brand sites to go on, to see if they’re accessible, and then going after them. It’s kind of like, uh, you know, ambulance chaser lawyers. These guys are just trolling the internet or patent trolls. They’re going after companies.
Now, alt tags are what you call them. You have to name your images correctly. And if you don’t, you won’t rate high in Google, and potentially, if you’re as big as Target, you might be. Suor may not be not as big as Target, but if you’re a big company, you might be at legal risk. Now, Gary, I want to ask this next *** question.
Google reviews, going back to this again. If I’m listening right now and I say I don’t have the time to get Google reviews, and furthermore, people won’t leave me a Google review. What is the best way to get a Google review? Well, you, uh, as any business owner out there, and I’m sure there’s a ton listening to us right now, you have to work hard.
You have to get up early. You have to put in that dedication; you have to ensure that you have a quality product and service, and it’s the same way on the internet. You can’t put up a page and say what will be rich. Look at all these leads coming in, you know; you know what I mean? Whoa, I have a website.
Show me the money. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Hey, nobody is going to the site; I don’t have any reviews. Uh, I can’t get them and start whining about that. If you are a business owner, you put your heart and soul into investing everything into that. Why not take that time to ask a client? They’re super happy.
You’re done. You just finished a project at their house, and you’re like, oh my God, boom, the perfect time to get a review, a restaurant that was the best meal ever. I said, really, you want to know? Can you give us a five-star review? Have you ever bought a car and walked in there? And they always say, you’re going to get a, uh, questionnaire.
Can you give us all tens? Yeah. Yep. That’s the same thing. You have to ask for it. If you don’t ask. You’re not going to get it. Oof. Biblical knowledge has not because you ask not to say that again. You have not because you ask, not here we go. Now, this is the next question I have for you. There are companies out that email you every day. Is anybody out there listening? Did you get this email? It’s a company typically based in India or somewhere near India.
And they will say we have Michael wave burritos for you—$ 399. We can get you to the top of us; we can do this for you today to optimize your Google map. We wouldn’t. And you’re saying, oh, you’re saying, okay. Okay. That’s cool. Because uh, uh, I listen to this show with Gary and Gary saying, you know, it might cost me three grand a month, and for $399 a month, I mean, they’re going to do it.
So why not? And I get a burrito thrown on the deal. Yes. It’s not a bad deal. I get a burrito, Gary. Can you tell me why you can’t hire a firm out of India to optimize your website for $399 rings? Sure. You know, what’s really crazy and strange? I get about five emails a day. I will contact you to be number one in Google in three weeks; send me 500.
I’m getting it. And you know what? I send them back. And I said, well if you had rankings, you wouldn’t have to spam me. So thanks. But no thanks. Woo. Truth bomb. Right? So here’s the thing. Everybody, when Bruce Clay and I know Bruce, you mentioned him before. I know him very well. We’re really good friends.
And when we started, only a handful of people were doing this. Now it seems like everybody and their brother knows this, and everybody from India is like, Ooh, this is a hotpot we can make a lot of money. They don’t know. They’re just thinking that by putting some keywords in, a website will get people ranked.
You might as well take that $300 and take your wife or significant other to offer dinner because it won’t do anything to get more enjoyment from the dinner. It’s not going to work. No. What you just said is not correct. Z, Z. Here’s the deal. He, he, this poor I’m going to call you. I’m going to call you out. Gary. That was a poor analogy.
You should take the $300 and take your wife’s brother on a **** because that is, that is, I mean, you don’t get any; if you take your wife on a ****, you at least get some impact. We have a disconnect. I think we have a little disconnect here. I’m saying if you take your wife on a ****, there might be a benefit to doing that.
Well, yeah, but if you take your wife’s brother on a ****, there’s no upside to it. That’s more akin to this. Oh, I see what you’re saying. Do you know what I’m saying? I see what you’re saying. I got it. I got, I got, I got it. And I’m just saying, I want to take my wife’s brother on a day. There’s something wrong with that.
Got a little got a little weird. There. Got a little weird. I mean, I’m just joking—right, guys. Fian left. Okay. All right. So moving on. All right. So now search engine optimization. A lot of times, people say, okay, my site looks incredible, though. It looks awesome. I just paid a website company to build it, and it looks awesome, but I cannot find the passwords.
Gary, how often do you work with a business owner who cannot find their password? Uh, yesterday, uh, we’re doing, yeah, we’re doing a wine, uh, distributor site. He is a good friend, and he goes, oh wait, I had somebody build this site for me. And I don’t know where the passwords are. I can’t find the passwords.
And we called the company. Uh, we actually couldn’t get the passwords. We had to get him on the phone to validate. He was the guy that owned it. We got the passwords, and he didn’t know what he was doing. He sent me passwords for his Facebook and all the other accounts. And he called us this morning and said, Hey, wait a minute.
There are all these new pictures and videos up on Facebook. I don’t even know how to post there. I didn’t even know I had to password from that. I get that all the time. You know what? This is your business, man. This is your business. Would you forget the unlocked code of your business? When you walk in the door, you have to keep this Infor; this is going to make you money.
So it’s essential. Ah, I lost the password. Oh, I lost the keys to the front door. I guess we’re going to be close until I get a locksmith. Let’s take some time off. I can’t find the key to my house. I mean, this is a big thing. So if you’re other than listening, this is, this is not meant to beat you up.
It’s meant to help you. You have to know your passwords. Talk to me about the dangers of just delegating your website to some web guy or somebody related to you twice removed. Gary. Why is it so dangerous to trust your web optimization to a guy? Oh, my God, this is probably the worst thing you could do, especially if it’s a family member.
Right. Cause I’ve had a guy. Yeah. I gave the web development to my cousin, and at Thanksgiving, we had a brawl at the table because he didn’t finish it. And it looked like crap. I was like, oh my God. Now, if you hired an agency, you’d have a professional. Do it because many people think they’d get, oh, go to Wix or Squarespace and put a website up.
Guess what? Those sites you can’t rank. You just can’t. And then it’ll get a guy with just a one-page wonder like a business card. That’s, you know, it won’t do anything unless you say, Hey, take a little. Here’s. But to make money, you have to think about it, man. Plan it. So when you build a building, now, look, I need to build my house.
Hey cousin, why don’t you just wing up the house and build it for me? Wing it up. You think that depends if it’s your wife’s brother. I guess I don’t know. Yeah. Just go for it. Get your nail gun; buy a hammer. I’ll even give it to you. Build the house. Hey, you know, I took you on that. I took you out the other ***** there.
Uh, brother-in-law, can you build me a house now? Real fast? Can you, yeah? I thought I remember buying you some incredible tableside walk, stake down. Tableside walk. Now I want to ask why Garry for somebody out there who’s just fighting this idea. Why does it matter what a website looks like? Okay. I’m going to put it kind of in simple terms.
Have you ever been to a store and you walk in, and you’re like, I’m never buying anything here? Turn around and walk right out. It’s dirty. It just doesn’t look cool. Everything is broken down on it. The same thing with the website; you have to present the image of your company. Like a plumber, you can give yourself to be larger than you are.
It could be amazing. His shop might be a mess, but that website people are like, this guy knows what he’s doing. So it’s all about the image. More importantly, become an authority and have trustworthiness on the site because that’s how you’ll get people to buy from you. So you have to think in those terms on the internet; I’m good at what I do.
I’ve got a great building yet. My website looks like crap. That could be the first impression somebody gets. Okay. I’m never going to use Joe Schal plumber. That site looks like garbage. His work will probably be the same. Why can’t you update a website and fill it up with meta tags, meta descriptors, meta descriptions, and meta keywords?
Why can’t you take a site and load it up with the meta tags, the meta keywords, and the description? And that’s it. Why do you have to keep adding content? Okay. Uh, another great question. Back in the old days, before cell phones were out there, I remember those times; you guys probably don’t remember those.
Oh, I do. I do. Mm. Yeah, you do, right? Oh yeah. So, back in the old days on search, you could stuff all the keywords in there. Put like 50 words on a page. Yeah. Put every product in service, and you might have the potential to be ranked. Oh, that’s nice. Nowadays. Google has so many signals to look at a site and score it.
They want quality. They want the site to be, uh, authoritativeness. They want to make sure you’re an expert. And so how they’re going to make sure you’re an expert is by the quality of content that you put out. Is it useful? Can somebody consume that and really get an answer? I’m going to tell you something new that’s out there that maybe you might have heard these little trick buzzwords, but user intent, micro-moments, Google answer box.
Have you heard of that stuff? Continue, Gary. Break it down. Okay, great. So, let’s look at this. If I’m looking for a plumber, I want information quickly. User intent is a person to find a problem and look for a product, like how to fix a leaky faucet. How do I fix that leaky faucet? I want to find a plumber to fix my leaky faucet.
So, the intent. For me, going on the search engine is to answer one of those questions; a micro-moment without getting too complicated is when the person is either on their phone or has a specific problem to solve; they will find that content because it’s really good. So Google AnswerBox, I don’t know if anybody has seen this, but if you go about how to fix the leaky faucet, you’re going to get videos up there of people doing it.
And I saw it the other day. I just wanted to figure out what’s this Google AnswerBox zero. Well, guess what? There’s a position higher than number one. It’s called position zero. It’s one of the most coveted positions to get. It’s because traffic goes off the hook. So if any of your viewers or yourself type in what is E-A-T, which is one of Google’s acronyms, we’re number one for that search.
And it’s huge. The traffic we’re getting on that is huge. And people are like, wow, these guys know about expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and they’re calling us up. And I said, how do we get that from Google? That’s a big scoring factor. So you have to think and plan out what you’re doing.
And, uh, that’s kind of the logic behind it. Why can’t you, Gary, uh, you know, submit your website to many search engines? You know, back in the day, you could submit your website to thousands of search engines and be top that way. Why can’t you do that now? Yeah. Google has created many scoring values now around two TA, uh, thousand 10.
Uh, if you think of this, if you get a link from Google, that’s like the best link you could have, and let’s call that a plus ten link. And then, if you get a link from a farm site selling Viagra or a **** site, that’s a negative ten you’d end up with. Yeah, you’d end up with zero results. Most of those sites that used to provide length they’re all spam.
They’ve got bad ratings, so you’d have to clean up that. That’s not the way to do it. And again, there’s no quick fix as an entrepreneur or a business owner; it’s blood, sweat, and tears. You know, you’re just not going to put a business up and make a million dollars. You have to work hard and relentlessly to make it happen.
Same thing. Why wouldn’t you do that on the internet? I mean, that’s the number one marketing tool. That’s the number one marketing, uh, uh, money maker for businesses. You have to think hard about that and make a decision. You know what? I put all this sweat, blood, sweat, and tears in. I’m going to do the same with my website.
And wait, what happens after that? Now, let’s say that I’m out there. Let’s say I’m in the medical space, or maybe I’ll give you two examples. Let’s say I’m in the medical space, or I’m in the chicken coop space, and I make nice chicken coops. Why, in a perfect world, should I, as the maker of the chicken coops, write my content in an ideal world?
And why should I, in the medical space, in a perfect world, write my content? Why would that be just awesome? If someone would do that? Okay. And you know what? Who knows your business or product better than you? Not too many people. Okay. I use the specific wood. I take my time. I don’t screw things in.
I use wooden dowels; it’s all handcrafted craftsmanship, and you’re proud of it. You want to put the pictures up there, maybe you put a video and even do one of those time-lapse recordings of how much energy and effort is put into that. So that’s the chicken coop guy, right? You want to write that content because you have to think you, you know, the product better than anybody.
You’re trying to sell that product. Talk about how excellent the quality is, and the more content you put out there, that quality that people are looking for, the better you’re going to rank. But what, what, what, what percentage of clients will sit down if they make chicken coops or again if they say they’re in the medical industry and they do sell a medical product? What percentage of people will sit down?
And actually, write the content. I mean, what percentage of the time do people do that? Or what percentage of the time do they hire your firm to do it for them? I’d say about 90%. Don’t write the content. I don’t have the time to run my business. And if they’re a client, you know, down the road, they’re super busy.
We want them to focus on making money and running their business, so we’ll take the marketing aspect off their hands. Guess what? We know how to do it because you know what people tell me, Clay, you know, I write this content again. It’s that holy grail moment that I put out all this content, but nobody’s viewing it.
Well, the content has to be optimized too. Okay. So, how much do you charge per page of content for the, let’s say, a guy who reaches out to you? They are in the medical industry or the co-op industry. What do you charge per page? Um, now many companies will pump out content, and I’ve seen pricing from about 110 bucks to $200.
I’ll tell what that good Gary Grant content, that *** content. This is the optimized *** content that uses latent Symantec, indexing, and all the great stuff. The buzzwords of SEL are around. It depends on about 300 $300, but that content will rank and make money. You know, again, creating one page is not going to happen.
There are so many issues with the site, like site health; you must make it healthy. You have to fix the errors, just like the alt tags. You have to fix those. So Clay, if you picture this, to put it in straightforward terms. Yeah. Yeah. If you have a, if you have a puzzle, that’s a thousand pieces. Yeah. If you’re missing one.
The puzzle will never be put together. You must put all the pieces in content onsite: optimization, getting links, getting reviews, and creating compelling content. That’s when you start to put together a campaign that will work. So again, if I’m out there and going, okay, I am a dentist.
I’m swamped. I make hundreds of dollars an hour. I don’t have time to mess with this, but I want to make millions. Somebody out there, for as little as about $3,000 a month, could get your team helping him. Is that? Absolutely can. And we are highly successful, especially in the geo-targeted local stuff.
It’s a little bit easier. Because what we’ll do is we’ll ask a client, pick out your top three competitors, and what I’ll do is go in, analyze what they’re doing, and then we’ll beat them at every turn and make my client’s money. The most important thing is, okay, we’ll get your traffic. We’ll create your content.
But if I’m not making you money, I’m not going to be a good friend of yours. And the next time I come in for a root canal, you’re going to pull my teeth out. Okay. So, what does it require an entire team of highly skilled people to optimize a website, not just a dude with a laptop? Great. Just as you have a guy building the house, you’ll have an expert carpenter.
You’re going to have guys that do the plumbing. You’re going to have electricians. You’re going to have sheet rockers. Same thing. When it comes to SEO, you’ll have a guy who writes excellent quality, compelling content. You’ll have an analyst go out and look at all the sites you’re competing with.
Figure out what they’re doing, and research the keywords. Then, you will have an engineer go in and fix any health issues on your site. So it takes multiple people, super talented people. My team has been with me for at least 5 to 25 years. I keep people. I treat them well, but they put out great work, and we get results.
Everybody’s vested in our clients. Gary, I’ve got a two-part question here for you. Here we go. The first one is to go ahead. I’m out and listening to this podcast; I’m getting super excited. I’m getting fired up, fired up, baby fired up. Woo. And, I’m thinking, what’s the, what’s the number one thing that I could do to my website or, or that I could have my guys do, or that.
I could do to help me right now that you see overall as a general rule of thumb, what is something that I can put my hand around, wrap my head around, and do today to help mine.
Okay. I would look at it. And sometimes, this is hard for business owners to do. They look at the website. Man, that website looks good, but nobody’s converting on it. They don’t, you know, people don’t like it. So what I do is I try to pull myself out as the owner and look at somebody viewing my website.
So the first thing you do is a couple of simple tasks. You can get an account with, uh, called Maz Oz and put your information in there and see what’s happening. They’ll give you all kinds of data on what your site’s doing. Uh, or if there’s another one called S E M rush, it goes, it’s a little bit more complex. Maybe it’s not for everybody, but if you were to ask me, what’s the couple things to do, create a well-crafted title tag, not a homepage, but like Joe’s plumbing, service, expert, plumbers, and en that would be a good one.
Um, if you want the brand, of course, you’d put it in brand terms. Um, so create a great title tag, create a; if you were to make your website, think of it as like a word. You want to put in H one tags that are like headline tags. That’s the most crucial on-page code you could do, but you could do it like in WordPress: copy the first line of text and make it an H1 tag.
That’s one of the most important words. Make sure you have your keywords in there and that it reads well. So those are some things you could do and get some reviews. Perfect. That’s pretty simple stuff to do. Yeah. Yeah. It’s pretty, pretty simple stuff to do. Now, the second question I had for you, I’ve heard some rumors, and I know they’re just rumors, and now that you’re really, you’re really on the, oh, you’re on the inside.
You’re in the inner circle of the Illuminati. He notices he’s the circle, the Google he’s the circle he made the circle. I heard a rumor that there is some talk about the government breaking up a couple of big monopolies, including Google. Um, have you heard anything about that? And if you have, can you tell us anything about that?
Or is that just a, a, cause I saw an interview with actually with, uh, president Trump the other day? And on there, he was asked that question, and he talked about the possibility of breaking up, uh, Facebook, um, Google. And there was another big one out there, too. What was it anyway that they were monopolies and that he was given some serious thought to that?
Have you heard anything? Uh, yeah, I’ve had there’s, there’s, uh, a lot of discussions around that. Um, you have to figure Google, you know, I don’t know, back in the days I remember as a kid, um, that we had telephone companies, you know, there’s no cell phones. They were considered a Mo monopoly, and they were broken up into smaller divisions to give everybody, uh, a competing chance.
It seems that everybody’s forgotten about that regarding the internet. Um, I know there’s like big box stores, like, uh, best buy. And then there was Circuit City who went out of business, you know, the bigger giants consume everything and the market share, and they take over, get rid Gary, Gary, Gary real quick.
Do you know anybody from Circuit City? Um, I used to work there when I was a young guy. Uh, do you like Circuit City? Uh, no, it’s closed, but can I be on? Can I be honest? Everybody. Go ahead. Circuit City sucked out business. Suck city. I mean, it was a rough rabbit trail, and I’m just, no, I’m just saying this though because Google is so good and like being.
Bing sucks. I mean, Yale. I mean, if you go like circuit city, Yahoo search, Yahoo sucks. I don’t want to look at the news. I didn’t want to go to the news.com or Fox news.com or see; I just wanted to search, man. I don’t want to know the weather and updates and all this mindless distraction back to you, Gary. Sure. You know what?
It’s funny. Uh, Google started as just like a research kind of engine. Yeah. And I found their patent with their algorithm, and I was like, okay. I had like a Ph.D. guy come over, and we sat down, we picked it apart, and we’re like, okay, it’s about the quality of content. Still, it’s about incoming links, and think of it as you’re going up for an election, which we just had the midterms; the more votes you get or inbound links, the higher you will be in the results.
So that’s a big one right there. Um, but yeah, you’re correct. Google owns about 90 percent of the search. I don’t think the older, older generation between about, uh, what is it about 30, 40 to 65 years old used Bing because guess what, it’s installed on all the Windows operating systems as the.
Right. And I, a hundred percent, I, I, Microsoft is so fun. I went to the mall the other day in Oklahoma City. Cause my kids had a cheer competition. They performed for three minutes. You wait in a holding tank for six minutes as people yell at you and encourage you to put your hands in the air. It’s cheer.
It’s unbelievable. Seriously, I never felt more uncomfortable as an ***** than going to a cheer event. I cannot, and I feel like I’m part of like a big AA meeting. They’re like, and it’s just, it’s like, they want this, you have to participate as a group. They will not let you know how many people are in section four.
And everyone’s like, woo. Section four B. And they’re like, they’re looking at your stand up and cheer, and I’m not going to stand up and cheer. I’m not going to do that. I am not going to; they’re like everybody cheers. And I’m like, I’m not doing that. Refuse. I have never done that in college and never done it in high school, not doing it now.
I freaking hate this place. Get me out of here. So I go to the mall, I go to the mall, there’s the Microsoft store. One Microsoft employee is working there, and he’s trying to escape to go to the Apple store. Yeah. And then, next door, the Apple store has got a line around the door. I mean, Microsoft is so funny in that they are always likely to require their products to be installed on things.
And we work so hard to uninstall them, but Bill Gates continues to win. He’s the ultimate sales he does. He forces us to buy his things. Gary, I want to ask you this. If everybody out there who’s struggling with grasping this idea. They were just pitched this idea at some networking event by some internet charlatan yesterday.
Why can’t I buy a bunch of backlinks to become top in Google? That is probably one of the worst things you could do. I can’t tell you how many people come to us; we call it a toxic profile. Oof. It’s pretty ugly. Uh, we had one, uh, site. They do eyeglasses. I’m not going to name the exact site. Yeah.
Ooh, but. Yeah, they had great rankings. Let’s get better. Let’s get greedy. Let’s go by, take the easy road, the quick fix of today: they bought all these links, and their traffic went from about 50,000 to 15,000. So what we did, that’s what I said, man. There’s so much traffic for these guys.
Let me look at the backlinks. And I was horrified. I mean, it was like Viagra sites, *******, any awful site. You could see the connection. I mean, you want to see, well, uh, so you look for Viagra now you can see, well, you’re looking for Viagra for four hours. See a better few hours. We have to move on this.
This metaphor quickly falls apart. Sorry. Sorry. So anyway, we took that. We detoxified the site for three months. They had thousands. So, seven months later, they had 345,000 visitors a month.
But, they no longer sold any Viagra. Right? So that’s, that’s a downside. They were a Viagra sales company. They were Garry. There’s somebody out there who says, but Garry, the search engine techniques you’re teaching me at SEO, Inc. You know, the search engine techniques I’m learning. I look at some big brands like Nike or Tesla that are flash-based.
They have images everywhere. They don’t seem like they’re having like a thousand, you know, words per page or 500 words a page. And they’re not following any of the canonical rules and don’t have optimized title tags. Gary, can you enlighten the listeners out there as to why a big company like Nike that’s spinning billions of dollars on advertising might not care a whole lot about following search engine compliance rules?
Sure. Uh, Things are changing. Some of the big companies have done this. I remember a BMW company. They got removed from Google’s index because they were buying links and all kinds of stuff. Oh, so immediately. Yeah. So, as soon as they stopped doing that and removed those, they returned in the search results like nothing happened.
But when you go and talk about the big brands, I’ll never forget Eric Schmidt. He was the, uh, former CEO of Google. He said we have to put more emphasis on the big brands and rank them higher just because they’re a brand. So they’re doing that. And you know, Google says they never manipulate the search values.
Uh, well, they do with big brands, put them at the top like Walmart, um, JC Penney’s, well, JC Penney had an issue, but the big box, big brand stores are going to secure those top rankings. Plus, they have a lot of links and a lot of people linking to them, and they have a lot of money to spend on marketing.
Gary, if I’m listening right now and I’m hyper-motivated, why can I not get to the top of Google’s search engine results within a month by doing nothing? It’s it? Same thing. If you have a business and do no advertising, especially if you’re out in the middle of nowhere, because the internet is the vast abyss, it’s the black hole.
You have to advertise, and you have to do something. And again, if you do nothing, nothing will happen, Gary; I paid you, though. And I don’t want to get reviews. Why can’t I pay you and not do anything on my part? You know, why can’t I write you a check and then not, you know, cause I wanna, I don’t want to get reviews.
Please do all the work. Why do I have actually to get reviews? In addition to you helping me. Yeah, we have, uh, we have worked that out with a lot of clients. They said I don’t have time to do this so that we can create an email drip campaign. Hey RAs, have you ever bought something from Amazon?
And then you go, Hey, please rate the service Amazon’s doing that, not the client. So, um, we do all things like that. We try to encourage business owners to look at their business, but if there’s something you could do to help it like reviews are simple. Just do it. I mean, it’s better if they do it than if we ask for it because we’re an outside company.
Sometimes, you have to roll up your sleeves and make it happen. Gary, why do I have to have an optimized HTML site map and an XML site map on my website? What the heck is that? Uh, sorry. I was reading the warning label here on some narcotics you were looking at the barcode. Yeah. What is this barcode?
Okay, so they’re two different things, right? The XL site map lists every page on your website that you don’t see. It’s fed directly to the search engines, and they **** it. Do you know why? Because time is money. Imagine the computing power it takes to search the internet, sort it out, and then show those results.
So Google wants a quick fix. They go to your site and find the XML site map index, the entire area; then they’re gone. Right. So that’s great. And HTML site math is kind of like the index of a.
Hey, I want to go to chapter four right away. Flip it over there. Boom. So if you’re looking for, yeah. So, if you’re looking for something specific on a website, you can go to this HTML site map, and it’s kind of like that index.
Okay. I want to go here, click it, and you’re there. It also helps search engines crawl the site better or go through it to pull your information. Let’s say that I’m listing right now. And I say, okay, Dr. Robert Z and this guy, Dr. Z, I will look your website up quickly here. Okay. Let’s just, I’m going to look up, uh, Tulsa.
Men’s haircuts. I’ll put up on the big screen here, Gary, which I know doesn’t help you at all, but it helps me to show Dr. Z. I’m doing something, not playing solitaire over here—so the elephant in the room today. Uh, if you look up our rank, we come up number one and two in Tulsa for, uh, the phrase Tulsa men’s haircuts with, uh, 665 reviews, 6 21 for our start number two.
And then we’ve got our website down here, slightly underneath Yelp. Now, if you type in, uh, Tulsa, optometrists, optometrist, we type that in here, and Dr. Z comes up number one overall, with 451 reviews today. Let’s say that Dr. Z is looking at his arch-rival right here. His arch-rival and Z have more reviews than the other guy, right?
Yes. But the other guy has more, uh, high or high-quality content than Dr. Z. Why does the guy, and we’re talking about the organic results underneath the map? Why does the guy that’s not that, uh, like, the 20 best? That’s a that’s a different company. Let’s go here. So you’re right here.
Yeah. Let’s go down here. Let’s look at this guy here. So let’s say this guy; I will mention his name on the air. I’m beating, but you’re here, here. You’re number three, and this guy’s number four. Okay. So, let’s say that the number four guy wants to beat Dr. Z in this case. How does the site with the most high-quality content win?
With less high-quality content. If, all things being, can E equal, why does the site with the most high-quality content typically win? Okay, because it’s going to show that you’ve got consumable stuff for, uh, searchers to look for, but more importantly, it follows that guideline of Google, the E A T principle expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Now, Gary, uh, I have a question about the content. Let’s say that I get highly motivated one month, and I get crazy. And I doubled the amount of content that my competitor had, and I put it up, and it never touched it again. Yes. One feels it once I, I put, I put it up there. Bam. My, my, it’s a two-part question.
Number one. Why my immediately not coming up over them, uh, at my competitor in, in rising in the organic search results. And number two, why do I have to continue to contribute the content over time? Sure, those are great questions I have that ask, uh, almost daily for clients. They go, you know, why do I have to write all this content?
And I’m going to write in 5,000 pages, and, uh, I should get ranked. And I said it doesn’t work that way. First, every time you write a page, it takes a while to get indexed and sorted through; there are all these variables. Or I call them scoring signals; Google calls them scoring signals.
Part two of that question is number one: why can’t I throw it up all at once in what? What I’m hearing you say is that if you put up 5,000 pages in one month, Google does not immediately validate that as being like high-quality content, you know, throw it up. It can’t, and can’t possibly be, you know, great, great articles; then the next part of the question was why I have to consistently keep doing it over time and not just like one month, and then I’m done.
So negative. The second part is. Fresh content, new content. So if you put out an article in 2002 on teeth cleaning, don’t you think there are new products like Zoom, or maybe you could touch it up with the crest, uh, strips? Okay. So everything is changing. Nothing stays the same. I’m going to give you the perfect example.
Hey, why do I have to wash my hair every day? Well, it’s going to get greasy and dirty. So, I always consider changing content or updating your site, especially on the internet, when new competitors come in daily. There are new technologies. Google does updates sometimes daily or several times a day.
So you have to keep up with the trend. Another thing is, Hey, I have a mullet. I just got my cut a mullet. Why do I ever have to change that? Well, you have to look pretty freaky today. If you had a mullet going on ***, you have to keep up with the, yeah. Woo. I have a hello. Gary. Now I want to ask you this. Why does everybody have to have at least 350 words of content per page on their website, minimum, minimum, minimum, minimum, minimum they have, uh? Google has a value in scoring S about the content.
It should be within a certain amount of characters. We look at it now from at least 700 to a thousand words on that page; that is the good news. Yeah, it stopped those. It contains those people putting out one paragraph, creating, you know, all these pages. So you have to put some time and effort into that content.
Okay. Now, Garry, the final question I have for you before we wrap up. I know Dr. Z has a last question for you as well. He likes to one-up me with better questions. This is the final question I have, though, for anybody out there that says, okay, I’m going through, I’m reading like searching engine for dummies, or I’ve read all these blogs.
And I know that I need to get my XML site map. My HTML site map. I know my site has to have a thousand words of content. I know it has to load quickly. I know there are all these things. Suppose I pay you three grand a month. Now, if I’m a dentist, if I’m an optometrist, if I’m a lawyer, if I’m a whatever, if I pay you $3,000 a month to optimize my local business, how long will it take for me to get to the top of Google and how much money can I make as a result of paying you.
That’s a great question. In each vertical, it’s different. So, if you’re a dentist, that’s one vertical. If you’re a window cleaner, that’s one vertical. Before I tell anybody or accept their business. I
look at the landscape because I’m not here to make or take money. I need my clients to make money because if I do, I have good friends and long-term business relationships, like with the carpet cleaning guy, uh, Jonathan; I **** him to death.
Yep. Oxy, we became great. Yeah. Oxy fresh. Um, we became great friends. I’m speaking. I’m going to be out in Denver in January to speak at their national con uh, convention. I take interest. This is my passion. I **** doing this. I **** seeing businesses that are struggling or doing okay. And slaying them. Now.
It’s hard to put that, uh, into. These are complex numbers because there’s not much information out there, but I will tell you that if you have position one on Google, the desktop search is about 32%, and mobile is about 23%. And then if you go down to position nine, It’s 1.3%. Whoa. I am so getting those. Yeah. So if you look at, okay, I’m at position nine today out of a hundred searches, I’m getting almost one and a half, but if I go to number one, I’m getting 32.
So that’s a big lift. It may not seem like a lot, but when you have different keywords, ranking, and nipping away, taking 30% here, taking 20% here, taking 20% there, it adds up to a lot of revenue. So if somebody were to call me, I would sit on the phone with them and explain, okay, what are you looking to do?
What do you need to accomplish? What are your goals? And then I would put it into perspective, and I. You know, based on this data, and we could forecast here, um, based on this data, your revenue is X from the website going up 9% because that’s what we see from the average. The shallow conservative end is a lift of 9%.
I have clients that are over 2000% Oxy, fresh being one of those, your company for as little as $3,000, which is like, uh, see if you hired someone, you’re paying them right now, let’s say 13 an hour after taxes, 14 an hour. I mean, you’re getting close to that $ 3,000-a-month range. Right? You could get to the top of Google.
You’re saying for as little as about 3000 in as much as for a vast brand listing; we have somebody out there listed as a huge company. It’s not unusual for a considerable company to spend, north of what, $30,000 a month. I mean to dominate the nation. Yeah, you could. Yeah. We have some national companies that are paying five to 10, but you know, depending again on how competitive the market space is, it could be better.
So good. Chuck, you have a final question for Garry here to one-up both myself and Dr. Z. Yeah, I was going to ask Gary, does it matter how long people stay on your website? Is that a factor that Google looks at? Hmm. . Mm. Mm. Let me think about that one. Absolutely. Yes. Um, because if a user is on there, guess what?
You’re probably using Google Analytics, and they know everything about you. So when they see these numbers, like, oh, the guy’s been on the page five minutes, it must be important. They’re finding what they’re looking for and reading it. However, if the guy’s been on the site for five seconds, the bounce rate, which means somebody goes to the site and leaves immediately, is high.
You’re not offering quality content, or it’s not a quality web website. You’re not going to rank. So yes, that is critical. Get your site looking good. Make the content great. Watch those numbers. How long are they staying on the site? If it’s not long, then why are they leaving? Let me think about revising the content or calling up Gary and see what the heck’s going on.
There you go. Marshall Marshall, Marshall. You have the final question, Mr. Garry. The last question, uh, Garry, is we’re optimizing our different websites, and content is king links. Why do we have to make this part of our daily habits? Why is it something that we commit to doing? If I’m a business owner, I’m just starting to get going on my sites.
Why is this an ongoing, habitual thing that I need to do? And not just like a passing thought for me as a business owner. Yeah, it shouldn’t be, you know, and, uh, I feel for all business owners, you know, I get up at six, I spend two hours reading emails. I go home. I craft out time for my family, my four gremlin dogs, my kids, and clean the house and all that stuff.
Then I’m back working on my business. So, as an entrepreneur, you should block out an hour of your time. Here’s why Google is updating almost every day. If not several times a day and little competitors, the ankle-biting competitors, or the big competitors, they’re doing the same thing. You have to put in that time and effort to make it happen.
So it’s not just a fleeting moment. Just dedicate that time management, put that block of an hour out there, or however much time you have, because you will be rewarded for the hard work. Garry, I appreciate you being on the show for more than you possibly know. I know you’re the CEO of SEO, Inc. You guys work with big-time brands worldwide, including SC Johnson, sandals resorts, obviously 20th century Fox Oxy, fresh carpet, cleaning wedding wire, and huge companies.
And it means the world to me that you would take time in your schedule to be here on this show. And we’d like to end the show with a boom, every show we in with a bang, which is Chuck. Uh, we, it stands for big overwhelming optimistic moment unstoppable. And so Chuck, are you ready to bring a boom?
I will yell boom, Marshall, as I count down to the 3 21. Are you ready to end with the crash? I’m ready, Dr. Z. Are you prepared for the boom? The big boom. I’ve got a boom. , just waiting for me, Gary, are you in California right now? Or where will you be bringing the boom from? I will be getting it from Carlsbad, California.
I’m bringing it. Okay, here we go. Guys. 3, 2, 1 boom nation.
Now that you know how search engines. What are you going to do about it? This is your year to thrive. This is your year to schedule time in your calendar every week, block it off, and put it in your calendar. Block off time to optimize your website or hire somebody to help you. But you cannot afford not to be on the first page of Google search engine results.
