SEO & Your Website: What You Need To Know

SEO & Your Website: What You Need To Know

Tim Fitzpatrick
If you want your business to be found online, SEO has got to be part of your plan and one of the best places to start with SEO is your website. I've got a special guest with me today who is going to share what we need to know about SEO and our websites. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have with me Joey Donovan guyto from Cuppa SEO Webdesign, and he's also the author of A Holistic Guide to Online Marketing. Joey, welcome, and thanks for taking the time to be here with me.

Joey Donovan Guido
Hey, Tim, thanks very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Absolutely. I'm excited to dig into this. I know SEO is always a hot topic for a lot of people. And it can definitely feel like some of the stuff happening with SEO is a bit of black magic. So we'll try and dispel that a little bit today. But before we do that, I want to ask you some rapid-fire questions. Help us get to know you a little bit better. You ready to jump in with both feet on this?

Joey Donovan Guido
I'm ready.

Tim Fitzpatrick
OK, so when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Joey Donovan Guido
Well, I like to spend my time. I've got two teenage boys, so we spend a lot of time together walking, playing video games or with my wife. But when I'm doing kind of stuff on my own, I love using vintage pencils and notebooks. There are these notebooks called Field Notes, show you one, super geeky, super addictive. I've got like three hundred of these notebooks.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And so what do you just, do you journal with them or what do you do?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, there live. I've got one for business stuff and one where I'll dump anything from spiritual work to day in, day out stuff, journaling. What's on my mind, really just mind dumps. It's kind of like.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I had no idea that there was such a thing as vintage pencil. So I'm learning new things every day. What's your hidden talent?

Joey Donovan Guido
My hidden talent. I would probably say is understanding and kindness, and I say it's kind of hidden because I'm a native New Yorker and as you can tell, I've kind of had a harsher kind of voice. So when people get to know me, they're often kind of surprised. Well, you know, this guy really has a kind of an understanding point of view.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, OK, well, let's go. So you're breaking from the stereotype?

Joey Donovan Guido
I think so, yeah. The stereotype isn't necessarily true for most New Yorkers, of course, but for some it is.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What about advice? What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Joey Donovan Guido
You know, I would say I'm going to keep this one to business because it's what's come up for me when you ask the question. And that is something that a gentleman named Dieter Rams said that Dieter Rams was the the basically the art director of Braun, the people who make raiser's stuff like that for like 40 years. And one of his mottos is less but better. Less but better. And man, that can transcend into your life, into your website, into your marketing campaigns. I think you mentioned it earlier. Let's keep it simple, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes, yeah. Yeah. That's a fantastic piece of advice. Less but better. What's one thing about you that surprises people?

Joey Donovan Guido
One thing that surprises people is probably one thing, it's kind of goofy, I used to play baseball with Ace Frehley when I was a kid, Ace Frehley from KISS. My dad was in a band called The Brats in the 70s, and they were super popular in New York. So I used to get to hang out with Ace Frehley, got to meet the drummer from Blondie and all kinds of famous people.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Very cool. Now, did you have like did you have a mullet back then or no?

Joey Donovan Guido
Well, no, but I kind of had like Joey Ramone hair, you know, which I wish I still had.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Oh, yeah. We can only do so much to control that, right?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, I let it go. I let it go.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What does success mean to you?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah. So success, success is very interesting because to me overall in life, success is being able to be in consciousness more often. And when I say that some people use the word mindfulness or being awake, but that kind of is the crux of it. And if I can be in that space. Where I'm in that more meditative space, everything else works much better, whether it's business, whether it's client work, relationships. So that's kind of the crux of success. And then kind of secondary to that is, of course. Helping enough people, so that they're supporting their families, they're helping their customers and clients, and kind of the residual of that is that I get to support my family.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. What about your happy place? Where is it?

Joey Donovan Guido
My happy place is, well, my office, which is four hundred and fifty square feet of bliss. It's like my little Buddhist temple. And one of the things that's so great about it is it just really puts me in a place where I can be like we talked about a minute ago, be more meditative, more mindful, more in consciousness. So I could just be more useful and helpful throughout my day.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What qualities do you value in the people that you spend time with?

Joey Donovan Guido
I would say the top quality I value is honesty, you know, and also the drive to be better. Not just to sit back and say, "OK, you know, like I'm doing pretty good in school, I'm doing pretty good, my business or my marriage." For me, it's always about what can we look at that of is a little weak that we can strengthen.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Awesome. So tell us a little bit more about what you're doing with Cuppa SEO, your book, types of clients you're working with and helping.

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, so it's been an interesting journey. Cuppa SEO started in 2013, which is just been a blast for eight years. And we started off as an SEO firm that, funnily enough, trained people how to do SEO. And quickly on people started saying, "Hey, Joey, we understand what you're teaching us, but we just want you to do it. This is way too much work." And a couple of months after that, my first client, Nancy, said, "Look, you know, I need the SEO but I need a new website. Can you do that as well?" And I had a buddy who built my Cuppa SEO dot com website, Jared, and he became my first contractor. So now, eightish years later, we've got ten people on the team. We've got SEO people that I've trained. We've got three developers, photographers, artists. It's just amazing. And kind of a the book evolved organically out of people coming to me over and over saying things like, "I need help with my SEO, I need help with my social media." And my first thought is let's take a step back and look at everything you're doing as a whole. You know, why do you need help with social media? Well, do you have a blog? No. Well, they have fresh content to share. No. Well, what are you going to share on social? We're going to share some cool things we find elsewhere. It's like, no, then you're a mailman. Right? We want to deliver your content, your expertize to the people who are listening. More recently, after the book was written, I started doing speaking and consulting, and training as well.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. I love it. I think you and I share a lot of the same thoughts of on marketing and definitely taking a holistic approach and looking at all the pieces as they fit together is really, really important. You just you can't do if you do a marketing piece by piece, it's just not, doesn't end up working very well. So awesome. Well, I look forward to learning from you as we dig into some of this SEO stuff today.

How SEO Help Businesses Grow

Tim Fitzpatrick

I think the easiest place for us to start as we talk about SEO is first let's make sure we're on the same page. What is it and how does it actually help businesses grow?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, that's a wonderful question. And we could talk for five hours about it, but I won't do that to anybody. So the way I like to describe it is SEO is a methodology that gets you found on Google. That's like the generalized anybody can understand terminology, and that's kind of how we market it, it's you get found on Google, right? But what does that mean? How does it work? So kind of behind what some people will call a curtain, but I don't like that idea, I like when people understand what's going on in the background. SEO essentially is a methodology you implement into your website. There are six major areas that you want to optimize on your site and when they're done correctly, they help people find you, so when they do a query, like in my case, SEO Madison, WI, right? We have a lot of localized statewide tri statewide work. Those search terms that people actually searching for are naturally on my website and six key areas. And so when Google goes to crawl and say, "Let me give this query a good result", I come up typically toward the top, if not at the top of page one. And then, of course, people will see me and click on my website and visit.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I think what a lot of people don't think about with SEO is all Google wants to do is provide the user a solid experience. They are serving the sites on page one that they believe are most relevant and going to be most helpful for the user based on that search query. Right?

Joey Donovan Guido
They are typically. There are people who I see play the system and sometimes they will wind up on page one for a week, sometimes for six months. Eventually they start to disappear. But really, when you're doing the SEO, whether you're doing it yourself or hiring a firm to do it, you want to do what's called white hat SEO. You don't want to play any games because it will eventually come back to bite you.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, yeah. I think that is a really, really important thing. Frankly, if that's the only thing somebody pulls out from this conversation, it's well worth the time because Google I mean, you see this much more than I do, but they've gotten so sophisticated from where they initially started. You might trick them for a short period of time, but they're going to figure it out. So, it's just not worth it.

Joey Donovan Guido
It's not worth it, and the nice thing is there are legitimate ways and we've been practicing them for years, tested, proven ways that don't, quote unquote, "go out of style." You know, it's interesting because in one way, people are always saying SEO is always changing, and in a way it is. But what I found is the way we've always done SEO. And again, this is through trial and error testing things typically on my own website to see if they work or not, things that tend to work that are in the vein of a better user experience. Google doesn't start to say, "No, we don't want that anymore." Right? They might change the rules a little bit. They might add some more contingencies, so to speak, that they want you to follow, like however many years ago, like mobile get right. You have to be mobile-friendly. Well, we were building websites that were mobile-friendly before that because that just made sense. Right? So it's almost like Google was kind of trailing us a little bit. Not that we know everything, but it's just about really putting the user experience front and center.

The 6 Sustainable Steps to Implement SEO on Your Website

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So let's that's a good segway into some of these tips. What are the top sustainable ways that we can implement SEO into our website? You had mentioned six elements, right? Let's jump through those.

Joey Donovan Guido
Let's do that. And then what's really great about these elements is that you do it once, you do it right and you leave it alone. So if you come across an expert or web design firm, you know, there are certain instances where, like retainer business, where you're paying someone to do work for you on a monthly basis, make complete sense and they're totally valid. For instance, if they're writing a blog post for you, if they're working on what's called a cornerstone content for your website. Updating your site when you've got a new product or getting rid of a product, things like that, totally legit. But if somebody says to you, "Hey, Tim, you know, what we're going to do is we're going to freshen up your content on your homepage and your sub-pages on a monthly basis. We're going to change your keywords." That's an indication, would you want to say, "Hey, thanks very much." Wave goodbye, turn around, and run? And I will address this more with you later. But I want to stick to your question right now. The top sustainable ways to optimize the website. OK, this is on the book, by the way, in more detail. First thing is to first you want to make a really good, solid keyword report before you do anything. So that's what we do for our clients. But if you don't have the capacity to do that, what I suggest is doing what I call common sense SEO. Talk to your team members, talk to your clients, and you can even just do some general research. Type in some keywords, see what comes up. If your competitors are coming up or if people who do what you do, maybe then that your competitors, maybe they're in a different state and you're a local business, just kind of start to make a laundry list of all these keywords. Right. Starting with anything is better than just kind of guessing.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So keywords that are a list of keywords that are relevant for your particular business?

Joey Donovan Guido
Right, were relevant to your business and your niche and really, you know, if you have a product or services-based business, you want those keywords to lead people to services or product-based results. And what I mean by that is that if you put in a result, like if you search for something like blogging. Right? We blog for clients. But blogging is not a good keyword because if you search that, what comes up in search results is how to blog videos and blog posts about how to blog.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. So that's a really good point. When you're looking at your keywords, look at what's showing up in search results. If it's more informational. Right? And you're trying to use those keywords to drive people to a product or service page, that's probably not the keyword. Is that right?

Joey Donovan Guido
Correct. Correct. If you're seeing that that kind of informational Wikipedia video blog centric type of results. That's OK. If it has high traffic and lower volume, I mean, sorry, lower, lower traffic, blah, blah, blah. I'm talking backward here, let me start over. If it has higher traffic or some kind of teeth as far as traffic, how many people search for it and lower competition, it might be a good keyword to use on your blog.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Go it.

Joey Donovan Guido
Or on your podcast or on your video series that you're going to transcribe. And I apologize. I'm kind of going on tangents before I answer the question you asked me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
No, that's OK. So we got keywords?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yip. You want to get those keywords in place and once we have them in place, the first thing we want to optimize on every webpage, on every blog post is going to be your title tag. And that sits right at the top of your page and a little gray bar. Most people don't even notice it, but Google does. Optimize that title tag. And a good tip for that is keep it to 70 characters or less and lead with your most powerful keyword phrase for that page.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
OK, the next thing you want to do is you're going to want to optimize all of your headlines. OK, so your top headline, which is what we call your H1 headline, as well as secondary headlines like your H2 or H3 and so on. Those are two areas there, your top one headline and your secondary headlines.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you recommend only one H1 header per page?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yes, that is an excellent question. More than one H1 is actually bad for SEO.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I know there's varying schools of thought on that. I have always leaned towards just one H1 header per page.

Joey Donovan Guido
I've found through testing and also through research. One is the one, one is what you want to shoot for. More than one is like saying, "Hey Tim, look at that." And then the user doesn't know what to look at, potentially, if they're close together. But Google is seeing those in the same level of hierarchy top importance and then Google is going to scratch their head and said, "Well, what's what am I supposed to look at here?" And I can ding attending your SEO.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. So we've got title tags, we have headlines or header tags.

Joey Donovan Guido
We got headlines. And then probably what I always find is the lowest hanging fruit that most SEO and Web design firms don't do is to optimize your image and your alt image names.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
Every single image logos. If you've got Facebook logos there. Your a company logo. Every image, even your people on the about page can be optimized. Every single alt image name can be optimized. We just did a photographer. He must have had three hundred images on his website.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And none more optimized.

Joey Donovan Guido
Well they are now, but they weren't before. Yeah. And I said to him, "If all we did was optimize your images, you would be way ahead of your competition."

Tim Fitzpatrick
So with images, it's the file name and the alt text. And do you so you're trying. One, they need to be descriptive of what it is, right? But are you trying to put the same keyword in the image name and the alt text or like do you have an example of how you might do that?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, absolutely. So so yes, you're to your point, you want it to be somewhat descriptive. And if that amount of descriptiveness is going to also depend on what niche of business you're in, you know, we do a lot of work with, like mental health, the health care industry, and those have to follow certain standards where you'll have more image descriptors or product descriptors in the image name. That might not necessarily be a good keyword.

Tim Fitzpatrick
OK.

Joey Donovan Guido
But we have to follow protocol so nobody gets in trouble. Right? So really, like, let's take my business as an example Cuppa SEO web design. Something like let's say it's my little coffee cup logo. It might say something like Cuppa SEO Web design Madison WI. So what it's got in there, it's got the brand name, which in my case has keywords in it, and also what's really important, especially if you a regionalized business, whether you're in a city, a county, a state, or want to hit a tri state area, really integrating the localization - Madison, WI, New York, New York, Chicago, Illinois - integrating that into your keyword research and also into your optimization process.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So would you use that same image title as the alt text or do you, Is that different?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, well, what we'll typically do is we want that image name if someone sees it, which most people don't, but if they did see it and were to read it, it would kind of make sense like an incomplete sentence. Right? So your image name every single word is separated by a dash. Not an underscore. Not a space that puts gobbledygook in the code and hurts the SEO. Dash nice and clean. So your image names got that, you know, Coupa Dash SEO Dash, Madison Dash blah blah blah. Your alt image name. We take that same image name and we just take the dashes out and we put spaces. So and what happens is the reason why and alt image name was originally put in there. And I'm sure, you know, this was for usability. So if somebody had some kind of a handicap, let's say they had vision issues in their computer, when they hover over an image, it speaks what the image, alt image name is the alt text. So it's got to make sense. But the thing is, Google looks at it two for SEO value.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, yeah, people don't realize that your images may show up in the search results when we search, right? You've got the search results, but then you also have images. And if you click on that, right? So it shows up all there. So we've got title tags, header tags, image name, and alt text. What's next?

Joey Donovan Guido
What's next is your on page copy or content. And this is something that's interesting because we don't want to stuff it with keywords. We want to look at the content that we're writing or that's already written if it's an existing website and just look at our keywords from our keyword report. And of course, we're going to have a plan in place. These are the best keywords we want to use. When we create them, we create them in a good, better, best format so everybody knows what to use. And if you've got ten products, we've got it broken out by product category. So if you're selling let's say it's toiletries and you've got toothbrushes, toothpaste, you might also have maybe some women's and men's care, skincare. It's all broken out so you know for which page, here's what I want to use. But in the content, you want to just read it and think about, if you might say something like this skincare product will help moisturize. Right? And this is kind of a silly example, but what if it's an organic skincare product? We want to say that what if it's, you know, no GMO kind of thing? I know that's more like when it comes to food, but you get the idea if we found that something that's a little bit of a longer phrase like organic, no artificial ingredients, if they are part of something people are searching for. Then we want to include that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
OK. Any idea, like how much is there a minimum amount of copy that we want per page?

Joey Donovan Guido
Not necessarily. It's really going to depend on a case-by-case basis. So if you've got a page that's got one paragraph of copy and no imagery, that page is going to be pretty light and you're probably going to be in trouble. Especially if all your pages are like that. So really, like, if you if it's a gallery page, right? You may not have any copy at all. You might have one sentence, but you've got twenty-four images on that page, plus your logo, plus a nice hero image at the top of the page. You're going to be OK, but let's say it's more of a content-driven page. The thing I always like to suggest to business owners and whoever's doing the writing is first and foremost write the content to your audience. What is it they need? What is it they're looking for? I've got three what I call magic questions. What does it do? What is it? What does it do? How does it help me? We really want to make the copy on the page customer-facing, benefit-driven, problem-solving. That's the number one goal. And that's kind of tailor it to how long it's going to be. That's going to dictate how long it's going to be.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
Some pages, like we worked for years with a client called Widen, they do software as a service. We would have cornerstone pages that were three thousand words and they needed to be. We work with a lot of local dental offices and their pages would be like five hundred. And that's what it needed to be. Those customers didn't want to sit there and trudge through three thousand words. You know, but once you've got your copy I would say like generally I'm looking for somewhere around five hundred words on a content-driven page that'll give you enough teeth along with your title tag, and your image namings your headlines that Google will say, "Oh, they're talking about SEO and Web design and user experience," "Oh, they're Madison, Wisconsin," right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. So what's next after on-page copy?

Joey Donovan Guido
So after on page copy, we've got something that's kind of not as popular as it used to be, but it's text links. So let's say at the bottom of your page, you say, "Contact us for more information." And the contact us part as a text link. That's totally fine. That'll bring people where they want to go. The user experience is clear, right? Contact us for help. But there's no SEO in that text links and text links have a little bit more SEO juice than the content on the page itself. So instead of just saying, Contact Us, it could be something as simple as contact Cuppa SEO web design in my case, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
In your case, it might say something like, you know, contact us about marketing, marketing consulting, or something like that, that is a good keyword for what you do, putting it right into that text link and that elevates it a bit.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So there we're looking to use those links. We want those to be descriptive?

Joey Donovan Guido
Right, we want to be descriptive, that's not to get crazy. It shouldn't be 10 words. There's always an exception, but usually, a 10-word text link is too much. But yeah, it's almost like when we went to school and we added an adjective to something, right? Some kind of a descriptor that makes something more clear. And in this case, it's really making it more clear to Google.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And is that, the example you just gave is an internal link, right? A link from one page on our website to another page on our website. Do we want to do that just for internal text links or external as well?

Joey Donovan Guido
So that's a great question. So so, yes, that is for an internal text link from whatever services or product page to our contact page or potentially a landing page, if it's some kind of a special offer, right? Now, when you say external text links, are you talking about text links going elsewhere?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. So a blog post is a perfect example. You may have an external resource that's on another site that you're linking to, right? I typically think about that as an external link.

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, yeah. Just wanted to clarify which way the link was going. I don't typically worry about that quite as much, only because if let's say we're partnering on something and I'm highlighting you on the blog the, number one goal first it's on a blog so we don't want it to be too salesy, it's a little bit different than a Web page as far as the salesyness of it, but I'll just make it clear where we're sending somebody.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
So, yeah. And it's, you could put it in there and it would help you with SEO as long as it was something that was within your wheelhouse or something you wanted to get found for. Kind of drilling down a little bit deeper to that actual blog post itself. Yeah, you're going to want to optimize the text link, this is kind of a separate but tangential and the same, you're going to want to optimize that text link, because if I'm talking about you and let's say I'm highlighting your marketing consulting and how you help people put a plan together. So that when they come to us or when you build a website for them, that everything is organized and the message is strong and clear. You know, having things like marketing consultant in there. When we direct people to you, it's totally fine and I hope I'm answering your question.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, no you are. So with text links, you're really focusing on the internal links between pages on the site itself. So do we have another or do we have another element?

Joey Donovan Guido
Well I think we covered all six, but I've, I've got one that's kind of a bonus.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
And then that is your meta descriptions.

Tim Fitzpatrick
OK, got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
I don't think we talked about.

Tim Fitzpatrick
No, we did not.

Joey Donovan Guido
Now, Google will swear that they don't count meta descriptions as part of the SEO equation. And no offense to Google, but I say that's baloney. One, it's got to be one hundred and fifty-six characters or less, if it's longer than that, you can wind up with an ellipsis most often. and you can get a penalty because it's too long.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
Plus, if you don't get a penalty and it's too long and Google cuts it off, the most important part of your meta description message might get lost.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
OK, I have also tested where if somebody is the local company and we put, you know, something like ice cream shop, Madison, Wisconsin or New York, New York, that will help raise their search ranking. Because, yeah, and it's like Google says this doesn't count, but at the very least, we don't want to break any rules with it because it could hurt us.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I also think too what you put in there maybe the differentiator that helps somebody, it helps entice somebody to click on your listing rather than somebody else's in the search results.

Joey Donovan Guido
Exactly. That could be your only chance if someone's reading it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Right. So it's kind of like your ad copy.

Joey Donovan Guido
Right, right. Right. That's your first and potentially only chance of engagement. So, again..

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome.

Joey Donovan Guido
Even if you're not worrying too much about how many keywords am I putting in there, sure you want to mention the service. You might want to mention your region. But it's also important to mention how you're using somebody's pain.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, OK, so we've got I want to recap these to make sure we're on the same page. So keywords, right? We got to create our list of what we're going to what keywords are important for us. We've got title tags, heading tags, image names and alt text for those images, we have on page copy, we have internal text links on the site. We want to make sure those are optimized. And then our meta description is that bonus. Those are the best ways that we can implement SEO into our website.

Joey Donovan Guido
Yep, yep. And they're sustainable. We've been using them. I've been using them for over a decade. It always works.

Tim Fitzpatrick
These are the fundamentals of on-page SEO.

What is a Website's "Freshness Factor?"

Yeah. I love it. Super, super helpful. So let's talk about you touched on this a little bit earlier, that freshness factor in a website. We I think we want to have it, but we need to be doing it in the right way. How does this freshness factor you talk about play into that? How does it relate to SEO? And so let's dig into that.

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, so the freshness factor has to do with a few different things. And I like to lead off by explaining it helps boost what's called your website authority. And that's really what the SEO does, that's what adding a good, rich, relevant Web page does. And website authority is a score from zero to one hundred. We get the score from a company called Moz M-O-Z, which I'm sure you use. We use it quite often and the higher the score, the better. So somebody like Amazon or Nike or Adidas, got sneakers on the brain, they'll typically have a score of 80 90 plus, right? Real close to one hundred. Whereas a smaller business, maybe a localized business like a local hardware shop that maybe has only 10 or 20 Web pages, they're score, if it's a good score, might be somewhere between like 20 and twenty-five or the high teens, right? Not going to be in the eight hundred in the 80s. So freshness is one of the criteria that the Google algorithm or algorithms, depending on how you look at it, because it's like this one big monster with all these moving parts, it's looking for freshness.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And we talk about freshness. Are we talking about new content?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yep. We're talking about new content. And that's what we want to run from the person who says we're going to freshen up your like your static Web pages, right? Products and your services, your home page, which begs the question, where do I freshen up my content if Joey's telling me not to do it on my Web pages kind of doesn't make sense. And this is where your blog comes into play. Your freshness comes on your blog and what you're going to want to do is blog at least one time a week. And this can be very daunting to people, I've tested this and three times a week is usually the sweet spot for most businesses. More than that is way too unmanageable in many cases. And it's also you're kind of pillaging people with too much content. No one will increase your freshness factor that will boost your website authority. And I've seen this. I tested it once on purpose and I tested it a second time when my wife got sick a few years ago, unwittingly, I stopped blogging. And I went from like first and first, second or third on page one from my major keyword phrases to the bottom of page one or page two, and all I did was stop blogging. So it makes a huge difference.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. So it's so the static pages are product service pages, our home page really shouldn't be changing all that much unless there's some type of message change or some type of update we need to make. The freshness factor is coming in with blog content in some way, shape or form. And I'll just ask you this, because some people, some people may go, "Oh, my God, I can't stand writing. I'm not going to do it." Are there ways? So, like, one of the ways that we use because we do it, we're doing this podcast, we've got video, we're putting the video, the audio, and the transcription on a blog post. Is that a decent way for people to utilize other type forms of content to get that freshness factor on their site?

Joey Donovan Guido
Absolutely, yes. Yeah, that is what I call repurposing. And that's fantastic, especially if you're sharing the video on your blog post and the transcription. Because Google likes video because it knows people like video. And then that transcription, the video, the only thing that Google will see when it crawls that blog post, will it only see the title of the video? It won't be able to read what's in the video. Which is why that transcription is so important. Equally important is to review the transcription, especially if you're letting YouTube, transcribe it and you have a New York accent. You could be in trouble. Make sure it actually is transcribed properly. And that's a little bit of time involvement comes into play. But yeah, man, you can do video. You can just do a podcast if you don't want to do video and you can just transcribe the podcast, you can repurpose. I have some clients where they'll hand us a webinar that's on their website and we'll turn that into three blog posts for them. Real long form blog posts0 go deep dive. So, yeah, repurposing is a wonderful idea. Even if you have a white paper or case studies that you show clients, you can turn those into blog posts.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, got it.

Joey Donovan Guido
Other things you can do is you can interview your clients and highlight them on your blog. I do that quite often, you know, or you can hire somebody if you just totally feel like it's dreadful to write it, hire somebody competent, not necessarily cheap, because there are people who will work for ten bucks an hour and you get what you pay for and then sometimes that can backfire.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, absolutely. I love it. This has been awesome. You've shared a ton of really valuable info about how we can integrate SEO into our websites effectively. Do you have any last minute words of wisdom, guidance you want to leave us with today, Joey?

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, a couple of real high-level things that I can share. One is something that tangential to your website, but also super important to supporting your website, helping boost its SEO, and also maybe getting you found before anybody sees your website in a natural search result as you Google My Business listing. You want to make sure you have one and then once you get your website optimized, you want to make sure you're optimizing that Google my business listing, filling out every single region in the listing. And just like you would on social any social media platform, pushing posts with optimized image names through Google My Business, you can post there. Nobody reads it. Nobody cares. But Google likes it. And that will help you wind up toward the top of the page in what's called the three-pack, where you see the map and you see three search results typically. So that's one really good thing to make sure we do that for every single client we work with, but something that can be easily overlooked by a business owner. The other thing and we touched upon backlinks kind of going from your website out, backlinks play a really important role in your website authority, but they're really hard to get.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Takes time.

Joey Donovan Guido
Takes time. And there are a lot of agencies out there that will get them for you very quickly and very poorly and very black hat style. Got to be careful. So what we advise people to do is use something like, what we did was we use something called Bright Local. Yeahm and Bright Local will help you push out maybe 10 or 20. That's it. 10 or 20 new directory listings each month. They're citations, directory listings, but they're really backlinks from super reputable high authority websites like Yahoo, Bing, other sites like that, some small, some large. And that will really even 10 or 20 a month will help boost your website authority in ways that you might be surprised.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. So you guys won't do those at once. You do them kind of piecemeal over a period of months.

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, we'll do we'll set up the account, we''ll optimize the listing, and then we'll push it through the major aggregators, which is a fancy word for like real high-level search engines that push stuff to a lot of search engines and directories. And then we will do 10 or 20 a month until we feel like we've accrued enough for the client. It's very, very quick to do very low cost. The reason we do so, so few is because if we wind up doing dozens or hundreds, you could get blacklisted or you can get flagged for being a toxic website.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Gotcha!

Joey Donovan Guido
And I've seen that happen.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So you don't want to do it once?

Joey Donovan Guido
Right.

Tim Fitzpatrick
OK, got it. Awesome. Joey, if people need help with SEO, their website, you showed a ton of great information. But where, where can they go to learn more about you and what you're doing.

Joey Donovan Guido
Yeah, people can go to Joey Donovan Guido dot com backslash overview gives you an idea of everything we do and it's all connected to helping clients get found on Google and helping them convert website visitors into actual customers.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. So, guys, as Joey Donovan Guido dot com forward slash overview Guido is G-U-I-D-O. We'll make sure that's in the show notes. But if you're watching video right now, you can see it down at the bottom of the screen. Please reach out to Joey if you like what he's had to say and you need some help. You're hitting roadblocks and all this fun SEO stuff that we talked about. Joey, thank you so much for taking the time. And I really do appreciate it. Again, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. If you guys are running into roadblocks with your marketing and you want to get some clarity, head on over to our website at Rialto Marketing dot com, that's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing dot com. Click on the get a free consult button. Be happy to chat with you and give you some, some ideas of where you should be focusing right now based on where you're at. Until next time, take care.