SEO Fundamentals Room: Week Feb 15, 2022
This week we focused on audience questions and some questions from our moderators in the SEO Fundamentals Room.
Questions
Question 1: What should I look for when hiring SEO for my marketing agency? (00:08:30 Ahmad)
Question 2: How often should I connect with the SEO person? (00:15:54 Ahmad)
Question 3: How long does it take to appear on the first page of SERPs? (00:27:15 Karin)
Question 4: We have a website for our company and has more than 3000 pages. However, we are not indexed by Google yet. What would be the reasons? How can we solve this problem? (00:40:19 Sirous)
Question 5: Sirous added that they expanded pretty rapidly, and in 4 months, they have created more than unique 4000 pages of content. Isn’t it possible that our website is penalized by Google? (Sirous 00:47:51)
Question 6: What is the best strategy for SEO if my content is highly visual? (https://photoruns.com) (Philip’s content is on wix.com) (00:59:07 Philip)
Question 7: Is schema data something that I can put in, or do I need a coder to help me? (Philip 01:03:13)
Question 8: At the beginning of the discussion Moe had asked suggestions on how to improve his sister’s website http://pinkhoneybee.com
Question 9: How do you convince your clients (especially small businesses or startups) to get on board for SEO projects in an environment where there are so many moving parts and new products, or features launched almost every day? (Such as Pinterest, Tiktok, Youtube etc.) (01:14:45 Pierre)
Question 10: Sam has a cannabis business. Should he start with paid ads or generic SEO? (01:21:22 Sam)
Room Information
Question 1: What should I look for when hiring SEO for my marketing agency? (00:08:30 Ahmad)
- Check out the post covering “SEO Hiring” question from SEO Fundamentals Room on Sep 14, 2022
- Find someone transparent and willing to teach you what and how they are doing the optimization. They should be open to explaining what they are doing. (00:9:45 Renee)
- Having a basic understanding of how SEO works is critical when communicating with your SEO team member. (00:10:57 Karin)
- Ask and verify that they know the industry you’re working with so that they have experience and insights into the industry’s inner workings.
- Also, look for the results they have delivered so far.
- Try to understand their approach to content marketing. See how they structure the content by looking at their previous results. (00:11:49 Firuze)
- Make sure to understand how they approach the buyer journey first process rather than the seller first approach for content development. Is the content strategy covering the critical aspects of user intent and smoothly taking visitors to transactional pages?
- The content development process should be wrapped around branding. The goal is to create brand awareness and recognition around the brand with the products and services offered.
- The keywords, topics and topic clusters are essential elements to creating content.
- Content marketing should be aligned with the overarching marketing and business goals.
- Then we have a competitor’s analysis to position our brand in the market and see how we can differentiate ourselves from the others. (00:13:00 Renee)
Question 2: How often should I connect with the SEO person? (00:15:54 Ahmad)
- It depends on the project. Connecting weekly is sufficient if you are working on content creation, marketing, and SEO.
- You can meet monthly if you’re not involved in content marketing but just advise them on the content topics and keywords. (00:17:17 Karin)
- I suggest checking in with your SEO freelancer twice a week without bugging them. You aim to see whether they need any information from you, have a question, or just see where they are.
- Email check-ins will help you know how the SEO process continues by sending them the check-in lists. (00:18:30 Jon Muranko)
- It also depends on a budget of the client. If we work with a large budget client, we prefer to connect with the client weekly. This is especially necessary if you’re working on Content Marketing, Technical SEO, along PPC campaigns.
- For medium-size budget companies, we’ll meet bi-monthly, and if the client has a small budget, we’ll meet with them once a month. (00:20:30 Noah Learner)
- An additional note is depending on the cadence of the work, try to figure out a way to communicate with your SEO service provider.
- If you want to ensure that the SEO provider is on the right track, perhaps get in touch with him more often. This will give you enough time to explain progress to your client. (00:22:30 Renee)
Mohammed shared his take on SEMRush and MOZ Pro and reminded the room that they have a lot of Free content for beginners (SEMRush Learner Academy) (00:24:35 Mohamed)
Question 3: How long does it take to appear on the first page of SERPs? (00:27:15 Karin)
- Karin gets some results in 4 months. That is especially true if she starts from scratch. (00:27:48 Karin)
- His take is to first run an SEO Audit,
- See how much and what needs to be fixed,
- Look at the vertical or niche that the client in
- Check out different keywords
- Decide on keywords that can get results easily and quickly (30-90 days) and keywords that will take time to get ranked (00:27:50 Jon Muranko)
- It’s crucial to see the competitive environment and look at how much content they have created, how high their topical authority is, and how many keywords they are ranked. The barrier to entry is getting more complex, and establishing a topical authority is more complicated when your competitors have already accomplished their topical authority and received hundreds or thousands of backlinks. So, under those circumstances, it takes time to get ranked, and it’s going to be very hard.
- Deploying a multi-channel approach will bring massive results if you are helping a client in a high competition industry. You can both work on SEO and Paid ads (Google Ad Platform or social media Paid Channels)
- Paid will provide you with a lot of data, such as money keywords which will help you strategize your SEO efforts. Over time, you can reduce your Paid Ad budget and focus more on your SEO. (00:29:00 Noah)
- There are no people that can give you a timeline. Depending on the industry, the competition and maturity of the business, a good SEO can provide you with an idea about what to expect in terms of time frame.
- Figure out what ROI you expect from the SEO while working on your content or other aspects of your optimization process. That will help incorporate SEO elements into a perspective that enables you to optimize your content and reach your ROI.
- First, focus on working/creating content that will bring ROI quickly. While the Search Engines are discovering that content, you can work on the content that’ll be difficult to get ranked. (00:32:00 Renee)
- He is getting 4-6 months, but his focus is not only where his clients get ranked but also to see whether they get more leads for their businesses. (00:34:18 Garrett)
- He’s also trying to understand how the client envisions themselves in the future, their goals, and what they want to achieve. Is it increasing the revenue, increasing the market share, or getting more sales or leads?
- Thinking SEO holistically is also a crucial step. It’ll build organic relationships with every other marketing channel.
- Due to privacy issues and limitations on some mobile devices to track users, it’s getting difficult to attribute a conversion to a specific channel. Therefore, a holistic approach could help us get results. Be ok with some of the fuzziness and increase conversions and revenue. (00:35:35 Noah)
- She wants to discuss another aspect when the client is so excited to get results and constantly asks questions because their expectations are high, and they don’t want to wait that long and ask questions. When are they going to get results? Why is the process taking too long? Those questions also psychologically impact her. With this respect easing their tension and helping them understand the strategy is a key to success.
- Always be open to any of client questions, answer them as quickly and honestly as possible and do not oversell what you are doing.
- As long as you’re receptive to their questions and helping them to understand the process, they will be happy to work with you and be patient. (00:38:20 Firuze)
Question 4: We have a website for our company and has more than 3000 pages. However, we are not indexed by Google yet. What would be the reasons? How can we solve this problem? (00:40:19 Sirous)
- The first thing to do is check if the page is set to be not Indexed. Make sure your website is asking the Robots to be indexed. Check out your Robot.txt file in the backend of your CMS (Content Management System)
- Check out your pages and ensure that there are no errors
- Verify that they get submitted on the google search console. Using sitemaps and resending the new sitemap file to Google is a way to verify that Google has received your sitemap.
- Put your URL into Google My Business posts
- Mention your and reference to your site links at forums (00:41:35 Karin)
- You can track up to 2000 URLs a day using Screaming Frog and Sitebulb. These crawling tools make it easy for you to check whether your pages get indexed. Sitebulb is an excellent tool for a beginner to understand the tool’s functionalities and recommendations to fix your problems. On the other hand, Screaming Frog is free up to 500 URL crawling for a website. ( 00:43:07 Noah)
- Check out the internal linking structure of your website and your breadcrumbs which is your internal category and subcategory structure when you serve your content.
- Make sure that Google can get to the pages.
- See how your content is delivered? Is it quality content? (00:43:23 Garrett)
Question 5: Sirous added that they expanded pretty rapidly, and in 4 months, they have created more than unique 4000 pages of content. Isn’t it possible that our website is penalized by Google? (Sirous 00:47:51)
- If you’re penalized, it’s tough to recover. It takes at least 3 months. (00:48:36 Karin)
- When you access Google Search Console, look for the section on security. Typically, Google will tell you that you are penalized. Additionally, if your site is penalized, you won’t see any of your pages ranked. It seems like your site is not penalized. (00:49:09 Noah)
Question 6: What is the best strategy for SEO if my content is highly visual and create a short video story? (https://photoruns.com) (Philip’s content is on wix.com) (00:59:07 Philip)
- Since this content is hugely visual, you need to help Google understand it as much as possible. Using Schema is particularly beneficial for your website. Schema is a backend code which is speaking a language that Google can understand, and it tells Google what the site is about. That way, you’ll describe the image: A tourist with a camera is running around London to capture the best moments around historical places. (01:00:44 Karin)
- (For more schema information, you can jump into previous discussions from December 4th or December 28th )
Question 7: Is schema data something that I can put in, or do I need a coder to help me? (Philip 01:03:13)
- Schema is a highly advanced SEO fundamental instrument, but there are also tools (both Free and paid) that can be handy to apply schema markup. Karin is using Schemaapp.com It’s a paid tool, but it’s functional and delivers an excellent job generating Schemas without her writing a code. Unfortunately, she is not familiar with a schema product for Wix. (01:03:20 Karin)
- Jon’s first step is to run a scan on the site by using Sitebulb. Then he suggested using both Exif data and Schema. Here is a definition for Exif data by Wikipedia () “Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif, according to JEIDA/JEITA/CIPA specifications) is a standard that specifies the formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras, scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras.
- However, Wix is not the best platform to design a website, and Jon needs to understand the context of the images and the goals of the website and the business so that he can answer better. So, he’ll ask Philip to dm him. (01:06:19 Jon Muranko)
- Karin received a message from her friend Celese, another great SEO expert, and she told Karin that Deepcrawl has partnered with Wix to provide SEO services, and it’s only $7/month. (01:08:30 Karin)
Question 8: At the beginning of the discussion Moe had asked suggestions on how to improve his sister’s website http://pinkhoneybee.com
Karin’s suggestions are:
- Figure out each page’s content and a matching keyword.
- However, don’t go for the head terms when choosing your keywords.
- Make sure that your keywords are used in the heading, in the content you’ve created, and in your images’ alt text or captions.
- When linking your page to a URL at your website or another website, always use the keyword that you’re optimizing.
- When you have an eCommerce website selling multiple products, the first thing you need to do is to create categories and related products with each category. Don’t forget to optimize for categories. Then target the optimization of the product pages.
Question 9: How do you convince your clients (especially small businesses or startups) to get on board for SEO projects in an environment where there are so many moving parts and new products, or features launched almost every day? (Such as Pinterest, Tiktok, Youtube etc.) (01:14:45 Pierre)
- Firuze finds this environment challenging where SEO is touching every aspect of marketing. You cannot do a proper SEO without knowing your audience, brand awareness, content marketing, web development UX/UI design, community and authority building. To make clients understand their situation, she exhibits competitor analysis and maps where each of their competitors is today. Her point is helping them to understand that they need to differentiate themselves from the others in the market when positioning themselves. They need to communicate with their customers that they are different in A, B, C or D ways.
- Describing the entirety of the competitive scene and showing that they are not the only solution in the market is helping her to convince her clients for reserving a budget for SEO.
- Especially if her clients want to be one step ahead of their competitors, they also get on board for paid ads in a trial period to understand which keywords are selling (transactional). That will guide them in the content creation process because they know which keywords are selling. (01:16:07 Firuze)
Question 10: Sam has a cannabis business. Should he start with paid ads or generic SEO? (01:21:22 Sam)
- Cannabis Ads are federally illegal. Thus, ad networks (Google, Facebook etc.) do not accept any cannabis businesses.
- He can try organic methods like SEO or organic social media posts. However, SEO is difficult in a highly competitive environment, but organic social media can go viral overnight.
- She suggested looking at the influencers in the cannabis market. That will make it easy to get backlinks and endorsements from the influencers channel. Sam can also ask for a review of his product from the influencers.
- Sam can talk with the influencers and tell them what he looks for rather than just asking for a backlink.
- Don’t forget that linking to yourself from your Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, TikTok, or Twitter is valid for SEO.
- Open a Pinterest business account. Pinterest let you put your website in your profile which will help your backlinking. Put your keywords in your pins, pinboard names, board descriptions and bio.
- Pinterest also allows you to embed your YouTube video into your pins.
- If you can use Tik-Tok (however, Sam’s account has been banned) and create a video, you can embed it into Pinterest and ING Reels.
- He can also use a WordPress plugin called WP bio links. This tool creates links to your website, social profiles or email address and shows other ways to connect with you directly from your website. (01:21:50 Karin, Karin, Pierre)
Room Information
Marketing Club: The largest Marketing Club in ClubHouse
Every Tuesday at 8 am Pacific Time
https://www.clubhouse.com/event/PQ48lGnw
Date: Feb 15, 2022
Theme: SEO Fundamentals
Next Chat: Every Tuesday at 8 am PST
Moderators:
Karin Tierney: https://alzina.marketing/
Kyla Herbes: https://houseofhipsters.com/
Firuze Gokce: https://firuze.blog
