Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #56: Offsite SEO Tools and Tips

Michael Utley: Hey everybody. This is Michael and Chris, welcome to Episode 56: SEO: Off-Site SEO Tips and Tools, tools, and tips. Yeah, there are a lot of things that affect how well a search engine works Chris, that are not on your website. So we're just going to do a kind of a round-up and talk about some of those today.

Chris Raines: Yeah, yeah. Let's go, man.

Michael Utley: Yeah. All right. Number one: create steady and valuable social media content. Social media channels. . . There are still a lot of companies that we talk to, and usually, they'll show up to us and maybe they've thought they need LinkedIn for recruiting, or maybe they have a Facebook page, but they're not really getting excited about it and they're not really driving it. And sometimes it's because they have other complexities like maybe their company's actually made up of 20 brands, and maybe they have social media happening at some of those brands and not others.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And so sometimes you have complex situations. A lot of the material that we cover on the podcast is for lead generation companies and local or regional companies. But some of these problems apply all the way up the food chain to really big companies. We work in healthcare with a lot of companies that do mergers and acquisitions to absorb local and regional networks of businesses. Often, they have anywhere from three to 20 locations.

Michael Utley: And so it's often a Wild West for this stuff and they don't really know how should we feel about social media. And a lot of it comes down to, "Well, who's going to do the work?" And if the work's being handled at some locations or in some brands in a portfolio company, they're often like, "Okay, well let's just keep doing that." The problem is, sometimes it's not being done well.

Michael Utley: And social media. . . It's one of these areas that Google has sort of cracked the code on understanding how it relates to a domain or a brand. And so the more activity there is around a brand, the more it signals to search engines that that website address is one that's valuable and should be higher, not lower, in search engine results.

Chris Raines: Yeah, and it matters to you're posting frequency, and I think it also matters to how many followers you have on that. You have to think that Google. . . If you have a social account that's attached to your brand and your website that has 50,000 followers, you have to think it looks. . . Places a higher authority on that then say, if you have 500.

Michael Utley: That's right, that's right. So all these metrics are tied together for Google. Social signals, levels of social activity, the level of engagement, all that matters. So if you've got. . . Gosh, we've had clients before that have come into us and when they started with us, the social media account was sort of a pet project of somebody who was interested in it, at a business, or within a brand.

Michael Utley: And they were even posting just silly cat videos to the corporate site, totally irrelevant. A very outdated way of thinking about social media. And so I would say as recently as in the last year, just kind of random stuff. And the reason is, not all of these channels, like social media, are necessarily a priority if you're focused on other things.

Michael Utley: But if you're looking for a set of principles to guide you, I would say, number one, yes, you do want to be in social media. Number two, focus on driving valuable, relevant content out on a regular basis. Don't get passionate about it and do it really strongly for a couple of months and then trail off. Decide what your plan is for the year and schedule your activity and think about it. So yeah, that's how to think about social media. It's not going away and it needs to be part of your SEO strategy.

Chris Raines: Yeah, thanks, Michael. So number two here is, "Use all of your website profiles to support each other". So you have your main website.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And some businesses own multiple domains.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: For whatever reason. And so if you do own multiple domains, make sure you're interlinking those two domains together, and then to piggyback on the social profiles, make sure all of your social profiles also link back to your website.

Michael Utley: Yep.

Chris Raines: And conversely, that your website is linking back to the social profile, usually you'll have that in the footer somewhere. But all that's important to sort of give to. . . It's like a link juice or something, right?

Michael Utley: That's right, it's link juice.

Chris Raines: All of that put together, if you have a proper that you're maintaining, you're posting regularly, whether it's another website you own or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or anywhere, just make sure you're actually linking back, either in the profile or the post that you do, you're linking back to your original site, so you can get that signal, that link signal that's important.

Michael Utley: Yeah. All those things are tied together. For search engines, they see a cluster of activity around a brand. And so when they see all of these online listings and directories pointed to the website, that's a signal for search engines. And so an example of the inter. . . I really like this idea Chris, of the interlinking site. So we have GoEpps.com, which is kind of our custom online marketing package, but then we have prepackaged, sort of commoditized, services with DodgeballSEO. And so you can buy kind of set levels by industry there, of SEO services. So yeah, we just put out a press release regarding something with the company GoEpps and yeah, we put it on both sites and we'll link over to the GoEpps site on the DodgeballSEO page.

Chris Raines: So that's a third-party site. That's a-

Michael Utley: Yeah. It's a separate domain. And so that link signals like, "oh, here's another inbound link to this website to Goapps.com". So that's a good thing to do. And I would say the only time I wouldn't do that is, we have things that are totally irrelevant from one another. And I mean like totally irrelevant, like dentist and oil change irrelevant. But if you have, for example, a lot of manufacturing companies have a new product release and they need a standalone website for a few years, to promote that new concept or that new entry into the marketplace. In that case yeah, link to your parent company and link your parent company to that new product release.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: That's- You may think these are really different from one another, but to Google, they're not as different as dentist and oil change. If it's less different than dentist and oil change, use the interlinks.

Chris Raines: We’ve still got to open that dentist oil change.

Michael Utley: I know we keep going back to that.

Chris Raines: You're already waiting.

Michael Utley: Yeah, that's right. Let's see. Who's got the next one? So I do-

Chris Raines: Did you do directories or is that about-

Michael Utley: No, I'll do that one next.

Chris Raines: Okay.

Michael Utley: So yeah, next up, use directories and online listings to gain inbound links. So this is similar to the previous point. Using online profiles. Directories are a really important thing to have a handle on. We use a process here where when we work with a client, we take in a profile of all their data. We identify: what are your business hours? What's your URL? What's your street address? What links do you have available for online appointment booking? We collect all that data in one central place, and then we pump it out every month. So it's constantly verified and fresh to hundreds of online directories.

Michael Utley: This is a good thing to do because when you maintain this kind of process, you're signaling within those directories that this profile data is fresh, it's valid, it's verified. And so they can have confidence when they list it in their system. And so companies like Yellowpages.com, these sites, they don't want bad information in their business directories. They're using the entire world of business data as sort of their thing that they have, that people would come to them for. So sometimes we call this “Maps and Apps”.

Chris Raines: Mm-hmm.

Michael Utley: And this freshness has to be maintained. Another category for this is community sites. Occasionally cities will have. . . Well, not occasionally, every city, but above a certain size city. There are often going to be five to 10 local business directories that you have to manually go out and identify, reach out to and say, "Hey, we're a local business we'd love to be included on your website". So for us in Nashville, that's the Chamber Of Commerce and a handful of other things that are trying to happen.

Michael Utley: But we've also got projects like. . . We're located in Downtown Nashville now, but for many years we were in the neighborhood of East Nashville. So anytime anything kind of popped up in East Nashville where we could participate and get an inbound link, we would do it, even supporting local youth sports. These are all signals to search engines that your website is valuable, even the small ones. I'm always kind of a “more is more” person when it comes to quality inbound links, as long as it's not a disreputable website. But I think. . .

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: It's and, Ross Jones is, is where this idea came from, but, Silly Church Links (SCL), but just low-quality, local, highly local. . .

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Websites that are willing to put a link to your site. Those are a good thing to do and they're a signal to search engines. So managing those directories online listings, always good.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Number four here on offsite, SEO tools and tips is, "Use consistent contact info everywhere". So a lot. . . This is particularly for local businesses. So maybe you've got a bunch of listings and maybe your office moved and then maybe you opened a second location and then maybe your phone number changed.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: So you could have one profile that has your old address, one profile that has your new address, another profile that has your old address, plus your new location and your new phone number, and then another. So you can see how this can all get messed up, or URL if you change your URL.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So all this gets messed up. What Google likes to see, especially for local SEO, is it likes to see all of your listings that have a consistent name of the business, URL, street address, phone number.

Michael Utley: Hmm.

Chris Raines: That's probably, that's probably most of it, right. . .

Michael Utley: Hours of operation. . .

Chris Raines: Hours of operation. . .

Michael Utley: Yeah. Everything that can be added. . .

Chris Raines: Anything that can be added across those, just make sure they are consistent. It's when you're sending mixed signals to Google, they'll, they're going to have less confidence in the validity and the authority of your business and your website. So there are tools like. . . Michael, what are some good tools to manage that? So you can. . . There are paid tools out there that you can do this with.

Michael Utley: Yeah. We use a lot of tools here for people who are using our SEO programs. We'll actually syndicate data to all the big, to the three big data warehouses that everybody pulls from. And so, yeah, there are a lot of good tools. There are more now than ever in the past: Advice Local, Synup. . . There are a bunch of good tools. One of the things that I recommend is, go out and do a search on your phone number. And if you have any information that you're trying to retire—

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Like if you've, for example, gone from using a local phone number to a toll-free number, I would do a searching quotes for that local number and just go through a page one and say, "Okay, everything I come across, is it good and complete data that we want out there? Or can we get it fixed?”

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: And, and sometimes there are “zombie websites” that have a lot of information about you, that's not maintained, like a lot of these business intelligence websites, they're guessing at half of the data like I've seen like our annual revenue on business websites for years that had no idea what our annual revenue was, or who the officers in the company are. They've always got bad information. So yeah, just using any kind of outdated data, you have like an old URL that you're. . . That you've replaced or an old phone number and just kind of hunt and destroy from the top down on that stuff. And that's a good way to troubleshoot.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Awesome. Good. Yeah. Last up for this episode, you have an opportunity. . . So make your YouTube channel branding complete. You have an opportunity with YouTube to create a presence and an online reflection of your brand, and YouTube actually offers quite a bit of real estate for stuff that you can do.

Chris Raines: Mm-hmm.

Michael Utley You have a couple of different images for the channel that you can manage. Also. . .

Chris Raines: You can do different social. . . You can do website links and different social links as well. . .

Michael Utley: Multiple links. . .

Chris Raines: So back to the interlinking link juice concept.

Michael Utley: Yeah. So linking to your website, don't miss that link to your social channels. Great. And also you can think through playlisting and think for our brand, for what we want to be known for, what are the types of categories that we'd like to fit into, and you can go create content for those categories on your YouTube channel. So thinking about playlisting and how playlisting works, but having a channel description, having a complete description of your company, that's kind of benefits-oriented and even call to action-oriented.

Michael Utley: Like if you can tell people, here's what you can expect working with us in your description. That's good content. I think YouTube is one of the underappreciated places that companies should think about as a priority. We really think of it as being a channel, as significant as SEO or email, video marketing's huge, but often when a client comes in and starts working with us, we're the ones going in and making sure, making sure that they're using everything that YouTube has to offer for the brand. And I'll say this, I've seen. . . I think YouTube did not change for a lot of years. There wasn't a lot of innovation, but lately, I'm seeing it kind of perk up. I'm seeing YouTube doing more and-

Chris Raines: They're aping a lot of the popular things that the other networks are doing. Like. . . They have story components or reels or whatever they're called.

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm.

Chris Raines: On. . .

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: YouTube.

Michael Utley: Yeah. This month TikTok surpassed YouTube in minutes viewed.

Chris Raines: Mm-hmm.

Michael Utley: And so I think YouTube. . .

Chris Raines: Which is incredible because the videos are much shorter.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Very short, but people are just zoning in and just watching videos. But I think the competition's good for innovation. I think. . . My hunch, I'm not connected to YouTube in any way. I don't have any knowledge of what's going on there, but my sense is they're kind of getting into the game of being a platform and a destination. I've always thought that the Explore features on YouTube were underpowered, and lately, I think with them wanting to do more and be more, there's a chance of YouTube becoming a really great site.

Chris Raines: I actually like the. . . I spend most of my time on YouTube, on the home tab where like. . . I almost never go to my “Subscribed” tab.

Michael Utley: Mm.

Chris Raines: Maybe that's just who, but maybe that's just my orientation. I'm always like I want to see new stuff that I'm. . . And it's. . . YouTube's pretty good at giving me stuff that I'm interested in.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: But I almost never go to “Subscribed”, now some of my subscriptions pop up in the home tab.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: But I spend most of my time there.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah. . .

Chris Raines: Maybe most people don't do that though. Maybe most people go to “Subscribed”.

Michael Utley: I think that until recently, YouTube really didn't have a strong focus on merchandising their content, the way that they seem to now.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: So, yeah. Great. This has been Episode 56: SEO: Off-Site SEO Tools and Tips. We really love receiving notifications from people and contact because of the podcast, but also drop your comments down below, if you have questions, you want us to talk about, subscribe. And thank you. We'll see you on the next one.