Making your online identity as high-profile as possible involves a combination of SEO updates and usability fixes. Here's how to jump-start the process.
00:00:52 - Avoid Confusion With Your Domain Name for SEO
00:04:10 - Know and Monitor Your Domain Authority
00:06:05 - Make Phone Calls and Phone Numbers User-Friendly
00:10:12 - Know How Well You Rank for Branded Searches
00:13:42 - Keep Your Keyword Research Current
Tags: SEO, keywords, domains, websites, branding
For more on the tools and tips in this episode, please visit:
https://www.dodgeballmarketing.com/
Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #57: Build Your Online Profile for Better SEO
Show Notes
Episode Transcript
Chris Raines: Hello. Hey, how are you doing? Welcome to Episode 57 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast, where we're talking about all things digital marketing. My name is Chris.
Michael Utley: Hey, I'm Michael.
Chris Raines: This is Michael. And today we're going to talk about building your online profile for better SEO. Now, when we say online profile, we're not talking about your social media profile. That's what most people think of when you think of a profile. We're talking about the way that search engines like Google, we'll just say Google, the way Google sees your business. And also-
Michael Utley: What's your name? Yeah.
Chris Raines: Yeah, and also how people perceive you. Right? So you're on your online identity as a whole. So we're going to name five things here that you can do to think about to make sure that that profile is consistent and it communicates the right thing both to your audience and to Google.
Chris Raines: So the first thing we're going to talk about is avoiding confusion with your domain name. So your domain name from an SEO perspective, Michael, and you can back me up here or contradict me if you want to, but I would say it used to be really important for SEO. You used to be able to go get Milwaukee Locksmith and bam, you show up for-
Michael Utley: Yeah, you'd be number one right away, yeah.
Chris Raines: So it's not as important as it used to be, but if you can use it in your URL, it's still helpful. Would you agree with that part of it?
Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah. I think SEO-wise, I would say having good keywords in your domain is not a bad thing. But I would say that now that's not so much because of search engines as much as maybe the user.
Chris Raines: Right. It signals to them what you do is on the right track.
Michael Utley: That's what I'm looking for.
Chris Raines: And another thing we could talk about is just avoiding confusion in the name itself. So a good example here would be, let's say you have a lawn mower-
Michael Utley: A commercial lawnmower manufacturing company.
Chris Raines: And let's say it's called Smith Mowers. Or let's say the company is called Smith Manufacturing, but you make mowers. You don't want to use a domain name like Smith Manufacturing or Smith MFG, like an abbreviation. That's confusing for the user and people don't know what “MFG” means. They think it's an acronym for something else. Better to go with something like Smith Mowers, or maybe Smith Commercial Mowers or Smith Residential Mowers, or however you want to do it. And the reason is because it confuses the user and sometimes it's hard to remember.
Chris Raines: It's another thing to think about when you're naming and your URL is that the more you abbreviate things and truncate things and add dashes, it becomes really hard for people to remember your website and go to it. And that's what you want, especially when you're building your brand. Everybody knows how to get to Apple Computers, I go to apple.com. So as much as you can, think about people remembering your domain and going directly to it. And that's really important. And related to that is, think about, especially now, think about when you're in the naming stage of your company, early, early, early on, think about your domain and you probably want to get a.com. And if the name of your company or a variation of it, or an augmentation of it, let's say Smith Mowers or something like that, if all of those are taken and you can't think of a domain that makes sense.
Michael Utley: Yeah.
Chris Raines: You might want to actually think of a different name.
Michael Utley: Yeah.
Chris Raines: So it's that important. That real estate is that important. If all of your options are taken up, you might want to continue exploring names for the company to see what's available. So it is that important. And if you think about it early enough, you can give yourself leeway. So you're not stuck with a weird domain that you then have to change. Or maybe somebody else has squatted on the domain and you got to buy it for like $10,000 or something like that. So, yeah. So that's item number one here is, avoid confusion with your domain name and get it right the first time.
Michael Utley: Yeah, that's right. That's good. Next up, know and monitor your domain authority. Domain authority is a metric from Moz and it's good to know what it is. It's going to be a number, I guess, from zero or one to 100. And one of the problems with some of these metrics is they don't move a lot. They don't move every day. It's not like looking at your website traffic. It's more of a big picture.
Chris Raines: It's a snail.
Michael Utley: Yeah. It's a snail. It's more of a “big picture” thing. So the way I would use this number is, number one, know it, see what your domain authority is. But then I would capture it each month in your KPIs. So, whatever your KPIs are for your marketing, I would include domain authority as one of your KPIs. And then, as you make changes strategically over the years, you can see in the big picture, what changes in your ship's log of big changes of your online presence influence or don't influence your domain authority?
Michael Utley: So an example of this would be, a company might have a domain authority of 40, and they may start to invest in content marketing and SEO (search engine optimization). And so, once they start that, they're not going to see something change immediately. But over six months or a year, they may see their domain authority go up 1, 2, 3, 10 points. And they can say, wow, that trend started three months after we started doing content on the website. And so, using domain authority as a very broad universal measure of, where do we fit in the world? How much are we known for subject matter on the internet? It's a really good tool, but it's best used in context of seeing it change over time and knowing the big things that you're changing strategically around it, that would impact it.
Chris Raines: Awesome. Number three here, for building your online profile better, is to make your phone calls and your phone numbers user-friendly. So a good example of this would be, if you are a local business, you want to have a local phone number. So don't put in... I think I can give you an example here. If I moved five years ago. . .
Michael Utley: Yeah, this happens all the time.
Chris Raines: If you moved five years ago and you use your cell phone as the company phone-
Michael Utley: And it's not the same area code, you've got a problem.
Chris Raines: That's a problem. Google looks at those area codes and it's more highly relevant if you're matched with the area code that you're doing business in. Another example would be, if you are a larger business that serves multiple area codes, multiple regions, you probably should have a toll free number instead of a local area code because Google will see that local area code in more closely associate you with the region that that area code represents. So if you're operating in three or four different states, go get yourself a 1-800 number and kind of work things that way.
Michael Utley: Or a 888.
Chris Raines: Yeah, the 800 numbers are hard to come by now. And also, just from a usability standpoint, make the phone number highly visible. So most people float up to the header of the site or on the footer of the site. So it's usually a good idea to have it in both places. So people know if they want to contact you, they know exactly where to go. So that's just a usability thing. And the other thing, and this was something, Michael, that you brought up before the podcast, which I think is really interesting, but answer the phone and the reason why—
Michael Utley: Yeah, answer the phone.
Chris Raines: Answer the phone. It's a really high-level strategy here. Answer the phone. But the reason is that you should obviously do this anyway. Answer your phone if you're a business that takes phone calls. But secondly, Google might be able to tell if you don't answer your phone and how they do that is that if someone goes to your website from a Google search, and then they hit the phone number, Google knows if they hit the phone number, right? And then if you don't answer, they might go back to the search results page.
Michael Utley: That's right. They may hit the back button.
Chris Raines: And look for somebody else that will answer their phone. So Google sees that behavior. They see them leave the website, and I think if you've got Google Analytics installed, they know what a phone number is and they know if you've clicked it.
Michael Utley: If you have a TEL tag.
Chris Raines: If they see that action happen and you go back and then they see them go to another... That's a signal to Google, oh, they did the phone call thing, but obviously, that didn't work for them because they went to another site. So I guess we don't know for sure if that's a signal.
Michael Utley: We don't know if they're doing that. But we do know that the “back button” behavior of that result didn't meet their needs. They're back for more.
Chris Raines: But we know that that matters, if people are ping-ponging off your site and going to the next result down, if they do that a lot, then that's a signal to Google. They didn't get what they needed from that site. So, answer your phone for SEO.
Michael Utley: Yeah, we could do a whole episode on phone numbers, but I would say the principle here is, take the work off of the user. Don't make them have to leave a voicemail if they could talk to a person. If they're willing to talk, that's the moment when they're raising their hand as a customer. Another place that this gets difficult for companies is when they have multiple phone numbers for different markets and they don't have a good solution, like a call center or a central office, for receiving phone activity to just one number. Well, guess what? In that situation there are some cons, you're putting the work on the user. And anytime we do that, mathematically speaking, there's going to be some fall-off.
Chris Raines: I have a client that's got four locations now, and they have four numbers in the header, and I'm trying to get them off.
Michael Utley: It's tough. It's tough.
Chris Raines: They need a 1-800, they need another local number that goes to a short phone tree where they can select which store they want.
Michael Utley: Yeah, and so you can like it or you can hate it, but it doesn't change the facts. The facts are, when the user has to do more work, they're not all going to do it, even though they could have been a good customer.
Michael Utley: Yeah. Next up, know how well you rank for branded searches. And I want to give you a metric that I think is really overlooked. It's really the only GoEpps that I've ever seen that uses the metric that I'm going to describe. A branded search is when someone searches for your name in relation to looking for you. As opposed to, let's say someone might search for the phrase “Northeast Dermatology”. Well, that's clearly an office or a brand that they're looking for related to a specific company. And if they just search for “acne dermatologists”, that's a non-branded search.
Chris Raines: Right.
Michael Utley: And so these are two different categories of keywords. They're both good. They're both good, because if you're doing any advertising, even on social media, and you're highlighting your brand, you want people going to search engines and searching for your brand.
Chris Raines: Right.
Michael Utley: So here's the question. How well do you show up? When somebody searches for a. . . And some brands are difficult, some brands are kind of generic sounding and Google doesn't have as easy of a time serving up them and just them. But other brands are a little bit unique. They have maybe a little funny name, or maybe it's a name that is unique in the industry. Like somebody's last name. Maybe it's a little bit of a silly word or a made up word, and somebody is able to spell it right in a search engine. So a couple of things can happen with this, do a search for your brand name and see how you look.
Michael Utley: And I want you to look for two things, number one, or three things. Number one, are you the number one listing? Do you show up? Do you come up for people in the organic results? Number two, do you have an expanded listing? Are there interior pages that are part of that number one listing, or is it just a little, skinny number one listing that would be easy to miss? So that's two things and number three, and this is where the new KPI idea comes in. How much of page one do you dominate with your brand? We really like. . .when a company has been with us doing SEO for six months or a year, it is often the case that we can look and say, when you started with us, you had one search result for your brand name on page one of Google. And when you're established up and running with us, we've been doing SEO for awhile, you've got multiple listings, because what those are doing is pushing competition off the page.
Michael Utley: We might have in the search results, an expanded number one listing, but then, Chris, maybe their YouTube page, their Facebook page, another listing that may be a local business's directory, but it's your business profile on that website. And then maybe a second listing that goes to your site, but it's for an interior page, maybe like your main services page.
Michael Utley: And so we'll often go from having one branded search result shown up on the page. And in the worst-case situation being kind of skinny, in some cases with clients who've started with us and had no presence for their brand on the homepage. And we'll go all the way up to having seven out of the 10 results on the Google page. And the reason that happens is, we're building out these profiles that have a lot of robust content and presence. And we're doing SEO, and it's just pushing those competitors off the page. So, know how well you show up and how much of page one you dominate.
Chris Raines: Yeah. Awesome. And last thing here, is keep your keyword research current. So, whenever you're doing SEO or something like PPC/paid search, you're embarking at the beginning of it, you're embarking on keyword research to figure out, which keywords do we want to buy, or which keywords do we want to show up for organically.
Michael Utley: Or work for SEO.
Chris Raines: Yeah. And so, keeping this current means visiting it quarterly or annually and seeing what new trends are emerging. You don't want to miss out on any new trends that are happening. So an example, a good example, Michael—
Michael Utley: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris Raines: A campaign that we've worked together on before is a commercial janitorial company. And what we found was last year, we started seeing spikes in disinfection service. Because it was right at the beginning of the pandemic, you had offices that were very concerned about stopping the spread and disinfecting surfaces.
Michael Utley: And needed help, yeah.
Chris Raines: And so we saw a spike in that search trend. Right? And so what do we do? Well, we start building pages to show up for that organically? We start buying those keywords on the PPC side. You would never know that unless you constantly revisited your keyword pool. And keeping track of that over time so as the coronavirus wave went down, those keywords became less. So it's always good to know every industry is always evolving with people searching for things in different ways. And so staying on top of how people are actually. . . Doing a fresh look at your keyword research is a really good way to just stay on top and not let trends pass you by.
Michael Utley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And those trends and every business is different, but I think a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking that keyword data is either going to change daily or it's going to change never. And neither of those is true. It's somewhere in the middle and it's going to modulate based on your business. How much your business changes, how often new, dominant products or services are entering the market. And just how much of a sense the marketplace has of what they are actually looking for and what they should call it. But yeah. Good, cool. Are you going to wrap us up?
Chris Raines: That's it, that's Episode 57. Be sure to follow on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, if you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and subscribe. And any of the podcast players out there, be sure to subscribe to us for more digital and marketing content. So we'll see the next one.
Michael Utley: Yep. Thanks.
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