How to Measure SEO Performance & ROI (ft. Patrick Scully)

00;00;00;11 – 00;00;24;16
Sean
Have you ever paid an SEO company and thought, what exactly am I paying for? Well, today we’re pulling back the curtain on the world of SEO and showing you what actually matters. If you’re a contractor who is paying for SEO to get more traffic, leads, and revenue, this episode is going to help you figure out if your current strategy is actually working.

00;00;24;19 – 00;00;41;02
Sean
Today, to break it all down, I’m joined by Patrick, which is CG SEO specialist, and he’s the guy behind our audit process. So he has seen, everything from ineffective link building, to contractors who promise the moon. So, Patrick, tell me a little bit about what you do.

00;00;41;05 – 00;01;11;23
Patrick
So, yes, I’m the SEO specialist here at CCN. My primary focus is making sure our clients are have technically sound websites, and a strategy that will help them gain more business. Our primary focus is lead generation for businesses like yours. And, what we do is, really dig deep into making sure your website’s a strong, safe place to visit for your potential customers.

00;01;11;26 – 00;01;20;28
Patrick
And at the same time, it’s built in a way that’s friendly with Google. And they’re able to crawl your pages, understand your content, and eventually rank you.

00;01;21;00 – 00;01;23;09
Sean
Perfect. That sounds very important.

00;01;23;11 – 00;01;37;26
Patrick
It is. It’s. From what I’ve seen, local SEO is really the number one driver of leads for contractors. Outside of referrals and paying for advertisements, it’s really, one of the places you can get the most reach for your business.

00;01;38;02 – 00;01;49;08
Sean
Yeah, and that would make sense, especially since contractors, their job really is, you know, they can’t get a job from three states away, right? A lot of them are within essentially their neighborhood, right?

00;01;49;10 – 00;02;05;25
Patrick
So it’s focusing on their local area. And then judging different businesses can travel a little bit farther than others. So we kind of break it down based on, each business, how far they’re willing to travel for a job, and what kind of radius. We’d like to make sure that they’re kind of dominant in. Cool.

00;02;05;27 – 00;02;22;05
Sean
So we’re going to break down. We’re going to start with, this whole thing is about SEO. A lot of our contractors don’t actually know, like, SEO is kind of an invisible force. And it’s something that’s kind of hard to trust, that’s working. And there needs to be a lot of transparency in the agency that you’re hiring.

00;02;22;12 – 00;02;46;03
Sean
So that’s the main theme here is how can our contractors know whether their SEO is working? And they’re, they’re their company that their pain is actually doing what they’re saying. So, you know, SEO feels like a big black box to a lot of our contractors. So why do you think that it’s so confusing for contractors and really, anybody who’s not in the SEO world?

00;02;46;05 – 00;03;19;05
Patrick
Well, for a long time, SEO was kind of sold in that way. It was it was kept as a little bit of a mystery so that when you did rank, it seemed like kind of almost magic. As Google evolved, as the years went on and updates came out and them fighting, you know, the kind of hacky tactics that did get you ranked back then, it’s gotten to a place where we don’t need to hide behind not telling what’s going on.

00;03;19;07 – 00;03;32;27
Patrick
It’s a true SEO agency. We’ll really be upfront with what they’re doing, because at the end of the day, it’s legitimate tactics now that get you ranked versus ones before that. Yes. You could manipulate the system a little bit.

00;03;32;29 – 00;03;56;21
Sean
Yeah, I remember. I mean, I don’t I’ve never known much about SEO. This is probably the most I’ve ever known about SEO in my life working here at CDN. But I remember always hearing back in the day when the SEO, when websites were Google was still relatively new, but, you know, you had things like, you know, keyword stuffing, and then you’d have things like just putting links really anywhere, whether it made sense or not.

00;03;56;24 – 00;04;19;24
Sean
Right. And Google would still rank you because you put a link somewhere on a website somewhere else, you know? Yep. And there used to be a lot of services like, like backlink, backlink, go. And I’m sure it’s still around, but there was a lot of different like directories that you can just throw your link into, whether it, you know, made sense to put it there or not or there was any actual value to it.

00;04;19;29 – 00;04;20;10
Sean
Right.

00;04;20;14 – 00;04;42;03
Patrick
So most of Google’s patents and the way that they kind of founded their search business was on this idea of a link from another website acting as, a digital vote for your website. And the way that they use those was to add up all the votes and kind of in the beginning, it was whoever had the most votes won.

00;04;42;04 – 00;04;47;02
Patrick
Yeah. Now, after all those years.

00;04;47;05 – 00;04;47;22
Sean
There’s some.

00;04;47;24 – 00;04;58;08
Patrick
SEO in 2010. And, I mean, we would run software overnight that would create these links, wake up in the morning and have, you know, thousands of links built for you.

00;04;58;09 – 00;04;59;16
Sean
Well, that’s nice, right?

00;04;59;18 – 00;05;04;11
Patrick
Close. And, you know, to be honest, SEO was kind of easy back then. Yeah.

00;05;04;14 – 00;05;22;06
Sean
But now there’s just everyone’s on the internet. I mean, 2010, there’s still not a lot of business on the internet, right? So now, like, there’s just so much congestion, you really have to stand out. So same thing with, social media. You know, like with putting content out there. There’s just so many voices competing, right?

00;05;22;09 – 00;05;43;10
Patrick
And really today, what we focus on is, you know, yes, there’s an algorithm. Yes, there’s things technical that Google looks for. But if you focus on the end user and create a website that they want to go to, they want to stay on. They trust they’re getting educated by, that is the algorithm, the user algorithm.

00;05;43;10 – 00;06;05;19
Patrick
Because if they leave quickly, if they do find your website and bounce, or they don’t go to multiple pages or they never convert, those signals are used by Google to determine kind of who is, you know, presented is the most trusted business. Yeah. So really, it’s now not just how many votes you have, it’s who’s voting for you.

00;06;05;22 – 00;06;08;12
Patrick
And what weight do they carry.

00;06;08;14 – 00;06;31;02
Sean
So that’s kind of breaking to some things to, to look out to look out for when you’re, you know, working with an SEO company. So, your buzzwords, a lot of people use buzzwords to kind of confuse somebody who may not be privy in the space. Right? So what are some common things that, SEO company might say that actually mean nothing?

00;06;31;04 – 00;06;52;22
Patrick
So there’s two sides of this. The first side is things that actually mean nothing. And these things are when people say they have a secret sauce or they have a proprietary method or, you know, even that they can guarantee rankings in 30 days, things of that nature. It’s just not true. There’s no secret sauce. There’s no proprietary method.

00;06;52;22 – 00;07;13;22
Patrick
None of us work for Google. None of us know what’s going on in there. They’re working on their stuff every single day, too. So how could we have some method that keeps up with that? It’s just not true. Yeah. What there is, is a methodology that works based on testing and based on experience. So people call that their secret sauce and stuff because they don’t want to explain it.

00;07;13;22 – 00;07;36;00
Patrick
And like you said, they want to kind of confuse you a little bit into buying their services. Sure. The other buzzwords that are thrown around that do mean something, but sometimes they don’t tell the whole story. And these are things like impressions and clicks and organic reach. Again, they’re important. And we track them, of course, for our clients.

00;07;36;03 – 00;07;41;00
Patrick
But if that’s the only metric that you’re being that’s being reported on, that’s a problem.

00;07;41;03 – 00;07;45;09
Sean
And those are impressions, clicks. And what was the last one?

00;07;45;09 – 00;07;46;01
Patrick
Organic reach.

00;07;46;01 – 00;07;51;00
Sean
Organic reach. So you’re saying that if that’s the only thing you’re hearing from them, right. There’s an issue.

00;07;51;02 – 00;07;51;11
Patrick
Right.

00;07;51;12 – 00;07;52;06
Sean
Why why is.

00;07;52;06 – 00;08;16;29
Patrick
That? Well, really, at the end of the day, the goal is ROI. Of course, the goal is leads. The goal is more business. Impressions. You can you can increase in impressions and clicks by writing content. That may not be relevant. Relevant to your to your audience. That’s still going to get you more impressions. That’s still going to get you more clicks.

00;08;16;29 – 00;08;34;18
Patrick
But at the end of the day, it’s not going to convert into more leads. So while we do use those metrics, because those can tell you if your SEO is being successful, your impressions should go up. Your clicks should go up. But it’s what are you being ranked for? What are you being seen for? What’s being clicked on?

00;08;34;20 – 00;08;37;23
Patrick
And then what is happening once they get to your website as well?

00;08;37;27 – 00;08;38;07
Sean

00;08;38;19 – 00;08;47;03
Patrick
So if it’s not converting into leads and that’s not really the, the final metric that’s being reported on. That’s where we kind of run into issues.

00;08;47;05 – 00;08;57;19
Sean
So is that the like. So you need although like impressions clicks. All of that is still important. But you also want to be having to get the leads in. Right?

00;08;57;19 – 00;09;16;06
Patrick
Right. So we track those as kind of micro successes. You can’t get a click if you don’t get an impression. You can’t get a person on your website if you don’t get a click. So it does trickle down to the lead. But we want to really focus on those macro successes, which are the leads and eventually closed deals.

00;09;16;09 – 00;09;24;07
Sean
Is there anything else that the other metrics that we should be looking out for to that we should also be hearing on top of leads?

00;09;24;10 – 00;09;26;26
Patrick
I would say rankings for sure. We want to be transparent about.

00;09;26;26 – 00;09;31;27
Sean
Where you are right now. For those who may not know, like what is what do you mean by ranking?

00;09;32;00 – 00;09;55;08
Patrick
So we’ll track where your website is ranked or shows on Google what page it shows on, and then what position it’s in for your, what we call money keywords or transactional terms. And these are the terms that people are searching for when they’re kind of ready to hire you. They’ve done their research. They’ve looked at if they’re into, you know, getting their kitchen remodeled.

00;09;55;08 – 00;10;16;18
Patrick
They’ve already looked at maybe paint colors and countertop types and kitchen layout designs, and they’ve done a little bit of research. And now they’re actually looking for a remodeling company in their area. So we track both we want to look at the informational keywords because that’s where people tend to start. Especially for a big job like a remodeling job.

00;10;16;25 – 00;10;18;22
Sean
And what would be an informational keyword.

00;10;18;24 – 00;10;36;13
Patrick
Things like researching design, design, trends or, you know, looking at different layouts that they could, you know, looking for inspiration online. You know, do they want to island do they not want an island? What’s in today in terms of, you know, countertops and fixtures and that kind of stuff?

00;10;36;16 – 00;10;46;01
Sean
Okay. So stuff they might be doing while they’re already like, it’s clear that they’re, they’re going to be getting work done or they’re already in the process of getting work done. They need to make a decision on something.

00;10;46;01 – 00;11;05;01
Patrick
Right, right. And so that kind of flows into what our SEO program, does. It provides, you know, that content that, shows up when people are searching for terms like that? Yeah. But most importantly, we also want to show you where you’re showing up for people that are now in that next stage of the funnel.

00;11;05;03 – 00;11;14;05
Patrick
And they’ve done their research. They’re ready. They have their, their, their funds. And now they’re really just looking for the best person in their area to get the job done for them.

00;11;14;06 – 00;11;15;01
Sean
Yeah.

00;11;15;04 – 00;11;43;02
Patrick
So we track both and we provide both as a kind of weekly place where the, our clients can go to, to check their rankings themselves. And then also on a monthly basis, we provide, kind of a updated report on where they’re showing up and then which one of those positions are potentially driving leads. So we want to show that clear difference between, hey, you’re on page two.

00;11;43;03 – 00;11;59;09
Patrick
You’re basically invisible, but we got you from page 8 to 2. So that’s progress. Yeah. But we know that’s not converting right now. So we want to show that difference. Now you’re high on page one. Let’s say in the top three results. How does that now translate to more leads for your business.

00;11;59;12 – 00;12;12;27
Sean
Yeah. And that might be something that you know, you don’t necessarily think about if you’re not in the space. But we really think about like when people are searching on Google and you’re on page two, are you how often do you go to page two when you’re searching someone?

00;12;13;00 – 00;12;18;00
Patrick
Right. It’s kind of that old SEO joke is where’s the best place to hide a dead body is on page two.

00;12;18;05 – 00;12;36;03
Sean
Yeah, okay. I’ve never heard that one, but that’s true. Yeah. Because I, I never very, very rarely, unless I really am looking for something. Can’t find it. Am I ever going to page two? And even then, especially now, you have all the ads at the top. Yeah. And then you’ve got, like, a few actual search results.

00;12;36;05 – 00;12;38;14
Sean
Maybe not even going down half of that first page.

00;12;38;16 – 00;12;50;03
Patrick
Yeah. And now we have to contend with I overviews as well. Yeah. In the new kind of generative search stuff that’s happening, you know, at the top of Google that pushes those organic results down even further.

00;12;50;05 – 00;12;57;11
Sean
So, maybe I’m maybe seeing two right to on that page before I’m moving on. Yep. So it’s important to be there at the top for it.

00;12;57;11 – 00;13;06;10
Patrick
To be there. And it’s important to show off when you’re there. So yeah, that’s when things like your reviews and stuff come into play. Because now your business profile.

00;13;06;11 – 00;13;10;08
Sean
Right. We just didn’t have that on there, in case anyone is wondering, incredibly important.

00;13;10;09 – 00;13;10;19
Patrick
Yeah.

00;13;10;23 – 00;13;19;07
Sean
Yeah. We just did, an episode on, Google Business profile with Stephanie a few weeks ago. So, yeah, if you haven’t check that episode out after this one, you go to that one, right?

00;13;19;12 – 00;13;23;25
Patrick
Right. Your website and your profile are tied together. Yeah. Incredibly.

00;13;23;26 – 00;13;39;15
Sean
Yeah. They’re both very important for your local SEO. So, Patrick, we have a lot of we’ve seen a lot of companies that will pitch 100 new pages for someone like 10-K. Tell me why. That’s something you should look out for and maybe steer away from. Possibly.

00;13;39;18 – 00;14;02;13
Patrick
Right. Typically, what these are are, are location style pages. Google has a terminology called doorway page. What this is, is a page specifically built on your website to rank for a keyword and bring in traffic, which is the idea of SEO. But at the end of the day, if it’s not a useful page to the internet, it’s still worthless.

00;14;02;13 – 00;14;30;02
Patrick
It’s going to be worth. It’s either already worthless or it will be. Yeah. So while publishing 100 pages to your website can be beneficial? Because you didn’t have those pages before. If they’re thin, duplicated pages that aren’t valuable, in kind of Google’s eyes. And really at the end of the day, if a human being looked at that page and would have to decide, is this valuable, is this not valuable?

00;14;30;05 – 00;14;46;15
Patrick
If it’s not, then you can kind of tell yourself, we need to do some work here. Yeah. So a lot of times those, those packages come with 100 pages, but they’re not quality pages. They’re not individual pages. They’re really kind of duplicated and quickly published.

00;14;46;18 – 00;15;01;16
Sean
Yeah. And if Google sees them as not valuable, it’s literally like it doesn’t help you at all. It’s like it doesn’t help. It only helps you a little bit. They just don’t even rank it at all. They don’t crawl it. They don’t. It’s just a worthless page on your on your site.

00;15;01;18 – 00;15;22;24
Patrick
Right. It can be for sure. Yeah. And especially if the agency or you’re working with a independent contractor, whoever is doing your SEO. Yeah. If they’re not talking about building up your website authority as well, which is kind of what we touched on before getting those votes from other websites, spreading your brand name kind of around the internet.

00;15;22;27 – 00;15;37;13
Patrick
Those pages can definitely be worthless. So it has to be kind of going hand in hand if we’re building all these pages. We need to make sure that we’re building up the authority of the website as well. Yeah. Because a website with no authority and 100 new pages, like you said, it’s it can be pretty much worthless.

00;15;37;14 – 00;15;47;13
Sean
Yeah, because no one’s going to see those. Right? Google is not going to see doesn’t anybody. Right. So they’re just sitting there for you to like look at and think, oh, this makes my my computer, my company look really awesome.

00;15;47;13 – 00;15;52;07
Patrick
It’s one of those, SEO getting sold on deliverables things versus the outcomes.

00;15;52;07 – 00;15;52;19
Sean
Okay.

00;15;52;20 – 00;16;10;25
Patrick
So what they’re doing is here’s 100 pages and it looks great, and it’s delivered. And we did it. Job done. Check it off the list. But what’s the ROI? What is it really going to do for your business? And if it is going to do something, how is it going to get tracked? How are they going to how are you going to know that it did something right?

00;16;10;26 – 00;16;16;16
Patrick
So, if you’re just getting 100 pages done, then, that’s not really.

00;16;16;18 – 00;16;37;15
Sean
SEO. So we see a lot of people come to us who they’ve already worked with, an SEO company, and they feel like they’ve been burned. Has there been a point, an idea, a time that you could think of when someone came to us, you did an audit where they thought they were actually getting some good SEO, but they actually weren’t.

00;16;37;17 – 00;16;40;06
Sean
Do you have an example of that?

00;16;40;08 – 00;16;46;25
Patrick
Definitely. I see it all the time. And really, it’s almost the same as the, location pages, but for blog posts.

00;16;46;28 – 00;16;47;08
Sean
Yeah.

00;16;47;08 – 00;17;12;00
Patrick
So a lot of SEO is sold as we’ll do blogging for you. And then when we see the website, yes, they did 50 blog posts for you, but they’re not valuable posts. They don’t share anything new. There’s no internal linking in between the posts that moves the user to another page. Or to your service page. A lot of times there’s no images.

00;17;12;02 – 00;17;18;22
Patrick
It’s really just kind of quickly published in order to check it off the list.

00;17;18;25 – 00;17;20;04
Sean
Do you see? Yeah. I’m sorry.

00;17;20;04 – 00;17;27;00
Patrick
Go ahead. My point was, I would rather publish one blog post of quality than 50 useless. Yeah. Thin posts.

00;17;27;05 – 00;17;42;26
Sean
Yeah, definitely. In this world, it’s quality over quantity for sure. It used to be quantity, right? Because there’s nothing out there and and it’s like a new social media, site. They want as much content as possible so that people drive people to there. But now we already have so much content.

00;17;42;26 – 00;17;43;12
Patrick
Yep. 100.

00;17;43;14 – 00;18;03;06
Sean
So it really does need to be the top 1%. Yep. Right. You need to be the best of everything that you do. Otherwise you’re just there’s no point. Yep. Right. Yep. So it is quality over quantity. Do you see many like, blogs going out there without images and without any type of content other than just text?

00;18;03;06 – 00;18;10;15
Patrick
For sure. Sometimes no headings, nothing to break up the text. It’s just one big block of text.

00;18;10;17 – 00;18;11;23
Sean
Yeah.

00;18;11;25 – 00;18;16;22
Patrick
Which again gets the job done. Yes. You published a new page? Sure.

00;18;16;22 – 00;18;31;12
Sean
But. But one. No one’s going to want to read that, right. They’re going to see it. It’s going to look bad. And then also Google is going to notice that. Yeah. And you know, especially if the headings aren’t right I don’t know much about it, but I know your h1 h2. All those have to be in a specific order.

00;18;31;14 – 00;18;36;25
Patrick
The basic SEO stuff is missing which is sometimes shocking okay. Knowing that they’ve now these are for.

00;18;36;25 – 00;18;41;25
Sean
A company that you hired. Exactly. Exactly. And the basic SEO is missing.

00;18;41;25 – 00;18;59;04
Patrick
Yeah, I can understand it. If, you know, maybe the owner dabbled in a few blog posts and wanted to try it out. And, you know, yes, we can work with those and fix them up and clean them up a little bit. But when it’s an SEO company doing it, it’s it’s not valuable for your business.

00;18;59;04 – 00;19;06;03
Sean
Yeah. Well, yeah, I know if I clicked on a blog post, I didn’t have any photos. I’m not reading that.

00;19;06;06 – 00;19;12;11
Patrick
In the in the design build world. Yeah, it’s a very visual images. You’re looking for inspiration. So it’s it’s. Yes.

00;19;12;14 – 00;19;25;16
Sean
And yeah, I mean, even now if I see, posts without video, sometimes I move away because a lot of times I like to watch the video and read at the same time. I like to do a little bit of both. It all depends on what mood I’m in that day.

00;19;25;19 – 00;19;39;27
Patrick
Yeah. It’s, it’s a very visual world especially, you know, when we think about social media, you know, if you don’t capture that in that first kind of second. Yeah. That attention of the person like they’re scrolling on, they’re moving so quick that the visual sometimes is everything.

00;19;40;00 – 00;20;02;14
Sean
Yeah. You got about 2 to 3 seconds, on any video on social media to capture that. Otherwise they swipe away. So before we move on, I want to ask the listeners if they know what their ranking is. And if you don’t know what your ranking is on your website, maybe you should go find out. So let’s move on to our next point, which is, you know how to spot if you’re, you know, SEO companies actually helping you.

00;20;02;17 – 00;20;06;13
Sean
So, talk to me a little bit about the three pillars of SEO.

00;20;06;16 – 00;20;08;02
Patrick
Okay.

00;20;08;04 – 00;20;13;26
Sean
So so for this, we got technical content and off link or off page. Right.

00;20;13;29 – 00;20;19;19
Patrick
And kind of the fourth little piece in there would be local SEO because we’re, we’re dealing with these local guys.

00;20;19;19 – 00;20;20;16
Sean
So we’ve added a pillar.

00;20;20;23 – 00;20;44;20
Patrick
We’ve added a pillar a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Because when it comes down to your website, you want to be technical. The technical SEO is mostly for Google at the end of the day. Part of it sometimes gets into user experience when we do things like speed up a website or make sure the browsing experience is good.

00;20;44;23 – 00;21;08;13
Patrick
But at the end of the day, it’s really making sure that your website can be crawled by the Google bot, which yeah, is a piece of software that that goes out, finds websites, tries to scan the content and saves it to a database or some kind of cloud storage. If your content isn’t easily scannable by that bot, it’s either going to miss things or kind of move on.

00;21;08;15 – 00;21;37;18
Patrick
It’s only got a very short life span on your website, so if you’re kind of bogging it down by slow loading videos or images or, kind of content, that is important, but it’s at the bottom of the page. It can possibly miss that content. So when we talk about technical SEO, that’s really what we’re focusing on is making sure the website is safe, secure, fast, and easily credible by both the Googlebot and users.

00;21;37;20 – 00;21;49;24
Sean
So it kind of sounds like the technical is really mostly the invisible stuff, right? It’s the stuff that the, the robots or the bots need to be able to see in a certain order, and we don’t necessarily see that ourselves.

00;21;49;27 – 00;22;12;28
Patrick
Yes, it can be. It can be a little bit behind the scenes. But again, a good SEO company will be reporting on, of course, what they’ve done, what they fixed, what they found, and why it’s important. Yeah. And if you’re not kind of seeing those things again, that may be one of those red flags that either nothing’s going on or maybe just they haven’t reported it because it can be technical and it can be confusing.

00;22;12;28 – 00;22;25;08
Patrick
And if you know, a lot, a lot of times, you may not read through the whole thing and understand any of it, but it’s that kind of touch point that, yes, we’re finding issues or fixing issues. And this is kind of the reason why we’re doing.

00;22;25;14 – 00;22;27;17
Sean
Yeah.

00;22;27;19 – 00;22;51;23
Patrick
Moving on to others, content is very important. Text is still the kind of main, content piece that Google is looking for. They do images now, videos are very important and they’re kind of multimodal capabilities that they have. They’re able to now, you know, understand images and videos and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But text is still king.

00;22;51;24 – 00;23;00;19
Patrick
Yeah. So we’re looking at not only number one, is there any. So when we’re saying thin pages or thin content, I.

00;23;00;19 – 00;23;07;06
Sean
Hear that a lot. I had to ask you what that meant because you I think you kept saying thin pages or thick pages. And I was like, I don’t even know what that means.

00;23;07;10 – 00;23;11;29
Patrick
So one of the one of my kind of sayings that I say that it’s good to do is kind of fatten up a website.

00;23;11;29 – 00;23;12;23
Sean
Sure.

00;23;12;25 – 00;23;31;00
Patrick
And so a thin page is one that just doesn’t have a lot of words on it. Yeah. And with a lot of, the websites that we come across, they’re not huge websites. They’re not massive websites that have a ton of authority, and they’ve been online for 20 years. Those websites kind of get away with more than what we can.

00;23;31;02 – 00;23;54;12
Patrick
Yeah. They can have a thin page that’s just 50 words. Maybe it’s, you know, a breaking news story or something of that nature. And those will rank for those style, websites. We need to provide Google with more context. And at the end of the day they’re scanning words and they’re trying to understand what it is that you’re talking about.

00;23;54;15 – 00;24;17;21
Patrick
They’ve always struggled with it. They openly admit that they struggle with it. It’s very hard to kind of create mathematical formulas that take words. And for a piece of software to understand what the words are saying, right. So really, at the end of the day, they need more words. Yeah. Understand that context. Especially for a local small business.

00;24;17;24 – 00;24;38;20
Patrick
Yeah. So that’s what we look for. Number one is their content. Number two, what is the content like we talked about before. Is it a blog post just for the sake of a blog post? That wasn’t thought through. We don’t know what the target kind of keyword or search term that they’re going after is.

00;24;38;22 – 00;24;49;15
Patrick
And it was kind of just written to be written. Those are things that we go in and either remove from the site because they’re at the end of the day, possibly hurting the site. Or we.

00;24;49;17 – 00;24;51;14
Sean
Heard a site.

00;24;51;16 – 00;25;10;04
Patrick
You can kind of dilute your kind of SEO power that your site has accumulated, that authority that we talked about. You can dilute that by now. You have, you know, all these thin pages. Okay. You built up authority but now you have this kind of, you know, a hundred pages that are worthless. Yeah. So they need to go hand in hand.

00;25;10;06 – 00;25;21;04
Sean
So does that mean like so if you, you had authority and then you started posting stuff that was just to be posted. Google is now going to kind of like ding you down.

00;25;21;06 – 00;25;39;20
Patrick
Well you’re never going to rank number one. So if you know that you want to search for a term and you go, fine, you go search it on Google. Look at those websites that are ranking in those top kind of five spots. None of them are going to be a website that has no headings and no images and no internal links, and just it’s not going to be that way.

00;25;39;21 – 00;26;02;05
Patrick
Okay. Especially as these Google updates roll on, their number one goal is to filter out the spam, filter out the thin crap from the website, and promote the real content they want to. Their number one goal is to sell advertising. The way that they do that is provide a great search experience so that the users find what they want.

00;26;02;06 – 00;26;21;23
Patrick
The next time that they want to search, they don’t go anywhere else. They come back to Google. So us as SEOs and website owners and publishers, we want to provide that good experience because that’s what Google is looking for at the end of the day. Yeah. And that’s what we’re all and really our users are looking for that, which.

00;26;21;23 – 00;26;22;24
Sean
Is why Google.

00;26;22;26 – 00;27;00;16
Patrick
Is looking so it all kind of works hand-in-hand. And and a real SEO agency kind of appreciates the Google updates that role on. You know, there’s kind of three, four major updates a year. We kind of like them because it filters out that spam and, and the people kind of doing manipulative tactics. And it leaves, kind of the true core SEO kind of evangelists that, you know, are into the content or into publishing great pages or into kind of creating interactive, cool websites that people love to visit.

00;27;00;18 – 00;27;01;28
Patrick
That’s kind of the goal at the end of the day.

00;27;01;29 – 00;27;18;18
Sean
Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about, off page. I also had to ask you to clarify this for me because I hear it a lot in this company off page. Yeah. And I had no idea what this was. So I’m assuming our listeners who are listening right now or viewers, if you’re on YouTube, are probably thinking what is off page?

00;27;18;20 – 00;27;19;28
Sean
Patrick, you why don’t you tell us?

00;27;20;01 – 00;27;33;22
Patrick
So that’s the piece that’s always been the kind of mystery the the the piece that’s hard to explain. It’s it’s it’s hard to kind of tell someone to invest in a link from another website.

00;27;33;25 – 00;27;34;22
Sean
Yeah.

00;27;34;25 – 00;28;01;23
Patrick
Without really knowing exactly what that’s going to do for you. And it’s it’s kind of just one of those real difficult concepts to wrap your head around. Sure. But at the end of the day, Google was again founded on the concept of categorizing web pages and then figuring out how to rank those pages. How they ranked them was votes from other websites, these links.

00;28;01;25 – 00;28;30;24
Patrick
So 20 years later, 25 years later, it’s those votes are still matter. But like we said before, it’s kind of who’s voting for you? Again, that quality over quantity. I’d rather get you one huge great link. Let’s say it’s, you’re a kitchen remodeler, and we’re trying to get you ranked for for kitchen remodeling terms. And we write a fantastic blog post on, you know, kitchen design trends in 2025.

00;28;30;26 – 00;29;03;20
Patrick
We’ve got great images. We’ve got pattern images that you can pick out, different patterns that you might like. It’s a really cool interactive blog post. And, there is a remodeling interior designer who has been running her blog for years, and it gets 50,000, visitors a month, and she’s got a huge Instagram following, and she loves to write about interior design, and she’s doing a updated how to design a kit, farmhouse kitchen for 2025.

00;29;03;20 – 00;29;31;00
Patrick
Right. That if she references our blog post in hers, that’s a fantastic link, because she has real traffic going out to her website from real people who are interested in interior design and remodeling and new kitchens and all that kind of good stuff. And potentially they may read her article and click on that link and get to our client’s website.

00;29;31;03 – 00;29;50;15
Patrick
So for me, that’s the kind of metric of a real quality link that’s going to act as that. Vote for your website. Does that website get any traffic? Could someone ever read that article and actually want to click on this link to see what it could be about?

00;29;50;17 – 00;30;09;10
Sean
So a off page is essentially it’s a link that is on someone else’s web page, right? That leads you, leads people back to your web page. Exactly. But in today’s standards, it needs to be not just any site as to be relevant to you. And it has to have an audience. Right? Right. That in layman’s terms, that’s what you’d say that is.

00;30;09;10 – 00;30;18;02
Patrick
Right. So generally, you can think of it like a link that you can create yourself for your own website. Pretty much think of that as useless.

00;30;18;04 – 00;30;18;18
Sean
Right.

00;30;18;19 – 00;30;31;04
Patrick
So that’s the kind of, thing that we want to avoid doing. Kind of our process in that is finding these blogs like I just talked about. There’s thousands of them.

00;30;31;05 – 00;30;37;01
Sean
How do you like how does one go about getting like, one of these, these these links?

00;30;37;07 – 00;30;59;28
Patrick
So the process is an outreach process. It’s number one. We have years of experience. We have relationships in the industry. We have, you know, known websites that, we can kind of target first. And the process is, is literally reaching out to the website owner saying, you’ve got a great article about this. I’ve got a great article about that.

00;31;00;04 – 00;31;22;22
Patrick
I think my article will give your readers a lot of context. Maybe a great tool, maybe it’s a calculator. We built anything like that. And they kind of agree. It’s a back and forth. It’s a little bit of a negotiation sometimes. You send out thousands of them and you get a few hits and it turns into a link, and you rinse and repeat and do it again and again again.

00;31;22;28 – 00;31;41;15
Sean
So this is something that you can does for our SEO clients. Yes. So we actually reach out to other people on behalf of our SEO and say, hey, this client does a great outdoor living space. You just did the top ten in this area. Yeah. Is this something that you’re willing to to work with us on? Yep.

00;31;41;21 – 00;31;48;14
Sean
Okay. Yep. That’s perfect. Yep. Yeah. So that’s actually something that I didn’t know until I started talking to you. Yeah. So that’s a great thing that we do.

00;31;48;15 – 00;32;10;14
Patrick
Yep. So that it’s it’s, it’s a real process. It’s focused on quality. It’s focused on again, our goal is building up that authority of our client’s website. So really the investment of SEO. Yes. You want leads. Yes. You want return all that good stuff. Yeah. Another huge piece of it is after you invest in this process for, let’s say, several years.

00;32;10;17 – 00;32;11;03
Sean

00;32;11;05 – 00;32;28;28
Patrick
You’ve built up that authority. So it’s not like every new page that you publish you’re starting from zero. There’s websites out there right now that have so much authority that they publish a new page. It can rank in ours. Yeah. Because they’ve focused on building up that steady relationship with, you know, at the end of the day. Yeah.

00;32;28;28 – 00;32;29;20
Patrick
A piece of software.

00;32;29;23 – 00;32;50;16
Sean
It just goes back to, kind of the theme of everything on internet and digital these days. It’s community, right? So on social media, when you’re building a page and trying to get, a following, you really have to build that community. You have to be on the site and, you know, engaging with your fans, engage more people who may be fans in the future.

00;32;50;22 – 00;33;16;19
Sean
Sounds like it’s the same thing here on when you’re blog writing and building any SEO, you have to have a relationship with other people, whether they’re, you know, in the same niche as you or they’re adjacent to you. Right? So you really have to build that community. So if you’re listening and you’re not building that community, you might need to start now because, it’s only going to get worse and worse in the sense of if you’re not doing it right now, you’re already behind.

00;33;16;19 – 00;33;25;14
Patrick
So many people with websites. There’s so many people writing articles. Yeah, you know, there’s 5 trillion searches on Google every year. Yeah.

00;33;25;16 – 00;33;26;03
Sean
And that’s only going.

00;33;26;03 – 00;33;44;14
Patrick
To stand out in some way. You’re not going to win. Yeah. And the way that we really help our clients is they have a lot of experience and knowledge in what they do. So we don’t want to focus on just writing these kind of top ten articles or this or that that maybe has been written over and over and over again.

00;33;44;14 – 00;34;05;25
Patrick
Yeah. We want to write articles that offer a new perspective or some information that’s kind of intrinsic to that business owner. They have 30 years of experience. They’ve seen so many projects. They know, you know, different things of that nature. So we want to get their like personal knowledge into this content as much as possible.

00;34;05;26 – 00;34;15;19
Sean
How do we get that out of them as a client if they’re if they’re joining our SEO program, you know, they clearly they’ve been in this business for 30 years. How do we get that out of them?

00;34;15;21 – 00;34;40;14
Patrick
So throughout our process, we have a lot of touchpoints with, clients. We want to keep this a very, collaborative process. So they’re involved in every step of the way without making it too much. So especially in the beginning months of a project of a campaign, our goal is to find as much about about you, your business.

00;34;40;16 – 00;35;07;03
Patrick
We do very intensive kind of background research into the region that you’re in your area. We want to understand, you your story. What makes you different? What makes you unique? And how we can best formulate a strategy to kind of attack that area that you’re in and present you as that way. Yeah. So a lot of people that we work with do have these great stories, do have all this experience.

00;35;07;03 – 00;35;28;28
Patrick
They have, things that maybe other competitors in the area don’t have, but they’re invisible. They’re not being found. So that story isn’t being seen. So that’s kind of our goal is not just maybe you’re not ranking because your stuff’s not good. It’s the right strategy. Hasn’t been put in place yet for your business.

00;35;28;29 – 00;35;45;20
Sean
Yeah. And with any strategy it’s going to take time to build. Yep. Right. Yep. So let’s kind of get back to how can they spot if it’s actually working. So let’s talk about maybe some of the tools that our contractors could kind of look into to see if there are SEOs actually working right now.

00;35;45;23 – 00;35;49;29
Patrick
Yeah. The big two that well, let’s call them three.

00;35;50;05 – 00;35;50;15
Sean
Three.

00;35;50;16 – 00;35;55;17
Patrick
Okay. One you guys did an episode about already, and that’s Google Business Profile, and you should own your profile.

00;35;55;25 – 00;35;57;18
Sean
And if you haven’t listened to that episode yet, you should go and.

00;35;57;18 – 00;36;15;01
Patrick
Listen to it and listen to it. Know how to claim your profile and know how to be the owner of it, and know how to access the, Right now, it’s a small amount of metrics that it gives, but it’s but it’s a way for you to know. Is my business getting any more visibility? Am I getting calls?

00;36;15;02 – 00;36;27;25
Patrick
Are people clicking to my website? So that’s the number one. Number two is Google Analytics. All of these are going to be Google products. Every single one is free. Google analytics you should again own your data.

00;36;27;28 – 00;36;29;01
Sean
What do you mean by own your data.

00;36;29;02 – 00;36;51;03
Patrick
So so you create the Google Analytics account. You don’t need to install it on the website. You don’t need to do any of the technical stuff. But you yourself, your email should be the owner of the account. And you share that access with your agency or whoever is doing your marketing for you. You can log into this. You don’t need to know everywhere to go in it.

00;36;51;06 – 00;37;12;17
Patrick
Typically, the home screen can give you some information, and the goal at the end of the day is graphs that go up to the right. That is enough to at least give you an indication that your traffic’s not going down. Right. So we want the traffic to go up. That’s not our only metric. Look at it’s not the only thing we report on, but it’s for somebody.

00;37;12;17 – 00;37;13;21
Patrick
Something to see.

00;37;13;22 – 00;37;22;00
Sean
Yeah. Especially for someone who isn’t privy to all the the ins and outs of SEO. Right. You can tell by a graph. Yes, it’s going up. It’s going to the right.

00;37;22;00 – 00;37;34;23
Patrick
And they’ve got great comparison tools where you can compare year over year data and say, right now, in May 2025, did I get more traffic than May 2024?

00;37;34;28 – 00;37;40;08
Sean
Yeah, right. So and Google has some of the I mean literally the best analytics are.

00;37;40;10 – 00;38;00;14
Patrick
It’s it’s been the market leader for a long time. And again they wanted to do that. So they get access to all that kind of website data. So don’t forget about that. Yeah. When we talk about things like bounce rate and our people spending time on your website, we’re kind of freely giving Google access to that data that they use in their kind of analysis of websites as well.

00;38;00;14 – 00;38;32;17
Patrick
So, that’s the number two thing. The number three is another free tool by Google, Google Search Console. This is the one that’s entirely focused on your positioning and your visibility on organic search. Okay. So this is not ads. This is your real rankings. A lot of people use they skip the ads. People may not even realize numbers like this, but the top three ads only get 1 or 2% of the clicks on a Google search.

00;38;32;17 – 00;38;45;03
Sean
And that’s only going down to right because you know, as we have people growing up in this age of knowing that those top three are advertisements. Yeah. They just they skim right over that, right? I know, I do.

00;38;45;03 – 00;39;09;21
Patrick
I yeah, I think they’re, I think they’re good for emergency services. You know, you got a, plumbing emergency and there’s water everywhere. Yeah. You want to look and kind of find a quick phone call you can make. Yeah. For a long sales cycle, like a design build project that may take a few weeks or months to talk to someone and and work out the, you know, exact project that you’re going to do.

00;39;09;24 – 00;39;15;15
Patrick
That is not you know, an ad is not going to lead to, to that. So we want to focus on those organic spots.

00;39;15;15 – 00;39;30;24
Sean
When you’re going to have somebody in your home for six months maybe. Yeah. That’s something that you are really doing a lot of research on. And that is a lot of trust. Right. So that’s something that you’re not going to just click on that first ad, you might click on that first ad, but then you’re going to do a whole bunch of research on that website.

00;39;30;24 – 00;39;34;12
Sean
Right. So you’re you’re back and still needs to be top.

00;39;34;13 – 00;39;42;16
Patrick
Down is never going to be an ideal fantastic landing page that converts, $100,000 remodeling project from one click. And yeah.

00;39;42;18 – 00;39;51;10
Sean
And a lot of those to make that decision. I mean, I’ve needed a new front door for a long time, and I’m still doing my research. You know, it’s it’s a lot of trust that you have to.

00;39;51;10 – 00;40;08;15
Patrick
Definitely. Right. Yep. Especially if you’re someone like me who really doesn’t know a lot about that stuff. I’ve got a deck on the back of my house that I would like to do something with. Yeah, but it’s going to take me a long time to look into what’s possible with a deck and, and different types of.

00;40;08;15 – 00;40;26;22
Patrick
Do I go composite or what? You know, all that kind of stuff I know nothing about. I would want to do a lot of research first. Sure. So back to kind of Search Console. You can see in there again, we’re looking for those graphs that go up to the right. But this is where you can see okay it’s going up into the right.

00;40;26;22 – 00;40;59;04
Patrick
But why. What were people searching for. What did they find my website for. What are the top pages that are getting clicked on. You know is it all blog posts that’s driving your impressions in your clicks which is great. You’re educating your community. You’re doing well in that regard. But are your service pages nowhere to be found? So we want to kind of keep a healthy mix and making sure that all the pages that we’re publishing on the site and we’re marking as ready to be indexed and available for Google rankings.

00;40;59;06 – 00;41;16;28
Patrick
Each one has a purpose, each one has a strategy behind it. And we’re not kind of forgetting about some just to rank some so we can grow the impressions and the clicks. Again we want those to lead into leads and new jobs and more money for the business because at the end of the day.

00;41;16;28 – 00;41;18;28
Sean
That’s what it’s all about. Yeah that’s the goal.

00;41;19;01 – 00;41;40;21
Patrick
Yep. So on those three properties Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, making sure that you’re the the owner of all three of those. That way, if you do need to leave your agency, you need to move on. You’re going to hire someone in-house. Maybe, it’s not some weird process where you need to get access now or, you know, anything like that.

00;41;40;22 – 00;42;00;16
Sean
I can tell you, I’ve seen it with the limited amount of time I’ve spent with some clients, but like, not owning those later on down the road is going to burn you. It’s going to be very difficult. We’ve had some clients in the past, on the video side of things where I just I’m waiting for that call when they’re going to reach out to me like, hey, I can’t get access to this.

00;42;00;22 – 00;42;20;10
Sean
Yes, because I created that for you. Because you didn’t spend the five minutes to create that for yourself. Yep. And if we were a different company, there’s a chance that I’m just going to not answer that phone call. And now you don’t have access to that account that you’ve spent years building up, and you can’t transfer it, you know?

00;42;20;13 – 00;42;37;14
Sean
Yeah. So it is very important that you own all this stuff. So if, if someone like us, you know, because we will do that, we’ll tell you, you need to set up this Google Search Console, give us access. Yes. Take that time and do that. So if you’re listening right now and you don’t have access to that, get your access.

00;42;37;17 – 00;42;38;23
Patrick
Make sure you’re the owner. Yeah.

00;42;38;23 – 00;42;49;26
Sean
You have to own all that. This is your property, right? It’s very important. Yep. Especially in the digital world, when it takes so long to build up and you’re spending so much money to build this up. Don’t do it the wrong way. Do it the right way.

00;42;49;26 – 00;43;03;25
Patrick
Yeah. And it, nothing is kind of worse than having years of data, let’s say, in your Google Analytics now, you can’t get access to it and the company won’t answer phone calls, and you have to start a fresh account and you just kind of lose all that historical data. Yeah. That’s a.

00;43;03;25 – 00;43;26;00
Sean
Crusher, you know, that’s like, almost like if you change your domain name. I mean, you could be losing months of of leads. Yep. Right. So quickly, before we move on to our last point, what is what can a client of SEO for for CDN expect in a report that you do monthly? So if there are client, what are they expect?

00;43;26;02 – 00;43;53;29
Patrick
So what they expect has really driven our reporting process. Because what we don’t want to do is report for the sake of reporting and have it be kind of overwhelming list of metrics that may or may not be important. And we’re just kind of reporting to get that out. So they see something or they think something’s going on and, you know, some instances agency kind of do that.

00;43;53;29 – 00;43;58;15
Patrick
So yeah, caught on the fluff. So you get it, you think something’s going on and you move on to the next.

00;43;58;15 – 00;44;03;29
Sean
Month, or they just see that and like, oh, I’m not gonna understand this. So they just skim through it every month and right. Don’t dig any deeper.

00;44;04;00 – 00;44;39;10
Patrick
Yep. So we have spent a lot of time, talking with our clients, asking them questions. What’s most important to you? Okay. To report. And we build our reporting around that. So number one, everybody’s number one answer is ROI leads. So we lead with that obviously. We’ve number one set up ways to track form submissions, phone calls, the different quote unquote events that can happen on your website, something an action someone can take on your website that will lead to a job, potential job.

00;44;39;13 – 00;45;05;13
Patrick
So we want to kind of put those upfront, even if that number isn’t increasing yet, because one of our big things is setting the right expectations for an SEO campaign. And if we’re doing kind of that background work that we just talked about, the technical fixes or, you know, starting to write content for your website, that lead number may not be the number one metric that’s affected.

00;45;05;13 – 00;45;25;17
Patrick
Right now. And in those instances, yes, we do show those what I said earlier, those micro successes. So we want to show you impressions going up keywords moving up at least in the rankings. Because we know a keyword on page five is better than ten, right. So we want to move that up. We want to show you that progress.

00;45;25;19 – 00;45;47;08
Patrick
We have that ultimate goal of of showing you that ROI. We do want to do that. So we use we kind of tie all that together. So what I would say our, our, our biggest focus on is leads, forms that have been submitted. We do a lot of stuff with forms in order to kind of increase those conversions.

00;45;47;10 – 00;46;01;16
Patrick
One of the things that we’ve kind of noticed across the board with contractor websites is the forms are a bit clunky. There’s a lot of information people want to collect up front that may not be entirely necessary until maybe the second time you talk to that person.

00;46;01;17 – 00;46;05;26
Sean
I’ve seen some forms. Yeah. 30 questions. Right. Like no one’s answering that.

00;46;05;26 – 00;46;23;03
Patrick
Right. So we look at it, we look at that whole journey of a user and not just, hey, yes, we’re doing SEO for you. Yes, our job is to get you ranked and to get someone to your website job done. Now we want to make sure that that leads into the user having a good experience on your website.

00;46;23;03 – 00;46;29;17
Patrick
Are they getting to your form? Are they filling out that form? Then we’ve done a good job. So little.

00;46;29;17 – 00;46;29;28
Sean
Things.

00;46;29;28 – 00;46;48;07
Patrick
Yeah, a lot of little things that go into it. And then of course we do. We want to report on your rankings. We want to be extremely transparent with you can see weekly our our ranking reports update weekly. And you have full access. We encourage people to to bookmark the report and literally Monday afternoon Friday afternoon whenever it’s convenient for you.

00;46;48;08 – 00;47;11;15
Patrick
Pop it open and and check ups and downs and all that kind of good stuff. We don’t hide the keywords that have dropped, because that will happen. But really, we want you to know, 100%. Here’s what we’re focused on. Here’s our core set of what I call money keywords, like I mentioned before, and how those are kind of reacting to the things that we’re doing month in, month out.

00;47;11;17 – 00;47;36;00
Sean
I think it’s pretty cool. Like, you know, customizing how you report to each client. Yeah. It’s the same thing as, like, everyone learns differently, right? So if you’re, you know, trying to be educated, what is the best way that that you. Right, you know, absorb information. Yeah. So I think that’s really important that, you know, if your SEO company is just giving you, you know, the same report as everybody else.

00;47;36;00 – 00;47;58;06
Sean
Yeah. Maybe you need to start asking some questions, right? Yeah, definitely. So we kind of touched on this throughout the entire way or the entire episode so far. But our last point is essentially, you know, what is bad SEO, right? So we’ve touched it from here and there. But maybe let’s, let’s talk about, what are some, some of the worst SEO practices that you’re still seeing today?

00;47;58;09 – 00;48;02;21
Sean
Like I said, I know we touched on a little bit, but if there’s anything that you could think of that we haven’t yet.

00;48;02;23 – 00;48;10;15
Patrick
So for me, the number one worst SEO practice that’s done today by agencies is nothing. Nothing they do nothing.

00;48;10;18 – 00;48;15;29
Sean
You know, actually, I remember you telling me about this, and I couldn’t believe it. Yeah. So there are a lot of it’s.

00;48;16;00 – 00;48;41;27
Patrick
One of the reasons why people are somewhat untrusting of the SEO world, because there are business models out there who rely on new customers, new clients. And their goal is to keep you for as many months as possible until you realize nothing’s going on and you cancel. So they get eight months, seven months, a year of payments out of you.

00;48;41;29 – 00;48;48;25
Patrick
Meanwhile, they literally may have not even ever logged into your website. Probably even opened your website.

00;48;48;28 – 00;48;51;29
Sean
This happens a lot, is what you said. More than people would think.

00;48;52;00 – 00;49;06;25
Patrick
More than people would think. So that’s why it’s important to understand these kind of metrics that you’re seeing in the reports and knowing which ones are the fluff. That’s being just kind of shown to you for that purpose. And which ones are really impactful for you? Yeah.

00;49;06;25 – 00;49;22;17
Sean
So I could see how that could happen because, you know, SEO as as we started this episode is it’s a lot of an invisible force. You may not even know it’s working when it’s working. And to know that there are companies out there who will take your money, know that you’re not going to double check it and for six months, get a paycheck.

00;49;22;18 – 00;49;26;15
Sean
Yep. That’s wild to me. Yep. But I can see how it happens.

00;49;26;21 – 00;49;55;16
Patrick
It definitely happens. Like you said, it’s it’s it’s reliant on that kind of behind the scenes work. And they say they’re doing things and it’s really you wonder why nothing has changed. And then you move on to the next. And sometimes it’s sometimes you go through two, three, four of those companies as a business owner because you get pitched by a salesperson who, you know, is so gung ho about what they’re selling, knowing that there’s no deliverable, there’s no fulfillment on the back end.

00;49;55;19 – 00;49;57;07
Patrick
Yeah.

00;49;57;10 – 00;50;10;29
Sean
So it’s also that’s very important as to why, like knowing the basics of Google search, right? Yeah. Because then you can law and owning it so you can log in and see like, oh literally our numbers haven’t ticked up at all. Yes. That means nothing’s been done. Yep. Right.

00;50;10;29 – 00;50;11;28
Patrick
Even though this or.

00;50;11;28 – 00;50;13;13
Sean
If it’s being done is not effective.

00;50;13;14 – 00;50;41;11
Patrick
Yes, exactly. So that’s one of the other things is kind of, you know, printing out a, audit report from one of these SEO softwares that’s got a bunch of red on it, and you have all these issues, and those software is create those reports with all those issues to sell their software. A lot of times, you know, companies will be so focused on changing those red lines and the green lines, saying that they solve that issue or fix that issue.

00;50;41;13 – 00;51;05;21
Patrick
And it’s been seven, eight months of fixing these issues and your traffic hasn’t increased. Because that’s not SEO. That’s not a strategy. That’s fixing issues. What really moves the needle knowing what moves the needle. And having an agency report on those things and tell you, hey, got a new idea for your website. We want to move some content in this area.

00;51;05;23 – 00;51;27;25
Patrick
We think it’s going to, you know, help impact this service that we’re going after. This is what our focus is for this next 60 days. And we’re going to show you the progress you started here ranking. We’re going to show you as you move up, the progress, the whole way and how that translates into more traffic to the site, more traffic to the service page, and then eventually more leads for that service.

00;51;27;28 – 00;51;43;28
Sean
So it kind of sounds like also that’s important that you are communicating with your SEO person a lot. Yep. How often would you say on average you are in communication with a client on like a monthly basis? This can be a bot a.

00;51;43;28 – 00;52;07;18
Patrick
Lot, a lot. Way more than, what a lot of clients maybe used to. One of the things that we provide is a dedicated slack channel. Yeah. Slack’s a software that’s kind of an instant messaging. So you instantly, from day one of signing on, have access to 16 marketing experts that are on your team. We are your team.

00;52;07;20 – 00;52;28;00
Patrick
It’s almost like we are your internal marketing team. You can walk down the hallway to the marketing office, knock on the door and say, hey, what’s going on? It’s the same thing with slack. That’s how we we provide it. So constant communication. We like to get touchpoints. We like to share wins. We like to say, hey, we just your blog post is now on I overview this new feature on Google.

00;52;28;05 – 00;52;50;12
Patrick
You’re the number one featured website and it’s showing this great information from your site. Hey, that’s a win. We share issues. Hey, this month we dropped for this. This happened and you update rolled out from Google. We’re very transparent about, you know, the ups and downs of a campaign as well. And then on a monthly basis we report on all those metrics that, you know, we just talked about.

00;52;50;12 – 00;52;58;03
Patrick
So and really in-depth, this is what we’ve improved on. This is what we’ve seen. This is what’s going on. So.

00;52;58;05 – 00;53;17;21
Sean
Yeah. So it sounds like a really great question to be asking yourself right now, if you’re a business owner and you’re with an SEO company. When’s the last time did you talk to your SEO specialist or your account manager? Whoever. When’s the last time you talked to them? Right. So, Patrick, tell me a little bit about, what is a Google manual penalty?

00;53;17;23 – 00;53;20;02
Sean
So that’s something we need to be worried about.

00;53;20;04 – 00;53;47;02
Patrick
Not so much. Okay. A manual penalty is, is is actually reviewed by a human. A human triggers the manual penalty. And at the end of the day, it’s based on their goal of weeding out spam from the internet. Yeah. Our websites that we work with, even if there’s been some not so good SEO work done on the website, it’s still not a spam website.

00;53;47;04 – 00;54;05;25
Patrick
It’s still a business website. Yes, there’s some thin pages and blog posts with no images and all that kind of stuff. That doesn’t trigger manual penalty. It’s really when you get maybe 20,000 links overnight from a gambling website or something of that nature where it’s like more nefarious than normal.

00;54;05;28 – 00;54;12;15
Sean
I don’t know, I feel like gambling websites are probably often reaching out to contract. Yeah, all the time. Yeah. It sounds. That sounds legit. Yep.

00;54;12;15 – 00;54;28;01
Patrick
And, so and and even worse, when they get to your website now, they get redirected to another gambling website. Like it’s one of those things where like a, the website is not it’s like, a farce. It’s like it’s there for to trick you.

00;54;28;04 – 00;54;32;02
Sean
Does something like that happen often where you, you get, like a manual penalty for something like that?

00;54;32;03 – 00;54;57;05
Patrick
No, it’s. You have to. You almost have to really try to get a manual. Okay. So what? We’ll see is a penalty. It’s not really a penalty. It’s more of a behind the scenes penalty. So a few times a year Google will do a spam update. Yeah. And what they’re looking for is these spam websites out in the world that are used to kind of manipulate their rankings, and they flush them out, they weed them out.

00;54;57;08 – 00;55;15;09
Patrick
They know they have a huge, massive kind of list of these domains. And if you have a link from one of those domains that just got kind of excommunicated from Google, your rankings will drop. You didn’t get a penalty, your website didn’t get a penalty. But 10,000 links that pointed to your website just got wiped off the face of the Earth base.

00;55;15;09 – 00;55;36;10
Patrick
Yeah. So they don’t exist anymore. So your ranking does drop. So that’s more of what we’ll see. Especially for like a larger site that’s been doing SEO, let’s say for like 4 or 5 years. They’ve been through different companies. I’ve had this guy work on it, this guy work on it. They’ve got links from here in here.

00;55;36;12 – 00;56;04;13
Patrick
When a spam update comes out, that’s normally the sites that we’ll see a drop on. If you’re doing SEO correctly, you should see improvements when Google makes updates because they’re doing it to clean the internet. They’re doing it to to provide a safe experience for their customers, searchers, who don’t want to find spam websites, who don’t want to be redirected to a nefarious site when they get to the site that they clicked on type, you know?

00;56;04;13 – 00;56;17;07
Patrick
So, that’s Google’s end goal. That’s our end goal is to build quality websites. So we we’re not afraid of updates. We actually encourage updates because, it usually bumps our clients up in the ranking.

00;56;17;08 – 00;56;34;25
Sean
Yeah, that makes sense. So the last question I have for you, is we get it from time to time that a contractor is getting a, lead from a completely irrelevant location. Why might this happened? Happen?

00;56;34;27 – 00;57;06;07
Patrick
Typically, this comes as a result of an advertising campaign, that may have spread outside of the areas that you’re, you know, trying to focus on, when it comes to SEO, it doesn’t happen as often because we do get our clients some national traffic a lot. Yeah. Because we’ve written, you know, a really quality blog post that, you know, again, I use kitchen remodeling is about countertops, comparing different countertop materials.

00;57;06;07 – 00;57;16;01
Sean
And if you’re information on that is good, right? It might be in Kansas, but somebody in Massachusetts, it’s looking for the same thing. And they’re still going to read your stuff. Right.

00;57;16;03 – 00;57;33;09
Patrick
So for us that’s okay. Again, we’re our goal is to build up the authority and the trust of your website with Google and with users. So if you are providing that information freely and someone does find it because Google is determined, hey, your article is the best one that we know of for this query. We’re going to show it.

00;57;33;12 – 00;57;34;10
Sean
So you still want that.

00;57;34;10 – 00;57;50;10
Patrick
That’s building up your, you know, kind of relevance around that topic of people are finding your site and clicking on it and reading it. That’s fine. Nine times out of ten, they’ll realize where you are and may not, you know, convert as well.

00;57;50;10 – 00;57;51;02
Sean
Sure.

00;57;51;04 – 00;57;51;25
Patrick

00;57;51;28 – 00;57;55;13
Sean
But they’re still reading your content. You’re right. Your bounce rate is still going.

00;57;55;17 – 00;58;26;23
Patrick
And if they’re finding it in Kansas, then they’re finding it in Massachusetts, too. So, yeah. So yeah. What? We don’t really do and what we won’t really see very often is maybe like a service page, your kitchen remodeling page that you’re ranked for in that area won’t generally rank in other states. So it’s mostly kind of blog topics that drive that national traffic, which again, I’m fine with because, yeah, it’s building up your site, building up your relevance, and.

00;58;26;25 – 00;58;35;23
Sean
It’s going to get you closer to page one. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Perfect, man I appreciate you coming on. This is very informational. I’m cutting this short because there’s so much to talk about this.

00;58;35;27 – 00;58;40;06
Patrick
Yeah, I feel like I feel like a second episode is almost necessary.

00;58;40;08 – 00;58;59;10
Sean
Well, we already have. You plan for a second episode? Awesome. And I think it’s going to be the next one that I do, because we do. We? If you’re new to this podcast, we do one with Logan, who is usually doing an outside source. So another contractor in the space, and then I do a lot of internal stuff with people like you who are, so we can get kind of a behind the scenes of what John does.

00;58;59;12 – 00;59;19;12
Sean
So we already have you plan for the next one that I do. It’s going to be a little bit more about AI with SEO, right? So I’m pretty excited about that one because I do love AI, you know, and it’s it’s a big buzzword. It is a lot of, a lot of fear and also a lot of, information that, like, people don’t know about just yet.

00;59;19;14 – 00;59;37;27
Sean
So it’s gonna be a good episode, so make sure you come back in about a month is when that one will be done, but there’ll be another episode before that. So the main thing that we’re going to wrap up here with is SEO should not be a mystery. Don’t let it be an invisible force. So if you are not sure of whether your SEO is currently working right now, you haven’t checked in with the SEO company.

00;59;38;00 – 01;00;05;01
Sean
Or you don’t own some of your, SEO tools, you should definitely look into that right now. If you want to learn more about this, they can always come to our website, which is contractor Growth network.com. And we have a lead form on there that if you’re looking for some SEO tools or more information about it, you can reach out to that, to us and maybe even talk to someone like Patrick or Stephanie or Stuart, some of our SEO specialists here.

01;00;05;03 – 01;00;16;06
Sean
So thank you for listening. And, we’ll see you in the next one.