Ep. 22 SEO Basics With Brad Post

INTRO: Thanks for listening to our podcast today. In this podcast you’re going to hear from our CEO and President Brad Post who is speaking to a group of college students.   Brad Post, Create the Movement: My name’s Brad Post. I’m the President and CEO of Create the Movement. And my story starts out, I ended up getting my degree, but I turned a four-year degree into 14 years. So, it took me a little bit longer than most people. I got a degree, or a bachelor in ministry. So, my background is ministry. But I started at a young age. Probably, I got married at 21, had kids at 22. So, I had to quickly get into – quickly start working to supply for my family. So, I got into the corporate world. I worked at a place called Citi, if anyone can recognize the umbrella. And my goal was to be the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company. So, I was very driven. I wanted to move up. I started at the bottom in Tulsa. Worked at an office in Tulsa. Moved to Broken Arrow. Then I moved to Tampa, and then to Atlanta. And when I was in Atlanta, actually when I was in Tampa – just kind of my testimony, I grew up in church. I had values of church. I could quote scripture. But I didn’t have a relationship with Jesus. So, when I started down in Tampa, I started going to church, and I played the guitar. So, I got into the Praise Team. Was saved. Moved up to Atlanta. Was working in the corporate world. My pastor started mentoring me in leadership. And I took a 75% pay cut, and a giant step of faith, and went from the corporate world into full-time ministry. And we were the fast-growing church. Grew from probably 50 members to a 1000 members over about a year, year and a half. And I started out as an assimilation pastor, connections pastor, just trying to set up systems and structures for people to connect to the church: small groups, Church 101, 201, 301, the membership classes, that type of stuff. And I also, about a year after that, felt led to go into student ministry. So, I went into student ministry and grew the student ministry. We were going to a lot of church conferences, fastest-growing church conferences, and I felt led to start a church. But my heart was in Tulsa. Born and raised here. Our vacations, we didn’t go to the beach or to the mountains, we came back to Tulsa to visit family. So, my heart was here. So, we moved back here. And moved back, no job, no place to live – just on a step of faith. And it ended up we had a place to live. I lived with my father-in-law and mother-in-law, so we stayed there. And I knew that I was going to have to be bi-vocational as I planted a church, and also needed to work to supply for my family. So, I got a job at another company, a marketing company here in Tulsa. And started working sales for them. I was selling them websites, and search engine optimization, and social media packages. So, I had to learn really quickly. So, I was working there selling products that I didn’t know what they were, so I had to learn. Planting a church. I’ve got three kids. You know? Active in the community. I was burning the candle at both ends. We were doing quite a bit. I shared a little bit last week. We started our church, and had a friend of mine help me build a website. So, I wanted to learn how to show up in the search engines. And so, I started blog posting. Started researching, and seeing how we could show up well in the search engines. We did. We planted the church. Worked it for about a year and a half. And then just felt, my wife and I, just felt like God wasn’t calling us to create a movement within a church. I felt Him saying it was going to be more in business. So, stepped out of the company that I was working at. Helped grow it from three employees up to 18 employees in about a year and a half. And we just had some substantial growth. There was just kind of difference in vision on where the company was going in leadership. So, I went and started my own company. And that’s where Create the Movement came in. So, Create the Movement, we started in a barn. Which, you know, if you look at it Apple started in a garage, the Wright Brothers started in a garage or barn, you know, The Ramones started in a garage. I don’t know if you’ve seen that commercial. But anyway, we started in a barn, and then moved downtown to an office. And it was a 10’ by 10’ room. No outside windows. There were three desks in there. We were, you know, really crowded. But, it was an office, and it was in downtown. And, you know, we started, kind of growing our business. And then we moved about 7 months ago to an office across the hall that actually had, you know, their own private offices. And a bigger office with outside windows so we could see if it was raining or whatnot outside. And, just really kind of had explosive growth. We’re now at 14 employees. And now, we’re kind of in part of creating a culture for our business. We’re a small business, so, you know, we don’t have insurance, we don’t have 401k, so we’ve got to create a positive culture. So, we’ve kind of developed that culture. But that’s kind of my story, but I want to kind of get into some basics, and some in-depth stuff on search engine optimization. So, do you guys all know what search engine optimization is? Or, do you want me to give you a brief explanation? Basically, what it is, and I joke around, but I didn’t know how to spell SEO when I started. You know? So, I had to learn really quickly. So, search engine optimization is basically when you build a website Google, which 80% of the world uses Google. So, you’re not going to hear me referring to Bing, or Yahoo!, or anything like that. We always talk about Google. Because the majority of the people are there. So, search engine optimization’s basically building your website. There’s internal, and then there’s external search engine optimization. Internal’s when you built the website. You know? You have your home page, your ‘About’ page, all the different types of pages. So, you’re looking at content on each one of those pages. And when I say content it’s usually written content that Google can come in and index and see. But you also want to make sure that you’re using Google Keyword Planner. And I’ll get into that a little bit more in presentation. What Google Keyword Planner is it’s basically letting you know what people are searching for, and how many searches those people are searching for so that you can write your content based on what people are searching for. And when you’re building a site there’s some basics on each page that you want to make sure of. And that you have title tags, meta descriptions, h1, h2 tags, are kind of the same. Title tags, I was going over with Matthew here, is basically, it’s kind of at the top of your website. You’ll see, you’ll usually see it at the top here what a title tag is. Google Best Practices basically says that they recommend that that is no longer than 70 characters. So, you can have up to two or three keywords, as long as they’re within those 70 characters. Tulsa Photography/Photographers in Tulsa. That type of stuff. And then in meta description, you don’t necessarily see the meta description on the website. But when you do a Google search, normally the thing that comes up is right down here, is your meta description. And so, you want to make sure that your meta description and your title tag have the same keyword in it. So, it makes sense? And then you also want to make sure that you have, you know, either h1 or h2 tags that have that same keyword. So, Tulsa Photographers would be a title tag. In your meta description you’d want to write a brief sentence, it’s usually a 165 characters, in the meta description. But you’d want to make sure that it includes the exact keyword. Anytime you put images on your website, you want to make sure that they have alt-text. So, there’s a little alt-text. And it doesn’t have to be the exact keyword, but you want to make sure that it has something in there relevant to the photo. And then, as far as search engine optimization, there’s link building. There’s internal and external link building. Internal’s pretty self-explanatory. Meaning on a page you have content, and then you have a keyword, or word, that you can click to that goes to another page within your site. Or, if you have a blog post, it’s a three-part blog post, there’s three different blogs you want to link back blog #2, or #1, in your blog #3. So, you want to make sure that you have internal links, but you don’t want to overdo internal links. You want to probably have two, three internal links. I’m kind of giving you updated search engine optimization because there’s, because Dominick kind of talked a little bit about black-hat SEO last week. And just about some of the things that people were doing. Some people were doing internal links – like over doing it. And so, Google Best Practices – you don’t need to have this many internal links. External links, we talked a little bit about, are when you are going to like a yellopages.com and submitting your business information. And then you put your link to your website, or, if somehow, you get Tulsa World to write an article on what you’re doing and you get a link on the Tulsa World website. Social media, different directories, different blogs. You know, if you want to write, we we’re talking, you know, if you want to go to a photography, I’m going to pick on photography, but, if you want to go to another photographer’s blog, or if their highlighting different photographers and write a brief blog about, you know, a wedding that you shot. Put a picture on there. Put a link back to your website. They approve it. You get an external link. So, Google basically looks at, it’s all about relevance. They’re trying to find what’s the most relevant search. If you to go and search for ‘Mexican restaurant in Tulsa’ and ‘Tulsa photographers’ came up, you would probably get frustrated with Google and go use Bing, or DuckDuckGo, or some other search engine. So, their whole thing is just relevance. And they look at external links as relevance. If you have 396 external links compared to another site that has zero, then they’re going to say, “Hey, they’re more relevant because they have more links.” Now, when we talk about links this is important because there was an update, a Google algorithm update, that hurt a lot of websites. Dominick shared a little bit about this. It was all black hat, well, it wasn’t necessarily black hat, it worked at the time. But now Google is basically giving domain authorities to each site. So, if you outsourced work to India and they went and built a bunch of different directory sites, with all it was was a ‘link farm,’ is what they called it. Then Google will look at that and go, “This is not a good site. Domain authority is low.” It would penalize your website. So, you want to make sure that the links that you’re linking your website to have good domain authority. So, does that make sense? So, we’re going to go through some Google tools that they really like – Google’s goal is somewhat to put SEO companies out of business. But Google is so complicated, they have so many different things that you can use, that, you know, we’ve gone through what, years and years of training and watching videos. Right Matt? So far as learning the different tools that they use, and sometimes people are just like, “You do it for us. We don’t want to learn.” So, Google Analytics – and I’ll go over that here in a minute. There’s also Google My Business, or Google Maps. There’s Google Webmaster Tools, Google Keyword Planner, and then this links, and I’ll – I think I got everyone’s email – is a link to a search engine optimization starter guide. It’s about a 50-page document. It’s somewhat technical, but it will kind of give you an idea of what, you know, Google’s looking at. And kind of goes over a lot of this. So, Google Analytics. It basically shows people coming to your website. You know? How many people came to your website. How many of those were, you know, users, new users. How many pages they visited while they were on your website. I mean it shows so much information. Google Analytics has got a ton of different information. It shows what a bounce rate is. Meaning, when people come to your website and they jump off - it’s a bounce rate, which isn’t good. You want to have that percentage lower. You know? Low is - probably lower than 40% is good. Just because Google will look at the average duration on your site, how many pages they visited on your site, just to see if their search gave what you we’re looking for. If you went to multiple pages. If that’s what you were looking for. You know? If you were, again, searching for a Mexican restaurant and you just pulled up a, you know, a photography site. Jump off of it because that’s not what you’re looking for. And Google Analytics, it’s basically free, you just have to have a Gmail account and you can set it up. They give you what they call a UA code. And you set that up on your website – on the backend of your website. And Google will start tracking, basically everything that’s done. It’ll also show where your traffic is coming from. So, you have four different one: referral, direct, social, and organic. Organic is people just searching relevant terms and then yours shows up in the search engine; and that’s how they found you. Social is just social media. You know? If people found you through Facebook, or Twitter, or whatnot. Direct is if they literally just typed in the URL itself – .com and then went to it. Referral, I want to go into this real quick. This kind of helps to look at where people are coming from. So, this site, we’ve got some rank checker online with a high bounce rate. So, 222 visits. That’s not good. So, we’ll want to add a filter to filter that out. But I won’t get too detailed on filters. But it will kind of show you like where all of the different referral...