#146: SEO For Amazon and Ecommerce

Norman Ferrar  0:01  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with norm the AMC FBA and e-commerce podcast. Alright, I’m late, I’m sorry, technical problems again, I can continue to blame Kelsey, but this one’s on me. My mic wasn’t working. So I thought instead of miming I would try to fix it before the show. Anyways, there’s so many excuses why we’re always late. Usually it is costo. Okay, so for today on the show, we have a new guest, Steve Whiteman and from the vitamin consulting group. And we’re going to be talking about SEO for Amazon, and e-commerce. So don’t miss it if you want to learn more. This is a topic especially on e-commerce and Amazon, we’re going to be talking about some really cool ways that you can pop up in the Google listing. So stay tuned. And now where is my son? How are you sir?

Kelsey

 I’m doing fantastic. How are you? 

Norman Ferrar

Well, one day of sunshine yesterday, we had one day of summer and so far. Yeah, it’s back to the rain back to rain. Yep. So let me see who we got here. so far. We got Dr. Cause Tony Simon, how are you? How are you? 

Kelsey  1:34  

Welcome to the show everyone if you’re watching, yeah, let us know where you’re watching from. It’s always great to see our international group and where everyone is tuning in from. And I guess I’ll do my part, as usual. So smash those like buttons. If you’re watching right now. That’d be fantastic. Also, we have our YouTube channel. That’s where all of the good stuff happens,all the episodes and daily highlights are there. So that’s just Norman Farrar. But if you search lunch with Norm, I’m sure you’ll be able to find us as well. Also welcome Tony, or Andrew and red. It’s good to see everyone. And look, Where is he this guy traveled to? Yeah, no, it’s insane. But also, if you’re interested in joining our Facebook group, that’s lunch with norm Amazon FBA and e-commerce collective. That’s where the good stuff happens. That’s where you can interact with the beer nation community. And yeah, I think that’s about it from my side. If you have any questions about SEO, put them in the comment section. And we’ll be sure to get to them. And that’s about it. 

Norman Ferrar  2:41   

You know, I’m kind of excited about this. I had my start in SEO, you know, many years ago, and I actually got out of it, because I thought it was getting saturated. You know, my mistake. But anyways, you know, I’m excited about talking to Steve, because he’s dealt with some major companies like Disney in Skechers, and Honda and Applebee’s. So he really does know his stuff. But anyways, if you’re gonna pay attention. But also, if you have any questions, put it over to the comment section. And now you can sit back, relax, grab that cup of coffee. I did and enjoyed the show. Hey, Steve. Hey, norm. How are you? We the man? You got it right this time? Yeah, there we go. I knew I’d screw it up. But you know, yeah, I was sitting there saying your name. And I’m going, you just told me your name. And I said it wrong. But…

Steve  3:38  

You know, it’s been one of those mornings. My name, my name is a little bit goofy. And then I had to wear a hat today. I forgot to comb my hair when I left the house. So I just realized I look like an elf on camera when I’m wearing a hat. And I think well, I look like I’m not a hat person. So I don’t know. There we go. Okay. Well, thanks for having me for sure. I’m excited to talk about SEO and share some of my experience and some tips and tricks that might help those digital marketers with, you know, doing some ecommerce, SEO.

Norman Ferrar  4:04  

Yeah, I love to hear this. This is always a, you know, I’m fascinated with SEO and ranking. And I got out when all these updates were coming out, like back in the 90s. And you’d be ranking number one and you know the system. And then Google came out with Panda and then you know it was pigeon and then it was whatever other penguins.

Steve  4:28  

It’s the Google zoo. So I’ve even called this last one that happened over the weekend and it’ll be interesting. I don’t know if it’ll be some other bird. But we’ll call it gnome. No, we were one of the first ones to talk about it..

Norman Ferrar 4:46  

Alright, so why don’t we talk a little bit about yourself. For those people who don’t know you can he just give us a little bit of your background?

Steve  4:54  

Sure. Of course. You know, I kind of grew up in the IT area my was in the army. Until 97, and I got out and immediately fell in love with computers and this new thing called the internet. I was creating these these gadi sites for friends and DJs. And, you know, Babylon boss buttons everywhere and scrolling marquees and animated GIFs. And all the crazy wacky things we used to do back in the day. And while I was working at IBM, I discovered that a lot of the businesses were starting to create their own websites more than just a brochure, but with functionality, things that you could actually do not just go to our website to get our contact info, right, and discover, you know, love for being able to actually move things that were offline to online and went back to school, got a degree in business management and continued to kind of fulfill my passion and in digital when my clients came back and like, Hey, we love our websites, but marketing any business out of it. So I had to learn how to get traffic to the sites before there was even a thing called SEO right. We were just doing website promotion or internet marketing, right? There was no SEO. So um, so yeah, I fell in love with that I started following people like Danny Sullivan and Bruce clay and Aaron wall. And, you know, all the pioneers in the industry. And I started to create my own sort of ebooks on you know, kind of compiling all the different things I learned in a way that was structured. I was the checklist guy so so I continued as SEO Steve in the in the 2000s picked up a really exciting job at Disney. I was reading the the paid search for Disney commerce and Disney marketing one tickets, packages reservations, the other one MIMO attraction Disney grad night, right. And then we had this new property called Adventures by Disney Adventures by Disney was all flash. So all Google saw and Bing and well, at the time, MSN, all they saw was a swift file this, you know, no keyword, little file that has absolutely nothing to do with anything. So I was able to convince my my boss at the time that I could do SEO, but to convince him, I had to show him that I could show up in the search results for the term SEO expert. And I’m like, Well, I show up for Orange County SEO expert in 2005 2006. And he’s like nobody searches that show me that you can show for SEO expert. So I created a page, I did your standard page level optimization, I got it to appear on page one, and I went back to my boss and I’m like, there you go. I’m on page one, check it out. And he’s like, well, you’re not number one. I’m like, oh my god. So I go back, I do a little bit of offline marketing, I tell people to search, I have them search. So who can see me in the search results, who clicked on my result, right. And I do a show of hands and a little bit of that exercise along with just continuing to get more links to that page, got me to that number one position, and I was able to convince, you know, the the group to basically take that flashlight and turn it into a hybrid. So it was party in the front and business in the back as opposed to your your normal, you know, saying there and, and it worked. We were able to get Google to actually index pages like family traveling to Ireland and, and so forth. And so when when the time a lot of my department was moving to celebration, I decided, hey, maybe I can do this on my own. So I left the corporate world and started freelancing, literally walking around the block, knocking on doors saying, you know, hey, I used to work for Disney, I have a degree in business management. Can I can I help you with your website? You know, my first couple of days, I picked up a couple $250 clients. And by the end of the month, I picked up $17,000 with the business. And I hadn’t done any of the work yet. So you can imagine what that that fifth week was like, it was a very, very long week. But yeah, that started my my kind of freelance career. And then 2010 I was just Steve Wiedemann, SEO expert. And then 2015, we incorporated a lot of the folks I’d worked with in different capacities were referring me, I was still getting traffic from some of the keyword rankings. But at some point, I found out that the reason I was getting blacklisted from a lot of these these community events, these big SEO conferences was because they saw that SEO expert ranking as a way of bragging, they thought I was like a braggart or something. And and I looked at it from that 30,000 foot view, you know, kind of taking it personal like I never bragged anyone. I’m like the most easygoing guy in the world. Why would they think that of me? And so yeah, when I looked at it from a distance, I’m like, yeah, that that does look like bragging. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t seem like something that is going to help me be part of the community. It seems like I’m saying I’m the best. And so I eventually got rid of that page. And now I get to be a better part of the community. I’ve made some incredible friends. I’ve done some some pretty amazing events. And I wouldn’t ever go back. I don’t think I’m ever going to have an SEO expert page again. So So yeah, you’ve asked about brands so yeah, the Disney folks were fun. The Skechers brand working with Tim over there has been amazing. At the moment, we have Applebee’s and I hop in about 3500 locations that we’re trying to support during the recovery from this pandemic. It’s been a it’s been a fun adventure.

Norman Ferrar  9:55  

Well, yeah, that’s quite the story. Oh, All right, so you know me I have my little Amazon brand and you know, now I’ve got used Skechers, Disney all this stuff. I feel so small. Anyways, we have a giveaway that looks like an elf norm. Come on. We have a giveaway today. And it’s a very cool after you’ve heard that. So everybody who’s listening after you’ve heard this, okay, so we’re not talking just a guy that took an SEO course. But let’s talk about the giveaway today.

Steve  10:32  

Perfect. So yeah, I’d love to give away for everybody who’s listening, I did, I do teach a course at Cal State Fullerton. And I use a lot of that same material to create a course of our own that we’re giving away to everybody. So if you if you’d like to take that same course that my college students are taking a very similar version of it, you can go to Academy of search running up my little Academy search shirt on today. Just use promo code SEO Steve, that was the old tag name when I was still relevant. Now I wear a bag over my head that says I’m not important anymore. But use SEO Steve, and you’re more than welcome to take that course we are updating it this year, and that promo code will still be good. So feel free to, you know, take the course visited again in a couple of months if you found some of the content 2020 ish. And, and we’re also giving away one strategic call with with someone. So that’ll be something fun, where we actually take a lot of input from you in terms of what your challenges are and who your competitors are. We’ll we’ll do a little bit of research. And then we’ll sit down and and together go through technical, contextual and off page visibility strategy for you For you know, a good solid and I think we got about 90 minutes.

Norman Ferrar  11:39  

All right, fantastic. So if you’re interested in entering our contest, today, it is hashtag we’ll have Kelsey, if you want to get to entries just tagged to other people. Okay, so let’s get started. There’s a lot of things that have changed over the last 20 years. But there’s there are a lot of things that have stayed the same. And I’d like to start there. So for people just to get better SEO, before we get into any techniques. What would you recommend that people do that Google is really looking for?

Steve  12:15  

Sure. Well, the principles never changed. The principles of search for organic search results, really, it’s in these are algorithms right there. They’re not just, we looked at it once, and we’re gonna score you and we’re never gonna look at you again. Right? They’re revisiting your website every day. So a lot of what searches is around patterns. And they’re looking at patterns of growth in three areas. So the three areas I would focus on with your digital marketing team, with your agency, or with yourself, if you’re doing it yourself, are going to be making sure that your page continues to be more relevant than the other pages that appear for the keyword that you’re trying to rank for that relevancy signal. The second is the off page signal. How often are you appearing on other websites, relevant websites, not your cousin Joe’s mechanic shop, right? We’re talking about sites that relate to your industry. Or perhaps they’re they’re larger sites that get a lot of traffic, like new sites, where you’re going to either get a link, or a mention from a site that either is going to attract links and mentions itself, whether it’s going to drive actual relevant referral traffic, how do you find those will look at your paid ad data, look at your display data in Google ads, pull that report, because those are those are the actual pages that are sending you converting traffic, those are great for getting links from and then you know, maybe a page that’s just there’s going to be seen by 1000s of people. Even if you don’t get, you know, a good referral from it. It’s great for brand awareness, and it’s going to get hit a lot of times by search engines. The third is, is of course, the actual search appearance of what users see in the search results. So it’s not just being the most relevant and being the most popular off the website. It’s also about how users interact with your, your site in the search results. If if somebody who’s not as relevant as you has a much more compelling title and description that show up in the search results, and they get clicked on more often. And they still kind of find what they need, even though they didn’t have as much of a delightful experience as it did on your website. Over time search engines might infer that maybe your result wasn’t as helpful. So you want to continuously test different things test, more rich results, test putting, you know, Star snippets, you know is from ratings and product reviews, or whatever, tests, FAQ markup test, putting a video thumbnail and image thumbnail test all sorts of different structured data to see what your users are interacting with and look at your click through rates in Search Console. So if you’re if you’re looking at those three things from an organic SEO standpoint, every month and setting some specific KPIs, with your developer, with your writer, and maybe somebody else on the team who’s in charge of that search experience, then all you’re going to see is growth on the local side of things. It’s a little bit different when you’re trying to rank up a business in the map pack for example, the localized results. Do you Use different signals that start with your business information. So the proximity, of course, to where the user is, isn’t something you can change, you know, unless you can magically take your whole business uplifted and move it close to where the user searching from, or hiking in some fantasy world, that’s never going to happen. So the four things we pay attention to, to try to maximize how much visibility we get, is making sure that our business data is accurate. And onpoint, making sure the page that we put in the Google My Business and being local website address is a page that that has all the same information that you’re giving them in your profile, we’re going to make sure that our business data is everywhere, it possibly can be your local Chamber of Commerce, it’s going to be in your local business directories, it’s going to be in your industry directories, if you’re a lawyer, you’re going to be in lawyers calm and Avvo, and justia, and so forth. And the last part is really the reputation. Nobody clicks on a one star rating, right? They just don’t they they want to, they want to choose the listing that has, you know, a lot of positive and good reviews happening. And then when there are a few bad ones, they want to see that the business is responding to it. And not just in Google Maps, and Yelp and Facebook, everywhere where people are talking about you, you want to make sure that you’re listening and you’re responding as quickly as possible. If you’re nurturing all four of those areas for local every month, and you take keeping the the team accountable to them. The data management, the local page, the business data visibility and the reputation again, you’re just gonna see growth, and that’s your metric. It’s not okay, we need to go from here to here. It’s no it’s it’s continuously massage and nurture these areas so that we just see growth over time. And then you’re doing great for SEO, at least on the organic and local side of things.

Norman Ferrar  16:40  

So just to go back, I didn’t want to interrupt you, but you talked about the map pack. What is that for people that don’t know?

Steve  16:48  

Sure. Those are the three map listings that appear in a web search. So if you’re on an Android device, and you do a search for a restaurant near me, the first three, maybe four with an add listings will actually be the map listings. And with those map listings, there’ll be a phone number link, a website link, the business information, address, phone number, etc. It used to be this seven back or either seven of those listings. Now it’s three rumors have it that maybe that like the shopping listings, how they went from free to paid that that map pack might eventually also be a paid feature? Who knows. But we kind of predicted it a few years ago, and now we’re actually starting to see more ads in both desktop and mobile search results within the maps itself. So who knows it could happen.

Norman Ferrar  17:35  

Yeah, I mean, who knows? Now I have on our clubhouse, call the other day, and you’re welcome to come on as a guest, I’d love to have you I’d love to. That’d be fun. So on our clubhouse room on Thursdays, we had Colin Campbell on and he serial entrepreneur, and he came on with something completely different. I didn’t think he’d be laying down this type of information. But he said, one of the things that changed his listing, and his traffic was something very simple. And he heard it at a conference and he just did it. He said we laid out our title, like our meta information wrong. He said that we were putting our inner company information up front, right base pipe, and then whatever it was, he says, all we did is we had to change this around New, like, Is that something you would do for your lane? So

Steve  18:30  

2011? Yeah, this if you go back to archive.org, you look at Skechers, calm, it was Skechers official website. And then if there was room at the end, Google would put in some information about the product. And was that as the same thing across every single page on their website, hundreds of pages, all having the exact same title and description. And so we said, hey, let’s, let’s test something, let’s roll out a change with the title, or we put the product at the front, right and, and we’ll keep the brand in there. Even though I’m kind of a fan of just using the brand for the homepage brands already in the URL, they can see it. But at the time, we had longer titles to work with. All right, let’s do 1011. Now it’s a little bit shorter, the pixel space that you have is a little bit shorter, but we had product name by Skechers starting at and the lowest price available in that category, or the lowest price that was on the product page itself. So by putting the price in the the title, and having the product at the beginning of the URL, you know, helped invoked a couple of those principles that we think about for writing titles and descriptions. And that’s, you know, using a call to action, the keyword you want to appear for and some sort of a value proposition or or selling proposition Why? Why should I click your listing versus the other nine listings that are there. Right so the call to action was by you know, the value proposition was putting starting out in the lowest price we can actually use and in some cases you might do something like award winning or leading or lowest price guarantee. To read or just something to compel them to want to choose you versus someone else, and the call to action tells them that this page isn’t a blog post, it’s an actual page where you can purchase something. So I think I think you’re right, I think, removing the brand, because we’re limited on space from everything except for the homepage. And using that space to try to include the keyword, a call to action and a value proposition. And I think if you search for title tag principles, you’ll probably even see my little Rich Snippet right there with those three things. And it seems to work pretty well for pretty much every client that we’ve done those tests for. But if you’ve got a lot of content, don’t just roll it out at once, like we did with Skechers. That CTR, by the way, the click through rates change was was dramatic. In fact, after the show, I’ll see if I can share a screenshot to show you just what that impact looked like, when we did that switch from brand name, you know, to a more click enticing title and description. It was it was really exciting to see it and I’ll see if just just so that you have something for context. But yeah, I wouldn’t, I would test a limited number, especially if you’re doing e commerce and you’re you’ve got you know, 1000 skews, maybe start with, I don’t know, 50 skews and run that test and see how that click through rates is impacted. Before you just roll it out across the whole website and schedule those tests line up a few tests and run them, you know, periodically caught me in a cough Just a sec. Now it’s all good. That’s cigar cough, cough in public. Now I cough in public now. And it’s like time freezes. And everyone’s staring at you. And like Oh, man, yeah, it’s just it was just a cough.

Norman Ferrar  21:34  

So this is like just using that one little tidbit, it can make a huge change. And I was wondering like when you’re so website, you might have an about as a contact as the blog, would you also use those principles, putting keywords into like before your About Us page. A lot of people I just see about us, and then the name or the name of the company and about

Steve  22:03  

when when we when anyone does a search engine strategy, part of that strategy should be looking at search terms that have actually driven traffic in the past through search console and any other web analytics you have access to. It should also be looking at that maybe some of the search terms that you’ve appeared for maybe in sem rush, or H refs, these SEO tools that are available. And then looking at the competitors search terms, maybe you do a filter where you remove their name, because you’re not gonna try to rank for their name. And then you take all that information, aggregate it, maybe run a pivot table to see which ones come up the most often. And then of all those search terms from your own data. And from the competitor data, you can start to build your own sitemap based on how people are searching for your products, your services, some of them, you’ll look at and say, hey, these are people looking to buy, some of them you’re looking at and say these are people that aren’t yet in that stage to buy. But there’s a lot of volume for it, it’s a broad term, let’s see if we can create maybe a definition page or a how to page for this to, you know, to build brand awareness, attract some links, you know, and maybe have that as a supportive page that, you know, to help that main sales page to rank better. I think if the if the approach is let’s, let’s figure out our information architecture strategy and build our website and our navigation around how people search, as opposed to Hey, let’s let’s just put out an about page link to a blog. You just it’s not a data driven navigation approach. It’s, here’s what I want to share, as opposed to here’s what my customers are searching approach. So with, with that, you know, of course, you’ve got your sales pages, you have your upper funnel marketing pages that attract links and sharing and mentions, then you’ve got that informational content. You mentioned the about page, the privacy policy, I can’t imagine what you would optimize that for I do have a page on our website about me. Right. And it’s a cheesy page with some silly pictures and little commercial I was in and stuff. So when somebody does do about Steve Wiedemann, or Steve Friedman biography, yeah, I’ve got that page there. But that’s like this compared to people who are searching for SEO strategy, right? So so I don’t really optimize any any of the informational pages for keywords, I focus, you know, on, on the content strategy around search terms that I find from my own data, and from those competitor insights usually lined up in some sort of a Google Sheet or in a smart sheets, or a project management system. So I know for the next three or four years, what content I need to create to continue to attract more visitors to my website. I’ve had

Norman Ferrar  24:34  

a bunch of people say that they pay no attention to meta description. For me, I think it’s important that at least you put the description in there because that’s another way to engage clients or customers, you know, they

Steve  24:49  

see your ad, essentially, I mean, it’s organic, but that’s what people see if, if it’s relevant to the page. Sometimes if it’s not, if you’re just writing something to make it look like an ad. I’ve seen Google just ignore it altogether. Use the snippet from the page, we do have to make sure that that that description is descriptive of the content that’s on the page. But beyond that, I think it’s fantastic way to, to convince visitors. So we mentioned that the three title principles, right the call to action, the key word, the value proposition, if we do the same thing in the meta description, but switch it up instead of by we use purchase, or order or, or whatever. And instead of the key word being that that focus keyword, maybe we use the derivative or the second most searched keyword in that cluster of keywords we want that page to rank for. And then we come up with even different or better value proposition. So now you’ve doubled up, you’ve got, you know, double down on on trying to convince the user to want to choose your listing. And if the word that they searched isn’t in your title, they’ll still bold it in the description, and that bolding will grab their attention. So while Google and other search engines might not use the meta description and words in it, directly in keyword ranking, there is this this causation of the user actually seeing their search term bolded in that description, and choosing the listing specifically because of that. So I wouldn’t exclude keywords in the description simply because Google said, they’re not going to use the description as a ranking signal, because the user is going to choose your result more often if that result was helpful to them. And most of the time, that means including a word or two that they searched.

Norman Ferrar  26:25  

We’ve got Steve for a half hour. Okay, he’s got a hard cut off. But, look, if you’ve got a question about SEO, there’s no stupid questions. Okay, we’re here, we’re ready to take your questions. And you’re just not going to have an opportunity to have a guy like Steve sit down and answer them. So, you know, please don’t feel like you know, you might have a bad question or anything like that. We get them all the time, Steve is here. And believe me, he knows 1000 times more than I do about SEO. But But the other thing is, and you know, very important, if you like what you’re hearing, you know, make sure that you do smash those like buttons and and follow us, you know, building our community is very important to us. And also we’ve got the great console. So just imagine what you’re hearing right now, if you could sit down with Steve for a half hour or so. And just tap his brain, what you can do for your site and your Amazon listing. So the next thing I’m I’m thinking about Oh, yeah, and that is hashtag, we’ll have Kelsey, the other thing I see. And that I love. And it if you don’t know how to do it, you’ll never get into it is the answer box. So can you explain to people just, you know, some simple ways of trying to get in to that elusive answer box

Steve  27:51  

positions, zero featured answer the coveted position zero and Google? Yeah, it’s, and it’s important, not just because you want to be in that top position. But it’s important, because my understanding is that 70% of voice queries that you run on your Google Assistant, will source the information from that featured answer. So not always, you have tested a few times where it didn’t come up, but about 70% of the time, you’re going to get that featured answer, which is great for brand awareness, it’s great for voice search, you know, it’s it’s just a really, you know, overall awesome way to build authority and be that in that, you know, number zero spot to get that it’s, it’s gonna vary based on the type of content and the type of query that was made. So if, if Google feels like a checklist is the most appropriate. In those cases, you want to make sure that your your answer your page that offers that information, has a very short, simple checklist, not one where your bullet is, you know, 16 words long, maybe keep it under eight or nine words, for each bullet, or each number, a number point, I think that’s that’s the starting point. If you see that Google likes to display a list for that, and you want that list to be yours, start by creating that first on your top of your page on your website, maybe even put a copy to clipboard button next to it. So other folks who read that content can share it, the more that Google’s crawling through the internet and looking at, you know, the question, which is probably your subheading, or your heading on the page, and then that they see that answer across the internet, they start to assume that maybe that answers the best answer. And they might serve that. And there was a bit of an exploit that still hasn’t really been resolved yet where, you know, we had a client that had that feature to answer spot right at the top. Because the content was amazing. And a few people shared it, maybe three or four other web sites. And then all of a sudden, we lost it to this other website. And what I did is I took a snippet of that feature and answer, put it in quotes and did a Google search. And we found like 10,000 spammy web pages that we’re sharing that so there’s a lot of really blackhat strategies that are happening right now. Honey, welcome strategies, just blatant blackhat spam All right, using old school tools, try to blast your short answer your featured, you know, answer goal across the internet. I’ve mentioned it to john Mueller and email, didn’t get a response, have mentioned this to, you know, to other Googlers and hopes that someone will start to treat it in the same way they did with that Penguin update where they either ignore or penalize sites that are doing that sort of manipulative work to get that feature an answer, it doesn’t happen for all industries is really competitive industries. This was a luxury watch website. So you still have an opportunity. So when you do create that short summary, that short checklist, and by the way, if you are just using a paragraph, and you realize, you know, Google seems to prefer a paragraph, keep it under 375 characters, make sure it’s right at the top of the page, you know, when when visitors get to that page, they actually see that short summary right at the top, make sure it’s shareable. So they can, you know, copy it and put it as their answer. And then take that once that page is published, take that short answer, and maybe do a little bit of social media with it, create a custom image, put that text in the description, description of YouTube video description, and your Facebook, post your your Instagram, maybe you’ve got an image on the page that you could use where you put it in your Pinterest and describe it with that paragraph. So that when Google bots crawling to the web, they find on controlled sites that you run that same piece of content with a heading or a subheading, that is the word that you want to appear for how to where to why to? And most of those feature answers, as you know, are, are really upper funnel, I know some, some SEO seem really ticked off, because they feel like some of the results are causing their sites not to get clicked on. If I got my answer. Why would I click on the listing? Because I got my short answer. I don’t need to click on it. So they feel like they’re losing traffic. And the reality is that those pages are showing up for upper funnel queries. They’re not they’re not customers yet, right? They’re the people that are doing it how to where to why, what ideas, strategies, tips, you know, those those aren’t customers yet. So those people who do find it helpful and interesting are going to continue to share it, it attracts links, so you don’t have to pick up the phone and say, Hey, will you link to me, it’s an organic link strategy. And then you don’t have to worry about losing revenue, because that person again, isn’t a customer for for those types of queries for e commerce purchase buyer face queries, Google’s not showing featured answers. And they’re showing shopping listings. And they’re showing, you know, regular organic results. So I don’t look at your data. And if you really feel like, Hey, I’m still losing revenue, because they’re not clicking, send me a note. And we can look at it together and we can figure out a way around it. But for the most part, I wouldn’t worry about it at all, getting that featured answer is a win.

Norman Ferrar  32:35  

So we write a lot of content, we put a lot of content on the different brands that we have. We’ve usually had the intro, maybe the paragraph or two and then we have multiple tables within that. So you know, we want to write it 1500 words 2500 words like long, bloody articles. would you suggest that moving the so you’ve got your title, we have a header and then moving the the information up to the top and then starting your article.

Steve  33:11  

So yeah, the framework for a well optimized upper funnel page starts with that main h1, right at the top of the page. So the user sees you know what, what it is that they searched for. And it immediately says, Hey, you search for this, this is what this is what’s on this page, or we don’t want to confuse them by putting a subtopic or something on there. So it should be a compelling headline. Maybe it includes that keyword that we’re trying to optimize for. And then we would have our short summary or, yeah, we have h1, you have your short summary, tell them what you’re going to tell them. And then break it down with your subheadings and supporting paragraphs. So keep up like the modern language Association’s old guide on how to how to write a thesis paper, right? Tell them what you’re gonna tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them. If you maintain that structure, it’s a great experience for users that have accessibility issues, because it reads as you know, as as you know, heading summary, subheading paragraph and it’s in a nice sequence. So it’s it’s easy to read, if they had CSS and images turned off. It’s a great experience for accessibility. It’s a great reading experience, if you’re, you know, navigating through the webinar in a way that doesn’t use images and CSS. And it’s just a really good structure to maintain. So it’s intuitive. In fact, I think Google talks about it in their Starter Guide, they talk about how they want your page to have you know, really good structure use a strong headline and supportive subheadings that that first paragraph though is, is something that we used to put at the bottom right we wanted we wanted to time on page that’s our goal, get them to stay on the page. So make them scroll to the bottom to get that content. And that’s just not a good experience, especially this month coming up in June. This page experience update is coming up which I know everyone’s really focused on core web vitals but think about it this the phrases page experience, do you like having to scroll to the bottom of the page to get the information you want? For, or do you like being able to see it right away. As a user, you want to see it right away. And if it is a long form page, I’ll also put a table of contents below that paragraph with the links to jump to links for those subheadings that are gonna be on the page. And oftentimes, those subheadings are the derivatives the semantic variations of the main keyword I want to rank for, just worked into a subheading. So I don’t know An example might be how to clean shoes, right? And my subheading might be how to clean white shoes, how to clean leather shoes, how to clean gum off your shoe, those would be my sub headings, and then I would link to them in that table of contents

Norman Ferrar  35:39  

with your table of contents, just so I understand. So that’s right at the top. Do you have a right? summary paragraph summary paragraph, then the table, I’ve never thought about doing that.

Steve 35:52  

Let’s think about think about what Google is going to display when they do the search for the longer tail phrase for the derivative, because now it’s not just mentioned in a paragraph, it’s emphasized in the subheading, and it’s got a jump to link. So it’s going to say right in the search results, jump to and thanks to this passages update, you know, that happened, what last three, four months ago, maybe even last year, this passage is update, they’re not judging a page, they’re judging the section of the page that that’s most relevant to the query. So having these new sections, if you haven’t already been doing this, with that subheading, and that supportive paragraph could actually enable you to have some rich results, you know, and, you know, an organic search. So it’s, and if you’ve got enough content for it, don’t just put up you know, paragraphs or to create a whole sub page, that way, you’re creating a taxonomy of content that supports that how to clean shoes parent page, but if not, you know, the subheadings are a great way to utilize them or take advantage of the passages update to get jumped to links within you know, the rich results and, and still provide a really well organized user experience having the the jump to and maybe add a button at the bottom to scroll back to the top.

Norman Ferrar  37:02  

How important or would it be something that you would consider is putting a YouTube video in the blog article.

Steve  37:13  

So I think content uniqueness is is the differentiator between a really well performing page and one that’s just like all the other pages, if your content is just paragraph, paragraph, subheading, maybe bullet list, and the competitors is the same thing. And very similar, then then there’s not a lot of unique attributes differentiating the two. So I think having custom images, and then the tests that we’ve done, where we’ve had attorneys, rent out a courtroom and do some custom photographs in the courtroom, we noticed a massive difference in keyword rankings by having more unique content on our page. And I think video is a great way to do that. I think if you look at the data on pages that have video, you’ll probably see longer page time, right, they’ll stay on the page a lot longer, because they’re watching the video. There’s an authenticity level when it’s your video and and you’re in front of it. And you’re like, Hi, this is Joe from such and such store. Let me let me show you around this page a little bit. And what we’re, you know why you want to choose this product and some some buying options and give some advice and show some expertise. I think those things are great. In fact, all of them in the luxury watch space, if you were to look for Rolex Submariner, or Rolex yacht masters, most of the top ranking pages include a video that shows the watch itself, because they realize the user, you know, really wants to know as much about that product as possible. The more expensive the product, the more details they want. And video is a great way to showcase that. But you have to be careful, because this new core web update, you know, video does have a little bit of a ding on that. So you’ve got to be careful on on how you load it, instead of putting it at the top like we used to, maybe you put a button that says watch the video, and you drop them down to the bottom or you take them to a lightbox that comes up that shows the video. So that page itself can still load without any of those web vital issues being impacted. So not to embed. I would test I would test and see cuz i’m sure i mean YouTube is a Google product, you think they wouldn’t ding them thing people for using their own product. So I wouldn’t I would test this as core webinar thing rolls out and see if the embed doesn’t affect anything and you’re still seeing great rankings don’t change it. But if you take it off and suddenly your rankings go up, then maybe I try the embed or try the the lightbox.

Norman Ferrar  39:27  

I want to get into all sorts of different things, you know, links and you know how to get the best links and what is the links? I mean, sure, you know, there’s so many but I don’t know, like we don’t have a lot of time, but maybe we’ll save that to next time if you come back. But it’s up to you. Let’s talk about for the little bit of time. We’ve got a few minutes about Amazon, they let me just give you what we’re doing. And then I don’t know maybe you’ll say that’s horrible stuff. But one of the things that we find is very important when we’re promoting our e commerce or Google, or Amazon products, is that first of all, we do it be a blog article about the product, it might be about, let’s say, I use bully sticks all the time. But let’s say it’s a 10 reasons why elderly dogs need whatever healthy snacks. And then we have a press release that we do it really high quality, great distribution, and we link the two, and then we link that back to Amazon. That’s one thing that we do, we also want to make sure that the quality of the press release that we send out is there. So again, this is coming up with brand awareness. If you can get into the answer box, that’s awesome. You know, again, by what just what we were talking about creating that meta title, just like we were talking about is important. But also tapping into the influencer network. So it’s not just you promoting yourself, we’ve got influencers talking about how great your product are, or is, you know, and those are, those are a couple of things that we we do to try to get get ranking. So I’m not sure if you agree with that. But I love like we put out tons of content that way. We also any image that we have, we make sure that it’s properly sent out. So high quality, HD quality. Yeah. And also the meta description and the alt tags. And you know, the the file names are all correct. So they pick up. What else can you do? how, you know, can you drive traffic

Steve 41:41  

on our norm, I would do all those things anyway, just for marketing, even if there wasn’t a huge impact to your keyword rankings. I remember, I remember complaining to Matt Cutts about years ago about Google math about about a site that was out ranking our client, and the only link building technique they were using was press release distribution, which is a, you know, a 2005 technique, right? It’s use PR, because as you mentioned, you know, the the Panda update, or farmer update is is it first started was trying to identify content that was already similar already in its database, you see those in limited results, take your next press release, take a string of text out of it and put it in quotes and drop it into Google and see how many times Google’s actually showing it and how many are actually omitted. Most of them are omitted because it’s duplicate content. And then the links themselves as long as, as long as there’s no keywords in the links, you shouldn’t have any problems. But if you do have keywords in the links, it’s likely over time that you’re going to see a manual penalty in Google’s search console for suspicious linking activity, and they’re going to charge you $125 per removal. To get those those press release links removed. So if you are going to do links in a press release, just make sure it’s, you know, a your regular URL link, you know, www.or the brand, right? So it doesn’t come off as trying to manipulate keyword rankings by using keywords and links. But you’re recommending no anchor links at all? Yeah, well, I wouldn’t do anything that was keyword rich, right? Maybe a click here, maybe a visit website. But because you’re because you’re distributing it on on the Google link schemes document, if you do a search for link schemes. Google has a document there that that walks through what not to do that could get you penalized. One of them is widely distributed and links on press releases or footers of websites, it’s on there, they’ve actually said, Don’t do this. Right. And we used to do it back in the day was in my first ebook, you know, use press release distribution, because it works in the wild, wild west of SEO before we add penguin and panda updates that penalize low quality content or over optimized links. So and the influencer? That’s fantastic. I mean, really, when we think about our brand and the keywords that we’d like to appear for, why wouldn’t we want Google to find that everywhere, especially if an influencer has has a wide reach, and our content is going to be seen and shared by 1000s of people? That’s fantastic. That’s more instances of our entity, our brand, our company, our business, and the keywords we want to appear for. There’s a correlation there I used to, but that SEO expert thing we talked about earlier, I used to tell people, my links are the worst, my page isn’t the best. But the reason I ranked number one is because I have more instances of my name, Steve Lehman and the phrase SEO expert than any of my competitors did. Again, this is 2007 2008 years ago, right? But you can actually see that correlation. So the influencer strategies, fantastic. Even Rand Fishkin, recently, when when we were talking, he was based on Twitter. Was he really right on? Yeah, he was talking about Twitter still a way to get people to share content about your your brand, even though the nofollow links that Google’s not gonna pass PageRank to. He’s actually seen in some of his data, incremental lift in keyword rankings by people sharing content, again, brand and keyword you know, across the US, and those influencers have 1000s of links pointing to their profiles, there’s all sorts of websites that that talk about the influencers and link directly to their profiles. Google’s following those links and giving their profiles some pretty good PageRank because they’re getting linked to. So if they’re sharing content, and their profile scene is high quality, and authoritative, and your brand and your keywords are mentioned on that page, why wouldn’t Google look at that and say, Hmm, maybe this brand or this entity is relevant to these words, and show your listing or the most relevant listing on your page, you know, and see how it performs. And if your page performs well, and people click on it, and they stay there and get what they need? Sure, I think I think all of those techniques could play a role. A lot of what you’re talking about, too, is a bit of like barnacle, SEO, we do this in local where Yelp is out ranking as well, if Yelp is always going to outrank us, let’s make sure it’s our Yelp page. So we’ll do some link building and some promoting of our Yelp page to get it to rank in the same way that you’re probably doing with your Amazon page. Right? How do I get how do I how do i do SEO to promote my Amazon page instead of my own website. And while I would prefer to have my own website, I know that Google’s just going to keep showing Amazon, there’s nothing I can do, then yeah, then I might, I might give up I might say, you know what, fine, Amazon, I’m gonna optimize my page to my Amazon page to rank instead of my website page, but long term, keep nurturing your your page, keep posting and promoting your version of your page and, and four or five years from now, that page could actually outperform Amazon, as long as you’re testing those three different attributes we talked about earlier. But don’t just don’t just throw in the towel on your page, versus your Amazon page, make sure you’re doing both.

Steve  46:40  

I think long term, that’s the best way to make sure when you make more money, because Amazon takes a lot of it, you know, and to that, that you own and control the content at any point, Amazon could take your listing down, your listing could get out ranked by someone spamming, and then your revenue goes away, it wouldn’t be nice to be at least your number two with your own website. So if you do lose a position in Google, you’re still getting, you know, a percentage of the traffic to your own website. So that’s, that’s what I’d want to say to ecommerce. Advertisers don’t just give everything to Amazon simply because they’re number one, most of the time for e commerce queries. Nurture both. Very good. So let’s try to get a couple questions in here. Kells, let’s do it. Okay,

Kelsey  47:21  

we got about four or five guys, we gotta get going. Alright, so from Simon, what is the best practice to SEO images on your website and social pages?

Steve  47:31  

Sure, I will, the social pages piece is interesting, because they, they sometimes will do some of their own compression and, and some of their own things with with images, I would suggest on your page using Open Graph tags and Twitter card tags so that you can control the images that do appear when somebody shares your URL on a post in Twitter or Facebook. So look, look into Open Graph tags and Twitter card tags, for images on your web page. Accessibility is going to be number one. So make sure you have a very descriptive alt text, you know, for those people who are visually impaired, but maybe even describe the image using some search terms, just don’t stuff keywords in there, it’s really obvious. And it is something that will be a negative points, you know, in the ranking scale, when Google’s looking at, you know, ranking focal points, we don’t want to spam using lazy loading. So that’s the page can load and the user can start reading the content, while the image is loading. High quality, we already talked about that really high definition images seem to stand out, avoid stock images, stock images are already in Google’s database, they already know what they are and, and that they’re not yours, that they’re not unique to your page. So if you have the resources, all of all of our top performing accounts have an actual studio somewhere in their building, where someone’s taking pictures, and they’re doing video. That’s just the nature of the digital marketing system. Now, you’ve got to have your own. Even as I’m talking, I’m talking into an actual film camera with a green screen behind over here. So we all have to do that if we want our pages to be unique. So for for your images, make sure that they’re your own images, maybe take a few of them. And then you know, put them together to have a really, really high definition image. The file name is important. We did a test with public storage years ago where we tested changing the file name from 16569. jpg dot JPG to self storage, Self Storage slash Anaheim dot jpg. And we did actually see an incremental difference in organic rankings. And we started to see our locations showing up an image search. Not that anyone would really use image search for storage, but it worked. It helped us that appear within those searches. And if you’re an e commerce site, you want your products to show up in image search, right, because that’s some of the places that people go before they even go to web search. So click right to images and look for the different product options. So yeah, the file name, the metadata of the image, just right click the image, go to info and put in some really descriptive information about that image. Make sure it’s yours. Captions can help too, if you want to throw a caption under your image on the page, that gives you extra text that you could use to describe the image with one or some other attributes, the metadata, the file name, how it’s organized is really interesting. I know, if you use WordPress, you’re kind of stuck with what it is. Same thing with Shopify. But if you’re on a different website, websites, you know, content management system, maybe organism, you know, in a way where the top categories, its images, and the top product category has its own folder, and then the image is stored under there. And so that’s a very intuitive organizational system for Google to crawl through your images folder, and to organize images and catalog them appropriately. Interesting.

Norman Ferrar  50:41  

Yeah. You talked about WordPerfect, or WordPress for a sec. When you click when you publish a page on word, WordPress, you can do that. Yeah, that’s it. It’s a little Engine That Could it The default is that you get a the copy the author, the date, the there’s five pages that are published automatically unless you go in and uncheck it. Sure. Is that considered duplicate information? And do you have to worry about unchecking it going into your WordPress settings,

Steve 51:17  

you know, I’m kind of based on on how often my site gets crawled, I might want my more important pages to get crawled more often. To make it easier for Google to know which version of the page I want to appear. Using some plugins, whether using all in one SEO pack or Yoast SEO, you can basically put a tag on the other versions of the page saying, you know, don’t index them. I’ve had it told to me several times by Google and by former Google Developers, that there is no such thing as a content content penalty. It’s more about just trying to keep a very intuitive experience, you have to imagine, I mean, there’s 1000s of websites on WordPress, how often do you actually see author and date now in the search results, Google’s figured it out pretty well. But again, I like having control, I like being able to guide the search engines to the version of the page that I want to appear. So I oftentimes I don’t use the the date archives, or the you know, tag archives or any of those because it is just duplicate, and it’s not really helpful to users don’t click tags anymore. So um, so I tend to not use those those features.

Norman Ferrar  52:30  

Very good. Next question, cows. I think this will be the last one. Okay, yeah, I’m just gonna say I think we’re running a little low.

Kelsey 52:38  

Okay, from Doctor, cause. Hey, Steve Nord talks about doing a nice blog or press release with about 1000 words, in your opinion, is that a fair word count to target? What is your opinion on word count? It’s 1500. I

Steve  52:49  

use? Yes, it’s 15 111.5. Now, so I have two different points. Their point one is I I like to use blog posts will recommend using blog posts for time relevant content. That means that when it shows up in someone’s RSS feed, it’s something that’s time relevant to what’s going on right now. what’s what’s happening in conversations about this product, what’s happening in the industry, what I want to have a voice and the conversations that are happening right now, what’s going on with my company events, people, things that are right now that are relevant, I use for the blog. For those other amazing long form content pages, I use them as sub pages under my sales pages under my categories under my main service pages as supportive content so that when I’m competing, I’m not competing with one sales page, I’m competing with a sales page in the section of content that’s underneath that same URL. That’s that’s how I like to organize it. Because I feel like in every instance, when we do that, we always have our sales page performed better because we have more supportive content under it in terms of the number of words per page, that’s going to vary based on the amount of information that’s available. If it’s a calculation, the answer is going to be one number, right? So so I would look at the search results, I would go to Google and perform a search for that, that top volume keyword and that cluster of search terms that you’re going to use on that page and see what comes up. But look at the content, look at the headings and subheadings that are used on the pages that show up in the top 10 or 20 results, right, maybe aggregate all that information, and then organize it into your own outline that’s more structured than those other pages. And some of them might resolve to being sub pages. And some of them might be you know, something that’s just a supportive paragraph based on how much you can talk about a particular subtopic of the main topic you’re trying to rank for. So I wouldn’t worry as much about the number of words but I would look at competing pages to see what types of content they have and make sure that your contents always more helpful, more useful, and the depth of that content is always greater.

Norman Ferrar  54:49  

So if I have my sales page and I have a topic, okay, so we’re talking about XYZ, yes. And I can either put a snippet with read more and then Drop down

Steve  55:00  

or a plus sign, I wouldn’t use read more. If Google said, you know, to avoid using links that don’t include helpful text, that would be more descriptive, read more about and then whatever it is,

Norman Ferrar  55:12  

okay, so use this. So you’re, you’re suggesting that you have the header, and then a little bit of snippet, then read more, learn more, click here, you know, and then it would drop down the 500, or 1000, or 1500 words,

Steve  55:28  

or sub page, if there’s enough content for it, maybe summarize it, and then I would say, continue learning more about sub topic. And then that goes to the, you know, the sub page, for sure. We did this with an attorney. We started with one page, he was going after a variation of, you know, Truck Accident Attorney, right. And, and so what we ended up doing was creating like 90 pages underneath it, for the different types of shock accidents, and the causes and negligence issues and case types. And, you know, we built an entire section on the website for truck accident lawyer and the guy by the time he got to that number one position, generated over $40 million in cases over a quarter simply because of the number of search terms that he was appearing for. mainly focusing on the one that had the most volume that you know, Truck Accident Lawyer search term. So it was it was a huge Coronavirus opener as to the importance of creating a silo of content. whereas previously, you know, the previous agency just kind of randomly thrown it on the blog somewhere and then maybe link to that page. But they were just doing it they were on different sections of the website, instead of being supportive of the main topic that we’re trying to rank for.

Steve  56:38  

Very good, sir. You got through part one because I definitely gonna have you back a couple times. If you’re building All right, yeah. Earning, earning, we don’t say link building anymore. It’s no. Link earning,

Norman Ferrar  56:52  

willing earning. Okay, so see, I call it link building from the old days. But anyways, there I learned something. All right. So let’s get to we’ll have Kelsey

Kelsey  57:07  

we’re at the hour mark two. So if you have to get going at any time, I can always just let you know about the results. Do you? Okay, great. So here we go. It’s time for the wheel of Kelsey. All right. Okay.

Norman Ferrar  57:30  

Before we do this, just a reminder, everybody that’s listening. You can go over to SEO, Steve or over to what is the name of the meetup,

Steve  57:38  

calm and Academy search Academy search calm is where we have that free course for you.

Norman Ferrar  57:43  

All right, and that goes out to everybody. So if you like what you heard today, check it out. Okay, let’s get going. Alright, here we go to one bankrupt, what? What’s that? Wheel of Fortune thing? Oh, yeah. All right. Dr. Cause is the winner cause man, that’s a good one. Mr. Khan. All right. That is awesome. Okay. All right. So we’ll get the information. send it over to Kay at lunch with norm and then we’ll make arrangements to get in touch with Steve. Sounds great, sir. This is a lot of fun. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. I mean, you know, you’re just you’re full of information. And you present it in a nice, easy way. So I’d love to get him back on like to get you on close to so i’ll talk to you a bit about that a bit later as well.

Steve  58:42  

And the clubhouse is allowing me on there with Android. Yeah. Thank you. Android news in

Norman Ferrar 58:48  

Okay, perfect. All right, sir. Thank you so much for coming on. And we’ll talk to you next time. Thanks, guys. All right, thanks. Okay. So I hope you enjoy the episode this week and talk about informative. I mean, Steve knows his stuff. I said it at the beginning, but he really knows his stuff. And anyways, Kelsey, what do we got going on?

Kelsey  59:11  

Alright, so first of all, smash those like buttons if you haven’t already. I know. This is a bit of a different topic that we usually focus on. But I think it’s really important and especially for the Amazon e commerce sellers. So that’s always great. Definitely check out our YouTube channel. Just search Norman Farrar lunch norm will come up. That’s where all the full episodes and short highlights will be. As well as our Facebook group is lunch with norm Amazon FBA and e commerce collective and you have a question for norm or even some of the guests are there so you can ask them questions directly or if you have a question about your own Amazon listing or an e commerce just it’s a free area to go to as well. We are starting a Patreon which is a monthly subscription service that is starting in June 1. So you can check it out. It’s a patreon.com slash live with Nora And I’ll put the link in as well. But that’s a great resource. We’re doing a lot of bonus extra content there. free services, exclusive deals, merge, all that fun stuff. ama’s consultations, it’s all there. It’s great. So yeah, definitely check that out. And I think that’s it.

Norman Ferrar 1:00:17  

Yeah. So the only other thing I like to say is that tomorrow, Thursday, we’ve been invited. And this is really cool to be part of the largest clubhouse club called startup club with over 500,000 members. So they’ve invited us to have a regular room we’ve accepted, and it’s Thursdays at one o’clock. It’s called it’s not lunch with norm, but it’s called weekly ECAM or ECAM. Weekly, learn, learn to sell online now is that every week we have a different topic. And usually pretty good rooms. We’ve done it for the last three weeks in a row had great guests, and has a really tons of engagement. The Friday who’s on Friday, is Kevin King, I thought so. So tune in Friday, we’re going to be talking to Kevin and see what he has to say about everything that’s happening on Amazon right now. Get his insights. It’s always great having Kevin on. So tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, at noon, Eastern central or Eastern Standard Time. And like always, thank you, everybody, for tuning in. It’s great to have you as part of the community. We really we really couldn’t do this without you. And just appreciate you being part of the episode and the community. So until next time, we’ll see you later.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai