August 20, 2024 • 28 mins
Unlock the secrets to online success with our latest episode of Small Business Big World, where we break down the essentials of search engine optimization (SEO) with our very own marketing director, Jon Portanova. Ever wondered how small tweaks can boost your website’s visibility on Google? Jon takes us through the must-know basics of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. From the importance behind keywords and meta descriptions to the power of internal linking, learn how the latest changes in Google’s algorithm can either help or hinder your web presence.
This episode offers tips on optimizing your Google My Business profile and leveraging the full potential of social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Jon also shares the often-overlooked technical aspects of SEO that can make a huge difference, including site structure and optimized image formats to enhance page speed and user experience. Whether you’re new to SEO or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with insights that could propel your small business to online prominence. Don’t miss out!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Small Business Big World, our weekly
podcast prepared by the team atPaper Trails.
Owning and running a smallbusiness is hard.
Each week, we'll dive into thechallenges, headaches, trends,
fun and excitement of running asmall business.
After all, small businesses arethe heartbeat of America and
our team is here to keep thembeating.
Welcome to Small Business BigWorld, our weekly podcast, where
(00:22):
we talk about all of the funand exciting, and sometimes the
miserable and scary andchallenging things about doing
business as a small businessowner manager.
Welcome this week, johnPortanova, who is our?
What are you?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Marketing director.
I think I think you have somebreaking news for me.
I don't know, there you go.
That sounds official.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
So John is our marketing director here at Paper
Trails and we're going to talkabout search engine optimization
today and mostly a lot aboutour journey, the things we've
learned and, hopefully, how youcan use those in your business
right.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It's kind of maybe a boring topic, but a very
important topic for smallbusinesses for sure.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I think a lot of folks don't know anything about
it.
I will say we didn't, right,right.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
We'll get into this more, but here we are, almost
three years into the journey andbefore I started at paper
trails, I couldn't tell you whatSEO was search engine
optimization but we'll get intothat pretty soon here.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
And before we get into that, this is my cue to
tell you to like, follow, sharerate, review, subscribe.
We are on every single stinkingsocial media platform maybe,
except the Chinese ones, I don'tknow.
Uh, johnny, soon the Chineseones, I don't know, johnny might
use those.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Well, soon enough, we won't be on some of them,
apparently, uh-oh.
Why, well, tiktok is gettingbanned, isn't it?
Oh I don't know, I don't followthe news too much, but
something about TikTok.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Well, if TikTok gets banned, we won't be on TikTok.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
But everything else.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Instagram, facebook.
Find us on Spotify, apple Music, iheart.
Where else?
John, you publish this everyweek.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
CastBox, youtube everywhere.
All right, that's where we are.
I think you've got the big ones.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
And if you find a burning question after this
episode or any episode, pleasefeel free to email us at podcast
at paperchillscom.
We're happy to get back to youor get you in the right
direction for a resource, Allright.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
SEO.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
John, what is it?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
SEO stands for Search engine optimization.
It's really the process ofoptimizing your website and all
of your online content toincrease your visibility in
search engines like Google.
Please, the Google, Exactly,the Google gods.
That's the biggest one.
There's others being, or and soforth, but Google is the main
one of probably 90% of thepeople use it out there.
(02:27):
So, yeah, it simply just kindof boils down to doing things
behind the scenes to increaseyour rankings on Google.
Like I said before this journey, I don't think I really
understood what SEO was, but Iwas on Google almost every day
and when you search forsomething on Google, of course
there's a list of things thatpop up, but what SEO is is the
(02:49):
things that go on behind thescenes to rank those results in
a specific order.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
And what if I still use Ask Jeeves?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Ask Jeeves, you're probably on Am.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
I using AOL.
Do I have an AOL email?
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yep, aol, aim, whatever it was back then, but
Google is the way to go now forsure.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
So talk to me about what factors influence that
right.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yep, so there's so many ranking factors.
Google recently just came outwith their new algorithm.
The algorithm is a big thing,right?
So there's 14,000 rankingfactors.
Apparently, google has beenlying to us about some of these,
that they say they weren'timportant, but they actually had
a big leak.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
It was a whole thing.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
And here we are and I think it's important to know
what some of these factors areand to use them to try to rank
better.
So not to get too much now.
We'll get into a little bitlater, but there's kind of three
areas on SEO, off page SEO andtechnical SEO.
So each one of those categorieshas specific things that help
your content rank better inGoogle.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So if I want to rank number one on Google, right you
search paper drills or payrollright.
What do you, what do we have todo to do that Sure?
Speaker 2 (04:03):
So it all starts with keywords.
So keywords are a specificquery that you would put, type
into Google, whether that be ashort keyword, like payroll, or
a longer key phrase, like mainpayroll company.
So the thing is you have tofirst find what keyword you want
to rank for.
Once you have that, when youare on your website and you're
(04:24):
creating a page whether it's ablog post or a service page you
have to optimize your site oryour page for that keyword.
So things that go into thatwe'll start with on page SEO,
that's things like your titletags.
So what you want to do is, forexample, we'll use main payroll
company is what we one of thebig things we want to rank for
here at paper trails.
(04:44):
The title of our article wouldbe you know what is the best?
Main payroll company.
So that's your title tag.
You want to make sure you usethat key phrase.
Another thing would be yourmeta description.
That is kind of what pops up ongoogle underneath the title tag
.
It'll it a quick description ofwhat that article or page is
about.
Make sure you're using yourkeyword in that meta description
(05:05):
.
Then we get into a little bitmore nitty gritty things like
heading tags on that page.
You want to break up yourcontent into different sections,
shorter sections on the pageitself, and each of those
heading tags should also containthe keyword or a variation of
that keyword.
Then we're going to get intothings like internal linking.
You want to make sure you'relinking to other pages on your
(05:26):
website.
You want to make sure that youhave alt text, which means that
on your image, on your page,you're putting in a little
description of the image and inthat description, again make
sure you're using your keyword.
So those are some on-page SEOthings that help factor into
your ranking on Google.
There's other technical stuffwe'll get into a little bit
later, but those are the.
(05:47):
Well, that's a lot.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah, that's a lot right in itself.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Sorry, just a lot of rambling, but these are the
things we've learned that havehelped us improve our rankings
on Google, and some of the pagesmay not be right up number one,
but Because all keywords arenot created equal right.
Correct.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
That's the other thing, right.
Just because you want to rankfor you know best payroll
company in Maine doesn't meanthat you're going to right Right
.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
So now we're getting into keyword difficulty and
doing some keyword research.
So again, I don't want to gettoo technical here, but like
there's certain keywords and youcan look on certain tools
online and to see how manypeople are trying to rank for
that keyword the difficulty, howmany people are trying to rank
for that keyword, the difficulty.
And it will be more difficultif an ADP or a Paychex wants to
(06:27):
rank for that word because theyhave a higher domain authority,
because they're a bigger company.
There's so much that goes intoit.
But doing some keyword researchand knowing which keywords you
want to rank for and which onesare a little bit easier will
help you rank a little higher onGoogle.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Right, so we talked about the on-page stuff.
What so we talked about theon-page stuff?
What's the off-page?
Speaker 2 (06:43):
So off-page SEO will include things like backlinks,
which means other websites arelinking back to your website.
So if the topic is payrolltaxes, maybe we want main
business to link one of theirarticles on their page back to
papertrailscom their page aboutpayroll taxes, and that helps
(07:05):
create your backlink strategy.
And then, once you have morebacklinks, your domain authority
will rise, so that'll helpincrease your off page SEO.
Another off page SEO thing isGoogle my Business.
So it's really important tokind of claim your Google my
Business profile.
When you go on Google, you cango on mybusinessgooglecom and
then you can claim your business.
(07:25):
You can upload go on google,you can go on my
businessgooglecom and then youcan claim your business.
You can upload your hours, youcan upload pictures of your
company, you can change yourproducts and your services on
there.
So those things will alsofactor into your off page seo
and that google listing is free.
Right, you can it is, yeah,definitely all businesses out
there.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Links yeah, it's free , go do it, because 100 and you
know what's the number one thingpeople ask in all the stupid
Facebook groups is is so-and-sorestaurant open this week?
Speaker 2 (07:49):
That's my biggest pet peeve is going to a restaurant
that says on Google that they'reopen until 8 pm and you show up
at 7.30 and, oh, we've beenclosed for two hours.
Whatever it is, it's sofrustrating.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
So make sure your hours are on there, because if
someone Googles what time doesJohn's favorite restaurant close
and it says it's open till nineand he gets there at 8.30, he's
going to be pissed.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I'm going to be pissed, I'm going to be hungry,
my wife's not going to be happy.
It's going to be a whole thing.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
So you know, that's the off-page stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
What about?
I mean, how does the otherInstagram, facebook?
They all have kind of their ownSEO, search engine optimization
factors too.
So on your Instagram profileyou want to put what category
your business is in.
So for us we would use mainpayroll as our kind of category.
That would help people that aresearching for payroll on
Instagram.
So the same kind of factors inyour description, making sure
(08:40):
you're using the keywords.
So social is kind of similar toGoogle in terms of that SEO,
those ranking factors.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Well, and it also and Google takes into account even
a little bit perhaps what you'redoing on social right.
If you have a lot of engagementon social, that again it's kind
of like those backlinks rightit builds your brand authority,
correct and your domainauthority so you know there's
another piece.
So on page, off page.
What about technical seo?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
technical seo is, I will just say right off the bat,
I think is something that we'reboth learning a little bit more
about every day.
That includes things like yoursite structure, meaning you want
to make it easier for Google tocrawl your website so they know
what information you have onyour website.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
So putting you know, just say, your blog in the
navigation bar at the top wouldbe better than putting it under
three different dropdowns, soGoogle is easily able to crawl
the page and understand whatit's about and then help you
rank higher for that specifickeyword you know one of the
things that we've found is, youknow, I think we went through on
(09:43):
through our journey in the lastcouple of years is we've worked
on a lot of the on page, someof the off page and now we're
kind of getting into more of thetechnical pieces of it.
We found that our website wasnot quite built in a way that
Google likes.
So we're in the process now ofnot totally redesigning, but we
have to fix the foundation thatthe website was built on.
To fix that and, please, theGoogle gods.
(10:05):
We also found that I mean, Ifeel like my whole life, right,
a JPEG has been what I know,right, that's the image, that's
our on-computer image.
Well, whole life, right, a jpeghas been what I know, right,
that's the, that's the image,that's our, you know, on
computer image.
Well, now we have like webpfiles, which I think have just
come out in the last coupleyears or if it's just become
more prevalent last couple years, but those are a lot smaller
and, in terms of file size,correct.
So when you're loading it onyour phone or on the computer,
(10:26):
you know those are your.
If it's loading slower,google's like gosh, right,
because I don't even know whatthe statistic is.
I probably could make it up,but it's like if you don't
capture someone's attentionwithin like 0.7 seconds, they're
going to go somewhere else thatmight even be too long, right?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Right, I don't know, I mean I'm sure it's the same.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
I know there's big statistics out there.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
And those WebP files.
Like you said, they're smaller,so it It'll make sure your page
load faster and page speed isone of the 14,000 ranking
factors that Google has.
So anything you can do toincrease that technical side of
your website to help userexperience, page speed, all
those type of things,click-through rates will help
overall increase your SEO.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah, so I mean, one of the things that we did a year
or so ago now is we kind of didour own SEO audit, right, when
you went through every page,looked at all this mostly the
on-page stuff right, that wasthe heading tags, the headers,
the descriptions, the alt text,all that stuff and I would say
that just quickly.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
That's probably a little bit easier for small
business owners who are busy.
Those things are a little bitquicker to fix and a little bit
less technical.
So if you don't have kind ofthat SEO knowledge, those are
the easier things to fix whichwill really significantly help.
Right, and it did help us andwe saw some great.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
We saw great traction until six or seven months ago
and we started to see thingsnosedive and then.
So now we've engaged with areally technical, heavy SEO
consultant.
They did their own SEO on us.
We found a couple of littletiny you know on-page things,
but the rest of it was.
It was the page speed, it wasthe backlinks, it's the
structure of our website is notdesigned in a way that Google
prefers, so now we're working tofix some of those things with
the more you know, gettingdeeper down the rabbit hole in
(12:03):
hopes of building those rankingsback up.
Correct.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
What you know, we're big on content.
We did a content marketingepisode.
You know, on content, we did acontent marketing episode.
Certainly that's a big thingfor us here, Even for other
businesses.
What kind of content shouldpeople be putting out there?
If you're a restaurant, what doyou want to do in terms of?
Speaker 2 (12:27):
that Maybe you're not writing a blog post twice a
week about how to cook ahamburger.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
But what can they do to really attract that?
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Those types of businesses wouldn't necessarily,
like you said, be writing blogarticles, but you still want to
make sure that your homepage is,you know, optimized for Google
in terms of ranking.
For if you're in, you know,thai restaurant, you want to
make sure that you rank in yoursorry excuse me, you're hearing
Kennebunk.
You want to make sure thatyou're ranking high for
Kennebunk Thai food and you know, using those keywords on your
homepage food and you know,using those keywords on your
homepage Videos, I would say arereally, really important for
(12:54):
restaurants shooting videos ofthe chef cooking the food, the
server, you know, serving thefood, bartenders making drinks,
and then optimizing those videosfor social, to have someone who
is searching for Thai foodKennebunk Thai food main pop up
on their Instagram.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Right, and that's been a new.
I mean, that's another piece ofthe algorithm that you know the
14,000 factors right.
Is video Correct?
Is they've?
They now almost expect you tohave video on your pages,
because that's what consumerswant.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yep, and it goes back to kind of that user experience
, I think, on the page, becauseyou know, with shorter attention
spans nowadays, no one'snecessarily sitting there
reading a page that has 10,000words.
They're looking for a shortvideo to know what that page is
about, know what the next stepsare, things like that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
So we've done our audit, we've done our fixes.
We're trying to build moretraffic and more leads and
people to the website.
What other tools are we usingto measure our SEO success?
I guess yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
So we personally use HubSpot as our CRM tool.
I use this keyword and SEO toolcalled SEMrush or SEMrush, and
what that does is going back tothe keyword rankings.
I can see what keywords aredifficult to rank for, who's
trying to rank for them, who areranking one, two and three for
them.
And then once we, you know,have our page and we give it a
(14:10):
couple months to rank and getsome stats behind it, we can go
back in and use these tools tosee where now our article or our
page, and we give it a coupleof months to rank and get some
stats behind it, we can go backin and use these tools to see
where now our article or ourpage is ranking on that list on
Google.
We can see if our organictraffic has increased to our
website or that page overall.
We can see who, where peopleare clicking on what page and
what forms are submitting toreach out to us.
(14:31):
So we can use these tools toyou know, do that analyzation.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Yeah, I mean those types of softwares are really
great tools for us to really begoing through and say, okay,
evaluating what pages areworking, what pages aren't
working.
You know, maybe we need totweak one or update one or
adjust one.
You know we use the Googlesearch console, right?
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, ga4, google Analytics 4 is a free one for
people to use.
If they're using Google, myBusiness and then the same thing
, they can see their organictraffic, what pages people are
interacting with, those kind ofthings.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
So I can tell you we're the little old payroll
company in Maine and we use asoftware called iSolve which
other companies like us aroundthe country use and we do a lot
of.
We're big on educating andhelping our clients, so one of
our most popular pages is thehelp page, right.
So we have papertrailscom slashhelp which helps all of our
clients and their employees login to iSalt.
(15:23):
And we get submissions multipletimes a week from Joey who
works at McDonald's in Wisconsinnot able to log into iSalt and
unfortunately we have to say I'msorry, I can't help you.
You need to go to your employerand go to your payroll company
to help with that.
But it does work right.
We're attracting traffic.
We rank higher for iSolvedlogin help than iSolved itself
(15:58):
no-transcript themselves.
Right, we had this just thisweek.
We had a guy from Pennsylvaniasubmit a request on the website.
He was watching one of ourtimekeeping videos and he goes
hey, I useSolved and I can't getan answer to this question.
Maybe you can help me.
I really appreciate your videosand we saw he's watched every
single video we've posted.
You know he was really engagedand not a client of ours.
(16:21):
But certainly you know weresponded back and said hey,
first of all, go back to you,know who you work with.
But here's what our experienceis and what can be said.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
It was funny because I was talking to Jeff, our sales
guy, who called this particularbusiness, and the business
submitted this form because heactually thought we were iSoft,
because we ranked higher onGoogle than they did.
So, again, it really has helpedincrease our organic traffic
and just get our name out there.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Right, I mean even things you know.
We've seen some really bigleads come through.
I mean hundreds of thousands ofdollars in recurring revenue
has been driven now through ourwebsite and John has goals on
that right.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
He gets stressed out every time we talk about it.
He's got hives right now.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
I think, just thinking about it, but we have
goals for that right.
We have goals to be able to say, hey, we want to bring in leads
from the website and qualifiedleads and so forth, and this is
one of the ways that we do that.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, and I think you know we're talking about this
company that we've been tryingto work with now.
They talked about that yourwebsite should almost be produce
more business than your top youknow salesperson that never
sleeps.
Exactly the salesperson thatreceives.
So it takes some time to set upthese things at the end, in the
front end, and it's veryimportant to keep on them and
updating them as they go.
(17:30):
But once you kind of have itset up, the you know the
system's kind of there, and thenyou produce content and that
content generally will rankhigher because you have that
system in place and it's thatsalesperson that never sleeps.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Yeah, I mean certainly it's a lot of work,
right?
I mean you spend lots and lotsof time.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Yes, it's basically my whole day, every day.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
You know not only producing the content, but also
you know editing and adjustingthe website and optimizing the
website for these types ofthings.
And certainly we are totallyself-taught, right.
I mean, we've followed a fewguys on Instagram, we've taken a
few classes, we're reading,we're discovering, we're just
figuring it out on our own andthere are some things that we've
run up against, that we don'thave the expertise to fix and
(18:07):
we've had to engage somebodyelse in that.
But I think we've learned thatwe are.
We know what we don't knowright, or we don't know what we
don't know, but we know we'renot smart enough to fix what we
don't know.
So we've been working onengaging with some folks to help
us with that too?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
No, and I think it's important for small businesses
out there to just take some timeat least to try to work on some
of these practices and optimizetheir website.
And I know, if you don't have amarketing department on your
team or you know you're a busysmall business owner, it's tough
to find 40 hours a week, like Ido, to do.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
you know this seo 40 hours a week I said four hours a
week to do this seo stuff andum, but you know if you can do
just that four hours a week,then, unless you get the thing
that moves your mouse around andkeeps you active all day, you
get that on tiktok I found athing I can bring my laptop into
the golf cart.
Oh yeah, and you brought it tothe beach before too.
We got that picture one time Igot it all.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I'm actually more productive in those scenarios
sometimes Work from home, workfrom home.
Home is anywhere I want it tobe.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
So we've been really successful in this and certainly
it has been a journey.
It's been a couple of yearswe've been working through this
and I will say, you know, again,we've seen really good results.
We've had some lulls in this.
You know, in our industry thekeywords are expensive to
advertise for.
Our keywords are very popular,right, there's a lot of
competition in our industry withsome Fortune 500 companies that
(19:32):
have teams of people that dowhat John does.
You know, and I think for mostbusinesses, even just getting
the basics right because you'rea local business right Again,
thai restaurant and Kennebunkright If you've got your basic
SEO stuff down, that's going tokeep the Google gods happy,
right.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And much easier to rank for right Right.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Much easier to rank for right.
For us, we're and you're notlooking for people outside of
that area.
For us, we have a largergeographic reach that we're
looking to attract, which againplays into some of the other how
we write articles and how webuild our website and how we
manage that.
And so we have to look like theauthority to Google on these
things and we have to be perfect, because, again, the Fortune
500 companies that have teams ofpeople doing this are, first of
(20:13):
all, have way bigger budgets,right, and they're really good
at it.
So we have to, you know, wehave to be not only just be
really good at providing ourservice, but we have to be
better at selling ourselves.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Well, and the nice thing about this for us is I'm
not going to say it's free,because of course you've got to
pay me and these marketingcompanies we're working with,
but it's a more organic approachand these bigger Fortune 500
companies have millions ofdollars to pay per month for the
word payroll on Google andthose first it's like $25 per
click.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Right On Google ads for the word payroll Right.
We don't.
We don't spend 10 clicks a day$2,500 a day.
It adds up.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Right, $250 a day.
You said, yeah, whatever themath is, but it adds up, it's
good, not the account.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, but no, seriously, we don't do any ads
right Because one it's reallyexpensive for what we want to
rank for and we tried to thinkabout that.
We said, okay, what are somekeywords that we can try to use
for ads, like, what are thingsthat people are searching for
that are less expensive?
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And we just, I mean, we spent a few grand and we
didn't really get anything outof that either.
Well, and it kind of goes backto that quickly.
That keyword research is it wasa little bit cheaper, but the
volume no one was reallysearching for those words, so we
got very few results out ofthat.
Those ads, yeah.
We thought we were gettingsmart, but we Right, we kind of
hurt ourselves a little bit.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
I think in that Well we just wasted five grand, but
we learned.
So what are the SEO mistakesthat we've learned that people
should avoid?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
One thing, and we talked about.
You know using those keywordsas much as you can make sure
you're not keyword stuffing,meaning you're just writing an
article about main payroll andevery third word is main payroll
.
Google doesn't like that.
It wants creative, but it wantseducational content.
Google ranks things based onthis acronym, eat, eeat, which
(21:58):
is expertise, education,authoritativeness and
trustworthiness I didn't knowthat.
Yeah, so those four things gointo each thing that google
looks for to rank.
So if you're better in each ofthose categories, you'll rank
higher.
So that's so.
If you're just keyword stuffingover and over and over, they're
not going to take that astrustworthiness content.
(22:21):
They're just going to, you know, kind of brush that aside and
that won't rank.
So that's kind of one mistake.
Another mistake to avoid wouldbe and it kind of goes back to
that Google EAT but is producingirrelevant content.
Again, you want to make surethat your content is educational
, is relevant, is up to datewith the latest information out
there.
You don't talking about thebacklinking strategy.
(22:42):
You don't want to buy backlinksor you don't want to buy
reviews.
Even Google will kind of flagthose as you know, bought
backlinks, bought reviews andkind of punish you.
Actually, you'll hurt yourselfif you do that.
Another thing would be to justdoing it all once at the
beginning and then thinkingyou're all set for the next
three years.
You've got to make sure you'reconstantly updating.
Google's algorithm isconstantly updating, so you've
(23:02):
got to make sure we keep thoseGoogle gods happy.
So I think those are kind ofthe three or four takeaways.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Other things you know everyone wants the beautiful
website, one of the things we'vefound is like everyone really
wants this really beautifulwebsite but it gets clunky and
it's slow to load.
And if it's very graphicallydriven, if Google can't read
what you're putting because it'sin an image or something like
that that's not going to helpeither.
We found that.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, it goes back to that technical piece.
Make sure that you're not kindof your structure of your
website's not jumping all overthe place.
You've got images on the leftand on the right and at the top
and all that the left and theright and at the top and all
that, like, the structure needsto be good and google needs to
be able to read it.
It's huge.
Yeah, page speed, userexperience, everything factors
in.
But these are mistakes.
Like we're not worried aboutuser experience, we're worried
about making it look pretty.
(23:46):
So that's that's something youkind of want to avoid as well
well, I think nowadays it's Imean, in our website.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
right, we hired a great graphic, great marketing
agency to build us a, which theydid, but they didn't take into
account much of the SEO stuffand the structure of the website
, and that has hurt us or didhurt us, and it's continuing to
hurt us.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
we think in part of that, so we're having to invest
in managing that Right, and Ithink that would be one more
mistake, especially if you'rebeginning this journey, would be
kind of start small with yourlocal SEO, and we touched upon
it briefly.
But local SEO is ranking forthings in your local or your
close-knit community.
So, going back to thatKennebunk tie, if you're adding
(24:25):
the word Kennebunk to yourkeyword, then you're ranking
locally for that keyword.
Right, just put it in your metadescription, just put it on your
website, just say hey, listen,we're a Thai food restaurant, so
at first we were trying to rankfor payroll and HR and now
we've learned that we should tryto be ranking for main payroll
and HR.
It's going to narrow down thatcommunity but you're also going
to be able to rank higherbecause there's less competition
(24:47):
for that and for us that's thebusiness we want.
Definitely for restaurants youwant that local business, but I
think for most small businessesyou're kind of looking for
business in your general area.
So that's definitely a hugemistake is to go too big, you
know.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
So what's your goals here for the next in the short
term for our SEO stuff?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
So I think would be to continue to optimize the site
, like now that we've learnedsome of these technical things.
I've been, you know, working onupdating our page at a time.
It takes a little bit, butthat's one immediate goal is
just to optimize all of thosepages and then hopefully, by
doing that, is going to beincreasing our ranking for
certain keywords we want to rankfor, maybe narrowing some of
(25:32):
those keywords down to andreally focusing on certain
important ones to us, as opposedto too many of them, and then
seeing if our organic traffic isgoing to be increasing.
You know we're seeing a couplethousand people a day.
Be nice to see 10,000 people aday and having them, you know,
directed to the pages where it'sgoing to bring us new business
(25:52):
our our services pages, ourpricing pages, as opposed to
just that help page that youtalked about.
Again, not that traffic is badtraffic, but so those are just
some of the immediate goals.
I don't know if you have anymore for me, but no, I think
that's all the stuff we'reworking on.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Yes, right.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
And those ultimately lead more traffic.
More better keyword rankingsultimately lead to more business
opportunities.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Right, and I mean again.
It also builds our standing asexperts, you know, in the
industry.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
And with our current clients, with our current
clients.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
We have a ton of resources out there that we use
that also help the currentclients.
I mean, I used it yesterday.
We had, you know, three clientstis the season here in Maine
where everyone's got theirtemporary.
You know foreign workers comingin and you know we, john,
created a really great articleabout the different visa types
and the different restrictionsand requirements for each visa
type and you know I've sent thatto three clients this week
(26:42):
because they're asking thequestion.
So here we go, here's theanswer.
Right, go, take a look at this.
Here's everything you need toknow.
So that is also really good forin-house use.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, definitely.
Just use your content, you know, for both your sales and your
service teams.
You're doing it for a reason.
You're making sure you're usingit in all the ways you can Sure
.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Absolutely Well, good Well, SEO is certainly a
minefield.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
I think we just barely scratched the surface
here today, but I think it wasjust a good overview for small
businesses to kind of focus inon these certain areas.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
If we've piqued people's interest, how can they
get in touch with you to answerany of their questions?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Podcast at papertrailscom.
Oh geez or johnjohn atpapertrailscom, I'd be happy to
help.
Like Chris said, we're bothstill kind of learning, but I
think we've come a long way fromwhere we started, so I'd be
happy to help any.
Yeah, just share.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Awesome, well, good.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Well, thank you, John , for joining me for another
riveting episode and thank youfor all the listeners out there
and yeah, we've been having fundoing this.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Absolutely Well.
Thanks everybody.
We'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening to thisweek's episode of Small Business
, big World.
This podcast is a production ofPaper Trails.
We are a payroll and HR companybased in Kennebunk, maine, and
we serve small and mid-sizedbusinesses across New England
and the country.
If you found this podcasthelpful, don't forget to follow
us at at Paper Trails Payrollacross all social media
platforms and check us out atpapertrailscom for more
(28:02):
information.
As a reminder, the views,opinions and thoughts expressed
are the hosts and guests alone.
The material presented in thispodcast is for general
information purposes only andshould not be considered legal
or financial advice.
By inviting this guest to ourpodcast Paper.
This is Small Business Big World, our weekly
podcast prepared by the team atPaper Trails.
Owning and running a smallbusiness is hard.
Each week, we'll dive into thechallenges, headaches, trends,
fun and excitement of running asmall business.
After all, small businesses arethe heartbeat of America and
our team is here to keep thembeating.
Welcome to Small Business BigWorld, our weekly podcast, where
(00:22):
we talk about all of the funand exciting, and sometimes the
miserable and scary andchallenging things about doing
business as a small businessowner manager.
Welcome this week, johnPortanova, who is our?
What are you?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Marketing director.
I think I think you have somebreaking news for me.
I don't know, there you go.
That sounds official.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
So John is our marketing director here at Paper
Trails and we're going to talkabout search engine optimization
today and mostly a lot aboutour journey, the things we've
learned and, hopefully, how youcan use those in your business
right.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It's kind of maybe a boring topic, but a very
important topic for smallbusinesses for sure.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I think a lot of folks don't know anything about
it.
I will say we didn't, right,right.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
We'll get into this more, but here we are, almost
three years into the journey andbefore I started at paper
trails, I couldn't tell you whatSEO was search engine
optimization but we'll get intothat pretty soon here.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
And before we get into that, this is my cue to
tell you to like, follow, sharerate, review, subscribe.
We are on every single stinkingsocial media platform maybe,
except the Chinese ones, I don'tknow.
Uh, johnny, soon the Chineseones, I don't know, johnny might
use those.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Well, soon enough, we won't be on some of them,
apparently, uh-oh.
Why, well, tiktok is gettingbanned, isn't it?
Oh I don't know, I don't followthe news too much, but
something about TikTok.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Well, if TikTok gets banned, we won't be on TikTok.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
But everything else.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Instagram, facebook.
Find us on Spotify, apple Music, iheart.
Where else?
John, you publish this everyweek.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
CastBox, youtube everywhere.
All right, that's where we are.
I think you've got the big ones.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
And if you find a burning question after this
episode or any episode, pleasefeel free to email us at podcast
at paperchillscom.
We're happy to get back to youor get you in the right
direction for a resource, Allright.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
SEO.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
John, what is it?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
SEO stands for Search engine optimization.
It's really the process ofoptimizing your website and all
of your online content toincrease your visibility in
search engines like Google.
Please, the Google, Exactly,the Google gods.
That's the biggest one.
There's others being, or and soforth, but Google is the main
one of probably 90% of thepeople use it out there.
(02:27):
So, yeah, it simply just kindof boils down to doing things
behind the scenes to increaseyour rankings on Google.
Like I said before this journey, I don't think I really
understood what SEO was, but Iwas on Google almost every day
and when you search forsomething on Google, of course
there's a list of things thatpop up, but what SEO is is the
(02:49):
things that go on behind thescenes to rank those results in
a specific order.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
And what if I still use Ask Jeeves?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Ask Jeeves, you're probably on Am.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
I using AOL.
Do I have an AOL email?
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yep, aol, aim, whatever it was back then, but
Google is the way to go now forsure.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
So talk to me about what factors influence that
right.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yep, so there's so many ranking factors.
Google recently just came outwith their new algorithm.
The algorithm is a big thing,right?
So there's 14,000 rankingfactors.
Apparently, google has beenlying to us about some of these,
that they say they weren'timportant, but they actually had
a big leak.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
It was a whole thing.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
And here we are and I think it's important to know
what some of these factors areand to use them to try to rank
better.
So not to get too much now.
We'll get into a little bitlater, but there's kind of three
areas on SEO, off page SEO andtechnical SEO.
So each one of those categorieshas specific things that help
your content rank better inGoogle.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So if I want to rank number one on Google, right you
search paper drills or payrollright.
What do you, what do we have todo to do that Sure?
Speaker 2 (04:03):
So it all starts with keywords.
So keywords are a specificquery that you would put, type
into Google, whether that be ashort keyword, like payroll, or
a longer key phrase, like mainpayroll company.
So the thing is you have tofirst find what keyword you want
to rank for.
Once you have that, when youare on your website and you're
(04:24):
creating a page whether it's ablog post or a service page you
have to optimize your site oryour page for that keyword.
So things that go into thatwe'll start with on page SEO,
that's things like your titletags.
So what you want to do is, forexample, we'll use main payroll
company is what we one of thebig things we want to rank for
here at paper trails.
(04:44):
The title of our article wouldbe you know what is the best?
Main payroll company.
So that's your title tag.
You want to make sure you usethat key phrase.
Another thing would be yourmeta description.
That is kind of what pops up ongoogle underneath the title tag
.
It'll it a quick description ofwhat that article or page is
about.
Make sure you're using yourkeyword in that meta description
(05:05):
.
Then we get into a little bitmore nitty gritty things like
heading tags on that page.
You want to break up yourcontent into different sections,
shorter sections on the pageitself, and each of those
heading tags should also containthe keyword or a variation of
that keyword.
Then we're going to get intothings like internal linking.
You want to make sure you'relinking to other pages on your
(05:26):
website.
You want to make sure that youhave alt text, which means that
on your image, on your page,you're putting in a little
description of the image and inthat description, again make
sure you're using your keyword.
So those are some on-page SEOthings that help factor into
your ranking on Google.
There's other technical stuffwe'll get into a little bit
later, but those are the.
(05:47):
Well, that's a lot.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah, that's a lot right in itself.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Sorry, just a lot of rambling, but these are the
things we've learned that havehelped us improve our rankings
on Google, and some of the pagesmay not be right up number one,
but Because all keywords arenot created equal right.
Correct.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
That's the other thing, right.
Just because you want to rankfor you know best payroll
company in Maine doesn't meanthat you're going to right Right
.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
So now we're getting into keyword difficulty and
doing some keyword research.
So again, I don't want to gettoo technical here, but like
there's certain keywords and youcan look on certain tools
online and to see how manypeople are trying to rank for
that keyword the difficulty, howmany people are trying to rank
for that keyword, the difficulty.
And it will be more difficultif an ADP or a Paychex wants to
(06:27):
rank for that word because theyhave a higher domain authority,
because they're a bigger company.
There's so much that goes intoit.
But doing some keyword researchand knowing which keywords you
want to rank for and which onesare a little bit easier will
help you rank a little higher onGoogle.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Right, so we talked about the on-page stuff.
What so we talked about theon-page stuff?
What's the off-page?
Speaker 2 (06:43):
So off-page SEO will include things like backlinks,
which means other websites arelinking back to your website.
So if the topic is payrolltaxes, maybe we want main
business to link one of theirarticles on their page back to
papertrailscom their page aboutpayroll taxes, and that helps
(07:05):
create your backlink strategy.
And then, once you have morebacklinks, your domain authority
will rise, so that'll helpincrease your off page SEO.
Another off page SEO thing isGoogle my Business.
So it's really important tokind of claim your Google my
Business profile.
When you go on Google, you cango on mybusinessgooglecom and
then you can claim your business.
(07:25):
You can upload go on google,you can go on my
businessgooglecom and then youcan claim your business.
You can upload your hours, youcan upload pictures of your
company, you can change yourproducts and your services on
there.
So those things will alsofactor into your off page seo
and that google listing is free.
Right, you can it is, yeah,definitely all businesses out
there.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Links yeah, it's free , go do it, because 100 and you
know what's the number one thingpeople ask in all the stupid
Facebook groups is is so-and-sorestaurant open this week?
Speaker 2 (07:49):
That's my biggest pet peeve is going to a restaurant
that says on Google that they'reopen until 8 pm and you show up
at 7.30 and, oh, we've beenclosed for two hours.
Whatever it is, it's sofrustrating.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
So make sure your hours are on there, because if
someone Googles what time doesJohn's favorite restaurant close
and it says it's open till nineand he gets there at 8.30, he's
going to be pissed.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I'm going to be pissed, I'm going to be hungry,
my wife's not going to be happy.
It's going to be a whole thing.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
So you know, that's the off-page stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
What about?
I mean, how does the otherInstagram, facebook?
They all have kind of their ownSEO, search engine optimization
factors too.
So on your Instagram profileyou want to put what category
your business is in.
So for us we would use mainpayroll as our kind of category.
That would help people that aresearching for payroll on
Instagram.
So the same kind of factors inyour description, making sure
(08:40):
you're using the keywords.
So social is kind of similar toGoogle in terms of that SEO,
those ranking factors.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Well, and it also and Google takes into account even
a little bit perhaps what you'redoing on social right.
If you have a lot of engagementon social, that again it's kind
of like those backlinks rightit builds your brand authority,
correct and your domainauthority so you know there's
another piece.
So on page, off page.
What about technical seo?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
technical seo is, I will just say right off the bat,
I think is something that we'reboth learning a little bit more
about every day.
That includes things like yoursite structure, meaning you want
to make it easier for Google tocrawl your website so they know
what information you have onyour website.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
So putting you know, just say, your blog in the
navigation bar at the top wouldbe better than putting it under
three different dropdowns, soGoogle is easily able to crawl
the page and understand whatit's about and then help you
rank higher for that specifickeyword you know one of the
things that we've found is, youknow, I think we went through on
(09:43):
through our journey in the lastcouple of years is we've worked
on a lot of the on page, someof the off page and now we're
kind of getting into more of thetechnical pieces of it.
We found that our website wasnot quite built in a way that
Google likes.
So we're in the process now ofnot totally redesigning, but we
have to fix the foundation thatthe website was built on.
To fix that and, please, theGoogle gods.
(10:05):
We also found that I mean, Ifeel like my whole life, right,
a JPEG has been what I know,right, that's the image, that's
our on-computer image.
Well, whole life, right, a jpeghas been what I know, right,
that's the, that's the image,that's our, you know, on
computer image.
Well, now we have like webpfiles, which I think have just
come out in the last coupleyears or if it's just become
more prevalent last couple years, but those are a lot smaller
and, in terms of file size,correct.
So when you're loading it onyour phone or on the computer,
(10:26):
you know those are your.
If it's loading slower,google's like gosh, right,
because I don't even know whatthe statistic is.
I probably could make it up,but it's like if you don't
capture someone's attentionwithin like 0.7 seconds, they're
going to go somewhere else thatmight even be too long, right?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Right, I don't know, I mean I'm sure it's the same.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
I know there's big statistics out there.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
And those WebP files.
Like you said, they're smaller,so it It'll make sure your page
load faster and page speed isone of the 14,000 ranking
factors that Google has.
So anything you can do toincrease that technical side of
your website to help userexperience, page speed, all
those type of things,click-through rates will help
overall increase your SEO.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah, so I mean, one of the things that we did a year
or so ago now is we kind of didour own SEO audit, right, when
you went through every page,looked at all this mostly the
on-page stuff right, that wasthe heading tags, the headers,
the descriptions, the alt text,all that stuff and I would say
that just quickly.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
That's probably a little bit easier for small
business owners who are busy.
Those things are a little bitquicker to fix and a little bit
less technical.
So if you don't have kind ofthat SEO knowledge, those are
the easier things to fix whichwill really significantly help.
Right, and it did help us andwe saw some great.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
We saw great traction until six or seven months ago
and we started to see thingsnosedive and then.
So now we've engaged with areally technical, heavy SEO
consultant.
They did their own SEO on us.
We found a couple of littletiny you know on-page things,
but the rest of it was.
It was the page speed, it wasthe backlinks, it's the
structure of our website is notdesigned in a way that Google
prefers, so now we're working tofix some of those things with
the more you know, gettingdeeper down the rabbit hole in
(12:03):
hopes of building those rankingsback up.
Correct.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
What you know, we're big on content.
We did a content marketingepisode.
You know, on content, we did acontent marketing episode.
Certainly that's a big thingfor us here, Even for other
businesses.
What kind of content shouldpeople be putting out there?
If you're a restaurant, what doyou want to do in terms of?
Speaker 2 (12:27):
that Maybe you're not writing a blog post twice a
week about how to cook ahamburger.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
But what can they do to really attract that?
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Those types of businesses wouldn't necessarily,
like you said, be writing blogarticles, but you still want to
make sure that your homepage is,you know, optimized for Google
in terms of ranking.
For if you're in, you know,thai restaurant, you want to
make sure that you rank in yoursorry excuse me, you're hearing
Kennebunk.
You want to make sure thatyou're ranking high for
Kennebunk Thai food and you know, using those keywords on your
homepage food and you know,using those keywords on your
homepage Videos, I would say arereally, really important for
(12:54):
restaurants shooting videos ofthe chef cooking the food, the
server, you know, serving thefood, bartenders making drinks,
and then optimizing those videosfor social, to have someone who
is searching for Thai foodKennebunk Thai food main pop up
on their Instagram.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Right, and that's been a new.
I mean, that's another piece ofthe algorithm that you know the
14,000 factors right.
Is video Correct?
Is they've?
They now almost expect you tohave video on your pages,
because that's what consumerswant.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yep, and it goes back to kind of that user experience
, I think, on the page, becauseyou know, with shorter attention
spans nowadays, no one'snecessarily sitting there
reading a page that has 10,000words.
They're looking for a shortvideo to know what that page is
about, know what the next stepsare, things like that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
So we've done our audit, we've done our fixes.
We're trying to build moretraffic and more leads and
people to the website.
What other tools are we usingto measure our SEO success?
I guess yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
So we personally use HubSpot as our CRM tool.
I use this keyword and SEO toolcalled SEMrush or SEMrush, and
what that does is going back tothe keyword rankings.
I can see what keywords aredifficult to rank for, who's
trying to rank for them, who areranking one, two and three for
them.
And then once we, you know,have our page and we give it a
(14:10):
couple months to rank and getsome stats behind it, we can go
back in and use these tools tosee where now our article or our
page, and we give it a coupleof months to rank and get some
stats behind it, we can go backin and use these tools to see
where now our article or ourpage is ranking on that list on
Google.
We can see if our organictraffic has increased to our
website or that page overall.
We can see who, where peopleare clicking on what page and
what forms are submitting toreach out to us.
(14:31):
So we can use these tools toyou know, do that analyzation.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Yeah, I mean those types of softwares are really
great tools for us to really begoing through and say, okay,
evaluating what pages areworking, what pages aren't
working.
You know, maybe we need totweak one or update one or
adjust one.
You know we use the Googlesearch console, right?
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, ga4, google Analytics 4 is a free one for
people to use.
If they're using Google, myBusiness and then the same thing
, they can see their organictraffic, what pages people are
interacting with, those kind ofthings.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
So I can tell you we're the little old payroll
company in Maine and we use asoftware called iSolve which
other companies like us aroundthe country use and we do a lot
of.
We're big on educating andhelping our clients, so one of
our most popular pages is thehelp page, right.
So we have papertrailscom slashhelp which helps all of our
clients and their employees login to iSalt.
(15:23):
And we get submissions multipletimes a week from Joey who
works at McDonald's in Wisconsinnot able to log into iSalt and
unfortunately we have to say I'msorry, I can't help you.
You need to go to your employerand go to your payroll company
to help with that.
But it does work right.
We're attracting traffic.
We rank higher for iSolvedlogin help than iSolved itself
(15:58):
no-transcript themselves.
Right, we had this just thisweek.
We had a guy from Pennsylvaniasubmit a request on the website.
He was watching one of ourtimekeeping videos and he goes
hey, I useSolved and I can't getan answer to this question.
Maybe you can help me.
I really appreciate your videosand we saw he's watched every
single video we've posted.
You know he was really engagedand not a client of ours.
(16:21):
But certainly you know weresponded back and said hey,
first of all, go back to you,know who you work with.
But here's what our experienceis and what can be said.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
It was funny because I was talking to Jeff, our sales
guy, who called this particularbusiness, and the business
submitted this form because heactually thought we were iSoft,
because we ranked higher onGoogle than they did.
So, again, it really has helpedincrease our organic traffic
and just get our name out there.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Right, I mean even things you know.
We've seen some really bigleads come through.
I mean hundreds of thousands ofdollars in recurring revenue
has been driven now through ourwebsite and John has goals on
that right.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
He gets stressed out every time we talk about it.
He's got hives right now.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
I think, just thinking about it, but we have
goals for that right.
We have goals to be able to say, hey, we want to bring in leads
from the website and qualifiedleads and so forth, and this is
one of the ways that we do that.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, and I think you know we're talking about this
company that we've been tryingto work with now.
They talked about that yourwebsite should almost be produce
more business than your top youknow salesperson that never
sleeps.
Exactly the salesperson thatreceives.
So it takes some time to set upthese things at the end, in the
front end, and it's veryimportant to keep on them and
updating them as they go.
(17:30):
But once you kind of have itset up, the you know the
system's kind of there, and thenyou produce content and that
content generally will rankhigher because you have that
system in place and it's thatsalesperson that never sleeps.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Yeah, I mean certainly it's a lot of work,
right?
I mean you spend lots and lotsof time.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Yes, it's basically my whole day, every day.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
You know not only producing the content, but also
you know editing and adjustingthe website and optimizing the
website for these types ofthings.
And certainly we are totallyself-taught, right.
I mean, we've followed a fewguys on Instagram, we've taken a
few classes, we're reading,we're discovering, we're just
figuring it out on our own andthere are some things that we've
run up against, that we don'thave the expertise to fix and
(18:07):
we've had to engage somebodyelse in that.
But I think we've learned thatwe are.
We know what we don't knowright, or we don't know what we
don't know, but we know we'renot smart enough to fix what we
don't know.
So we've been working onengaging with some folks to help
us with that too?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
No, and I think it's important for small businesses
out there to just take some timeat least to try to work on some
of these practices and optimizetheir website.
And I know, if you don't have amarketing department on your
team or you know you're a busysmall business owner, it's tough
to find 40 hours a week, like Ido, to do.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
you know this seo 40 hours a week I said four hours a
week to do this seo stuff andum, but you know if you can do
just that four hours a week,then, unless you get the thing
that moves your mouse around andkeeps you active all day, you
get that on tiktok I found athing I can bring my laptop into
the golf cart.
Oh yeah, and you brought it tothe beach before too.
We got that picture one time Igot it all.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I'm actually more productive in those scenarios
sometimes Work from home, workfrom home.
Home is anywhere I want it tobe.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
So we've been really successful in this and certainly
it has been a journey.
It's been a couple of yearswe've been working through this
and I will say, you know, again,we've seen really good results.
We've had some lulls in this.
You know, in our industry thekeywords are expensive to
advertise for.
Our keywords are very popular,right, there's a lot of
competition in our industry withsome Fortune 500 companies that
(19:32):
have teams of people that dowhat John does.
You know, and I think for mostbusinesses, even just getting
the basics right because you'rea local business right Again,
thai restaurant and Kennebunkright If you've got your basic
SEO stuff down, that's going tokeep the Google gods happy,
right.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And much easier to rank for right Right.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Much easier to rank for right.
For us, we're and you're notlooking for people outside of
that area.
For us, we have a largergeographic reach that we're
looking to attract, which againplays into some of the other how
we write articles and how webuild our website and how we
manage that.
And so we have to look like theauthority to Google on these
things and we have to be perfect, because, again, the Fortune
500 companies that have teams ofpeople doing this are, first of
(20:13):
all, have way bigger budgets,right, and they're really good
at it.
So we have to, you know, wehave to be not only just be
really good at providing ourservice, but we have to be
better at selling ourselves.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Well, and the nice thing about this for us is I'm
not going to say it's free,because of course you've got to
pay me and these marketingcompanies we're working with,
but it's a more organic approachand these bigger Fortune 500
companies have millions ofdollars to pay per month for the
word payroll on Google andthose first it's like $25 per
click.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Right On Google ads for the word payroll Right.
We don't.
We don't spend 10 clicks a day$2,500 a day.
It adds up.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Right, $250 a day.
You said, yeah, whatever themath is, but it adds up, it's
good, not the account.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, but no, seriously, we don't do any ads
right Because one it's reallyexpensive for what we want to
rank for and we tried to thinkabout that.
We said, okay, what are somekeywords that we can try to use
for ads, like, what are thingsthat people are searching for
that are less expensive?
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And we just, I mean, we spent a few grand and we
didn't really get anything outof that either.
Well, and it kind of goes backto that quickly.
That keyword research is it wasa little bit cheaper, but the
volume no one was reallysearching for those words, so we
got very few results out ofthat.
Those ads, yeah.
We thought we were gettingsmart, but we Right, we kind of
hurt ourselves a little bit.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
I think in that Well we just wasted five grand, but
we learned.
So what are the SEO mistakesthat we've learned that people
should avoid?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
One thing, and we talked about.
You know using those keywordsas much as you can make sure
you're not keyword stuffing,meaning you're just writing an
article about main payroll andevery third word is main payroll
.
Google doesn't like that.
It wants creative, but it wantseducational content.
Google ranks things based onthis acronym, eat, eeat, which
(21:58):
is expertise, education,authoritativeness and
trustworthiness I didn't knowthat.
Yeah, so those four things gointo each thing that google
looks for to rank.
So if you're better in each ofthose categories, you'll rank
higher.
So that's so.
If you're just keyword stuffingover and over and over, they're
not going to take that astrustworthiness content.
(22:21):
They're just going to, you know, kind of brush that aside and
that won't rank.
So that's kind of one mistake.
Another mistake to avoid wouldbe and it kind of goes back to
that Google EAT but is producingirrelevant content.
Again, you want to make surethat your content is educational
, is relevant, is up to datewith the latest information out
there.
You don't talking about thebacklinking strategy.
(22:42):
You don't want to buy backlinksor you don't want to buy
reviews.
Even Google will kind of flagthose as you know, bought
backlinks, bought reviews andkind of punish you.
Actually, you'll hurt yourselfif you do that.
Another thing would be to justdoing it all once at the
beginning and then thinkingyou're all set for the next
three years.
You've got to make sure you'reconstantly updating.
Google's algorithm isconstantly updating, so you've
(23:02):
got to make sure we keep thoseGoogle gods happy.
So I think those are kind ofthe three or four takeaways.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Other things you know everyone wants the beautiful
website, one of the things we'vefound is like everyone really
wants this really beautifulwebsite but it gets clunky and
it's slow to load.
And if it's very graphicallydriven, if Google can't read
what you're putting because it'sin an image or something like
that that's not going to helpeither.
We found that.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, it goes back to that technical piece.
Make sure that you're not kindof your structure of your
website's not jumping all overthe place.
You've got images on the leftand on the right and at the top
and all that the left and theright and at the top and all
that, like, the structure needsto be good and google needs to
be able to read it.
It's huge.
Yeah, page speed, userexperience, everything factors
in.
But these are mistakes.
Like we're not worried aboutuser experience, we're worried
about making it look pretty.
(23:46):
So that's that's something youkind of want to avoid as well
well, I think nowadays it's Imean, in our website.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
right, we hired a great graphic, great marketing
agency to build us a, which theydid, but they didn't take into
account much of the SEO stuffand the structure of the website
, and that has hurt us or didhurt us, and it's continuing to
hurt us.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
we think in part of that, so we're having to invest
in managing that Right, and Ithink that would be one more
mistake, especially if you'rebeginning this journey, would be
kind of start small with yourlocal SEO, and we touched upon
it briefly.
But local SEO is ranking forthings in your local or your
close-knit community.
So, going back to thatKennebunk tie, if you're adding
(24:25):
the word Kennebunk to yourkeyword, then you're ranking
locally for that keyword.
Right, just put it in your metadescription, just put it on your
website, just say hey, listen,we're a Thai food restaurant, so
at first we were trying to rankfor payroll and HR and now
we've learned that we should tryto be ranking for main payroll
and HR.
It's going to narrow down thatcommunity but you're also going
to be able to rank higherbecause there's less competition
(24:47):
for that and for us that's thebusiness we want.
Definitely for restaurants youwant that local business, but I
think for most small businessesyou're kind of looking for
business in your general area.
So that's definitely a hugemistake is to go too big, you
know.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
So what's your goals here for the next in the short
term for our SEO stuff?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
So I think would be to continue to optimize the site
, like now that we've learnedsome of these technical things.
I've been, you know, working onupdating our page at a time.
It takes a little bit, butthat's one immediate goal is
just to optimize all of thosepages and then hopefully, by
doing that, is going to beincreasing our ranking for
certain keywords we want to rankfor, maybe narrowing some of
(25:32):
those keywords down to andreally focusing on certain
important ones to us, as opposedto too many of them, and then
seeing if our organic traffic isgoing to be increasing.
You know we're seeing a couplethousand people a day.
Be nice to see 10,000 people aday and having them, you know,
directed to the pages where it'sgoing to bring us new business
(25:52):
our our services pages, ourpricing pages, as opposed to
just that help page that youtalked about.
Again, not that traffic is badtraffic, but so those are just
some of the immediate goals.
I don't know if you have anymore for me, but no, I think
that's all the stuff we'reworking on.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Yes, right.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
And those ultimately lead more traffic.
More better keyword rankingsultimately lead to more business
opportunities.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Right, and I mean again.
It also builds our standing asexperts, you know, in the
industry.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
And with our current clients, with our current
clients.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
We have a ton of resources out there that we use
that also help the currentclients.
I mean, I used it yesterday.
We had, you know, three clientstis the season here in Maine
where everyone's got theirtemporary.
You know foreign workers comingin and you know we, john,
created a really great articleabout the different visa types
and the different restrictionsand requirements for each visa
type and you know I've sent thatto three clients this week
(26:42):
because they're asking thequestion.
So here we go, here's theanswer.
Right, go, take a look at this.
Here's everything you need toknow.
So that is also really good forin-house use.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, definitely.
Just use your content, you know, for both your sales and your
service teams.
You're doing it for a reason.
You're making sure you're usingit in all the ways you can Sure
.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Absolutely Well, good Well, SEO is certainly a
minefield.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
I think we just barely scratched the surface
here today, but I think it wasjust a good overview for small
businesses to kind of focus inon these certain areas.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
If we've piqued people's interest, how can they
get in touch with you to answerany of their questions?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Podcast at papertrailscom.
Oh geez or johnjohn atpapertrailscom, I'd be happy to
help.
Like Chris said, we're bothstill kind of learning, but I
think we've come a long way fromwhere we started, so I'd be
happy to help any.
Yeah, just share.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Awesome, well, good.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Well, thank you, John , for joining me for another
riveting episode and thank youfor all the listeners out there
and yeah, we've been having fundoing this.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Absolutely Well.
Thanks everybody.
We'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening to thisweek's episode of Small Business
, big World.
This podcast is a production ofPaper Trails.
We are a payroll and HR companybased in Kennebunk, maine, and
we serve small and mid-sizedbusinesses across New England
and the country.
If you found this podcasthelpful, don't forget to follow
us at at Paper Trails Payrollacross all social media
platforms and check us out atpapertrailscom for more
(28:02):
information.
As a reminder, the views,opinions and thoughts expressed
are the hosts and guests alone.
The material presented in thispodcast is for general
information purposes only andshould not be considered legal
or financial advice.
By inviting this guest to ourpodcast Paper.
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