SEO for Manufacturers: Case Studies Included

[00:00:17] An empowering team member of productivity and wellbeing with a liberal arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. William has combined his studies with his affinity for technology to teach himself the skills of the trade. He thrives in situations that require unraveling complex processes, data and algorithms to find new insights and produce clarity.

[00:00:39] As always, this starts with creating a human connection to understand the impact of the technical issues, then coming up with a strategy. Plan to implement the chosen approach. His background will be helpful in teaching us about the power of search engine optimization, so please help me in welcoming William to the stage.[00:01:00]

[00:01:07] William: Thank you, sir. These are my people. Clearly you hardcore marketers who have made it to the end of the day and are here to learn about search engine optimization for manufacturers. So congratulations. You know, I know that I get the dubious honor of being the last speaker before happy hour. I tried to give them, bring cocktails in here, but they just said no, they couldn't do that.

[00:01:31] So we've got about 45. We'll take this time learn a little bit about search engine optimization and you know, talk marketing. This has been a, a really great conference. You know, kudos to the organizers who'll put this together. I was just sharing with Danny in the back. There's a lot of overlap between all of the sessions today.

[00:01:49] You're gonna see. Me talking about some of the things that D was just talking about, that Dave was talking about and that Jim was talking about this morning in this deck [00:02:00] where we come in and play a key part, a key role with our clients is in, you're creating great content. You're producing great products.

[00:02:08] You've got a fantastic sales team, but are you getting the exposure online that you want for your company? That's where my agency comes in. That's where search engine optimization comes into play. First of all, I'll say SEO is not for everybody. I'm not saying that SEO doesn't work. I wouldn't be up here as an agency if I was saying SEO doesn't work.

[00:02:31] But it is not for everybody. It does take the key ingredients, and that's what I wanna share with you today. What we believe after 20 years of doing search engine Rock. For industrial clients like yourselves, what we have found to be effective. This will continue to evolve over time, but here's state of the art right now.

[00:02:54] So we're, I'm gonna use a lot of jargon today. I'll, I'll try to explain it. Let's, before we [00:03:00] start, let's start with seo, search engine optimization. Somebody said to me once, explain it like I'm. And so my simple definition of SEO is showing up when your customers or prospects are looking for your products or services online, you ask five other search engine optimization companies, what that definition is.

[00:03:19] You'll give five different answers. But that's a simple version for me. It's showing up online. So a quick poll. Who in the room is doing us here or who's. Maybe you're on sales and you're not involved, but whose company is doing seo? I see a few, very few hands. So maybe, you know five or 10 folks.

[00:03:39] So just a handful of, of companies are doing seo. I'm sure you're doing elements of SEO that will cover today, but whether you're currently doing it, Evaluating the plan. Hopefully this presentation will give you some ideas on how you can improve your online visibility. So, quick agenda. Here's [00:04:00] what we'll cover in the course of the day, why it matters, what it is.

[00:04:04] A couple case studies that we have and then. Really what I think the core of this talk is, is building an SEO program inside of your company and then some quick wins you can take home. So let's start with why and where we'll start is looking at Google. And these are some estimates Google doesn't release actual numbers.

[00:04:24] But estimates, and these estimates are a couple of years old. This is the most recent, I could find 63,000 searches per second, so that's 63,000 people every second doing a search on Google. That's just Google. There's also Bing, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube. That adds up to 5.6 billion searches a day, and almost 2 trillion.

[00:04:49] Searches year. You may say, William, so what, what's that mean to me? I manufacture, you know, hard steel. I work in a, a, a dirty, loud, [00:05:00] noisy plant. How does this matter to me? So let's take a look at this market and in your market. We looked at the mining and metals market using a tool called s scm, rush and the market.

[00:05:13] Every month is almost 450 million searches happening each month, and that's traffic to the websites that make up this particular market. 14% of that traffic is coming from search, and that'll be relevant here in just a moment. We then took another, And we said, all right, let's look at the FIA attendees.

[00:05:39] And then we also, compared to some of your online competitors that are competing for similar types of keywords, they're basically showing up for similar terms you're showing up for. So there we're looking at over a hundred thousand searches per month. Yeah, that's a fair number. Are you getting a percentage of that?

[00:05:59] Do you know [00:06:00] if you're getting any percentage of that? But here's the real. 75% of that traffic is being driven by search. And what that means is that the bulk of traffic coming to your company's website today is most likely coming from a Google search. So the discrepancy here, 14% versus 75%. I think there's a simple explanation for this is that not many people are saying at lunchtime, oh, let's go check out the company blog.

[00:06:33] Or, you know, let me go and, and look up this company's, other company's website. They may be going and reading industry information. They may be browsing their LinkedIn data and coming to these sites that could be getting email. From these industry influencers, marketers that I, I point this out just to give you some context within, and this backs up data that we see in our industrial clients as well.[00:07:00]

[00:07:00] So if you think of SEO from a value standpoint, first value from an is the visibility. Again, back to what I was saying in the. If you're creating great content, you're creating videos, you're telling good stories, you've got a, you know, a crack sales team, if you can create more visibility, can you get more opportunities in Second, opportu value of SEO is traffic.

[00:07:26] So showing up in enough. We're gonna break down a search engine results page here in a minute, but there's a lot more than the 10 search results that come up. And then here's where the, you know, the rubber meets the road is lead generation. And those leads can come in multiple different forms.

[00:07:44] There's customer acquisition. It could be that you're working the channel and trying to drive channel. Or it's a matter of retaining, upselling, cross-selling, your existing customer base. And it really comes down to what the business strategy [00:08:00] is behind the SEO plan.

[00:08:05] So I wanna level set a little bit. Searching optimization. I gave you the basic definition. Let's look a little bit deeper into what goes into an SEO program, and we'll start with where searches start in a results page. So I told you we have acronyms, so we have search you know, the basic breakdown.

[00:08:27] Seen these there's nobody in this room who hadn't searched Google or being you know, there's paid ads, you know, there's the organic search results. There's also the knowledge panel, there's the rich snippet, there's the frequently asked question. There's the rel related videos. If you're searching for a term that Google thinks means you want a local business, you'll get the local business pack.

[00:08:51] There's news that could show up depending on the intent that Google interprets is behind the search. [00:09:00] So that's the anatomy. Of that search results page. So now how do we break into page? You know, it's, it's not hard if you're doing SEO today, you know, it's difficult. And it gets more challenging every day.

[00:09:14] If you're not doing seo, there may be a good reason right here to step out of the room and say, okay, they're done. Don't need to pursue this. You know, as I mentioned, hard to rank a lot of clients that come. Their teams are already creating content, but it's just not showing up. They need just a little bit of extra help to get that content to rank and to get the click to come through.

[00:09:36] It's constantly changing, you know, Google updates their algorithm a lot. Just in the last four weeks, there's been two major. To the Google algorithm. One is the helpful content update, and then the second one is the broad core update that happened. Keeping up with that is practically a full-time job.

[00:09:58] And then there's this concept of [00:10:00] SEO moats. And if you worked in SEO for a while, if you've tried to get a a page from or a yes, a website page from page two. Which is the best place to bury a dead body and, and search to page one. You know, what emote means is, is the fact that you are essentially, you know, trying to topple somebody else who's established rank for that particular keyword.

[00:10:23] So we've understand the anatomy of the page. It's given to search intent, and this is where you gotta get into the psychology. Of the person on the other side of the keyboard. And this is also where it pays to have those conversations with the sales teams. Understand what are the customers asking? What are the pain points?

[00:10:45] What's your to pay that they are facing, that's going to get them to come to your site. So the most common. Of keyword is informational. The who, what, how we all do these [00:11:00] searches regularly. This drives a majority of traffic to websites. The second type of keyword is a commercial keyword. This.

[00:11:08] Is where somebody is starting to evaluate what the options are to solve a problem that they have, and then the transactional is where they're getting to the point that they're ready to engage in the sales. Conversation is an interesting statistic. Jen shared this morning that 83% of the sales process takes place without the buyer.

[00:11:34] And it's taking a lot of, it's taking place out here. Transactional is where you get to start having that. A direct conversation with the buyer. And then this is an interesting one. This is called navigational. And essentially this is somebody who already knows your brand, who is trying to learn more about the company.

[00:11:51] It may be an existing customer, it may be an employee. I use Google to search my own site sometimes to content and maybe somebody in the. [00:12:00] Process that's looking for more stories more examples, more proof. So those are four types of keywords. So as I was getting ready for this presentation, I sat down with Michelle, my head of SEO at the agency and said, Michelle, what are five things that I can tell this group if they walked away with nothing?

[00:12:22] They'd at least have these five keys to rank. Like I said, I, I don't work in threes. We work in fives. First one is strong keyword selection. That's where, you know, knowing what the different types of keywords are, knowing how to do keyword research, understanding buyer intent. Oftentimes we'll start at what we call the bottom of the funnel with those search terms that are close to Transac.

[00:12:48] And then build our way back. Other times we'll start at the top and work our way down. It really depends on what the objective is. This is what for me separates the amateurs from the [00:13:00] pros is the ability to do strong keyword selection. The second thing she said was, To create unique und duplicable content that is actually a word

[00:13:10] It's, this is hard. You have videos, a great way of doing it. You heard from Dave and Danny was sharing some examples of how you can use story and testimonials to create unique content. I'll share some other examples in here as well. The third thing Michelle said was page speed. Google's been telling this for years.

[00:13:29] That you've got to improve pH speed. There's proof over and over again that we are impatient. It's just, it's built into our psychology. Don't blame yourself if you're feeling bad. Don't blame your kids. It's just who we are as a species. We have short attention spans, so make sure your pages are.

[00:13:45] Responsive. There's a three particular tools that they talk about, which in that fit into core web vitals. You know, if you're doing SEO today, you probably know about core web vitals. Site Health is the fourth one [00:14:00] and Site Health. That's where you're getting into ensuring that your site is clean.

[00:14:04] There's no broken links, no dead ends. That if you've, you know rebuilt the site over a matter of years, there's probably old redirects that need to go away ensuring there's a good. Index to the website. The robot's file is up to date. This is getting technical, but that's get the site health. And then the last piece is the links.

[00:14:25] This, both the internal links are important as well as external links. The external links are the authority that your site has the internal. Help Google to understand how the content on your site relates to each other. So those are five keys to ranking. So if you have a program in place, or you've, you've got to this point that, you know, you're, you're starting to put these keys to rank and place, how are you going to measure success of the program?

[00:14:57] We look at three particular [00:15:00] metrics, vanity metrics, volume metrics, value metrics, the vanity metrics are those. We feel really good about it. As marketers, we can say, Hey boss, look, you know, our traffic's going up. We've got more people are consuming more pages, more content, they've got more followers.

[00:15:17] It's not that it's bad, it's just if that's all you're hanging your hat on, you're not following it through to the volume value metrics. Those end up being noise, but they can be some leading indicators. The volume metrics are getting into. The number of leads that are being generated. The, the traffic can be a early indicator for volume metrics of future sales.

[00:15:40] And then the value is getting into the dollars getting into the con sales conversations that are happening. Could even be email opens the engagement that you're having with customers from a. Standpoint, we break this down in terms of sessions, [00:16:00] contacts, customers if any of you are using HubSpot, you may recognize the chart here.

[00:16:06] It's one of the tools that we use in our toolbox. So those are key marketing indicators and the sales side. Is revenue all comes back to revenue. Any questions or comments about what is SEO at this point? Good. So let's take a look at some case studies. And this is, this is proof. I'm a marketer. I've got the charts.

[00:16:34] So this first case study is with a customer that we've been working for with for almost 10. Our data doesn't go back that far. But it's some context to be aware of. This is a long time customer and so across the top you see visibility, traffic, leads, customers. That's kind of that process that we're following as an agency to ensure that, you know, the work we're doing is turning into dollars [00:17:00] and that's.

[00:17:01] I think SEO can get a bad rap for. It's just about the creating the visibility or creating traffic, but not creating leads. Not creating customers. You, it, it has to go all the way through or you've got bad targeting, bad messaging. Anyhow, back to the story here. Visibility. We look at the number of. Our clients are ranking for.

[00:17:27] So the chart here, this graph is the the keywords by rank that this particular client is ranking for. And as I said, this is an established client, so there's some growth, but we've done a lot to corner the market on the keywords that are really important to them. And you can see the effect of that work here in this chart.

[00:17:47] This, this goes back a little bit further. You can see. Start actually getting them on board to write blogs. That was a tough one for this particular group. They were worried about giving away intellectual [00:18:00] property and information. There was an interesting switch that they had that, you know, maybe could be useful for some of you.

[00:18:06] If you're trying to sell leadership into this idea of sharing information, you don't have to give away the answer, you just have to show that you. Answer. So this is showing a, a healthy growth over that period of time in traffic. You know, things are gonna go up and down, but it's the overall trend is what we're looking for.

[00:18:30] And then leads, this is a combined graph here. And the reason I did this combined graph is there's an interesting story to tell. When we started work with them, their leads count was somewhere around. Twenties, you know, in a good month. They're up in the thirties, forties. As we started working together with them and ignored the dip in the middle, there was something that was up with our tracking information during that time.

[00:18:54] But as we started working with them, the conversion rate, which is that blue line tracing the. Cross [00:19:00] actually dropped. So the story here is getting enamored with one particular metric. Like if you, if we were just focused on conversion rate at this point, we would've missed the fact that the, the number of leads is increasing.

[00:19:15] Thankfully the conversion rate is pretty much studied out at this point, but there's still that continued increase in the number of conversations in this particular g. Of the company's who was formerly the commercial director and we were working on this project with him said to me once that 90% of their new business comes through their website.

[00:19:34] I don't think he meant that it's all generated from the website, but at some point in that sales process, they're passing through and consuming information from the website and then customers and the ability to track back marketing. Customers, we call this closed loop reporting. And it's such a critical part of a successful program cause it helps to inform [00:20:00] the marketing team on the kind of leads, the kinds of activities that visitors are taking on the website channels that they're coming through so that we can do a better job on getting more.

[00:20:13] Second quick example here. More recent client just actually rebuilt. Site in 2020. And they went from being a very regional company based out Chicago to having a nationwide, actually a North America footprint in the US and Canada. And it's a more broad set of terms that we are able to target for them.

[00:20:35] The first example was in the chemical space. This is in the distribution ware housings. Space. They got a healthy bump this summer with some of those updates that Google made. So just an indication that Google does reward good marketing. Again, looking at keeping up with traffic and keeping an eye on that and tracking back to leads.

[00:20:54] Same thing happening here. Higher conversion rate at the. When we started working, [00:21:00] saw a quick drop, but overall, the number of leads is increasing over time. They are in the process of implementing HubSpot at their business so that we can get that full view 360, look back. All right, so this is the meat of what I wanted to share with you today is if you have a program in place right now, here's how we go about tructure.

[00:21:24] An seo team SEO process and the tools that we use, if you're thinking about putting one in place these are what I mentioned earlier, the key ingredients to a successful program. It starts with people. I'm glad that that made it into my bio. I forgot that I put that. But it really does, as much as I love technology enamored by the tools it really comes down to people.

[00:21:49] And a website at the end of the day is really just a method for your customers, prospects recruits to connect with the company. [00:22:00] So there's two teams that are critical to success. The first is the business team, and this. Of the visionary the person who has, you know, the next six to 18 months, maybe even further mapped out of where the company's going.

[00:22:17] What markets are the, are you entering geographic or industrial markets? You know, what products are being released? It may be multiple people. But these are the, we break it down into three key particular roles, the sales leader within the company who has the voice of customer, and then finally the mar the marketing leader.

[00:22:38] Some of these roles can be shared here, and there may be other roles depending on the company. HR may be a key component to the SEO strategy. Recruitment is important as it is for many of us right now. The responsibilities of the business team start with the strategic direction of the company and [00:23:00] then having the go-to market plans in place, knowing who the audiences you're trying to reach, what the industries are, what services and products you're bringing to market.

[00:23:12] They also established kpi. That they want marketing and sales teams to be hitting the budgets and the alignment between these two teams. I have a question for y'all at the end. I'm not gonna let you off like Danny did. If you don't ask me questions, I'm gonna ask you questions. Second team. Is the marketing ops team.

[00:23:34] Key roles on this team are the digital strategist, SEO analyst, the copywriter, the marketing coordinator, ensures all these great ideas are getting executed. The designer and the developer again, some people may wear multiple hats. But all of these roles need to be filled. The responsibilities of this group are to build the marketing strategy that supports the business plan, [00:24:00] creating quarterly plans, establishing the volume and value metrics that back up to the KPIs.

[00:24:09] That the business wants to reach, running the program from day to day and then reporting back to leadership in terms that make sense. Not vanity metrics, but actual what's business value being created

[00:24:24] with the process. This is gonna be a little bit small to read. I know these slides are gonna be shared. After the event, so you'll have our roadmap. What we've done is we've mapped out what the first six months looks like with our team. You'll notice that these sections here on the side, the swim lanes track back to those five keys to rank that were mentioned earlier.

[00:24:53] You know, a couple of them were here in optimization. It starts with research and strategy. [00:25:00] Content is critical to this process. Optimization and building trust and authority are ongoing.

[00:25:12] So let me dive into the, Orderly clan a little bit cuz this, this tees off. Everything that happens in an a SEO program, we have learned to work in 90 day cadences. We have monthly meetings during this time, but the 90 day cadence. Is set about based on a quarterly plan. So the quarterly plan includes what the annual business objectives and marketing goals are, what the KPIs that the plan is trying to influence are.

[00:25:46] It lays out the content. Plan for the quarter ahead. It evaluates the SEO performance. You know, the progress towards goals from previous quarters it could be looking [00:26:00] at this by topic, by page by keyword or by the entire website, is terms of SEO performance and then activity tracking. So as work.

[00:26:15] Done. It needs to be logged and tracked in order to see how effective that is being on the outcome on the other side. So being able to look back at previous activity will improve your future forecasting.

[00:26:34] Probably the hardest thing, I think, is learning the technical parts of seo. that can be, you know, learned relatively quickly if you have a technical background. But when, for us, one of the, the pieces of these proven hardest is producing useful content. We rely on our clients to come up with most of the content.

[00:26:56] We'll bring ideas, suggestions, recomme. [00:27:00] Based for what they want to rank for. But this part is such a difficult piece of it. We look for ways that we can re reuse content that I'll talk about here in just a minute. But some ideas that we ha will share with you about producing content you've already heard from our other speakers.

[00:27:17] But these are things that our team is doing interviews with your subject matter experts. As people on the line that we saw in the video, Danny was showing. I'm a Snyder Electric talking to the product development team, talking to the sales team the customer relationship team doing research on your competitors and seeing what the industry's talking about.

[00:27:37] And this is really a good place to do research for content. Four q4. So, you know, listen to what's being discussed tomorrow. Looks like it's got some interesting speakers talking about forward looking predictions. Something that's a little bit unique here is marketing with your customers, even with your prospects, if you can, if it makes sense.

[00:27:59] [00:28:00] Ideas here include an ask me anything. It could be a luncheon, it could be a round table conversation. You could do a roundup conversation looking at industry standards, industry updates you know, feedback from others in, within your, you know, suppliers or customer chain doing podcasts together.

[00:28:20] I think Jen, Jennifer this morning was talking about the research that both her company did and. Example company who, I'm forgetting that, that company, but they went out and did research and then brought that research back to share with their customers and running benchmarks. Uh, What should the expected outcome be?

[00:28:43] And as you're building content, really focus. On the buyer's journey, you know, look at, look at search intent. What did they want to accomplish in order to create content that's helping that buyer along? Ken's was foreshadowing for Danny to be talking [00:29:00] about that storyline. We talk about story brand, which is a book that I'll mention at the end.

[00:29:06] Shifting the position from talking about yourself and your products, to how do you turn your customer into the hero? How do you identify and solve problems for them? And then as you go about this, pick one topic, pick one, buying stage, pick one particular. At a time. Don't try to boil the ocean. And as you think about content production, I've got a, a couple of recommendations on types of content.

[00:29:35] So the categories of content for our website starts with the evergreen content. Your homepage, you're about us. Page, your services and products pages. These don't get updated on a regular basis. Then we get into the thought leadership type of content. Only you and your company can create. There's content that can be written for the sales and customer service to support the buyers, to support your existing [00:30:00] customers.

[00:30:02] Then there's content. Specifically for traffic generations, as I tell my clients, you're not gonna win awards for this kind of content. This is purely to feed the beast that is Google, and it is part of playing the game of rank and creating more popularity in search than competitors. And then there's company news and updates that are worth sharing.

[00:30:27] May not. But it's valuable information along the path. And then if any of you are familiar with Marcus Sheridan from originally, is it Sales line now? He wrote a book. They ask you answer. He came up with the big five. And his big five are the subjects that every business needs to cover on their website whether it's in long form text or in video, preferably in both.

[00:30:54] But these topics need to be covered, pricing and cost. This, very few companies do [00:31:00] this, this, I'm, I'm at fault for not doing this. This is something that we're gonna be working on in q4, ensuring that we tackle that. And it's not about giving away your pricing, it's just explaining it, you know, the transparency video.

[00:31:13] Was a good example of how one company went about being transparent about pricing and costs addressing problems, you know, what are those common problems that your prospects have, your clients have? Yeah. Maybe it's a problem that, you know, somebody's gonna run into. With your product, if you can address that up front and be transparent about it you're gonna be ahead.

[00:31:36] The versus in comparison, we all like to, you know, look at one versus the other, Ford versus a Ferrari Chevy versus gmc. What you know, Know, I'm pulling automotive examples, but name the example. We've all searched for comparisons and versus reviews. You know, this would be a long form product review.

[00:31:59] It may not be [00:32:00] your product, it may be an end product that your product goes in, told that you can write a long form review. It's gotta be backed up though by the research that shows this is information that somebody wants to, to consume or is supported by the sales team saying. Yeah, folks are asking for this information and then best in class, you know, what are the best five manufacturers in Wisconsin.

[00:32:24] What are the best tools for the trade if you're looking for help creating a content. Marketing plan. We did write a blog post about this, we call it the four Ps, and it's about planning, producing, which is doing the research, doing the writing, doing the interviews, promoting content. But this fourth one may be new to you as.

[00:32:46] Perfecting content and that's taking your existing content and ensuring it's up to date, ensuring it's continued, continuing to perform against what your competitors are doing. SEOs, I think of it as a leapfrog [00:33:00] game. So you want to get above that next person in rank. You follow what they're doing and they're gonna do the same thing against you.

[00:33:10] And as I said, a minute. Reuse, reuse, reuse. So you can take content, you can take videos, interviews, and repackage that in multiple different formats, and it can be packaged in a way that addresses the different buying stages for your customers. So this gets into how you can support the sales process, how you can support the buyer's journey multiple ways to take that content and reuse it, even if.

[00:33:40] Originally generated primarily for seo. So tools, this is to me, this is a fun part. There's, there's actually about 9,800 and some tools that were tracked by. The recent chief MarTech report on state of marketing [00:34:00] technology tools. That's a lot of tools. The explosion has been huge over the last 12 years since Scott Brinker started tracking that.

[00:34:08] I think it was less than a thousand at the, at the beginning of his tracking. So this is an explosive space to play in. We have some. That we continue to use, and then we'll share a couple examples that we're beginning to fold in. So first, you know, probably made a surprise Google Analytics great tool for just being able to get aggregate data to slice and dice that information.

[00:34:30] SIM Rush, you've seen some of the reporting we're pulling out of that tool. You can do competitive analysis and audits out of that tool. You can look at your own site, get site health reports. Th this is a key part of our process. And then HubSpot. HubSpot to me, takes it. From being aggregate information to knowing exactly, you know, what comp, what company, what person, what part of your website your visitors are engaging with.

[00:34:59] Now, that's one [00:35:00] of the more interesting reports that we like to build, is, you know, here's the list of the companies that are engaging with your content on a regular. And helps to sell the idea of marketing, sometimes upstream to others. Some of the newer tools that we've applied, data boxes, a integration software.

[00:35:20] So there's reporting that comes out of all of these tools that you use. Probably comes out of your sales tool, your crm. Your marketing for sure, even in your revenue tools, Databox can pull that together into a single unified platform. They have over 70 integrations and growing on a regular basis, and then a newer tool.

[00:35:43] Is market news now. This company's been around for a while, but they are coming at this space with a new approach now and a newer pricing model. If you were familiar with their old pricing model, it was very expensive. Six digit. A [00:36:00] year that price has come down significantly to I think their, their standard rate now is 12,000 for an entire year.

[00:36:07] But if you wanna start applying AI to the SEO work that you do, I highly recommend checkout. Market news. They do have free trials. All of these have freemium trials and offers. I I recently saw the market news, one of the co-founders speak, and of all of the tools that I saw at this particular conference, this is the one that stood out that we're now evaluating at the agency primarily where we're looking to evaluat.

[00:36:32] If you already have existing content that's ranking and you want to improve rank, marketing is exceptional in that. So I do like to read these are three books that I've have found to be really influential on helping me understand. Stand SEO as a business owner, I, I don't do that much seo, but I need to be conversant in it and understand it and know just a little bit more than my [00:37:00] audience and my customers.

[00:37:01] The SEO for Growth is a great foundations if you really are gonna be managing part of that SEO team, I highly recommend the SEO for Growth book. If it gets you really fluent in the. And tactics building the story brand. You know, SEO is great for creating that visibility, getting the traffic to the website, but if you don't have a great story, they're not going to stick.

[00:37:26] And what we've have found over time is that the clients that have a strong story know how to tell that story in. Resonates with the buyer, outperform all of our other clients. So we actually have hired a in-house brand strategist who uses this process to help our clients tell a better story and the results are remarkable.

[00:37:52] And then the last one I mentioned, Marcus Sheridan. Ask you answer really great book about flipping the script. And you know, building [00:38:00] a brand story is about putting your customers, making them the hero. They ask you answer is about thinking about your, the problems that your customers are facing and addressing those specific problems.

[00:38:15] And Marcus will challenge you and c. Sales team on how well you really know your customers. There's some interesting exercises in there. So getting started, if any of this has inspired you to undertake an SEO program or maybe to reeva, reevaluate your internal program here's some quick wins that we pull when we're starting to work with new clients.

[00:38:37] One, review your website against competitors. There's a couple of ways to do that. One, just search Google for keywords that you wanna show up for, that you think are important to you, to your industry, to your buyers. See who's there if you're. That could be a indicator of, all right, this is an area I want to pursue.

[00:38:57] Look at what other companies are in that [00:39:00] space. Is this the type of neighborhood I want to hang out on? You know, if it's more universities and educational, that may not be the right keyword. If it's more of your competitors, now you're starting to hit a seam. Second. Sim Rush. Sign up for a free account.

[00:39:14] Let them do some of that work. Second quick win. Get GA four installed. It's gonna be a pain in the, you know what? Do it. Bite the bullet. Google Analytics three or Universal Analytics is going away at the end of June next year. If you're not in marketing, you can close your ears to this, but anybody in marketing here, get GA four installed.

[00:39:35] You'll run to side by side with GA three and then the. Quick win. Do an audit on your website, a technical SEO audit on your website. Sim Rush offers this. There's a lot of other tools out there that can give you this data. But take a look at how effective your website is at meeting those core web vitals that Google is.

[00:39:56] Saying you need these in place to rank, and [00:40:00] we've literally seen clients that we've been ranking for for years drop when we didn't have core vitals in place. So I can't emphasize the technical se audit enough. So I thank you for your time here today. Thank you for your attention. Feel free to connect with me.