How To Understand SEO

How To Understand SEO

Garit Boothe (garitboothe.com)
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
3/4/2021

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

that's why i like to make it super clear lay the tech foundation you create one page of content of content for every single keyword you want to rank for and if you're in a big niche you're going to want to rank for thousands of keywords and then get other websites to link back to you which is his own kind of specific type of pr those are the three things that compile seo and any seo company that's good will be creating content getting links for you hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the ceo and founder of miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks and if you ever need help with uh with anything feel free to reach out to us at miller ip law by just going to strategymeeting.com now today is another great expert episode where we have an expert on to talk about some things that are helpful to startups and small businesses and uh today's guest is uh garrett uh booth booth is that right that's right okay and uh we're gonna talk a little bit about seo and we've had we've discussed seo a bit in the past with some other expert episodes but this one's going to be a little bit more kind of both technology company centric and also a little bit more on the technical side of what does seo means and some of the considerations and the ways you approach it so a little bit more of the the back end and a little bit more on the tech side as opposed to what we talked about in the past so i'm excited to dive into it so with that welcome on the podcast garrett hi devon glad to be here so before we dive in and we'll definitely dive in to talk a little bit about seo but tell everybody just you know one or two minutes a little bit about your background why it is that you're an expert and why they should trust you and listen to your advice yeah absolutely so i've been doing seo strictly for the past five years been doing it overall past seven eight and um my first real uh experience with it was a small e-commerce company uh based out of here in utah or i believe we're both based out of and uh um they had an off-site blog that was um frankly i don't know i don't know why they wanted to create a blog that was on a separate domain but you see companies doing that sometimes they weren't making any money from it was kind of a sunk cost and i said is there anything we can do here and i was you know running a lot i had my hands on a lot of different marketing pies with my first real marketing job and i said well why don't we just take this blog and redirect it over to our main website where we sell the products and i did it in a very with seo in mind and i did it in a smart way and it turned out making a ton of money for the company and so i go oh this seo stuff works this is pretty cool so i just kept and i actually had hired an seo agency uh that didn't work out as well so um i fired them took it in house learned everything i could and it was a big success and so that just i was just off to the races after that i stuck deeper and deeper and to this day you know i'm still i still love just you know manipulating google right one of the biggest companies in the world and i manipulate their search engines for my clients no that sounds like a fun and a kind of interesting way to get into uh to seo and get into that aspect of uh of your business business so now let's dive into a bit of the technical expertise and talk a little bit so you know like maybe a softball question but you know looking at seo you work a lot with you know tech companies and particularly i think a little bit with fintech but give us an idea of if you're in the because a lot of our listeners are on technology whether it's you know doing and i work a lot with them with patents and trademarks and that but you know you take the tech company is there anything specific or different with seo when you're looking at it as a perspective from a tech company as opposed to other kind of companies whether it's services company or you're a restaurant or you're a small business or you're an e-commerce platform is there anything different that they should be considering when they're when they're a tech company or in fintech definitely and uh sorry i realized i didn't totally answer your question before in my own background as you mentioned now i do focus exclusively on tech companies for seo um particularly in fintech and um you know have the opportunity to work on some some big brands in my career like verizon and at t uh but i've also lost and then i moved to fintech after that so i've worked on huge brands and i've also worked on sites starting from nothing for example launching business.org and uh yeah you definitely approach it differently both on in for when you're working uh for a big company versus a small company versus local versus national and so uh there's a there's a number of things you have to take into mind if seo is the right fit for you and how you approach it based on who you are so one bottom line are people looking for you on google google has 90 of the search market share so being in yahoo and a few others exist but really we're optimizing for google here and you know if people aren't googling what your product or services don't do searching don't do seo don't do search engine marketing anytime so that's first and that applies to a number of bdb niches for example i did a little work for a um an insurance api tech company uh you know for for some reason they thought seo was for them because they'd seen all these other companies grow grow with it but it turned out what they were building was just way too technical and so i said sorry this isn't a good match for you but for other companies and you see a lot of these success stores like gusto right the um the heat they've grown to be this huge you know payroll provider tech company it's been a huge growth for them because people are looking at payroll terms so that's the first baseline thing but let me so let me dive in with a question a bit on that because i mean one thing i've always wondered so you have everything from you know restaurants or mom and pop shops right to you have some and one and more wondered and i don't know the answer hence why i ask you i'm generally interested is let's say you're whether you're a local plumber or you're a home builder or you're our landscape architect you know some of those are a lot of it is word of mouth you do it in the local area and so how do you determine if people are searching for you or if you should even dive into seo meaning you know you don't know if hey really you know if i'm a carpenter should i be putting my stuff online would that help my business or really that just going to be all the local people in this word of mouth and referrals and i shouldn't worry about seo how do you kind of go about starting to weigh that yeah totally yeah so i'd say first if people are searching for you um you know then you need to find out who's searching for you are the kind of people that you want to do business with which is which sometimes the people searching for your products i know this because i've worked in lending a lot of the people that are searching for lending solutions have terrible credit so only 20 of those will be qualified leads anyways and then uh you know what's the competition how hard is it going to be to rank for those keywords so like you mentioned a local service provider if you're a carpenter a plumber even an attorney right which is usually bound by geography um it's going to be less competitive because you only compete with those local service providers around you then the question is let's say you're a you know local service provider um you know what's your budget that's a huge factor i know that that seems really basic but you know you can't really do good seo on 500 a month unless you as the owner have that expertise so if you go out and want to hire a consultant or an agency you probably just you'd be better to do some advertising right yeah no i definitely yeah now one question i've had and i think that starts to answer and i'm going to follow it up is how do you know that people are searching for you mean let's say you take someone that isn't various suit you know they have great in their craft i'm going to use a carpenter just as an example you know that does woodwork let's say i'm really good at carpentry and i have you know great i have no idea if people are searching me in the sense that you know i know that i have people that are locally that are referring to me or that you know that i have a book of business with you know home builders or others that i'm using but i don't know if people are searching for me so i don't know if i were to start to get into seo or build a website or that if it would increase my business or it'd be a time sink and i've always wondered because you know when when we built a house previously in that we had a great carpenter and i don't think he if he has a website is so obscure that nobody would ever find it i don't think he does and he's not very technical and i've always wondered hey would he be great if he were to build a website and seo and would it 5x his business or would he just or sync a whole bunch of money so how do you even start to dive in and determine whatever the industry is as to whether people are searching for you yeah that's a great question so uh what i would start as the seo service provider is i was i have tools that tell me what the search volume is so i look at what you do and just see do people google let's say you know you're a carpenter in morgan utah people googling morgan utah carpenter if you get 500 searches a month for that that's not bad because if you could rank number one for that and you'd probably get anywhere from probably around 300 people a month to your website 300 people a month actively searching for a carpenter yeah that'll 5x your business um and and you know but for people that don't have those seo tools that i have to be able to look that up i'd say you know you probably want to look for a service an seo service provider who is in your niche there's lots of people who focus on local seo that's what they call it local seo so go to one of them in their pitch they can show you all the data take a look at the pricing you know and and that's probably where you'd start and they could give that to you for free um and of course the best way to hire someone this is true for any industry is just through referral right somebody you know has done great for others and and i i i'm sad to say that um there's a lot of seo and digital marketing providers that don't do a good job we kind of have a bad reputation in our industry so uh you know it's it's great if you can find someone who's done great for somebody like yourself no and i think that that definitely makes sense so now kind of shifting a bit of gears and you know kind of to follow on to that is one one of the things we talked about and it kind of dovetails into that is you have a lot of different types of businesses right some of them are b2b b2c sas which is software you know making or explaining those acronyms for those that don't know b2b is business to business b to c is business to customers are you selling to other businesses are you selling direct to consumers is it software as a service that is you know basically it's a monthly subscription or otherwise using software to provide a service or other tech specific if you're in one of those industries you know how do you how does that affect how you do the seo or what does that mean or mean when you're starting to tackle or dive into this yeah yeah so um that's a great question so kind of like we were talking about earlier you know if you are selling products nationally or even internationally right but let's stick with nashville um you know you're going up against anyone else who's trying to rank for that keyword so if you're e-commerce or you're a software provider right you're competing against anyone else and so that's what kind of gets back to the competitor analysis that i talked about earlier see if your keywords are hard or easy i have some clients um believe it or not even though they're in industries with big players nobody's doing seo and so it's really easy to rank for their keywords other places like for i can think of several different finances for example if you want to rank for anything credit card related okay when i was working at a finance company nav i was able to rank number one nationally for the keyword business credit cards and i had to almost i had to really work hard on that one and i was still my full-time dedicated job you know so ranking for one number one for credit cards forget it never going to happen unless you dedicate a whole team to it so you look at the competition are you nationwide are you local what's your industry uh how difficult is the keywords in your industry and then you know a good service provider can can guide you on how you tackle that from there um so now and i think that definitely makes sense i think that you know one of the things that people often times hey i'm just seo and all this it's the exact same for every industry and for every you know clientele and that's part of probably the reason that sometimes you have bad or bad reps not to mention you know at least on the other side i always get blasted by a whole bunch of spam and junk emails and on linkedin and everything else you just bombarded and some are probably very good at their services and a lot of them you look and they don't have hardly any clientele or any experience and they're really just doing very minimalistic things that they took you know a course or they figured out or they watched youtube and they're trying to get going and i'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that but it gives the industry a hard to figure out who's the good ones and the bad ones because you know they don't know enough of what they're doing to really specialize in that so i think that that definitely makes sense that you know learn what your market is and your seo if you're doing it yourself or something you're hiring someone should or should do some of that in analytics so now let's get a bit into that technical side so if you're to talk a little bit about kind of the technical side of seo kind of what that back end might mean what kind of backlinks are pr is and kind of what people should start to consider you know take it kind of assuming that one that they don't know a ton about it and two that they haven't hired a firm they can do it for them kind of what are some of the things that they should start to be aware of on the technical side totally so first off let's talk web platforms the whole point of technical seo is just to make sure that your website is indexed in google in other words that you show up so your first goal is when people google your name you show up and i know that sounds super basic but especially for new businesses doesn't happen a lot of times so first what you want to do is get a web platform that's easy to operate and so if you're you know on a shoestring budget maybe you're a local service provider or just a tech company just started bootstrapping um you know do wix do square do one of those they're really cheap really easy to go you don't have to ma you don't have to mess with hosting or setting up or it's very easy to set up email through they have hookup connections with with gmail and because your tech platform is the basis right and if you're a company with um with a little bit of budget i'd say stick to wordpress i've worked at companies who built out their own internal what we call content management systems cms's and they're horrible and wordpress is free so so just you know get wordpress there's plugins that you can use to give you advanced functionality um and and they're different and those will give you seo capabilities that otherwise might take a team of developers and so there's a lot of things i look at in tech seo um i'll crawl you i have a number of tools that i pass uh a site through um how many urls does your website have do you want all of them to be public facing is every page on your website linking to other relevant pages google works on a system of links um when a page shows up the listing actually in google is actually comes from your code your title tag and your meta description in html are those completed do they make sense are they conveying a message that going to make people want to click so there's a whole bunch of weird nitty gritty little things to look at on the technical side um but but to be totally honest with you you know you hire somebody like me we know all that stuff and and even just a quick project one-time project can get you going with a solid tech foundation or if you're hiring a web development or web designer make sure they have good seo people making sure that seo side of things is checked off most of the work when you're doing seo once you've laid a solid technical foundation is creating keyword-centric content and getting other websites to link back to you and i think you know devon if i may because i've thought a lot about this this is the part of seo where people kind of go like like what backlinks well you know what is that because because you know if you want to i've talked with marketing executives where they'll spend one two three hundred thousand dollars a month on google ads because it makes sense you pay money you get an ad people click on it they show up to your website versus seo is kind of like this dark art and all these weird different aspects but again that's why i like to make it super clear lay the tech foundation you create one page of content of content for every single keyword you want to rank for and if you're in a big niche you're going to want to rank for thousands of keywords and then get other websites to link back to you which is his own kind of specific type of pr those are the three things that compile seo and any seo company that's good will be creating content and getting links for you so now just as now correct me where i'm wrong if i were to simplistically try and break down what a backlink is is that's basically whether it's a hyperlink or other ways of directing people back to your website meaning so let's say you wrote a great piece of content you got published by forbes or new york times or whatever the outlet is and then they give a link back to your website that would be a backlink that people can follow that the internet they can index or google can index but that people can also follow it back to your website to find out more information is that a fair or simple summary exactly that's perfect google based it's if you go back to the 90s and read the original stanford phd paper on their idea for google it's based on links and even though there's been a lot of changes that's still the platform so the creators of google see a link of one website to another as an editorial vote because if you as a content creator or as a webmaster think that somebody else is valuable enough to work to to worthy a mention in the form of a link that probably means you've done something right and worthy so over the years there's been a lot of people who try to create spam links and you know you'll pr if you manage a website you'll see people trying to spam you for a link that doesn't even really work anymore if you go into most forums the links that you can get from those don't really count so there's some links that carry juice or equity if you like if you like and others that don't and as an seo person you know i know which ones do and which ones don't but generally if a link requires you talking to another real human it's probably going to be valuable no i think that that that definitely makes sense and now one thing that we kind of got into that that was an interesting interesting way of putting it was backlinks are really kind of a form of pr in the sense you're trying to provide valuable content that people are going to naturally want to share or otherwise put on their website and link back to you is that a fair kind of how does pr work with backlinks or kind of how to give us a bit of an explanation on that that front yeah that's a great question so yeah how do you build backlinks so there's a variety of techniques for this i'll start off with a simple one that's very common it's been around for years it's called guest posting so anyone who owns a website you probably devin you've probably been swamped with people asking you for a guest post opportunity and the reason that they do that is because they want to include a link back to their website or their clients website in the content that they provide for you so the idea is i'll provide free content for you if you link back to me and that has become such a common such oversaturated technique that now many publishers say yeah sure you can write a piece of content on my website and pay me an editorial fee so uh google doesn't want you to do that but that's i'm telling you that's the way palms get greased these days so you can either reach out to other websites ask them if you can provide some content for them or simply mention you if what your content says is relevant to what they're already talking about and you have to do a lot of outreach um but you know doing that kind of guest posting or link mentioning is very very common now one kind of flip side to that because i if i were to argue again i don't know against it but if i were on the other side i'm saying okay i've got a great website we get a lot of traffic now i'm maybe hesitant to link to someone else because then they go off on my website they go off of my page so how do you kind of overcome that if you're trying to get the backlinks you're trying to get the pr to get people to link you know to do that linking because that you know what the worst thing is if i do a whole bunch of time and effort to get someone onto my website and then i link to somebody else's they go off into somebody else's they never come back they never convert and it creates that issue so is there any thoughts as to how you make that balance yeah that's an interesting point and generally speaking because i do a lot of this kind of guest post outreach the websites that are willing to allow guest posts don't care about that most a lot of websites i'd say most they don't allow anyone to guest post on them ever unless maybe they know you already right so um in terms of the traffic that you'd lose if you look at the analytics click there's different tools you can use to see where people click and how much traffic where traffic goes generally and in if you write an article an in-content article link that's like a little blue link not a big button or something just a little blue link they almost never get clicked on so that particular concern although i think it's extremely valid usually it's not a problem most of the time it's just that most people asking for a guest post will really write terrible content and so that's why people say no um i think the best way to really go about it though and i gave guest posting as an easy example is to create content that's so good and that's citable link worthy has unique data has great design and visuals to it maybe you add a video to the article too it's so excellent in a way that nobody else's internet has done it when you reach out to people in your industry who are interested in what you do they say wow this is worth a link i want people to know about this and that's the best way of going about it but it's very very hard but that's that's kind of like the holistic way of approaching it no i think that definitely makes sense because i think it to your point i think it's hard if you were to get hit up a lot of times saying yeah you can write an article but by the time i have to read through it i have to look at it and then i have to make sure it fits in what it and even i all of that is like it's not worth it i'll either write our own content or you know unless it's you know to your point unless you're like a blog place where you're featuring a lot of guest posts or you're providing information or you're something of that nature but if you're a just a company or commerce you're gonna say it doesn't make sense to fit in with us so definitely just was an interesting question well i'm gonna we're starting to wrap towards the end of the podcast i do have one more question and you know i always say one more question i probably have more than one more but um if you are a startup a small business and you you're either in this spot that you're not convinced that you should invest or you really don't have the budget to invest in it yet what are what's the best way to at least start to tackle seo or start to get in involved in this to help your business to the degree that your budget allows yeah so i'd say hire some and this is what i tend to always do hire someone for a one-time project they can do keyword research they can do a technical audit of your website and just make sure that you're optimized for google make sure that there's a couple of different free google programs so first off sign up for the google search console anyone can do it um you can just google search console formerly was called webmaster tools and you can sign up your website for that get your website set up with google analytics that's free so right there if you do those two things um you know that's very helpful because google will communicate you know important information to you that way and then you know hire someone to do a quick audit do a quick um uh you know keyword research and if it's worth pursuing um maybe see if you don't have the budget tuck it away for maybe a year later when you're at a better place or or if you can you can maybe just start by writing one article a month around a strategically important keyword and that's something anyone can do no i think and i think that's great advice at least get to see if it's worthwhile if you should start tucking things away do the things that you can reasonably understand i think one that maybe add is at least work towards providing content right even if it's not perfect even it's not that's an easy one that you can start whether it's a blog video otherwise it's providing content that's relevant to your business such that even if it's not perfect you can at least start to generate it and then start to soft that money away such that when you are able to or you have the budget to start to engage in seo and you know that you need it and it's worthwhile to pursue well as we wrap up if you're to give kind of one last tip for people that are listening as to the if they could only do one thing if it was all they had the time for or the budget for as related to seo what would that one tip be no guy that's interesting i'd say um you know get signed up with search console that's google's official seo tool that they'll they'll tell you if there's errors on your website that you need to fix it'll tell you how much search traffic you're getting and that's just the best way to get started awesome well i definitely uh definitely encourage people at least get started at least start to become familiar with it because you know and if you never get going you're never going to reap the rewards and it's one of those that you kick if you kick down the road eventually you're going to be or fall behind or otherwise needed for most businesses unless as you said there are businesses that simply don't need it or don't need to engage with that well as as we wrap up if people want to reach out to you they want to find out more they want to be a client they want to be a customer they want to be an employee they want to invest in your business they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out and find out more yeah uh garrettbooth.com i have a strange spelling to my name g-a-r-i-t-b-o-o-t-h-e here at booth.com and uh you can find me there all right well awesome well i definitely encourage people to reach out to garrett if you're looking for seo whether or not you need it figuring out what that might entail how to get it going and how to engage with that definitely reach out to garrett and i want to say thanks for coming on the podcast it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell or your own expertise that you want to share feel free to go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the podcast two also if your listener make sure to one click subscribe in your podcast listener so you know when all of our awesome episodes come out and two leave us a review so new people can find out about the podcast as well last but not least if you ever need help with your patents trademarks or anything else with your business reach out to us at miller ip law by going to strategymeeting.com thanks again garrett and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last it's been a pleasure thanks devin English (auto-generated) All Sales From Miller IP Law Recently uploaded