SEO Made Simple: A Live Workshop

[00:00:00] Calan Breckon: Today’s episode is sponsored by Surfer SEO. Trusted by brands like Square and Intuit, Surfer SEO is a tool designed to help SEO optimize your written content, like blog posts and articles on your website. Instead of guessing what Google likes to rank, this tool offers you a data driven analysis of exactly what’s missing from your already existing content. Surfer SEO is constantly checking thousands of data points, analyzing its findings, and prioritizing that information so that you have the best chance of ranking your articles on Google. Surfer SEO also comes jam packed with AI technology. Their powerful Surfer AI tool allows you to streamline content creation by taking care of research, writing and optimization, saving you countless working hours each week. Once the AI is done writing the article, you get to go in and make all the edits you want to bring that extra special magic only you can do. Don’t leave your SEO strategy up to chance. Surfer will give you an SEO workflow to boost your organic traffic, increase your visibility, and improve your rank. Visit calanbreckon.com/surferSEO for more details or just click the link in the show notes. Now let’s get into today’s episode.

Welcome to the Business Gay podcast where we talk about all things business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m your host, Calan Breckon, and on today’s episode, I have myself. So today’s episode is going to be a little different. I usually have a guest that I’m interviewing, but on today’s episode, I wanted to share with you a workshop that I recently did on the importance of SEO for small businesses.

This episode is from that live recording of the workshop where I shared practical tips about SEO, why SEO is important, and how it can truly benefit your business if you want to commit to it. If you want the full picture, I suggest that you check out the accompanying YouTube video to follow along with the slides I share. You’ll still be able to grasp the great understanding of SEO and what I’m talking about, even if you just choose the audio. But going over to the YouTube video is definitely going to give you that extra bonus of the visual of it. So with that, let’s jump in.

[00:02:14] Calan Breckon: So hello everybody.

Today we are going to be talking about understanding SEO marketing, how it can either make or break your business. I’m sure we’ve all heard about SEO, but what really is SEO? So that’s what we’re going to be unpacking today. Pru did an intro, but hello. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Callan Brecken. I use he him pronouns. I’m an SEO specialist. I’ve been doing this work since about 2018. I’ve worked with companies like Cohere Canada, life and Image engine, and I’m the host of the business gay podcast Little shout out to myself. Go check it out, where I interview people around business, marketing and entrepreneurship. And I’m also a CGLCC certified diverse supplier, like Pru said. So today’s learning outcomes, I like to kind of map everything out so that everybody knows where we’re going and what we’re learning. So we’re going to start off with what is SEO? Then we’re going to move into why is SEO important for your business? We’re going to get into how search engines actually work.

Then we’re going to talk about something called topical authority, and then we’re going to go into some free tools that you can use to find out about your website, and then we’re going to dive into some best practices. So what is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is basically the operations of making your website visible to search engines. And there’s lots of things that go into that, like keyword research on page SEO, link building, content creation. All of these things improve your website’s ranking in search engine results.

But really, what is SEO? SEO is basically the process of getting Google and search engines to know, like and trust your website so that they recommend it to more people. I know people think maybe just putting up a website and being like, oh, well, yeah, my website’s up there. Shouldn’t Google be able to find me? Theoretically, technically, yes. But if you don’t have any content on there, if you don’t have enough information for Google to know, like and trust you, Google’s not going to send people to your website because Google doesn’t know who you are. It takes time. It’s a relationship that you actually have to build. In today’s world, Google is your friend of a friend. Remember back in the day we used to have people and be like, hey, I need a plumber. Do you know somebody?

I’m looking. I don’t want to get screwed over. Do you have somebody you trust? Google’s now our friend of a friend that we go and ask more often than not. If you think about it, think to yourself, when’s the last time I actually went to somebody and asked them about something over just going to Google and looking up who the best one in the area is. And the reason you trust Google is because more often than not, it usually gives you some pretty good results because Google wants you to have the best experience possible. That is Google’s job. The more it can give you exactly what you want, the more you’re going to trust Google every single time you go and find out something new. So you need a new plumber. You go on there, you look up plumbers. In my area, there’s going to be a ton of options, but more likely you’re going to pick one of the top three options. And also Google has like Google, my business, if it has one of those, it’s going to give you star ratings. You’re going to know, oh, this person has like 405 star ratings. Chances are, I can trust that company, I can trust that business, I can trust that organization.

This is part of doing SEO, and doing SEO well is building out this library for yourself and your company and your organization so that Google starts recommending you in those top three spots.

So why is se important to you?

SEO helps your website rank higher in Google search engines, which means more traffic coming to your website. If you don’t have a lot on your website and Google isn’t recommending you, you’re not going to get many people coming to your website. But even if you had like one really well performing article that can make the difference between no people coming to your website and over 1000 people coming to your website on a regular basis for free, I mean, it might be for free if you were to write the article and it does really well. Possibly more often than not, you’re going to get somebody like myself or an SEO writer or a specific writer to write an article for you at a certain cost, and then that article will return those viewers to you again and again and again. So why is SEO important for you? It’s your roadmap to getting more traffic to your website, which equals more potential clients. More traffic to your website, more potential clients. It’s pretty simple math, right?

You could have the absolute best product in the world, but if nobody knows about your product, it’s not really going to do much good. Now, I’m going to talk about ads a little bit later on because they have their own place. But SEO is the long term vision. Ads are more of a short term vision and you can save thousands of dollars in advertising if you really focus on your SEO game and use SEO marketing as a long term strategy. This is not a short term strategy. This is a long term strategy that takes a time to build up for you and your business. So I put together this little spreadsheet and it shows fast results versus slow results and expensive versus cheaper. So down in the bottom left, you’ll notice SEO over there. I put cheaper. Not to say that it is cheap, it is not cheap per se, but when you think about the return on investment in SEO, when you’re building SEO for your website, which I’m going to dive into more of that later on. When you’re building your SEO, you’re investing money into things that are going to live on your website and build your website as an asset versus if you’re putting money into display ads, they have their place. If you don’t have any SEO, ads can get people through your door easily, but you constantly have to pump money into those ads in order for them to return those visitors to your website. The moment you turn those ads off, all of those leads dry up. And so you always need to be investing in your SEO in the background, even if it’s not your main strategy right now, if you want to be able to build your website, which is this amazing asset that you can build for yourself, big major corporations out there have huge teams dedicated to just this because they understand the power of SEO. If they’re ranking in those top spots, they’re going to be getting all of that traffic for those search results. And the more traffic you get, the more Google knows you, likes you and trusts you, the more they’re going to be sending you traffic more, begets more, begets more. But you have to get into that world and into the game in order for it to start working for you.

So how do search engines actually work? So search engines use algorithms to crawl and index your website. Basically it’s not AI, but it’s AI. It’s been around for a long time and it keeps getting smarter and Google always is updating what they’re looking for. But basically your website is built out of text and Google understands text. So the more text you have on your website that can contextually get across to Google what you are, the more it’s going to understand who you are. And one of the best ways to do this is having blog articles or articles on your website, giving that information to, you know, if we’re going back to the example of plumbers, if you want to be the best plumber or known for being the best plumber, you have to have all these different articles written on your website so that Google can go, oh, wow, Billy over here, all Billy talks about is blog or is being a plumber. And all these different topics around being a plumber, he must be an expert. We’re going to send more traffic to him because he clearly knows what he’s talking about. Your website is ranked based on the relevance and authority. So this plays into that authority. It’s the topical authority, which I’m going to talk a little bit more about later. But this topical authority of, like, you’ve blanketed the whole industry of plumbing. You’ve written every article possible in the different sub niches and everything that’s going on, well, Google is going to look at that and go, wow, they have like over 500, over 1000 pages, all to do with plumbing. Chances are they are an authority in that niche because they’ve talked about it so much.

But this is why I say SEO takes a long time and it’s a long term investment that you need to make because that thousand articles that need to get written aren’t going to happen overnight. And it’s an investment in the asset of your website to then generate these leads that come in all of the time. So if you focus on building your website and building your SEO, eventually you don’t need to invest in ads as much or even at all. If you’re getting like 100,000, 200,000, a million viewers coming to your website, that’s organically going to generate those leads. And would you rather trust an ad or would you rather trust a general search that you went to and you found the website because you were looking for that thing?

The higher your SEO score, the higher search engines will rank in search. So there’s lots of different factors that go into your score. One of the tools I’m going to show you later is going to kind of show you how you could figure out what yours is. But the higher your score, the higher Google places that trust in your website. And the higher the trust in your website, the more likely it is Google will actually send you traffic. So how does this ranking system work? So first off, you need keywords, which is the topical authority. Keywords are the things that people look up when you go into Google. You’re like, how to make an ice cream sundae. That could be a keyword. And so if you’re a baker or in the food industry, that might be a keyword that you want to target. And so you have to build all of these different articles around, not just how to make an ice cream sundae, but all the different relevant things that might go into how to build an ice cream sundae. You might have ten articles just on different types of ice cream or different kinds of ice cream cones or different kinds of sauces. All of these things build up and bolster that one specific post about the ice cream sundae. So that is keyword keywords. And that’s how Google searches the Internet, searches your website to find out all the keywords that are on your website. And then based upon those, it goes, oh well, they’re talking about this one thing a lot. They must be a topical authority inside of that niche. The next up is quality content. So with the inventive AI, it’s the hot topic of the day.

There’s going to be a lot of crap content out there where people just generate an AI content based article and throw it up. And in the short term it might work right now just because Google’s learning. The world is learning, but eventually over time that’s going to start to fall short because people can tell the difference. Usually I can tell the difference. When I go to an article, I’m like, this is crap. It’s not actually giving me what I want, it’s just kind of a bunch of stringed together sentences that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense versus an actual well written article for your website. Now you can use AI, and I also use AI to help map things out, map out the article, get your brain going so you’re not staring at that blank page. Especially for writers, it’s really great to use, but in actual going in there and writing the content and sussing it out and making sure that it’s actually nice, that’s really important to do for that quality of content because that’s what Google is going to be looking at heavily in the future.

Another ranking factor is backlinks. So backlinks are really important.

It’s one of those ways that Google Calan go, oh, hey, this website has a ton of backlinks, which means that they’ve been out there in the world, other people trust them. It’s like your friend saying, hey, this is Billy my plumber. You should trust Billy my plumber. That’s what a link back to your website is saying. And so when your friend refers somebody like that, you trust them more, right? And so links pointing to your website tells Google you should trust this website more because they have a lot of backlinks. The more backlinks you have that are relevant backlinks that are good quality backlinks, not just from spam websites, that’s going to help your website’s ranking user experience and speed. This is a really important one.

We’ve all done it. We go to a website, we try and click on something. It takes more than like 2 seconds for it to pop up. We’re like, I’ll go to the next one. We’ve all done it. We all know we’ve done it. And so that speaks volumes for your own website. If your own website is going slowly and it’s loading slowly, Google’s going to take another website that is equal to yours, maybe a little worse, maybe a little bit better, and it’s going to spit that out in front of you higher in Google search if your website takes a couple more seconds to load. So the faster you can get your website, the better. If you use WordPress, there’s plugins you can get that can help you speed up your speed and clean things up. There’s a bunch of little tips and tricks you can do, but speed is definitely a very important ranking factor.

Technical SEO. So this is something like a job that I would do where it’s your actual website, where you’re on your website, and there’s just these little things and little ways that Google likes to see things that a technical SEO person would come on and go, oh, you need to change this or this or map this out a little bit differently. Add this here. Here’s a plugin that you can add in the background, but it definitely has a lot of ranking factors to just keep your website nice and cleaned up and tidy. And keeping it updated is a huge part of technical SEO.

And then also your page authority. So the page authority is the page ranking that I was talking about. I’ll be sharing a free tool where you can check yours a little bit later on. But page authority definitely is an important factor. It’s kind of like zero to 100. If you’re sitting at zero, you don’t got a lot. If you’re at 100, that never happens. Pardon me. I think even like Forbes and stuff is about like a 96 or 97. So think of those big news articles or those big websites. Those are the high ranking websites because they have millions of links coming back to their websites. They have thousands of articles on there. That’s how they can build up their authority so well. And then social signals, these aren’t massive. They don’t give you what’s called link juice. So if you link from Facebook to an article or any social media or anything like that, they’re not actually going to count towards your page authority or your authority inside of your website. But Google still looks at those social signals and goes, okay, well, this article has been shared a thousand times. It’s a really popular article. It’s leading back to this website. That’s a good social signal. Plus also people can follow those links back to your website really easily. So this isn’t all of the ranking factors, but this is a part of the ranking factors.

So I talked about topical authority and I’m just going to unpack this a little bit more for you. So topical authority is putting out constant content based on your niche topics to blanket the topic. So my website, I have it all about entrepreneurship, marketing and business. Those are kind of the three areas I want to talk about and then I pick specific niches within that world to talk about. My focus over this next year is going to be about podcasting and podcasting for SEO. It’s one of my specialties. I love doing it and it’s not really a blanketed topic right now out there on the Internet. So I know I have an area that I can get into where I can be the leader in that area. So the way you do this is blog posts and articles. Blog posts and articles is the best way that you can grow your website and grow your topical authority because that’s providing all the context for Google to read all those words and understand and go, oh, okay, this is a blog post about podcasting and then this is a blog post about special mics for podcasting and then advertising for podcasting. All these different articles that build up to kind of build out your topical authority in the niche. Another great way you can do this is podcasting. So this is one of my specialties. A lot of people don’t know about this, but if you do it correctly, you can use, instead of building out blog posts, you can use a podcast to help grow your SEO and to help grow your website. Now it has to be routed through your website correctly. You have to make sure you’re getting your transcripts and inputting everything correctly. But if you do it well, this can definitely help you build your topical authority. Plus everybody likes podcasts. It can help build your brand. It’s great. I love it. If you want to start a podcast, give me a shout and then links to your website from experts and well known websites in your niche. So like I was saying, a bunch of crap links aren’t going to help you. But if you get an article, and I’ll use this example, the CGLCC, when they had the $25 million grant get released and told to the public they had all of these news articles, news publications do articles on them. And those articles linked back to the CGLCC website. Those were positive signals for Google saying, wow, look at this website. It already has a good standing. And now all of these news articles are pointing all these links back to them. They must be an authority in this niche user experience. So this has to do with speed again. So making sure your website speed is faster than your competitors is super important. A lot of this comes down to the technical website SEO and making sure you have an up to date website, making sure your plugins are up to date, making sure your template is up to date. I’m working with an organization right now that in the back end, all of their signals are red. They have a bunch of updates that they need to do. It’s not been updated since like 2018.

Obviously that means the website goes slow. It doesn’t work really well. It’s kind of clunky. It needs to be fixed up. Now there are easy enough fixes. It’s going to take time you have to go through to make sure you don’t break the website. Because you can’t just update everything because it might not be compatible with what was there before and it might break what’s on there. So you have to back things up and make sure you do things methodically and slowly, but making sure that your technical SEO is done by a professional so that you don’t break your website. And then also using something called a CDN, a content delivery network. If you’ve had your website set up by a professional, they probably should have done this.

But this really helps in your loading speeds, especially with images. So the content delivery network kind of takes like snapshots of what’s going on on your website so that it can send it out to people really quickly. A really popular one you’ve probably heard of is called Cloudflare. And so a lot of people use that. That’s the one that I use. It’s easy enough to set up for somebody like myself, but if your professional has set it up correctly, they should have done this for you already. And basically what this does is say you’re in Canada, your website in Canada, but somebody in Australia looks you up. Instead of having to send your website from Canada all the way to Australia, a CDN will have a server based in Australia, and it will be able to take a copy of your website and send it out to that person really quickly. So that instead of taking minutes to actually get to that person across the world, the CDN has a backup of your website and sends it out to them really quickly so that they can access your information really quickly. So this helps the user experience, making sure that things are done quickly and efficiently. And then that also helps your rankings because you’re high in the rankings. So then your speed ranks you higher than other people.

So we’ve come to the free tools to use area of the webinar. So this is the first free tool that I’m going to share with you and Pru is going to put the link into the chat for us, but it’s called backlink checker. And so if you go to this website, do it after, but click on the link. So you open it, but do this after. I’m going to show you an example. So you come in here and you paste in your domain. And I used the CGLCC as an example and this is what pops up. So you can see here that they have a domain rating of 64. So this is the scale I was telling you about, from zero to 100. This is kind of how Google trusts and ranks your website, and it’s based on the links coming back to the website. So the CGLCC has over 674 links coming back to their website. That’s really good signals to tell Google, hey, trust this website. They’ve been here a while, they’ve been doing their stuff for a while. It’s really, really good.

And then also the backlinks, there’s over 26,000 backlinks aren’t as important as the actual linking websites. And then also right underneath it says do follow, 85%.

This is more technical in regard to SEO, but there’s options where you can say, do follow this link or don’t follow this link. What happens is if somebody does a do follow, Google will crawl the website, see the link and continue to crawl through that link to the next website. That’s a do follow link.

If it’s a no follow link, Google will see that link, but they won’t continue to crawl onto the website. It will recognize it, it will see that it’s there, but it doesn’t hold as much weight as a do follow link. So you always want do follow links, but even if you get a super powerful no follow link, but it’s on a Forbes website, that’s still going to be a really powerful link over many other links that you could get that are do follow just because of the power that comes with it. So it’s a bit of an ebb and flow to it all, but it all kind of builds together in regard to SEO. So this is one tool you can use to check out and see where your domain rating is for your website. And if it’s super low, all the things we’ve been talking about in today’s webinar are the things you’re probably going to need to work on if you want to focus on your organic marketing through search engine optimization for your marketing strategy in 2024.

Now, the next one is the page speed for your website. So again, Pru is going to send the link into the chat for everybody. But this is put together by Google, so you know it’s a safe website. But if you go pagespeed web dev and you come in here and in, you paste your website’s domain, it’s going to run a test and it’s going to tell you how fast your website is. Now, because I walk my walk and I talk my talk, I used my own website as an example, so my performance is 99%. So performance is 99, accessibility is 98, best practice is 100 and SEO is at 92. Ideally, you want all of these to be green.

Now, there is two sections to it. There is mobile and there is desktop. The mobile will be the first one that pops up, the desktop will be the second one. They’re going to be different based upon tons of different factors. Like the template you use for your website might be great for desktop, but it might be not so great for mobile. And these things, just as the Internet grows and evolves and changes. Maybe when you set it up it was good and now it’s fallen a little bit behind. Again, this is technical SEO stuff that somebody should come in and be able to kind of help you speed these things up. Updating your website regularly, doing all these little things in the background really helps your performance speed up. And then there’s also plugins you can use if you’re using WordPress to speed up. Word to the wise, if you are using like a squarespace or a wix, likely you’re not going to be able to get your performance up above the 80 to 90 area, not because of anything you’re doing on your website, but just because the way that squarespace and wix and those kind of build box like build out of a box drag and drop websites, they just can’t get faster. It’s just a kink in their building. They’re never going to get to the kind of 100% mark. That’s why WordPress is kind of like the golden standard for if you’re really working on this, if you really want your website to be fast, if you really want to eventually build a team that works on your website, chances are they’re going to want to do it with WordPress in the future.

All right, so some best practices that you can do to make sure that you’re doing what you can right now, to make sure that your website is performing the best as possible.

So building high quality links back from authoritative websites. So one of the things that I do is I have a podcast. When I have guests on my podcast, I have in the show notes links back to their websites. That’s like, here you go, here’s a link for being a guest on my show. That’s a gift to you. Because sometimes links from really good websites, like if people are asking you to pay for them, they could get upwards of average is probably about 600, $700 to the thousands of dollars if you’re going to be getting a link from a big major website. It’s called link selling. Google doesn’t like it. It’s actually against the rules, but people do it anyways. But one of the things I ask my guests is if they have a website, it’s not mandatory, but I ask in return, hey, it would be really nice if you could include a link back to your episode from your website that helps me build my links. It’s organic, it’s natural, it feels good, everybody wins. So think about different ways that you could build links back to your website. Maybe there’s articles or things already on the Internet about you that they’ve just not linked back to you. So you can go and you can search your name or search a business and find something and say, oh, hey, you’ve not linked back to me. Would you mind just inserting this link? More often than not, they’re happy to insert that link for you.

Putting out consistently high content within your niche and your target market. So this is where it’s kind of like you need to have a dedicated person or hire somebody or hire a writer to write content for you on a regular basis that you can put out. I like to say once a week at a minimum, but at least like twice a month. My podcast comes out once a week. So that’s one piece of content a week for me. But also I do do regular blog posts as well. And so I’m constantly building that library of content for my website, which is building my asset, which is my website.

Working with an SEO to fix up your website’s technical SEO to make sure that it’s all set up and doing all the things that Google likes to see is another thing you can do. So this could be like a one off cost. You get an SEO person come in and say, hey, can you just take a look at my website? Take a look at all the actual things going on on it. And then they can give you a one time package deal like, okay, this is easy enough to fix. It’s this one price for all of this stuff and it should bring you up to a nice level. I’m doing that with a company right now. I’m kind of just bringing everything up to standards and then you can negotiate maybe into the future, say, hey, do you want to work on retainer for a couple of hours a month, making sure everything’s kept up? Maybe that includes like an article or two articles. Every SEO is different, every person is different. So you have to find out what their specialty is. But those are some great practices you can get into. Other best practices that you should focus on, that are in your control, that you can do yourself if you know how to do them, is making sure you have an about page on your website. Google needs to have this in order to figure out again, who are you? What do you represent, what do you do?

A content page, where are you, your location, address, number, all that kind of stuff.

Author bios inside of your articles now on WordPress, most templates you can set up so that the author bio is at the bottom every single time and it’s automatic. Again, a technical SEO person should be able to set this up for you inside of a template. So even if you write an article, you don’t have to worry about inserting that author box each and every time. But having those author bios on articles tells Google there’s an expert here. They are the ones who wrote this so you can trust them a little bit more because they go crawl the Internet and say, oh yeah, Callan talks about SEO and podcasting all the time and he talks about it on his own website. We are getting all the fact, all the signals saying that he is an expert. We can trust this. So author bios are important, making sure there’s an easy layout and it’s not complex or hard to navigate. We’ve all come to those websites where we go there and we’re like, this is way too complicated. There’s links everywhere, there’s a bunch of stuff going on on the home page. I’m a firm believer in clear is kind and so I don’t like mess. I like very organized and efficient things. You go to my website, the front page is very clear, very simple. Then at the top you have my blog, my contact page, my about page and my podcast. It’s really simple and easy to navigate and you need to learn how to date Google. Basically at the end of the day, this is a long term strategy. It’s not going to happen overnight. Google is a long term thinking kind of a person. They’re thinking about marriage and kids and the whole shebang. So if you really want to get good at SEO, it can’t be like, oh, let’s throw up a couple of articles and hope for the best. It’s how are we going to implement this into our business and implement this into a regular practice so that we are taking steps each and every single day or each and every single month that we are building this library of content, that we are building this asset for our business instead of just throwing money at ads, because you could take $350 and throw that at an ad and maybe get a couple of leads, maybe not. Or you could take that $350 and give it to a writer and they can write you one article and you can put that article on your website and it can live there forever. Of course you should update it and that kind of a thing. But in essence, if that article does really well, that could bring you in thousands of visitors each and every month. There’s different factors that go into that, but this is kind of the difference we’re looking at. Ads are quick and easy, but they might bring in, you might bring leads into you, but once you turn it off, they’re gone. You can invest into that article, it lives on your website and that helps build your asset, which is your web page. This is kind of the two big differences here. And so with that, it’s obviously going to take more time. You can think about it like your rrsps or your tfsas. We all know we should be investing for our retirements and when we get older, but so many people are so worried about the now, we don’t think about the future and we’re not willing to wait for the future for that payoff. But if you do, it’s really going to be beneficial to you. So if you start now, by the time you get to that retirement age, you have all that funding for you to continue living your life at the level that you’ve been living it. That’s the same for your website. If you start building it now, it’s going to take a while to get there, but you’re going to be so grateful you did it in the future when you’re having tons and tons of traffic coming to your website on a regular basis. Like I just said, building an asset over ads.

[00:35:02] Calan Breckon: Thank you so much for taking the time and listening to that presentation that I did. I hope you got a lot out of it. I hope you understand SEO on a deeper level. Thanks again for tuning in today. And don’t forget to hit that like and subscribe button if you enjoyed today’s episode and maybe consider giving me a star rating. The business Gay podcast is written, produced, and edited by me, Calan Breckon, and if you’re interested on getting a little free SEO, a website audit, you can head on over to calanbreckon.com/audit and fill out the information there or just click the link in the show notes. That’s it for today. Peace, love, rainbows.