Your SEO Strategy is Failing - Panic or Profit

Your SEO Strategy is Failing - Panic or Profit Speaker 1: Amazon sellers can build backlinks to your listing that will ensure that you stay at the top of the search result for that keyword. Meaning there are SEOs like me who can go ahead and build something like 25 referring domains. That is enough for me. Push your Amazon listing down and overtake you. Speaker 2: What not to do? What are some huge mistakes people are making? Speaker 1: Don't buy links on Fiverr. Speaker 2: What platforms do you think we should get on just to get that exposure? Speaker 1: Establishing your brand going forward. Not necessarily even ranking for keywords, but establishing your brand in as many places as possible and planting your flag is going to be super critical moving forward. Speaker 2: Think your SEO strategy is working? Well, think again. Search engines are shifting. Organic visibility is fading. And if you're not evolving, well, guess what? You're losing. Today, we're exploring the latest SEO and advanced keyword strategies, as well as we found some really cool new innovative insights to help you stay ahead of the game, and more importantly, your competition. Our guest today has been a marketing mercenary since 2006. He is a grower of businesses, the optimizer of processes and the slayer of bad digital marketing. His 15 year career in digital marketing includes consulting work with companies like Bing and Nielsen to grow their businesses through the process of workflow automation, workflow optimization and automization. And it's a first time guest. I met him at a conference a few weeks ago. His name's Dan Kurtz and you don't want to miss Dan. But now let's have a word from our sponsor. Tired of negative reviews dragging down your star rating in sales? Traceviews has your back. Traceviews specializes in removing non-compliant Amazon reviews the right way. I'm talking 100% compliant with Amazon terms of service. And with over 11,000 reviews removed for 400 plus brands, they know what it takes to protect your reputation and boost conversions. And here's the best part. You only pay for performance. That means you only pay for reviews they successfully remove. No contracts, no monthly fees, just results. Plus, as a Lunch with Norm listener, you get two reviews removed for free. Ready to clean up your reviews? Visit TraceFuse.ai. That's TraceFuse, T-R-A-C-E F-U-S-E dot A-I. So now, let's get into this episode. So if you have any questions or comments, Put them in the comment section and let's sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and bring in Dan. Here's the man. Speaker 1: Hey, Norm. Speaker 2: Hey, Dan. You know what was really great? You were just on the Marketing Misfits and we said it there. I'll say it again. One of the reasons we go to these shows is to meet really remarkable people. And in fact, we met during a cigar. We sat down, we had a really great cigar together Then we went to a cigar lounge the next day, but really got to know you. You got to know us a little bit and it's really cool being able to forge a friendship that you not only can you do some business together, but it's just great to hang out with like-minded individuals. So yeah, I just found it was cool. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. That's what I like about it, too. We had kind of talked about cigar culture. It kind of makes it easy to network in business. Speaker 2: You blew me away. I'm sitting there and my mouth is dropped listening to you talk about your SEO, SEO strategies, the people that you know in the industry. You are a true authority. I'm not even sure where to start here, but can we talk about some SEO trends that you might be seeing? Speaker 1: Sure. So one of the big ones, I'm still out here in Vegas. I've been here for about a week. Had a conference last week, here for another one starting today, Funnel Hacking Live. If you've seen me around, come say hey. But one of the trends that we're seeing, and I was talking with Rand Fishkin, he had a talk. Speaker 2: Oh, Rand was on the podcast a little while ago. Speaker 1: He was here at Affiliate Summit and he had a presentation about how most of the traffic that you're seeing now from Google and a lot of the other social sites is what they call zero-click traffic. So what that means, and sometimes it's even less than zero-click, meaning that, for example, we were having a conversation and Somebody had come up with the idea of how old is Paul Rudd? Actor, looks fairly youthful, yada, yada, yada. Somebody started typing it into Google, typed in Paul Rudd age, and before they even got to click in the search result, the autocomplete in their phone filled it out with all the information that they had. So as an SEO, how do you optimize for that? So between that and Social having, you know, a walled garden, so to speak. Rand was showing some statistics and some data on how most of the social media platforms are making it so that all of the traffic that comes through instead of being the name of the platform or saying social media is now coming through as direct in your analytics. Again, how do you figure that out and optimize for that? The conversation relied very, very heavily and the key takeaway that I had from it is Establishing your brand going forward online, not necessarily even ranking for keywords, but establishing your brand in as many places as possible and planting your flag is going to be super critical moving forward because you never know how many touch points somebody has had with your brand prior to them sending a message or checking out or, you know, what their experience is with whatever you're doing. So omnipresence is going to be a big thing. Multi-channel marketing is going to be a big thing because you just never know where they're going to be. Traditional SEO in the way of content, it'll still exist. Google's still gonna crawl the search engines and do its thing and do what it does, I guess, best. There are a lot of other things I think Google's probably a little bit better at. Running ads, for example. But for right now, I don't think SEO is going anywhere. I think with more and more platforms out there and especially we had this conversation on the Marketing Bisfits podcast, but specifically I think Getting into the weeds with a lot of that stuff, making sure that your brand is well represented anywhere that you try to go on the internet and then for the AI bots and crawlers to come find it. You want them to know who you are. If you go type your business into Perplexity, how many social channels pop up? Does your most recent video that you posted to YouTube pop up? Does a press release that came up maybe a couple of weeks ago pop up? Because I know Perplexity tries to pull a lot of that in real time. Those are the things you're gonna have to work on. And as my friend Mike says, he's another SEO buddy of mine, Mike Marlino, his tagline for a lot of stuff he does is branded effing traffic. And it's becoming more and more relevant and definitely more clear as we start marching into a lot of this AI stuff. Speaker 2: You just talked about like almost blitz marketing and that's so important. What or who, what platforms do you think we should get on just to get that exposure? Loving this episode? Sharing is caring. Don't forget to share this episode and give us a review. Speaker 1: So the thing is, it's going to depend very heavily on your audience and where they're hanging out. That's kind of marketing 101. But I'd say the big socials, so right now probably Facebook, LinkedIn for your personal stuff. I know that doesn't apply to everybody, but if you're B2B, obviously LinkedIn. YouTube, probably Pinterest, just because you can get a lot of decent traffic from Pinterest. There's a ton of buyers on there and even if you're not playing with it, doing some image SEO is always fun. It's an easy way to get your brand out there and at least have something static visual if you don't have the capability to make videos or you're just scared to get in front of the camera. I know sometimes for business owners, that's a thing. So that's an easy one. And then in regards to that, obviously YouTube. So shorts, reels, vertical videos, those are pretty much dominating in a lot of different places right now. So I would recommend if you can make vertical videos about your brand, your content, whatever you can do. I know there are third-party services that can make AI-generated UGC videos for your content. There are services out there like that if you need it from a product or Amazon perspective. And I would say probably obviously TikTok as long as they keep it around, I suppose. But the other thing I would say is For all the big sites that are out there, try and claim as many handles out there as you can. So Medium, Reddit, all those types of sites because you don't want somebody else, number one, owning your handle for your business and number two, you can link to all of the other websites that you have connected, all those different little social channels can all be linked together for just kind of letting people know who your brand is. So you're creating kind of the spider web of information. That's always super important because it gives Google more points of reference for who you are and you have more sites that you've gone ahead and like set up the official business page and all that kind of stuff. Speaker 2: So, I just want to interrupt for a second. We use an app. You probably know of the app as well, but it's called Name Check and it's spelled weird. Maybe Kelsey, you can just check it out or Dan, if you know it. Speaker 1: It's named CHK. Speaker 2: CHK, that's it. And what happens with that is you can see, let's say that you're trying to figure out a brand name. Man, Kevin and I went through a ton of discovery trying to find a brand that we could grab their handle. And this will go through and show you everything. Like there's probably hundreds of different social media sites or like the Reddit sites. Everything that you need to know that you can grab your name. And I guess the other thing you have to do is if you can't get your name, but you get the majority of them, come up with a secondary that would be close to it, like real Norm Farrar, you know, compared to Norm Farrar or the beard guy. You know, there's lots of beard guys out there, but I had to come up with a different handle. But that's really important. So that cuts down a ton. A lot of people just go one by one by one. This does it in a split second. Speaker 1: And a fun SEO tip for anybody that is either new at starting a brand or picked up a domain and maybe you haven't played with it too much, but this is a fun little branding hack. So what you do is, let's say you go register a domain. You set it up on your hosting. What you do first things first is go set up a catch-all email. So just a universal email on whatever server and there's instructions out there how to do it. Then you go to every single social site and hit forgot password and plug in what you think the email might be from that domain. What will happen is that catch-all will grab a whole bunch of the password resets for all of those social accounts that somebody created on the domain that they let go. So now you don't have to go and build all those. Somebody else did the hard work. You just collect all the forgot passwords into the catch-all bucket and then go ahead, put your new branding in there and your entire business branding is done. It took you maybe a couple hours. Speaker 2: Ah, that's, that's crazy. I've never thought of that. Uh, I can tell you one thing not to do, uh, and this is so important. Anybody who's listening, make sure you don't do what I did. We had, uh, somebody had hacked, hacked our GoDaddy account. And hijacked our main domain for one of my businesses. And so the guy wanted ransom to get it back. And what was happening while we're in the panic mode, I was trying to reset all my passwords, but my passwords were all associated with that domain. So social at that domain. So if you have a password, don't put your name or your domain that you're using as one of the passwords. Make sure it's a different one, like make up something completely different so you can have a password recovery. Now, some platforms do have this, but guess what? The person who hijacks your listing or your domain name will always have access to your main platform. So you can always switch it back. We went through hell. And we finally did get it back, but it was a learning experience. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, definitely. Speaker 2: Okay, so we talked about the social, but also something that we've talked about is the Google side of things, Google Business Profile, Google Knowledge Panel. Press releases, this is outside of just having social accounts. Can we dip into it and we'll get into Google Business Profile in detail a little bit after the bottom of the hour, but let's touch on that because I think that's important too, really mixing up all the different types of traffic that's coming. Speaker 1: Great example, putting that out there. So with a lot of press releases, your press releases. So we'll do your traditional newswire. We'll AI generate a minute, minute and a half podcast. We'll go ahead and create an infographic and then we'll go ahead and submit those to as many places as we possibly can. And then of course we have a small Google news network that we own and control. So we put all that information in there and just kind of do You know, a full blitz on everything. Just because, as we were talking about, not only is it, you don't know what channel people might be finding you on, but you don't know what type of content they like to consume. Like if they're spending time on Pinterest, it's gonna be static images. If it's YouTube, it's either vertical or horizontal video. You know, these are different things. It's the same brand message as if you were to sit there and write an article for SEO, but you're putting it in, and again, multipurpose that content as many places as you can. Speaker 2: Can I interrupt you for a second? So I've heard a variety of different thoughts on this. So with content and repurposing, which I like to do, there's a lot of people that I've heard say, look, don't release it at the same time, stagger it. I've heard other people just say blast it out there on as many like if you put it on Facebook, your followers might not be on Twitter or wherever. And then I've heard them say, well, no, that'll just piss people off having the same information coming in. On all these different platforms, even though they're different formats, what are your thoughts on that? Want to hear about the latest Amazon ad strategies in 2025? My newest episode with IGPPC's Mikey Freckie will reinvent how you think about running your ads. So check it out right here and also don't forget to subscribe so you can watch new episodes every Monday. Speaker 1: So I prefer to do it that way because I'm letting, I look at it this way is if I'm I'm a media company like Comcast or Fox News or CNN or whatever. I want all of my subscribers to know wherever they're consuming my content, whatever the latest breaking thing is today. So I want to make sure that if they're like Comcast, if they're using the radio and they're tuned into one of our channels that we happen to own, I want to make sure they get it there. If they're listening to a podcast, I want to make sure that they also get it there. If they're reading an ad somewhere on the internet, I want to make sure they're getting it there. So I see it as, again, it's omnipresence. But you see the same thing when movies come out. You see the same thing when anything else comes out. And why should your business be any different? You know, you're rolling out a promotion essentially. So, you know, take that promotion, do it all at the same time and just let it flow because what's going to happen is obviously with social, some of the links are going to roll off the page very quickly. Social dies, you know, pretty much in a few hours. Longevity stuff is going to be the PR news outlets and things like that. The YouTube video, if it's relevant, will be relevant for as long as the topic is. But all these things have a different rate of decay. So if you put them all out at the same time, you're going to have other things that are going to have staying power and you're going to have some other things that are not going to be around very long. But in doing so, you can actually kind of keep that flow rolling the way that it should. Another thing with the content distribution, which a lot of people, there were some mixed thoughts about this, but In the SEO world, a lot of people who do press releases and syndication and stuff like that, a lot of people for years have wondered if that's duplicate content and if it's actually hurting you. And the answer is no. Duplicate content only counts if you have the same exact page on your site more than once. It's the copy-paste nonsense that spammers used to do back in the day. So having the same news article posted across 400 sites is not duplicate content. You're not going to get penalized for that. In fact, doing press releases is one of my favorite white hat ways to build links to your site because every time you do a press release, you get about 400 domains pointing at that page. If you've done your on page and a little bit of magic on the back, That'll get you a nice solid boost for at least a couple of months. Speaker 2: I've been saying that for 20 years. You know and it's funny because press releases and a lot of people that are probably listening know that I I talk quite a bit about press releases. I actually stopped talking about press releases for a while because no matter what I said, it would just, I'd hear arguments about it and it just wasn't penetrating through the Amazon mindset. And it's so true what you said. I'm so glad you said that. You know, I owe you a cigar for that one because people say, well, it's no follow links. Well, yeah, but the nofollow links are actually, it's good to have a nofollow link because first of all, it looks organic. Second of all, co-citation and co-occurrence is probably one of the biggest things, one of the factors that Google loves as well. Like, you know, this information is coming from, like you were talking about, multiple sources. And I think that's important, you know, to get the word out there. Plus, It can be one of the things that that we try to do is what's trending? Well, the Trump tariffs right now are trending. You could put out a news a press release that goes national or global very inexpensively about the the Trump tariffs and how it hits your brand or your association or your niche. You can deal target into areas that you're finding that you're getting a lot of sales. There's so many things that you can do with with press releases and it's just great that You mentioned that. Is there anything else, if anybody's on the fence, using press releases as a marketing strategy that you can push them over? Speaker 1: Sure. So a lot of people, and I know this because obviously I've been doing it for a while, a lot of people are hesitant about doing SEO, hiring an SEO, hiring a firm, that kind of stuff. Most press release outlets, depending on where you get it, can be anywhere from $299, sometimes even like $199, upwards of $700, depending on the complexity of it. But if you're on the fence about SEO and whether or not you can rank your stuff, spend a little time, figure out how to optimize your page a little bit. There are sites out there you can check. One of my favorites is one called topseofactors.com. It's run by a buddy of mine, Ted Kibaitis, who has a software that actually checks the top SEO ranking factors and that website is an amalgamation of all of the search results and all of the rankings that they're pulling back from their individual pieces of software. Really, really good tool. It'll tell you exactly what you need to put on the page, what it means, which is super helpful. But do that or just take a page or something you're trying to promote and just bump it with a press release. Wait a little bit, watch the traffic to that page, see what happens. So it's also, it's a very efficient way to be able to get stuff done that most SEOs, some of the really, really white hat luxury SEO brands, they charge upwards of five figures for like 10 links a month. For 200 bucks, you can go build 400 and get 400 different sites talking about your business. Speaker 2: Okay, so next strategy too is the backlinks. So a lot of people think That backlinks are no good because they heard of these link factories back in the day, but that's not the case. If you get a high quality authority link back to your site, I know like I, I used to, I used to have a business which got onto Dr. Phil and we were in the directory in Dr. Phil. The next day, Like literally, we were starting to get all these calls. Our site got bombarded and we were wondering what the hell happened. And it was the day that Dr. It wasn't that day. It was weeks later. And all of a sudden, we got nailed and we were wondering what happened. And then we figured it out. It was Dr. Phil. So, you know, getting good quality backlinks And even going out if you're a brand owner, if you're in the pet industry, reaching out to other websites and doing guest blogging. That works though, doesn't it? Speaker 1: Yeah, it does. Guest blogging is a little slow for my taste, but yeah, you can absolutely do that with different tools. I think one of them is like Outreach Ninja. There's a couple other ones where you can go ahead and essentially you're cold pitching somebody to put a link on their site in exchange for, you know. Whatever, a reciprocal link or something else. Speaker 2: So going back to the backlinks, so is that something that you should press releases are great for backlinks, but how can you build quality backlinks for your website? Don't forget to subscribe right now and join us every Wednesday at noon Eastern Standard Time for our live recording of the Lunch With Norm podcast. And don't forget that you have a chance to win big with our weekly giveaways. Speaker 1: So there's a ton of different ways to do that. One of the oldest and still tried and true methods because Google made it possible within the past year, year and a half is going on forums. And in that regard, Reddit right now and Quora, Q-U-O-R-A, are two of the best ones out there to do that. Reason being is Google provided some funding to Reddit in exchange. Google is now ranking Reddit higher than most of the other search results. And the reason why is because People have kind of stopped trusting SEO to a point. You know, they see you on the first three pages of Google. They're like, okay, whatever, you know, we're going to go find another keyword about this brand and go ask questions because people are now starting to go third party. They want to find out from people who have interacted with your brand, who have experienced your brand, your services, your products, whatever you have, find out if you're legit or not. And people will sometimes, you know, it's, it's the internet. So you're going to get mixed reviews sometimes. You know erring on the side of more bad than good, but It's people's, you know, for the most part, honest feedback. So being on, again, being on those channels and being able to go there and interact, even setting up your own subreddit for your brand is a great thing to do because then when people go to post something, moderators can then point them to your Reddit for your business and people can go there and talk with you directly, you know, as long as you're not censoring the channel or something like that. I know a lot of people heavily moderate their forum posts. But forums like Reddit and Quora are a great way to get backlinks because people are going in there and trying to vouch for stuff. You can also make an alternate brand account if you felt the need to, alternate to your brand. Just make up a random person, hop in there and start asking questions about the business and get people talking about your own business. That's an easy way to do it. It's just kind of go on Reddit, make an account under some other alias. And then go into a place where people are already discussing businesses like yours. And then just kind of put a little head nod in there towards your brand and say, Hey, what about, you know, XYZ company? They kind of do the same thing. I came across them in a Google search and now you're building, you know, building that web that we're kind of talking about. So you've got the SEO that you've done with the press releases. Go ahead and throw a PR link into Reddit. And now you've got referral traffic coming from Reddit and clicking on the press release, which helps to boost that press release, which then boost your page. Speaker 2: Right and also a look Kevin and I talk about this all the time to just getting newsletters out there getting different forms of of media out there or other types of. There's other types of services that you could use to just keep that traffic going to make it diversified. One other thing that you might want to do, there's apps, very easy. You can go out there and just monitor keywords. You could do that with Google alerts, but you could do that. There's apps out there that'll be a little bit more efficient and you just monitor and then you answer. So just like a Quora, you know, there'll be questions in there that you'll either post or that you'll answer. The same thing with just monitoring your hashtags. And if you can do that, you're on it. It's usually real time. I forget the service that we use. I know that we used to do that on Hootsuite, but we've changed that. I forget the service. I'm not sure if Kelsey can put up the service that we use right now. If not, we'll put it in the WhatsApp group. Let's take a break. It's the bottom of the hour. This is the first time we've got lots of people listening. Hopefully there's some new listeners. We have something called the Wheel of Kelsey, and that's where our guest provides something really cool and useful to the topic that we're talking about today. So, Dan, what do we have for that one user who wins the Wheel of Kelsey? Speaker 1: That's a great question. So we kind of chatted through it before we hopped on, is potentially putting together an automation. That you can go ahead and run and install in your business and by automation I mean I do a lot of stuff in business automation and marketing obviously doing SEO. So and I've built myself a handful of tools for different things. So I'll provide one of my automations that you can install inside of make.com and have up running pretty much the same day. So we'll figure out which one that is because I've got probably about 150 of them at this point. But we'll go through and figure out what the winner gets and give them a good one. Speaker 2: All right, fantastic. So who doesn't need automation? And that's a great topic, actually, for us to discuss on another podcast because, you know, SEO is one thing. Automation and making your life seamless or easier to manage. Why not? And I don't think a lot of us use automation to its fullest. Make is an awesome app, by the way. So check it out. It's very similar to Zapier, but it's a lot less expensive. Are there any other advantages to make other than being less expensive than Zapier? Speaker 1: So if you're familiar with how Zapier works, everything is very much a bulleted list, order of operations kind of thing. With Make, it's more of a mind map of what you're drawing. So it's actually, it's a visual workflow. So as you connect all these little dots together and plug in your services, you can just connect them and have one lead to the next to the next. So it kind of works like a baton pass. But you can have a lot of stuff go into or out of make depending on if you know how to use something called webhooks. I like it. And then there's also there's an AI powered assistant in make now. So you can chat with it. And say, I'm looking to build an automation that does this, this, this, and this. What elements do I need? And it will draw you a workflow. And then you can say, no, I didn't really mean that. Just the same way you would prompt ChatGPT or any of the other AIs. And it will actually help you to develop a custom workflow on the fly. So you don't need to have any coding experience. You don't need to know how to design. Even if you're going in to make, you know, completely wet behind the ears and brand new at it. You can go in as long as you know how to have a little bit of a prompt. I just have a conversation with it, like, hey, I'm trying to do social media posting. I want to take my post from my WordPress blog, take the featured image, and I want to share it to Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram and this, and then we'll go ahead and draw those all out for you, which is super cool. Speaker 2: And it's so simple, and I don't have an affiliate for Make or anything. What I liked about it was the training, the tutorials that they had for their training. So I use Make, I love it. So check it out. If anything, just go over, check out Make and see if that's worth it for you. Again, automation is so important in today's world. And I guess we go over to a commercial right now. Hey, Amazon sellers, are you leaving money on the table with Amazon? Well, TrueOps is here to help you reclaim every last cent you're owed. Over 1,400 brands have already recouped millions with TrueOps cutting edge technology. Finding reimbursements others may have missed. And guess what? You only pay 10% commission, no more overpaying the industry standard of 25%. Plus the first $1,000 in reimbursements is free to you. Here's the best part. TrueOps doesn't get paid unless you do. If Amazon ever reverses a claim, TrueOps automatically credits your fees back to you. Now that's peace of mind. Remember, $1,000 free reimbursements to start than just 10% of successfully recovered funds. You have nothing to lose but the three minutes it takes to sign up for a free audit and so much more to gain. Sign up with the link in the description and start reclaiming what's rightfully yours. Content. A lot of people might not realize that you can syndicate content. Can we talk about that? You can syndicate press releases. It's yeah, that's a no-brainer. It'll go to 400 media outlets, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if I said you could do the same with your blog articles, it's what? I had no idea. Let's talk about that. Speaker 1: Sure. So my favorite weapon of choice for doing that is using a tool called IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 1: It's an old school tool. It's been around forever. And the way that you set them up is kind of what we were alluding to earlier. So when I was saying, go claim your blogger, your wordpress.com, all that kind of stuff, those are all end points for your blog posts to be pushed to. And you can set that up through if this than that. So you can tell it, Hey, every time my website updates or this blog, you know, my RSS feed updates, Share that link on all of these platforms. So you wind up building out a nice little hub of, again, it's not duplicate content, but you're building links back to the original post. So if anybody finds your business blogger or your WordPress.com or Instapaper, Google Drive, whatever it might be, there's a link back in there going back to your site. So it's another easy, low cost way to go ahead and actually start generating your own backlinks. Speaker 2: So how can you discover. Speaker 1: These sites where you can send out your content basically anything that has an RSS feed So there's there's a ton of them out there. I can provide a full list. You know, we'll throw it in the description. Speaker 2: Oh fantastic. Speaker 1: Yeah. So I'll give you guys a list and a couple of my favorite recipes to do that. And like I said, it's a super easy way to get like 25 links right off the bat for a lot of stuff. And you know, they're not super authoritative. They're not, you know, high traffic sites, but if you're just starting out and doing SEO and you just want to have kind of a fortress of solitude, if this then that will help you kind of build that. And it also helps to power your brand up. So you can do things like that. And like we were talking about earlier, like on sites like blogger.com and wordpress.com, you can have a blog roll on the side, which is just a list of your favorite links. For each of those links, I plug in all of the other sites that I have my IFTTT connected to. So that when Google goes and it goes to look at that blog post, it goes, Oh, it was posted to these sites. And Oh, these sites are all related. Google starts crunching all the numbers and figuring out that, Oh, this is a brand. This is a company. This is an entity. And to the point which we, that this makes a great segue is that's part of how you start building your knowledge graph. Speaker 2: All right. Knowledge graphs. All right. This is something that nobody is talking about. So if you're in the audience and you want to check out my knowledge panel, just type in Norm Farrar, Norman Farrar. You'll see what I'm talking about. It's completely different than a regular search. Let's talk about the webbing and first of all, What's the importance of this? Speaker 1: So when it comes to stuff like As far as online marketing goes, a knowledge panel is kind of a all-in-one business card that Google creates for you and sticks in the side panel of your search result. So that little blank spot on the right-hand side, you can find it on all sorts of different stuff, actors, musicians, bands, stuff like that, that Google is starting to recognize as entities. That's their classification for what a thing is. Same way we would do, you know, person, place, or thing. So in doing that, yeah, like that's a knowledge panel. And then you'll have additional information that comes up, like your socials, and then you'll see all the related stuff to Norm right there. And like we were talking about earlier, his most recent posts on all of his platforms, because he's a little social butterfly. But that's, that's exactly it. So as you spend more time and do stuff by do stuff, I mean, go ahead and put out content, produce content, become active on different platforms. As all of that starts to happen, Google starts to take notice and figures out who you are. You know, this is your handle on this website. This is your handle on that website. And one of the things you can do, and this is a little bit more of an advanced thing, but You can do something called schema on your website. And schema is the, how do I put this? Schema is the equivalent... Speaker 2: The order maybe? The structure? Speaker 1: Kind of. So yeah, it's, it's structured code. The way I was going to describe it is if you remember back in the day in the library used to have card catalogs. And those card catalogs have all the information about whatever book it is you were looking for when it was published, what it was about, all that kind of stuff. That's exactly what Schema is. It's an index card for Google that says, hey, Instead of wasting your crawl budget going through this entire web page and trying to render all this code, here's the CliffsNotes version, and here's all the information that's actually on this page. So when the Googlebot comes to pick it up, it's a machine-readable piece of code, meaning it can take it back, categorize it, and not have to waste any more processing power to get you started to be found. So like we do this on the homepage for our business. So we'll go ahead and put in the brand schema. So all the information about who we basically who you are, what you do and how you do it as my buddy Mike Marlino likes to say. Those are the three things that Google's looking for when they come to your site. So like looking at your search result norm, you know, have your name, what you do as a subtitle under it and then all the information about what channels you're doing it on. The more you Here you are, and it will start establishing more and more data points to eventually generate that user knowledge graph. Speaker 2: And so it actually expands out in that web, like for this podcast, having you on this podcast that associates me with you. And you know, if I have Rand Fishkin on, you know, all of a sudden it becomes a spiderweb. And now you can do this as a brand, you can do this as a person, sorry, you can do this as a person and associate to the brand. But Google Knowledge Panel is First of all, I just want to make sure I get this right. First of all, it would be to make the person of the brand an authority figure. Is that correct? Speaker 1: Yes, you can do that. Again, it depends on what you're doing, how Google classifies and categorizes it, how much of their data they can get access to. But that's generally the overarching theme there, yeah. Speaker 2: And you can't just go out there and get a panel. You have to actually be approved. Google's gonna go and check you out. So you gotta take your passport, you know, look, take a picture and send it to Google. That'll be the hardest part to the whole thing. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. But it's all stuff as a business owner running anything online. It's stuff that you should be doing anyway, right? Everybody knows that they should be producing content. It doesn't have to be the best content in the world, but as long as it's true to you and your brand and what you're doing, it'll start getting momentum. It'll start picking up. All those things will start to happen. It's not an overnight process. Doing anything, a podcast, building an SEO website, building an authority, All that stuff takes time, but it is all compound interest. Speaker 2: What about quality? Quality over quantity or does it matter? Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. So when it comes to content, that was Google's latest update last year. Speaker 2: Oh, I was going to say the one that you just gave me the heart attack last week about. Speaker 1: No, no, no. Not that one. That's a different one. Speaker 2: We'll talk about that in a second. Speaker 1: But, um, no. So the, um, they, they updated one of their algorithms and their, their abbreviation for it is EAT, which is, uh, expertise. It used to be EAT, which is expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. They added a second E. I didn't pay attention to what they did. Um, but essentially, All it is is make sure you have good quality content, make sure you are actually having some hand in it and it's not generic AI output garbage because that was really what that update was about, was slapping all the people who just went, I need a blog post from ChatGPT and just typed in, I need a blog post about topic X and then waited for it to spit it out and put it up with that proofreading. That was mainly what it was slapping, similar to years ago, the Panda and Penguin updates back in the day. So the links and content. Speaker 2: Sorry, you just mentioned about AI and posting AI. Should you not only review it, but how much human content, when you're looking at it, Should you go in there, edit it and put a paragraph, a couple sentences here? Instead of just posting AI, any thoughts on that? Speaker 1: Yes. So I've got a few prompts that I've put together and they're fairly long prompts, but they are meant to humanize as much as possible. So things like verbal texts, diverting from the thing you're talking about and coming back. So like when I'm writing a blog, I took all of my personality traits of how I normally talk, Loaded that to ChatGPT and I said, okay, how do I give this to you as an instruction? You know, this is who I am as a person. How do I feed this to you and give it to you so that you can talk like I talk? And it came back with a list of instructions of tone, brand and voice, personality, yada, yada, yada. So now every time I go to do a blog post for my own stuff, I take that, copy it, and I say, okay, here's all the information from all the SEO perspective. And I said, and here's me being an absolute freaking goofball as a human being. Talk Like Me, and it goes, gotcha, and it just runs off and goes and does the thing. And it's pretty close, but the thing that's going to get you the most clicks is gonna be being entertaining, being your authentic self when it comes to doing that. You can absolutely use AI to do it. Google doesn't have a problem with AI content. They have a problem with crappy AI content. Speaker 2: So that's it. One of the prompts I learned just a while back I don't know where I learned it from, but similar to what you were just talking about was I put in a prompt, I think it's a good prompt, but then I say, if this is not clear, please, I always say please, I talk very politely to my AI, I'm Canadian, I say thank you as well, but generate a prompt to make this better or make this a better prompt. And all of a sudden, like you just said, it spits out what I have to do Today, we're going to be talking about how to make it a better prompt or, yeah, this is a good thumbs up. Speaker 1: That's the best part about it is going back and saying, okay, I know you're a machine. How would you like to accept this? What is the best way for me to make sure that we are speaking the same language from human to computer, that you can understand what I'm asking you for and then you can, in return, give me that thing? Speaker 2: Okay. Let's talk about another one of my favorite subjects that Brand owners don't get the power of Google business profile. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. So if you are a local business anywhere in the world, and specifically, I've seen this with service-based businesses, So, you know, anybody who would be on HomeAdvisor or Angie. I would say 6 out of 10 phone calls that wind up being book jobs are going to come from your business profile. They're not going to go to your website first. They're not going to go to any of that because Google has prioritized the map pack at the very top. Now, that of course will vary. It can be on location, demographics, all of that information, but for the most part, that seems to ring true across most of the profiles and brands that I work with. You don't necessarily have to be posting stuff, but In the same way that you would go ahead and build links to your site, you can also build links to your Google business profile. Every time you go ahead and make a post on a Google business profile, whether it be an image, text, whatever, it comes with a share link. That share link is something you can build backlinks to if you know how to do link building. So you can take that page that you just posted or that post you just put up or that promo you just put up, grab the share link, And go ahead and give it to your SEO guy and say, okay, go build links to this. And they can do that and that will help to beef up the brand profile. The other thing, and this is again coming back to the first thing that we talked about here, is the branded traffic, the branded profiles. If those are connected to the GMB and you're posting about stuff and you're linking back to the GMB from some of those posts, if it's a local blog post you put on your website, That will give your Google Business Profile links, that will give you the authority you're looking for. Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a couple of other things I really like about it. First of all, when you do a post, that's one thing. You can provide an offer, which is another, but you can also create an event. And what I found with events, Google likes the events. They're short-term, they wanna get traffic to the event, and the event will populate Higher than if I just put in a regular post and We use that for the podcast. We are temporarily down. We got to figure that one out but It's fantastic. And the other thing I love about it is that I can take an image. You've got your anchor URL So you build it around let's say Lunch With Norm But if I was selling anything on Amazon, Walmart, over to my Shopify store, I can take and add a product and an image with a link going over to my Amazon store. Another one with my Amazon listing over to my Shopify over to wherever and they're shoppable links. I love it. And you can't do, where else can you do that? So that's a, that's another major point. Now, the other thing you were talking about local SEO, I'm talking about brands. So they've changed it where people would Say, oh you can't do it. Well, you've always been able to promote brands. You can check it out brands.google.com No problem, but people would say oh you have to have a bricks-and-mortar store. No, no I've been doing this for years and you you display you have to have an actual address But you don't have to have it showing. You click the checkbox, you know, and it's gone. But brands can now go on to Google Business Profile and it'll ask you when you first go, are you an online brand? Check. And now your brand is out there. And I'll give you just a little bit. Sorry, Dan. I love Google Business Profile and people don't realize that they're missing out on tons of opportunity. Just a quick example. We had this company that we were working with. They had great optimization. They were ranking for keywords. But as soon as we put up Google Business Profile, you were able to see whether it was a phone call, whether click over to the page, and you have to be number one to be shown. What does number one mean? Well, you get to see that big map. On a Google or on a mobile phone, you have real estate. A few swipes before you get to your second competitor, you own the real estate. And so for this company that we were working with, in one year, They got 117,000 occurrences that they would never have been able to track or show, um, because they clicked through business, Google business profile. It's so incredible. Again, it's one of these secret sauce things. Speaker 1: Absolutely. I'll give another secret sauce tip because I know you said there's a bunch of people here on the podcast that do a lot of Amazon stuff. Oh, yeah. Amazon sellers. You can build backlinks to your listing that will ensure that you stay at the top of the search result for that keyword. Meaning there are SEOs like me who can go ahead and build something like 25 referring domains. Not a whole lot. We're not building a ton of backlinks. But that is enough for me to push your Amazon listing down and overtake you. You need to be building SEO links, especially with affiliate marketers out there who are going to do the exact thing I just mentioned. Build some backlinks to your stuff. It's a good way to keep your brand top of mind. Even though it's Amazon's listing, it's still your brand. It's still your product. Spend a couple bucks, build a couple links. It doesn't have to be over the top. You just have to keep enough. 25 seems to be the magic number according to my buddy Ted, who has worked in eCommerce for forever. He was formerly working on a site that rhymes with coupon. So it's probably from an eCommerce perspective, he knows what he's doing, but he said 25 was the magic number to get Google to pay attention and then prioritize your page. Speaker 2: Wow, so that is a little secret sauce. Okay, last thing, if, if you were to sum up, just a quick some action steps. What should you do, and I'm talking about content-wise, what should you do to make sure, and we talked about it in detail, but just a quick list. Social media, Google business profile, what are the things that people should go out and try to make sure they have content on? Speaker 1: Sure. So, if you've ever gone to do a Google search for a company and you couldn't find the phone number, you couldn't find any social channels, you couldn't find any of those things, Those are the things you need to be doing. So, going back to the initial thing that we talked about, get your profile set up, social, blogging platforms, otherwise. Connect those to your If This Then That. Now you've got automated content coming off of your website, now producing backlinks to your stuff, which oddly enough, if you set up If This Then That the right way, you get 25 referring domains. So, real easy. The other thing that I would say is spend some time, learn how to do content in your own brand voice, spend some time with GPT, hammer out a personality prompt that you can feed it and then ask it questions about how would you write that content and then let it go. See if that fits how you regularly interact with your customers, how you regularly interact with your brand. Once you can nail that brand voice, pass that into the rest of your stuff. So your social posts, your blogs, your press releases, everything. Because that brand voice will make you stand out from everybody else. Spend some time, learn about links. You don't have to, again, you don't have to hire an SEO guy. You can do press releases. That's white hat enough and it'll keep your nose clean. So if anything happens with Google, you can't, you know, turn around and say, Oh, I built too many links to my website. Like, no, you just use press releases. You're fine. So you're, you're playing by the rules without actually, you know, dipping your toe into what would be potentially black hat area. But spend some time, Get your brand set up. Tell people who you are, what you do, how you do it. And the more you can get that out there, the more that some of the things that we've talked about today will start to happen in your favor. Again, compound interest. Best time to start is today. Speaker 2: I just thought of this. What not to do? What are some huge mistakes people are making? Speaker 1: Don't buy links on Fiverr. Don't go to third party websites. Here's the way I look at it. If you're building links to your website, Don't build links that you can't undo yourself. So anything that's touching your website, press releases, you can't really undo. But again, those are super, super clean, white knight type of links. You can build links to those press release links, by the way, which will help to push up your brand and your authority if you so choose. But spend some time. You can also use, and this could be a whole other podcast by itself, but Google Drive has a bunch of tools in it. You've got Sheets. You've got Docs. You've got G Sites. You've got Images. You've got Slides. All of those things allow you to put links and content into them just like anything else. If you start using them as link building tools, all you have to do is turn that document public and every five minutes Google will crawl that sheet or that doc or that whatever and it will directly affect your ranking within 72 hours. Speaker 2: Wow. Google loves its own tools. Speaker 1: It does and that's why it works so well. It's a google.com domain because you're using docs.google.com, sheets.google.com. Those are all high authority links according to Google because Google's kind of a narcissist. It sees the link and goes, oh, it's me. I love me. Let's make this work. And then you start, you know, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Speaker 2: So if you put out, just want to be clear, if you put out an article, you publish it to your website. Like you said, the duplicate content, you don't have to worry about as long as it's not on the same website. So this link that you have, you've created the article in Google Docs. But then put it up onto your website. That's still a separate link. Speaker 1: Yeah, so if you were to make a blog post you put it up on your website and then you went ahead and copied it with all the formatting over to a Google Doc and then the bottom of the Google Doc you said this article originally appeared on your website.com slash whatever the URL is that would count as a backlink. Speaker 2: There you go. There you go. Another way. Speaker 1: The only people that will be able to see that link is you and Google because Google does not index Google Drive. It will crawl it. So it won't count as a backlink that you can go search, but it will count as a backlink in so much as Google will count it towards your score. Speaker 2: Just make sure it's quality. That's it. All right. You've given us a ton of information, really great content today. Anybody listening today want to get a hold of you or buy some of your services? How can they get a hold of you? Speaker 1: Sure. So our agency website is misspepper.ai. It's misspepper.ai. And then you can find me on LinkedIn at Dan Kurtz. Speaker 2: Is Miss Pepper married to Dr. Pepper? Speaker 1: No, no. Speaker 2: Okay, just wondering. Speaker 1: So the name came about as a reference to a certain assistant to a certain Marvel character. Speaker 2: Oh, okay. Speaker 1: So that was the the idea behind it was she's kind of the AI assistant version of doing that. Speaker 2: Oh, very good. Let's go over to a sponsor. Unknown Speaker: Start, scale, exit, repeat. I'm Colin C. Campbell, and I've started over a dozen multi-million dollar companies in the last 30 years. I spent the last 10 years writing the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, to figure out what it is that these serial entrepreneurs do over and over again. We interviewed over 200 people. We created 58 chapters. Over 30 illustrations, 180 call-outs, and we quite frankly made this book for the ADHD entrepreneur. It's been number one on Amazon in 15 categories and has won 12 awards globally. Get your book today either on eBook, paperback, hardcover, or Audible on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. And we just got a comment coming in from Business & Finance. Trying to make a Google business profile now got rejected when I tried before. Speaker 2: It could be a variety of different reasons. Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a ton of reasons out there. Most often it's they go to check you out and they can't find anything about your business. Speaker 2: Yeah, or a fake address like, oh, are you a P.O. box is probably one of the worst things because I don't want to show my personal address. You're working from home. Show the bloody address. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Google, no matter what you do, if you've got a P.O. box, you call it a unit number, just a number, whatever. Guess what? They're going to catch on. And you'll be absolutely 100% denied. I think that's it, Dan. Thanks for coming on today. Speaker 1: You got it. Speaker 2: All right, everybody. Well, thanks a lot for joining us today. Thanks a lot for being part of the community. As I mentioned, there's a variety of different ways to be part of the community. Listen to the podcast, join the newsletter, go over to WhatsApp or our Facebook group. That's it. We will see you next Wednesday. Unknown Speaker: I'm Dan Kurtz.