LOCAL MARKET MONOPOLY EPISODE 58
What Every Local Business Ought to Know About SEO
Podcast by Clarence Fisher
Local SEO

About This Episode

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a hot topic in the business world right now, and for a good reason. It's one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website and improve your search engine ranking.

But what exactly is Local SEO, and how can you use it to your advantage?

In this episode, we'll discuss everything you need to know about SEO, from the basics to more advanced techniques.
I'll share some valuable tips on how you can use Local SEO to improve your website's visibility and attract more customers, clients or patients.

So whether you're an SEO novice or an expert, this episode is for you. Tune in now!

Disclaimer: The transcription below is provided for your convenience. Please excuse any mistakes that the automated service made in translation.

Clarence Fisher: Would you like to know more of the tools, tactics, and strategies, the most successful small businesses use to dominate their local market and own the block. Of course you do. Hey, it's Clarence, welcome back to Local Market Monopoly wanted to tell you about a free newsletter, the free newsletter that we put together for you. It's called Local Market Monopoly where we share more of these tips and give you the answers to these important questions and challenges that every local small business is facing. Like, what is hyper-local marketing and why you need to focus on it? How to capitalize on the foremost powerful marketing levers in the world to grow your business, how to monitor and influence what people see and say about you and your company online, and how to systematically reach more and more of your ideal prospects and customers every day.

Clarence Fisher: Making sure more people know about you today than did yesterday and how to get more customers, clients, and patients to buy from you more often. We go into it in this free newsletter and I wanted to make it free because I wanna reach more people, even more people than the podcast. So all you have to do to subscribe is go to localmarketmonopoly.com and we have a big report that we'll give you just for signing up, all free to you. All right. Just go to localmarketmonopoly.com. Now, if you're interested in SEO and how to make your website rank faster, stay tuned, we'll get right to that.

Clarence Fisher: All right. And we're back. Hey, it's Clarence and thank you for standing by with that horrible, horrible intro. that I did before the intro. It's crazy. We created this new newsletter that I'm super excited about, but this is really gonna, mess you up. And I tell you this, I hate selling like this is a free newsletter. And anytime that I, that I offer it or I offer anything, then, uh, I don't know. I just get, uh, like it's crazy. It's crazy. And any, if you're a client then, or customer of ours, you know this right now, right? Like there's no hard sell with me. There's never, ever a hard sell, uh, with me even upselling you into other stuff. And you know this because you know this, so if you're not , if you're not a customer yet, when we get that type of relationship, you will understand that what you hear right now is really what I, how I am.

Clarence Fisher: I am a super soft sale. It is a wonder that I am not starving and my kids have not starved. Uh, but we do. We, I mean, we do pretty good. And I think it's because we lead with value. I think everybody will tell you that lead with value, and hey, if you want us to do some for you, we'll do it. But anyway, thanks for weathering through that. You're gonna be hearing about the new email newsletter. It's absolutely free. You can,, you can go and join that. I think at some point we are going to offer, maybe a one-time upsell type of offer for you to get onto the, super cheap, paid newsletter, but there's always gonna be that free one. Okay. So just go to localmarketmonopoly.com and you can, you can join there.

Clarence Fisher: All right. So today we're talking about SEO, which is not new to you, you know, about SEO, 81% of customers, clients, or patients use the internet to research their purchase before they click or call. And SEO is a big deal. Uh, but SEO takes time. And again, if you've called me and we've talked about SEO and you've called specifically for SEO, I am probably going to sell you, try to talk you out of it. And the reason being, I know I'm not an SEO hater and I don't hate kittens. The reason being is SEO takes time. And a lot of the times rarely do I get a call that is so strategic that a business is saying, you know what? It's okay if it takes nine months to work. Uh it's okay. We've set aside that, that doesn't happen very often.

Clarence Fisher: So when you call me for SEO, and it's usually because you have in your mind that you want to your website to rank higher, and you know that it's going to take SEO. That part you do know, and deep down, like way back in the back of your head, you know, it's going to take time, but, and you may tell me this. I mean, I've been doing this for over 10 years, probably, we're going on 12 or 13 years, I've been doing this a long time. And so you're going to allow yourself to tell me that you understand this, and then we start an SEO campaign. And then in month two, I'll give it month three. You'll call me and say, Hey, Clarence, when are we gonna see something, uh, happened? Uh, you know, what's going on. And I'm gonna say, Hey, do you remember when I told you it would be, six months, maybe nine months, man, six is fast nine months before we saw traction here. Do you remember that? And he'll go, no, I don't or you may say, yeah, but you know we need to be making something happen either way.

Clarence Fisher: This is why I try to talk people out of SEO and they call me and say, Hey, Clarence, can you do our SEO for us? Um, we're gonna have a conversation. And with it, if you really are stuck on doing SEO, you're going to have to add a paid campaign with that. You're gonna have to add AdWords to that for us to do it because yes, you need SEO. And I want you to have SEO, but we also know you need the phone to ring right now, especially so you can keep paying for us to do SEO. So we're gonna do paid ads as well with the SEO now to get that out of the way. And I think you should do that no matter who you go with, you need to do that is run paid ads with SEO, do not hold the SEO bucket over your marketing.

Speaker 2: Person's head and say, Hey, you're fired if we can't get this ranked in 30 days, I'm gonna tell you if they're getting you. If they're getting you extreme results in 30 days, you're gonna pay for it most likely in about six more months or a year, as soon as an algorithm switch happens. But all that said, now let's get into some stuff to do. If you're gonna do SEO, which you should be doing SEO, the first thing is target relevant, primary and secondary keywords. We all know that each pay Google ranks pages, not necessarily websites. So you wanna have a page. Every single page needs to have its own primary keyword that you're trying to rank for. And it also needs to have secondary keywords. We're not gonna get into LSI today, latent, semantic, indexing, that's kind of an advanced thing, but it's basically where Google says, Hey, anybody who is talking about this one specific keyword, if you're talking about chiropractic, there are other words that people use that are chiropractor related, but not necessarily all out saying chiropractor. Google's not stupid anymore. Google's super smart. So you wanna use these other keywords and not just have your city chiropractor, chiropractor, your city chiropractor in your city, in your city chiropractor. You don't. I mean, that can be your primary keyword was we gotta have some secondary keywords. And then we have to have other kind of content in there that is alluding to, but not all out saying. And speaking of content, number two here is have original content. I really think the duplicate content penalty

Clarence Fisher: Is all in your head, but at the same time, original content is going to work is going to rank better. You wanna have at least 51% unique. So if you're going to get one of the services where they're giving you replicated content, we'll stick, we'll stick with the chiropractor, thing for a moment they're giving, they're selling that you pay 50 bucks a month, right? Well, you know, that the exact same content is going to all 300 clients that they, that customers that they have, right. Well, you wanna kind of Finese. That a bit so that you have at least 51% content. I am not going to tell you that just having the straight up duplicate content is going to kill you but it's definitely gonna be beneficial to tweak that a little bit so that it becomes evergreen and it becomes you, number three is you wanna optimize your title and meta descriptions.

Clarence Fisher: And when I say meta descriptions, the description is what shows up. I mean, you've seen it when you could do a Google search, you have the title, all of those listings are a title. And then right up under that as a little paragraph that talks about whatever that page is about. Those need to be unique on every single page of your website reminds me if you want us to do an audit for your website, and I'm gonna, you know what team I'm gonna throw this out there for? Or they're like, don't do that. Don't you do that because of inflation. I'm gonna say, ask for the $500 audit, ask for the $500 audit I'm gonna do that. I gotta put a limit on it though. I gotta put a time limit on it because of inflation. That's gonna be good until, um, 2023 my team is like, what are you doing?

Clarence Fisher: 2023. So if you're listening to this after 2023, it may be $5 and 25, $500 and 25 cents. I don't know. But anyway,, let me go back to the content. Typically, I don't put, I just told you I don't do sales, right? Typically I don't do that, but we've been doing a lot of these audits here lately, and they've been super beneficial because when we got down to title and meta description, where the audit spits out is the title and meta description on every single one of your pages on your site and shows you exactly which pages are missing title and meta descriptions, and which one needs to change. All right. So you can do this yourself, open your website, go to each page and look at the title, make sure there's a title. Make sure that title is not the same as any other page on your site. It has to be unique and then make sure the page as a description and makes sure it's unique on each page.

Clarence Fisher: An easy way to do this is to download. It's a free plugin. It's called Yoast, Y O A S T plugin. You can do this with all in one SEO plugin, either one of those will work great. We use Yoast a lot. Matter of fact, we use Yoast now for almost everything. So, but you can download it for free. There is a paid version, but the free version does great. So, uh, it will definitely allow you to change your titles and meta tags on every single page. If you have a WordPress website, which you should really have a WordPress website right now. So when you're in there and you are changing these titles, keep your page title to 30 to 60 characters and keep your meta description under 160 characters who wanna make sure that they don't clip off and include the target keyword.

Clarence Fisher: I would say in the title, include the keyword somewhere in the middle to the beginning. And then in the description include the keyword at the beginning. If you can, we don't wanna stuff. We want things to sound and read to a human that's. Another thing is we can do these things for Google, but you really, you want them to be readable and enjoyable for a human being communicate what your page is about and what makes it unique and make sure that the title and meta description, as I said, is unique on every page. Number four, we wanna use short descriptive URLs. If you, if your website, especially your blog is putting the date in there. Qe typically change those, t's called the permalinks, and you can do that on the left hand side.

Clarence Fisher: When you log into the back of your WordPress website, look on the left, go down to settings. I believe it is. And permalinks and change the URL is it's appearance, isn't it? Yeah. It's appearance, change the URL structure so that it is the page name. And in that way you have the keywords in the page title, and you also have it in the URL and it's gonna be great. All right. , it's gonna be great. It's gonna be fabulous. So, uh, use the keywords, try to include your primary keyword in that URL. We wanna make sure they're readable and make sure it's concise. You, you know, around 60 characters, you don't want this really long web web address. Okay. Those are, uh, really, I think the biggest, biggest things that you have to look out for in SEO is target have a primary keyword for every page.

Clarence Fisher: You can have secondary keywords for the page. Each page need to be tightly optimized around a specific keyword. Okay. Don't try to stuff everything into one page. One page is about that one thing which is what makes blogs so awesome, because you can take a list of keywords and write a blog around every single one of those keywords, like one keyword per blog, and you can go on for decades, right? Make sure you're writing quality, original content. If possible. I know the service providers that only serve vets that only serve chiropractors that only serve dermatologists, make it so enticing for you to pay $100, $97 and get one blog a week or two blog. And it's the same thing for everybody else who signs up for it. I'm again, I'm not telling you you're going to hell cuz you're using those. What I'm saying is, if you can tweak it a little bit, have someone tweak it. If it's front desk, if it's your marketing person, your part-time marketing person. I can't imagine that you're doing this on the weekends, but if you are it's you, but try to tweak it at least a little bit. Okay. But if you can't do that, definitely use the duplicate content either way, you gotta have unique page titles and meta descriptions and make sure that,your URLs are short.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. So there you have it, using SEO and getting the best out of SEO again, I recommend that it's gonna be with a paid, that you got something paid going on unless you just have the budget set aside in order to work on SEO for the next nine months without a major, major return. And again, like I said earlier go in and sign up for the free Local Market Monopoly newsletter. We've got a really meaty report that we give you to help you optimize the four proven marketing systems that are I can't say guaranteed to make your business grow by 25%. I can't say that. But what I can say is that you will Def you will. I can't say definitely. Can I, dad, come it go and download the report, put it in the use and you will see improvement. Okay. localmarketmonopoly.com that's it for me this week. I'll see you next week. Go own the block.

Resources

Note: Some of the resources below may be affiliate links, meaning I receive a commission (at no extra cost to you) if you use that link to make a purchase.

LISTEN ON

NEXT EPISODE:
Episode 59: Next Level LinkedIn Marketing