Welcome, everyone, to the webinar on How to Dominate Search Results in Your Market. We are so glad you could be here today to learn more about improving your hearing aid practice's web search results to drive leads to your clinic. Your moderators for today are me, Fran Vincent, IHS Director of Membership and Marketing. And Courtney Pitts, Marketing Specialist. Our expert presenter today is Nick Fitzgerald, President of Odd SEO. Nick has been optimizing websites for search before most people even knew what a web search engine was. As a professional optimizer, Nick has been involved in marketing projects for some of the largest companies in the world. His focus and his company's focus is now entirely on the hearing health industry and has been for some time. We are very excited to have Nick as our presenter today, but before we get started, just a few housekeeping items. Please note that we are recording today's presentation so that we may offer it on demand through the IHS website in the future. This webinar is available for one continuing education credit through the International Hearing Society. We've uploaded the CE quiz to the handout section of the webinar dashboard, and you may download it at any time. You can also find out more about receiving continuing education credit at our website, IHSinfo.org. Click on the webinar banner on the homepage or choose webinars from the navigation menu. You will find the CE quiz along with information on how to submit your quiz to IHS for credit. If you'd like a copy of the slideshow from today's presentation, you can download it from the handout section of the webinar dashboard, or you can access it from the webinar page on the IHS website. Please feel free to download the slides now. Tomorrow, you will receive an email with a link to a survey on this webinar. It is brief, and your feedback will help us create valuable content for you moving forward. Today we'll be covering the following topics. What is SEO? We'll touch on the basics and give you an overview. We'll look at the key factors to improve your rankings and strengthen your following. You'll find out where you can find free tools that are available to help your SEO. Plus, you'll discover some valuable review sites for your practice and learn how you can improve your traffic from these sites. At the end, we'll move on to a Q&A session. You can send us a question for Nick at any time by entering your question in the question box on your webinar dashboard, usually located to the right or top of your webinar screen. We will take as many questions as we can in the time we have available. Now, I'm going to turn it over to Nick, who will guide you through today's presentation. Nick? Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. First, just let me say I apologize. The weather here has been kind of crazy in Wisconsin, so I'm a little nozzly, nasally. Forgive me. So we're going to talk about search engine optimization. I know some of you probably already know what search engine optimization is, but I want to talk about it just briefly and define it as it pertains to this webinar. So search engine optimization, I know particularly we're talking about Google and Bing when we're talking about this webinar, because they're really the biggest, what we would classify as typical search engines, the ones that you're going to put in your keywords and see where you rank. Search engine optimization itself is going to be changing the factors that those search engines use to rank you so that you rank better. So that's what I've been studying for 13 years, and as Fran mentioned, I've done it for some of the largest companies and now completely for hearing health. So there are more than 200 ranking factors that go into figuring out where you should rank in the search engines for any given keyword. It's not just rank in general. It's actually on an individual keyword basis. So there's a lot at play here. It requires both work on your website and work off of your website. That's why oftentimes I won't talk about search engine optimization as it relates just to your website. I'll talk about it as it relates to your web presence. So that's what search engine optimization is. Now let's talk about that website. So first of all, the thing about websites is my opinion has always been make a website with the purposes of ranking or why even bother? I mean, if people aren't going to come to your website and they're not going to see it because you don't rank in the search engines, why even bother making it? So a couple of items that you guys will want to know about, and this will be helpful, is Google in particular, they're the big boy. They have gone what's called mobile first index now. So what they do is they actually look at your mobile site first to determine how you should rank when it comes to the content and everything on it there. So it's really important that your website is what we call responsive or mobile friendly. So we want to make sure that your website is responsive. Otherwise you're actually going to be penalized or pushed down for mobile searches. So the second thing, and this is not so much SEO related, but it's housekeeping related on your website. You want to have adequate calls to action. Without calls to action on your website, such as the screenshot below where it says risk free, zero deposit, no obligation hearing aid trial. If you don't ask them to sign up to do a hearing aid trial, you won't get anybody signing up to do a hearing aid trial. And I know that sounds obvious, but sometimes when you're building a website or you're thinking about all the aesthetics, you just kind of forget those things. So make sure that your website has adequate calls to action. Otherwise you're just not going to get those leads. Another thing for your website that you're going to make sure, and this goes for, this helps your SEO potentially, but it also helps other factors too. Make sure the reviews on your website are visible or even off your website. So if you have reviews on the search engines or elsewhere, and you could put them on your website, that social proof is going to help you drive more leads. In addition, there are certain ways, and I'll talk about this later, but there are certain ways that we can make that help your SEO as well. The last thing here is obviously our demographic. Sometimes we go into an older demographic here, right? I mean, a lot. So it's really important that the site itself is clean and easily readable. If the font is small and everything's jam-packed together, it's not going to help you very much obviously, because they're just going to leave the site before they even get started. Also with websites, you've got the blue screen of death on the right. Hopefully it's been a long time since you've seen that. Technical issues with your website can really hold you back. So this is something that I'm going to help you guys check for. I'll give you some tools that'll help you guys check for some technical issues. You can kind of do it yourself if you want, but there are things that can kind of ruin the foundation of your SEO, and some of those are broken pages or broken links on your website. Most often, unless you frequent your website and you go through every single page, you probably don't even know that they exist. So I'll give you a tool that scans for that. There is a file, and there are two files, one called the site map and one called the robots.txt file on your website that can have an important role. We'll talk about that a little bit later too. Your site structure and content is very important as well. Those can cause issues if you structure it incorrectly, and content is also key. We don't want to have any duplicate content, and you'll hear me just beat that over the head the whole time. You don't want duplicate content. I'll give you a tool to show you that. And then is your website slow? I mean, how many times have you gone to a website on your mobile phone or even on your desktop and it's still loading after five seconds and you just leave? The search engines are aware of this, and they've decided that if your website is slow and goes outside of certain thresholds, they are going to penalize you and you will not rank as well. So we need to make sure we get some of these things out of the way. Otherwise, any of your other efforts are just going to be subdued. So let's talk about the search engines. Like I said, Google and Bing are the two that I typically focus on. Google has become so huge. They have 62,000 searches per second. As a matter of fact, I think that's a little bit higher now. It's just perpetually increasing. They have over 100 million gigabytes of hard drive space, if you can imagine. If you've heard about a Google server farm or an Amazon server farm or something coming to your area, that's why. They need so much hard drive space, they create entire facilities just for hard drive space. Now if you look on the right side, the U.S. search market share, this is as of just a couple months ago. This is how much of search each particular main player in search had for the U.S. So Google accounts for 63.5% of all search. So typically, they kind of lead the way when an SEO like myself is just talking about optimizing and getting you ranking in Google better, 63.5% is why. They have almost two-thirds of the entire market. Interestingly enough, Bing has 24% of the market. But before I talk about that, number three, there's this company called Oath. They bought Yahoo about a year ago, and Yahoo had about 11%, and they have 11.4% now. But Oath is the same company that owns AOL and some of these other 90 search engines that we might all be familiar with. Funny thing is though, Oath and Yahoo just pay Bing for their search results. So Bing actually technically has like 35% of the market. So you're basically talking about Google and Bing owning the entire market when it comes to search results, except for the 1.1% like Ask or formerly Ask Jeeves and some of the other ones that we kind of chuckle about if we hear. So Google and Bing are where we focus, and there's good reason because that's where all the searches are going. So this is kind of the anatomy of a search result. You can see at the top, this is for Google. If I type in hearing aids Anaheim, California, or CEA, you'll see the map show up right here with the top three, right? And then below that, you'll have other ones start to show up. I'm only showing one here for the purposes of the slide, but there'd be like eight or nine other ones. This part up here at the top is really what we care about, right? That's the local SEO. We call it the local pack with the map and the three people there. The reason why we care about that the most is because Google actually figures out where I'm located when I search for hearing aids, let's say, and then they try and show me the three most relevant places locally for that. And that's where you want to show up for the most part. Most of you are probably practices or what not, so your particular location, you want to show up there. So that's called local SEO, and we'll be focusing a lot on that. Below the map down there, just below more places where it says Anaheim Hearing Center, that's actually what we call national results. They're influenced by the local search, but they're not quite as localized. So that's kind of the anatomy. We have these two main components, Google local or local SEO and then national SEO. So let's talk about where did all the clicks go. I mean, people do these search results and then what are they doing? One of my favorite nerdy jokes, best place in the world to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google search results. The reason being is that almost all the clicks go to the first page. So we really need to have you on that first page, you know, one through 10. And particularly for you guys in that local pack, like I said, less than 5% of clicks on Google go to the paid ads. Over 90% of them go to what we call organic. So those natural searches, the ones that I was just showing you, over 90% of them will go there. If you can imagine, Google makes tens of billions of dollars a year, but most of that money is from less than 5% of clicks on their search engine. So imagine the potential there. The top three results get 60% of all the organic clicks on a page. So top three is really what we're aiming for, for a given keyword. And that's that really. I mean, if you're not there, you may get a trickle, but it's not going to be as great. So we'll talk about that a little bit more in a later slide as well. So local SEO, like I said, the local pack, you know, that map and the three things underneath it, it's specific to small geographies, right? So if somebody types it in and you're 150 miles away, there's almost no chance you're going to show up, not in the map portion of it. You might show up in the bottom if you have really strong SEO, but not in the top. So it's specific to smaller geographies. Now the second part is important. Note if you have a mobile practice, it is possible to show up in maps, okay? I'm not discouraging that. I know mobile practices are becoming more popular, but to be really effective in the local map, having a physical location is really helpful. So I just want you to know that it can influence positively your SEO, because Google really wants to know. There's a lot of shysters out there, there's a lot of people trying to fake the system, and Google really does not like that. And that physical location really helps them verify that you're not fake. So just be aware of that. Last thing is local profiles and Google Maps, Bing Maps. So your local profiles, jot this down. If you haven't done this, make sure you do it. Set up your Google My Business profile and set up your Bing local profile. Without those profiles set up, it makes it really hard for you to show up in that local map. And we'll continue to talk about those, too, throughout the presentation. So I like to talk about local content, because it's something that can give you an edge. And when I say big box or chains, I'm mostly talking about places that really don't truly have a local presence, okay? There are some what I would consider chains or places that have many locations that are local and are involved with their communities. But the Sam's Clubs and the Costco's, those guys can't do local SEO very well, which gives you an edge. And the reason why is they're typically too focused on that kind of corporate structure and then doing SEO from corporate. But they don't have somebody local working on it. Local content is really important for local SEO, so this is where you can really get an edge. And not all of you are going to like to write, but you can always hire somebody, you can have somebody else do it. Anyway, the point is, if you create local content about things that you've done in the local community, okay? You've done, let's say you've done some events at a local senior center, or perhaps you sponsored a baseball program, a kids' baseball team. Those things are important. You can write about them on your website, and they may not be the most valuable content to the hearing health community at large, but what it does is it tells Google that you are locally focused, that you are a local organization. It also allows you to do something else, and we'll talk about this a little bit too, is you can then take that content and use it to get yourself a link from somebody else. So I'll talk about that in a minute, but just know that it has that as well, and we'll talk about building links with that shortly. But your competitors, a lot of them, I notice a lot of them are not doing this out there. A lot of hearing health practices and audiologists are just not doing this. You want to do your job, and you don't want to write content, so put it on a schedule if you can. Once a month or something like that, write a little piece or have somebody write a little piece for you. It can really help. Last thing, this is a big word of warning, guys, and I can't say this enough. The content that's written for you or that's on your website, period, needs to be original. If it's duplicated, if you hired a web developer who uses the same content on your website and 500 others, that is building a broken foundation or trying to build a house on a broken foundation. It's not going to do you any good because Google and the search engines, they look for duplicated content, and they try and find the original source of that content and then only give this source credit. If your site, for instance, were a bunch of duplicate content, you're not ever really going to rank terribly well because Google thinks that you're not original. Okay, so let's talk about reviews. I bring up reviews because it's important on multiple levels, but it's part of your SEO strategy. This comes from a Yelp study from just a couple of years ago. 92% of online users now read reviews. This is important because I think most of us would probably say that when we're shopping in a new place, we want to look at some reviews. 68% of online users say positive reviews make them trust the local company. This is a key component for you guys because reviews are just, they're really going to help somebody. Trust is big in the service industry, right, and yours. 48% of people will visit a website after reading positive reviews. Effectively, if you have positive reviews and you're getting people to view them, you're actually going to get more traffic just from that. And 9% of people will call a business after reading positive reviews, which is obviously lead generation, right? And then this is important and why I'm talking about it, 10% of your search ranking approximately is influenced by the reviews, particularly on Google My Business, okay? So not even on Bing, Google My Business is kind of where that is. So if you're getting reviews, if you're trying to get reviews, there are some great places to get them beyond Google My Business, but Google My Business will actually influence your ranking on Google. So that's very important. 68% of consumers trust reviews more when they see good and bad reviews. So if you have 50 reviews and your average is five stars, that's actually not awesome. If you have 4.8 stars and 50 reviews, people love that. And that's because they think you're fake. They think that your cousin, Eddie, and your local extended family and all your friends are your reviewers, but without any negative detractors, they don't feel that you're being genuine. So it's actually interesting. So if you find that you have an average review rating of 4.5 or 4.6, don't sweat it unless you get under four, you know, four to 4.9 is kind of the magic number. Okay, as I just said, where should you focus on getting those reviews? Number one, Google My Business. If you get the reviews from Google My Business, that will help your rankings. More people will see it and it'll lend you additional credibility. And you also have the right to use those on your website too. So as I said, on your website, you need that social proof. Fantastic, right? Number two, I say Facebook, because Facebook is really the social media platform where all of our demographic is. It's almost 70% of the demographic is on Facebook. So it's the oldest search engine, which is why it makes sense. All the young people are fleeing to get away from their parents, to Instagram and Twitter and everywhere else. Facebook is an older demographic. I believe the average age on Facebook is in the 30s. But our 45, 55 plusers, they are all on Facebook. Number three, everywhere else, right? You've got Hearing Tracker, Healthy Hearing. You've got all these other sites, industry sites. These are all great sites to get reviews on, but unlike Google My Business, they're not going to improve your, the review itself is not gonna improve your rankings, okay? And then Facebook is just popular. And a lot of people like to check you out on Facebook. So I always say Facebook's important as well. So let's talk about this as a new concept, probably for some of you. This is a way that Google tries to figure out if you're legitimate. Remember, I talked about having a physical location. Without a physical location, you actually can't even do this part of SEO. So it makes it difficult. And I wanna make sure that you guys are aware. So it's called citation consistency. Sometimes you might hear people call it local listings or local or directory listings, okay? So just sometimes people swap out those names. But what it is, is it is making sure that your business information is consistent for each location that you have, is consistent with your Google My Business profile across the web. So if you put in your Google My Business profile when you set it up, that this particular location is located at 123 Street in Chicago, Illinois. And then Google sees that and they search the web and they find that on yellow pages, it says 123 ST period, not street, but ST period. That's actually an inconsistency. I know it's picky. We all know that street and ST period mean the same thing, but the robots wanna see that they're identical. And the reason being is that they consider that a credibility factor. So this is one of the things that we make sure that we fix when we're doing SEO for people. And I would make sure for you, this is something, one thing that you can do kind of in reverse, is if you start seeing on these other directories, you know, it could be, again, I have a bunch listed here. These are kind of generic ones, but you know, hearing tracker, healthy hearing, those places. If you start seeing that your address is not consistent with what your Google My Business profile says or your Bing local profile that you created for free, what you could do is you could try and find that common inconsistency and actually change your Google My Business or your Bing local address to say street instead of ST, or to say ST period instead of street, if that's what everything else is saying, is that consistency is what they're looking for. Otherwise, you know, you'll want to work with a professional or get a service to fix that. But one other word of warning, since some of Google's recent updates, and I say Google again, just because they're the big boy, they have affected local search to some degree by enhancing what are called their filters, which means that if you're right next to another business, they may filter you out if you're not the stronger SEO wise. And there are a number of tests saying, you know, that distance between the two is, you know, roughly 400 feet or 200 feet or whatever. It's not consistent. There are all sorts of tests. But in short, if you're right next to somebody else, or if you're in a suite number right next to another suite or something like that, you want to make sure that your SEO is stronger than theirs because Google may filter you out if it's not. So I just wanted to warn you that even if they're a dentist, it doesn't matter. It's the geographical proximity. So be aware of that if for some reason you just don't seem to be showing up next to somebody else. Okay, this is not something that's gonna help SEO directly, but this is something that should be done. You can see down there that My Hearing Center's location there, they have 4.8 stars. Those are not in the map, right? That is in that national part below the map. And most people don't get star ratings down there. But when you do, if you can make star ratings show up in that national area below the map, people's eyes gravitate towards it and you get more people clicking on it. So this is called schema markup to basically tell the search engines, hey, I have reviews, show them in my search results. This is something your webmaster should be doing for you. Make sure that they mark those reviews so that you're showing up like this. Otherwise, you're probably just missing out on a little bit of traffic. Your competitors, I mean, I still see a very small percentage of people doing this. So if you do it, you'll stand out compared to your competitors. Okay, so remember I talked about local content and link building? So now we're gonna talk a little bit about link building. This is extremely important, extremely important. I mean, 50% or more of SEO power in general comes from link building. So there's onsite, there's content, all that stuff, but the links from other websites to your website, that's what we call a backlink. So, you know, ionotseo.com, you know, if International Hearing Society puts a link on their website that goes to my website, that gives me a little bit of SEO power, okay? That's called a backlink. So backlinking is extremely important. Unfortunately, thanks to a snake oil salesman everywhere, it has a little bit of an unscrupulous history and I'll give you some warnings in that regard to protect you, but I wanna give you guys some strategies that can help you locally that are DIY, right? I know some of you guys are probably larger practices, some of you are smaller practices. If you don't have the budget to hire somebody to do stuff like this, you need to have somebody at least give me a little bit of guidance. So here it is. If you don't have a lot of backlinks, and you may not if you're smaller, make sure you leverage every relationship that you currently have. And this goes for everybody. Are you a member of the local chamber of commerce? If you are, they should have a link on their site to you. And if they don't, ask them, they'll give it to you. Are there any industry sites out there that you can put yourself on? As I mentioned, Hearing Tracker. Hearing Tracker, you can create a free profile. You can create a free profile and then they have marketing tools on there. And you get a link as well, especially premium ones get a better link, but you can get a free link. Also partners, what kind of partners do you have? Do you have referral partners? Do you have, what kind of relationships do you have in the industry? I mean, obviously you probably have manufacturer relationships. Who could you talk to that you could ask to put a link on their site to you? Or that makes sense. Why wouldn't they wanna call you out? Why wouldn't they want to call out that partnership? And you can offer to reciprocate. I mean, it doesn't take a lot of these. You don't wanna end up reciprocating 100 of them. But if you have five strong partners and you guys are willing to call each other out on each other's websites, that can help you tremendously. And the reason why is because Google looks at, and I say Google just again, because it's a big boy, but Bing does too. Google looks at a backlink, like a vote of confidence. Okay, if Auto SEO has a link from International Hearing Society, it tells them that I'm somehow related to the hearing industry because International Hearing Society is clearly related to the hearing industry. It also tells them that IHS thinks that I'm legitimate. Right, and that actually helps. So it's important to keep that in mind, okay? So I want you to think as part of your business process, if you wanna help yourself, as part of your business process, when you're making those relationships, think of this as something to work towards. If you get really good at it, make lists of people that you think have websites that could possibly link to you, and just ask them. It's not really that hard, but it's something that most people just don't think about. So keep that all in mind, that'll help you a tremendous amount. Most of you, I bet if you get two or three links out of it, your rankings will go through the roof compared to what they are right now. Okay, so let's talk about some free tools. I like free stuff, the price is right. So if you have a website right now, Google Analytics should be installed on it, it's free. And any web developer worth their salt can put it on there in 30 seconds. And from the moment that it's put on there, it can tell you so much about what's happening on your website. First and foremost, how many people are actually going to it, but it can also show you things like, hey, do they hate this page? Do they like this page? And when you set up a couple of things that are remotely, you know, moderately advanced, you can even see when they're actually filling out forms or clicking on phone numbers and calling you. So that kind of stuff is extremely important. I mean, if you're a business owner listening to this webinar, I mean, I'm a business owner, I wanna know what my ROI is on this stuff. So I'm always looking for ways to match. So make sure Google Analytics is on your site. If it's not, and if it is, make sure you have admin access to it so that you can carry it with you no matter where you go or what you do, you know, on the web in the future so that data doesn't disappear on you. Search Console is another free tool. More commonly known in the nerd circles, but it's something that would easily be installed by your developer. It can show you one thing that Google Analytics can't. It will show you what keywords people are actually searching. Now, Google Analytics, it looks like it shows you that, but it doesn't. 95% of the keyword searches they don't show and it's become inconsistent. But this will, for the last three months, give you all the keywords people saw you on for Google. And it'll give you your average position for those keywords, which is really cool. We use it a lot to figure out, hey, this person's average position is nine right now and there's still a lot of people seeing them. Well, if we can get them to number one, you know, we're gonna focus on that one. So there's a lot of good data there. Google My Business Insights. So Google My Business, as I mentioned, is a free tool, right, and it's something that you need to set up to be able to show up in those maps. If you have Google My Business set up, it has its own kind of analytics version in there that tells you how many people found you on those local maps. It tells you how many people called you from those local maps. And it tells you how many people asked for directions from those local maps. That information's invaluable too. I mean, if you wanna know if your SEO is working, I mean, there's no easier way than to see how many phone calls you're getting as a result of it, right, I mean, there's other ways, right, we can get at it, but at least with this information, you'll be able to figure it out pretty quickly. Bing Search Console is just like the same thing as Google Search Console, but for Bing only. One other thing about Search Console is it'll also tell you if Google thinks that you're doing something really, really, really bad and they penalized you or something. Without that installed, there's no, I can't tell you how many, over the years, how many people came to me and said, oh, I have no search engine traffic, and I just install that tool and Google says, hey, we banned you because of this, and then I figure that out real quick and they're no longer banned. It's just, you would never know unless that was installed. So I'm not sure what your situation is, but definitely do Google Analytics at least. More free tools, these are more kind of active tools you can try, so Copyscape.com. Remember how I said duplicate content is bad? Throw your URL, your domain name in Copyscape.com and it'll give you, if you have the same content as other people on the web, it'll give you 10 of them. And you can click on them and you can see, oh my gosh, this person's homepage content's identical to mine, or this page is identical. That will tell you right off the bat if you have a problem. And if you do, you need to start working on creating original content or something. So otherwise it's gonna hold you back. Sightliner.com, this will scan your website and tell you if you have some broken links. So, and more, there's a lot more, but I won't get into every nit and gritty detail, but broken links, as I mentioned earlier, not so great. And a lot of times they're a big surprise. So throw it in Sightliner, see what your site looks like in there, see if anything's broken or if it tells you anything else. Last one here on this page, the search, the Google search mobile-friendly test. This is actually Google's tool. So it can really go right to the source and say, hey Google, is my site mobile-friendly in your eyes? And you can't get better than that when it comes to mobile-friendliness. So put your site in that tool. I realize this is a goofy URL, so if you're trying to write it down, don't forget you can download the slides. But it'll tell you right off the bat if your website is mobile-friendly or not. And if it is not, then Google is going to be suppressing you in the search results. Okay, so I wanted to talk about social. It is the topic that goes along with SEO, right? So I wanted to talk in general about it and how it relates to SEO. Because there's a lot of misinformation out there and I want you guys to make sure you're, I want to make sure you guys are educated. It only impacts Bing search results. It does not impact Google directly. So if you have a great Facebook page and you've got a lot of followers and you're posting a lot of content, that's not gonna help you in Google, okay? Your Facebook page may rank really well, which can have advantages, right? A lot of people might check you out to make sure you're legitimate before they come in or before they consider using you. But it is not going to actually change your rankings in Google. Bing, on the other hand, they look at those signals a little bit so it can help a little bit. Where it can help you, though, is remember we talked about content, we talked about that local content. So let's say you wrote a nice article about how much you enjoyed going to the local senior center and that's it, I mean, that's what you write about. Let's say you then syndicated on Facebook, you put it on your website and then you put the link on Facebook and you call out that senior center on Facebook and say we had such a great time, ABC Senior Center, thank you so much for having us and you call them out. All their followers will be able to see that, right? And then they'll probably reply and call you out, which means all your followers will be able to see them. And so you're kind of sharing followers. Not only will you get more likes, but actually if somebody really likes the content and they happen to have a website or something like that, they may pick up the content and actually link to it on their website, which gets you a backlink, as we talked about. So good content can do that. I doubt it happened with that particular situation, you probably wouldn't get a backlink unless you asked the senior center themselves if they would put it on their website or give you a backlink, but chances are they will because they usually put events on their site. So keep that one in mind as a good opportunity for you. So it can indirectly help your SEO if you syndicate stuff on social and somebody sees some awesome content that links back to your website, right? So it's gotta be an article on your website and they decide to give you a link for it. So obviously social can provide leads. Is it the top lead generator? No, I mean, I would say referrals, of course, are probably going to remain a very strong lead generator, but SEO is a strong number two in general. Social is down there in the category of three, four, five on the list, but it's something that doesn't take too much time and you can get somebody that's in your office that's maybe not an expert that you're paying just to do that, but just to post every so often and whatnot. So it can be good for lead gen. One thing to note though, here's some things not to do with social. Down here, the 100% response rate on Facebook. And again, like I said, Facebook is the main market for this. If you're not responding to people on Facebook Messenger, they're not gonna message you anymore. So you need to make sure somebody's responding to them when they have questions. And I've seen a lot of people come in through Messenger asking for appointments unresponded. I start working with somebody and then I see that they missed five or 10 potential appointments because they never checked their Facebook Messenger. And now it says that they have a 0% response rate and nobody ever contacts them anymore. It's just bad. So make sure that you're doing that. I wouldn't post articles written by other people too much. It's hard to do because you can't just post your own stuff. You guys don't have an unlimited amount of time to do this stuff. You gotta curate other people's information, but don't post other people's articles all the time because when somebody clicks on that article, it takes them to another website. It doesn't take them to your website. And we want them to go to your website, be interested in your website, and ultimately take an action on your website, right? A call to action like get that free trial or whatnot. As I mentioned already, I kind of skipped ahead. You need to interact and answer these questions. And then this is always a fun one. Don't publicly attack any critics. If you're getting reviews on Facebook, if you're getting reviews elsewhere, when you respond to those reviews, don't say, oh yeah, Jerry, you're a jerk. I know you're my competitor. I don't like you. Please don't contact us ever again. What happens is you got Jerry back, but at the same time, everybody that ever sees that review and that reply now thinks you're a big jerk and they're not gonna come to your practice or they're gonna look over you when they see somebody else instead. They wanna see that you care about your customers and if there are some complaints that you will handle them. So the best way to respond is civilly. So Jerry, I'm sorry to hear you didn't have a great experience. Please consider calling our office. We'll do everything we can to make it right. And if he is your competitor, he's of course not gonna call your office, but that makes you look a lot better to the general public. Okay, what to do. Just real quick on social. Publish interesting content to your readers. We already kind of went over that a little bit. Pay attention to what they react to. There's analytics on, just like I told you to do Google analytics. There's analytics in Facebook, so when you're posting in there, you can see what people actually like. If you pay attention to that, you can just start posting more stuff that they like, and that increases your popularity over time. Again, publish your own content, too. That's because you may potentially get backlinks if it's good, if other people see it, and then they have a blog, and then they link to you. And then cross-promote with other organizations. Like I said, calling out the senior center you visited on Facebook and going back and forth, you can actually get likes from each other that way, and that can get you some business. All right. I wanted to talk a little bit about just a couple of brief warnings. Google is not calling you. I just want to protect you here. The only time Google will ever call you is if you're already spending a lot of money on their ads platform, and they'll usually have an 18-year-old call you that had a one-week crash course on Google Ads, and they're just there to try and get you to spend more money. If somebody calls you and says, we can get you number one on Google, we're a Google partner, or says, this is Bob from Google, and we can get you number one on Google, guaranteed. Something like that. Don't even listen to them. That guy's a scammer. Google will not call you like that. A lot of the times they use what's called Google partnership, which is easy to get. It's basically a certification to become a Google partner so that they can say on the phone, oh, yeah, this is Bob, Google partner, and just kind of breeze through it so you think it's Google, but anyway, don't talk to him. This next one's kind of a jest. Don't hire your neighbor's brother's nephew's cousin who's a tech guy on the side. You know what? I mean, when you're starting out, a lot of people have to do that, right? You're going to hire the cheapest guy you can find, and this guy's brother's cousin's nephew seems to know what he's doing. The problem ends up being that that kid will get a job. He will move away, and all of a sudden you won't be able to access your website or get ahold of him. I see that happen all the time. So whatever you do, make sure that you have access to everything, even if you hire your neighbor's brother's nephew's cousin. Make sure you have admin access to your website so you don't lose it when that guy leaves. The last thing, I know I keep hammering over the head on this duplicate content. This has to be fixed before you do any other SEO, otherwise it's a waste of money. I mean, I hate to say it, and I bet there are a lot of you guys on this webinar, I bet if you throw them all in Copyscape, I bet 30 or 40 of you are going to realize that your whole site is a duplicate. I mean, it's pretty prevalent in this industry in particular. It's kind of the lazy man's way out when designing websites for other people. So check that out, because that might be a major issue for you. That's it for me. I know that you guys are going to have some questions. Fran, you want to moderate? Thanks, Nick. So everyone, we are super excited, 100 of your fellow colleagues who joined us today on this webinar. We do have some time for questions, so if you have a question for Nick, please enter it in the question box on the webinar dashboard. Nick, our first question is from Claire. Claire wants to know that if we house all of our backlinks on one no-index, no-follow page, will that help or hurt our SEO? So Claire's asking if she puts a bunch of links going out from her site to other people on a page that's no-follow, no-index. Is that what she's saying? She didn't elaborate any further than that. Okay, all right. She says yes, that's correct. All right. She chimed in. Thanks, Claire. All right. Gotcha. Well, first, if the page that all the external links going to other people's sites, first of all, that's only helping them, even if it was a page, right, where you're linking to them. It's really, I mean, there's some slight chance it can help you, but for the most part, it's helping the other people you're linking to going out, right? Now in terms of no-index, if the page is no-indexed, and for everybody else on the call, what that basically means is there's a code on the page that tells Google, hey, this page is not important, don't read it. The problem with that is if that page is no-indexed, those links will never get read. And if those links aren't read by Google and Bing, then it actually doesn't even pass the link juice, the SEO power from those links to those other sites. So by no-indexing the page, you've kind of made everything else irrelevant, the no-follow, everything else. It really doesn't matter because Google is not gonna, not gonna even see those links. But if you index the page, if you remove the no-index and then index it, the no-follow can be helpful because you're not giving away all your SEO juice, right, to other people. But really, it sounds like, you know, there are always a lot of caveats on this stuff. I mean, it, you know, my questions to you would be, and I'm not gonna go back and forth probably on this webinar, but happy to talk to you afterwards. How many links do you have on the page? I mean, is this a really prevalent link? I mean, or is this a really prevalent page? You know, there are all sorts of other things to keep in mind, but I hope that answers your more specific question, but happy to talk to you about it more later. Thank you, Nick. We have a question from Adam. So Adam is going back to, you were talking about Facebook and social media and answering when people submit questions or, you know, email you via social media or comment, right? He wants to know, does just pressing like on a comment count as replying? Well, if we're referring to positive ones, so there's, I tend to answer questions complicatedly and, you know, I apologize for that. But when it comes to a review or something like that, a comment, if it is a positive one, a lot of people don't reply to positive comments just because it's time consuming. If you do, people appreciate that more, but oftentimes they're already a big advocate of yours, right? So a like can kind of be that middle ground, you know, if it's a positive comment. Obviously you're probably not going to be liking negative comments, so I'm assuming you're talking about positive comments, but negative comments, no, you certainly wouldn't want to, you know, put an angry face on a negative comment or something like that. You need to actually, you need to actually reply in that regard. Okay, thank you, Nick. Zachary has a question. He wants to know, does it matter if your site is one continuous scrolling page instead of multiple pages? It can matter. It's an individual case. So a continuous scrolling page, when there is, when the site is very smaller, can be helpful in the regards that it gives that page more credibility because it has more content on it and whatnot. But when you start to build it out in the long run, and if you decide to build out more product page or get more product on there, you know, information, you decide to put more information about, you know, different services, stuff like that. I would recommend that eventually you create multiple pages because what happens then is those individual pages are much more focused. Google sees that at Google and Bing, and then they start ranking that page for some of those more focused terms. If you have a continually scrolling page, it ends up having more authority potentially because it has a lot of content on it and stuff. But it's kind of considered general, right? Because there's so much information on it, Google's not sure what the focus of the page is. So it can hamper you if your site becomes bigger, I guess, if that makes sense. Cool, Nick. Thank you. Just curious to know, does having video on your site make any difference for SEO? It can a little bit. There's a lot of factors that go into that, but mostly people, when they put video on a webpage, it can keep people on the webpage longer if it's an engaging video, which ultimately can actually help your SEO a little bit because Bing, for instance, has come out and talked about a concept called dwell time where if you as a user go to Bing and then they click on the website, they then start a timer that basically determines how long you've been on that website before you hit the back button and go back to Bing. And if you hit the back button really fast, they know that you didn't like the website. And over time, that'll be a ding against that website. So if you have a video on there, for instance, the person goes to the website, they're not going to hit the back button really fast, right? They're going to stay on there longer. So as a result, it can kind of retain the users on the site better and ultimately improve things a little bit. It's not going to be a massive improvement in terms of SEO, but I like video for user engagement. Wonderful. Thank you, Nick. We have a question from Jennifer. She wants to know, is being a Better Business Bureau member considered a backlink if you're listed on their page? And also, are some backlinks better than others, such as with like a larger organization versus smaller business or the size of the site that's backlinking? Yeah, that's a good question because there's a lot of factors involved. So Better Business Bureau, for instance, I believe, and I'd have to double check again, it's been a while since I looked at a Better Business Bureau link. I believe they nofollow those links. If they do, that's not going to help you. But what you can do is, this may be a little nerdy, but if you right click on the actual link, like if you go check it out, right click on it and look at the code around that link, basically. And if it says anywhere in there nofollow, then it's not really helping you so much. But if it doesn't, by default, then it can help you. In terms of size of sites, here's the thing. As a general rule, if you have a backlink, the closer to the homepage, the stronger it's going to be on that site, right? So if it's on, let's say it's at the top of the homepage of a website, that's a strong link, right? Most people aren't going to have links like that. Most of them are going to have it in their blog or something like that. But the reason why I say that is because the homepage is the strongest page almost on everybody's site. It's another reason, Zach, on your question why doing a scrolling page can be helpful. But anyway, the homepage is the strongest page. Now, is their site strong? That's another question. If it's another practice, maybe it's a small practice you have a link from, something like that, a friend, that's not going to help you as much as if you had a really strong link close to the homepage on a very large site. But I can tell you that most of the places you're probably going to be able to get a link from easily, such as directories and things like that, they're not going to be nearly as strong as if you get a link from a friend organization or something like that. So I hope that helps answer your question. There's never an easy answer to some of these, because there's a lot of factors that go into it. You also want to make sure that the link itself doesn't say click here. You want it to say something related to what you do or at least your brand name. Because that actually, it's called anchor text, and it's actually a signal to Google as to what keywords you should rank for. That's great. That's great tip, Nick. Thank you. So Jacob wants to know, in the event of a false review submitted to a Google My Business account, what is the best course of action to get the review removed besides flagging it for Google to handle? Well, unfortunately, Jacob has probably been the victim of something like this, and he's probably unfortunately also figured out that Google's relatively worthless in terms of getting rid of flag reviews. And unfortunately, that's your only recourse, except to ask them, ask the actual person to remove it, which they're probably not going to if it's fraudulent. This is actually a big problem in the SEO community, and a lot of us are railing against Google for their review policies. But nobody's doing it right. I mean, I wish I had an answer for you. I really do, because none of us are happy about it. It's really become a kind of a place for trolls to be able to try and hurt your business just because they're mad. But the best way to deal with reviews on any level, even if it's a fake review and it's negative, is to reply and say something like, hi, Joe. I'm so sorry. I feel like you had a bad experience. We've checked the records, and I don't have anyone with your name or information in them. Would you please contact us so we can resolve the situation, something like that. And that lets people know that, oh, this might be a fake one. But unfortunately, Google's relatively worthless in terms of getting rid of them. That's a bummer, Nick, but thanks for your honesty. Yeah. Yeah. So we have a question from Barry. He has a corporate website with a big box store, and he wants to know, should we make a separate website for their individual office alone, or will Google see it as a duplicate because it's the same business location as the corporate website? But really, his overarching question is, when you are a part of either a big box chain or maybe a franchise or multiple offices that might have all the same website, his big question is, how do we help our local office be original with our corporate website? So the corporate website, and obviously, there are going to be specifics to this, but in general, when you're dealing with a franchise or a large organization with a lot of locations, you want to structure the website so that you've got the home page, and then you've got services, et cetera. But then every single location should have a page on the corporate site with some original content on it, with the name of the practitioners, et cetera. And it can be a real task, depending on how many you have. But then what you have to do is, every Google My Business profile, every Bing local profile has to be set up with that particular page set up as the website for that particular individual or for that particular location. And then that gives you the opportunity to actually rank locally with that page in the local market. Also from a structural standpoint, from an SEO standpoint, that allows you guys to take advantage of the larger commercial branding side that's going to pull you all up from an SEO perspective as you continue to push forward. If you try and do individual sites, if you even do a sub-domain, even a sub-domain or a separate domain name, you're going to end up in a situation where you're marketing 25 different websites, and they're all at ground zero, or they're all starting at zero. And it's just, it's impossible. You need to consolidate the presence as much as possible, and then focus on it from there. Does that answer the question? I mean, there are individual issues. I think so. Okay. Yeah, I think so. I think that gives kind of an overview. We have time for one more quick question and answer, Nick. And if you could encapsulate it briefly, we had a few people ask, number one, what should you look for in an SEO consultant, and number two, how much can you expect to spend? Sure. Well, from an SEO consultancy perspective, it doesn't have to break the bank. So from an expenditure standpoint, you know, you can start doing this for around a couple hundred dollars a month. I mean, depending on your situation, you don't need to spend, I mean, maybe if you're the guy with dozens and dozens of locations, you know, maybe it's going to cost more to attack that big presence. But you can start this, you know, for a single location practice, you know, you can do this for a couple hundred bucks. But everybody's situation is different, right? And you want to make sure that they actually look at your situation and audit your situation to determine what you need, because you might already have a fantastic review system, for instance, or maybe you've already got 75 reviews on Google. That might not be something that you need to focus on right away. Instead, there might be other areas. So they need to figure out your strengths and weaknesses and then customize it to that. If it's just like a cookie cutter thing only, you know, I would worry about that. This is kind of getting into what to look for for SEO consultants. You know, cookie cutter is not always good. If they're talking about selling you backlinks, that's a red flag. You know, mostly work with someone that you trust. I mean, this is a knowledge-based industry, much like what you guys do. And there are a lot of people out there that don't have a lot of knowledge in it. They read a few articles and decided they wanted to build websites. Talk to them, make sure they know what they're talking about, and then make sure you trust them. That's a big factor because you're not always going to see, you know, in our company, we try and report to people, we try and do all sorts of things, but we don't explain every little thing that we do because it's impossible. We'd have to teach you how to actually do everything that we do, right? So you have to trust that we actually know what we're doing and that we're actually doing it. So that's a big part of it. So have a conversation with them. Make sure you talk to them. Make sure you know who you're working with. Thank you, Nick. So guys, we have to wrap up everything today, but Nick, I want to thank you again for an excellent presentation. And I want to thank everyone for joining us today on the IHS webinar, How to Dominate Search Results in Your Market. If you'd like to get in contact with Nick, you may email him at nick.oddseo.com, and in just a moment, you're going to see that email address up on the screen there. In case you didn't know, everyone, IHS members get a comprehensive and complimentary SEO assessment. It's not one of those automated assessments. Nick or one of his SEO experts go through your entire web presence, and they take an inventory of all the things you need to improve to get the best search ranking. It's normally $100, but it is free for IHS members and can be found at ihs.oddseo.com. So that's a great perk for members. For more information about receiving a continuing education credit for this webinar through IHS, please visit the IHS website at ihsinfo.org. You can click on that webinar banner, find more information on the webinar tab on the navigation menu. IHS members also receive a substantial discount on CE credits, so if you're not already an IHS member, you can find out more at the website, ihsinfo.org. Please do keep an eye out for the feedback survey you'll receive tomorrow via email. It's real quick, and we just ask you to take a brief moment to answer a couple questions about the quality of today's presentation. And I want to thank you again for being with us today, and we will see you at the next IHS webinar.

search engine optimization

original content

local profiles

building backlinks

free tools

social media engagement

continuous scrolling page

video content

fake reviews

citation consistency