New Featured Series Video: Generating Business Through Google
Internet Marketer Ryan McLaughlin demonstrates the basics of Search Engine Optimization
Austin, Texas – December 26, 2013 – MortgageDashboard’s monthly Q&A, The Featured Series, released today a fascinating new discussion on search engine optimization presented by internet marketer Ryan McLaughlin. The presentation asks the over-arching question “How do loan officers get discovered on Google?” and delves into topics like webpage optimization, SEO, healthy link building, and the importance of professional, ethical staff.
MortgageDashboard asks the following questions:
- How does Google play a role in modern business?
- What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
- What common mistakes do business owners make when creating their website?
- How would a loan officer generate more business through Google locally?
- Who are you & what do you do?
About Ryan McLaughlin
Ryan McLaughlin is the Managing Director at RIISE. He specializes in search engine optimization, content marketing, website analytics, conversion rate optimization, multivariate testing, and pay-per-click advertising. Ryan is passionate about giving client websites the power to increase traffic, conversions, and profits. His focus is in collecting valuable visitor data and behavior analytics, then making informed decisions based on this data to increase the success of the site.
Video Transcript
How does Google play a role in modern business?
Ryan: “Google is an increasing role in modern business. Obviously for the last decade it’s been an engine of discovery for new customers to come in and see what businesses might be able to satisfy their needs or what businesses they might be able to purchase this thing that they need. Now, recently, they’ve installed a couple properties that allow Google to become a research engine as well, meaning, if you are a local business you have a Google + page & you have a local presence. This means your customers can come in and find out about your hours, your address. Your Google + will reveal what kind of content you share and really the personality of your business.”What is SEO (Searching Engine Optimization)?
Ryan: “SEO is really just the methods used by marketers to increase their exposure in the search results. It can be tied down to two categories. You’re going to be optimizing your website- that has to do with your page titles, your page headers, the site architecture, URLS, really all the elements of your site. Then you have Off-page optimization which is usually link building and then for local SEO, citation building, which is your NAP (your business name, your address, & your phone number). ” “An NAP is your business name, your address and your phone number, and it needs to be in the exact format you have it on Google and all the citations you’ve built off of your website. What that means is, if you have the first three numbers of your phone number in parenthesis and that’s the way you have it on Google, then that’s the way it needs to be on your website and consequently that’s how it needs to be if you place your listing on a different website like yelp, or really any website across the internet.” “Link building is really important to SEO in general. It’s the method of getting sites to link back to your website via text or image. Google see’s this as an endorsement for your website, meaning, that it’s going to increase your authority in Google’s eyes. All else being equal, sometimes it comes down to a popularity contest because Google still uses it to determine like competitors which is really important in terms of beating out your competition in your local market.” “Citation building, kind of like link building, is the act of getting an endorsement from another website. Citation building, specifically, is getting your NAP onto other websites in the exact same format. Remember what we said, business name, address and phone number- exactly the format that it is on Google and your website. It needs to be on other websites as much as you can control it because that helps build your authority as far as local SEO goes in Google’s eyes.” “Google uses all of these signals as an indicator to see if your business is relevant enough to list it for a particular searchers query. Marketers optimize all these elements to show Google that ultimately you are relevant & what the customers are looking for.”What common mistakes do business owners make when creating their website?
Ryan: “One of the things that business owners ignore to their disadvantage is thinking about the customer first when they’re building their website and content and optimizing for search. This really means understanding what they came to your website to find and then to decide if you’re the right business to service their needs or find what they’re looking for. For me as an consultant, what I’m trying to provide to my users is, they’re looking for 1) what do I do? 2) how do I do it? 3) Am I actually good at it, and 4) Am I a good fit for their business. So I set up my website so they can discover those things in the order they’re looking for them, so they come through my conversion funnel nicely and feel comfortable that I’m the right business to service their needs.” “Another thing that I think business owners do that puts them at a disadvantage is not learn SEO for themselves. If you don’t know SEO, even at it’s basic core, you’re not going to know how to hire a good firm to do it for you or your business. Small business owners in the past, who have jumped in without doing the right preparation, really just leads to a misunderstanding of online parties and how SEO fits into that (and how it integrates with social, content, pay-per-click, and the rest of your online channels). And even more specifically than that, getting into your content and how your content applies to the rest of your marketing strategy online. I really think that not understanding those priorities and how content will fit into your online landscape beyond SEO is really something that puts business owners at a disadvantage just because content isn’t just for SEO. Content is going to be more of an omni-channel approach for you. Something that I usually tell small business owners to consider is if they’re putting content on their website, we really want to understand if it’s share-worthy. If it’s now, what is the purpose of putting this on your website? Is it really bringing value to your users? Even if it does get you ranked by the search engines, if your customer or your target market comes to that page and they’re turned off by it, it’s not doing you very much good anyway.” “The second thing that business owners need to consider about content is that it really needs to be fresh. There is a few advantages of keeping fresh content on your website. 1) Search Engines are increasingly looking at freshness as the factor to determine if you’re relevant as a company looking to offer a particular good or service. Also, it’s really just a good touch point for your target market. Even outside of SEO, it’s really something that puts you as the business owner who does it well at a really big advantage.” “The last thing about content is really simple. It just needs to be good. To stand out in the internet where the content is replicating all of the content that existed a decade ago every forty eight hours, you really need to put out good stuff to stand out and to rise above your competitors.”How would a loan officer generate more business on Google?
Ryan: “What I usually suggest to small business owners who are looking to increase their sales and traffic from Google is to ask the last 10 customers where they came from and specifically get customers that came from Google. So if you can do that and get that sample data, what we’re going to be able to ask them is behavioral questions such as do they go straight to the organic results or do they look at the ads? how many companies did they click on before they came to a decision? How many companies did they reach out to out of the companies they clicked on? When you have that data and that information you’re able to understand more about that discovery process and how to adjust to it.” “Ok. So, let’s say for hypothetical reasons that they skipped all the ads and clicked 2 to 3 companies in their local listings. What that means is you really need to focus on local SEO and you need to be in the top 2 or 3 spaces to win them. Optimizing for local SEO is in a lot of ways similar to optimizing for regular SEO, but there are also differences including when you’re optimizing for on-page- if you have one address that applies to your whole domain, you want that address in its NAP form on every page of the website. If you have multiple locations, you’re going to want landing pages for each of those locations, and have that NAP on each of those locations. Then you have local SEO off-page optimization. As opposed to regular SEO which usually focuses on link building, we’re going to be focusing on citation building for local SEO. Which means getting that NAP onto other websites across the internet so Google can crawl it. It’s really important to remember that the NAP needs to be in the exact same format that Google has it and that you have it on your website. Google has become really advanced over the last decade but they are still relying on you to be really specific so they can pick up and really understand that there is another website that is referencing and endorsing your business. It should contribute to the overall authority that Google has for your business.”Every month, MortgageDashboard releases The Featured Series, an informative question-and-answer-style presentation from industry-experts for the benefit of loan officers. If you’ve enjoyed this month’s presentation, please consider subscribing to The Featured Series so you never miss it.
Next Month: Vicky Valdez, Austin’s Small Business Program Manager, explains the secret to starting a successful business.
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