BIM: So when you have a new client coming in to see you, Adam, what’s the first thing that you do to explain all these things to them?
Adam Vest: Initially we’ll sit down with a client, and all of the packages that we offer are a tailor-made to each individual client. So, I think listening is really one of the most important things that we can do to start the relationship off on the right foot. And it really also helps to build trust when a client or a customer knows that they’re not just another number within your agency, but you actually take the time to get to know their business. That’s very powerful. So, initially, we’ll spend a significant amount of time doing keyword research for each client. But over time, we’ve been around for over three years now, so we’re starting to kind of see the same keywords over and over again for different industries. However, there are what’s called a long tail keyword that long tail keywords which are becoming more and more prevalent. So, because of that voice capability, the voice search capability, long tail keywords are important to optimize for as well. It’s going more and more in that direction. There’s just no getting around it when you have voice connected devices all around you, Siri, Alexa, Google, it’s extremely important to optimize your site for those long tail keywords that are going to get you found with some of these mobile devices.
BIM: So, how do you find these long tail keywords and what kind of content do you have to generate to make them rank?
Adam Vest: Well, as you said, it’s generating content and the way that we specifically find these long tail keywords is based on the industry. We’ll come up with 50 keywords that we’re targeting, and we’ll track those 50 keywords. A lot of agencies will track three, five, 10 keywords at a time. We like to track at least 50. The more, the better as far as we’re concerned. And what we do is based on the volume, based on our different analytics tools, we’re able to kind of see exactly how many searches are being done. It always surprises me to see some of these long tail keywords that people are using their voice to search for it. But, optimizing for them is critical these days and one of the ways that we’ll actually go about finding them and I think a lot of people miss this is to actually just start to search Google for that industry in the form of a question and what will end up happening is you’ll see a list of quite a few of the most common long tail keywords that you have to choose from.
BIM: So, could you give me an example of that?
Adam Vest: So, if you’re looking for “best roofers in Denver”, or if you’re looking for who is the “best garage door repair company near me”, what you’re gonna end up seeing is about 5 to 10 variations of that actual search. And that would be considered a long tail keyword. And you just come up with 10 to 15 of these searches. You start typing them into Google and you’re going to see significant amount by the time you’re done, you’re going to have 40, 50, 60 different long tail keywords that you actually want to rank for.
BIM: And when you have a list of your long tail keywords, do you have to write a page for each one of them or do you try and include many of the keywords in one longer blog post or article?
Adam Vest: So, generally speaking, we’ll target around two long tail keywords per piece of content that we write, whether that’s an actual webpage or if it’s a blog. Then, of course, you want to link from that anchor text using that specific long tail keyword. If you can link to other places within your site, what that’s doing is it’s telling Google what the page is about. Then also there are things like Schema markup to where you can be the expert, the authority when answering these questions. You know, if you type in a question to Google, you’ll see that little snippet and as long as you’re optimizing properly the goal is to be able to be the authoritative resource for Google to use and they’ll actually put your information right there and then of course they link to your website as well. So it’s a very powerful tool.
BIM: What are some of the misconceptions that you hear about SEO?
Adam Vest: Okay, well, how much time do we have left Neil? There’s quite a few. I think I could probably talk about this for the entire half hour here. It varies customer to customer and industry to industry. But from what I’ve seen, some of the biggest misconceptions surround pricing. A lot of business owners think that search engine optimization costs thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a month, which is not always the case. Some, other things that we hear all the time are, it just doesn’t work. We don’t get leads from our website. My answer to that usually is, how are people finding you? If you’re not showing up in front of the customers who are actively searching for you? How would you ever get leads on your website? So, that’s a big misconception, we’ve never gotten leads in the past. Why would that change now? And then also a lot of the technical aspects of SEO kind of can put some business owners off.
