Spill The Tea | Episode 1 – SEO Transcript:
[Ming Johanson]
I remember very clearly your first week in the business, which was ‘ugh a help! I’ve fallen into a hole’ and you had Googled something? I think about SEO at the time.
[Kira Carlin]
I had googled SEO. Which was a mistake, nobody do that.
[Ming Johanson]
And I and I had specifically said to you before you started Googling to not Google it, which then you took a cue to Google it.
[Kira Carlin]
Of course, I did.
[Intro]
What if you could learn from the mistakes of others? The Spill The Tea podcast is a great way to get information on all things related to digital marketing and business hosts, Ming Johanson and Kira Carlin break down our knowledge in various fields, including business, sales and marketing. So whether you’re new or old at doing any of these things, tune in each week and hear the lessons learnt titbits of knowledge and talk of tea.
[Ming Johanson]
Hi Kira
[Kira Carlin]
Hi Ming, sorry was sipping my tea there.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, you were. Yeah. I’m just going to tinkle my cup so that people can tell that I have a tea cup here, with at least a spoon.
[Kira Carlin]
I should have a spoon. I should just sip noisily like my mom told me I shouldn’t.
[Ming Johanson]
You rebel! She wouldn’t listen to this, would she? She might. Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
You know it’s the only way to make tea audible.
[Ming Johanson]
Our mums do have some stalker vibes, I’m not going to lie.
[Kira Carlin]
[Laugh]
[Ming Johanson]
So how did we get here today?
[Kira Carlin]
Oh, I mean, you and I have worked together for about a few years now in one form or another.
[Ming Johanson]
A lifetime
[Kira Carlin]
It’s been about four years
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, it’s a small toddler. We’ve we’ve worked for about…
[Kira Carlin]
A toddler of time
[Ming Johanson]
For a toddler of time.
[Kira Carlin]
Until you kidnapped me from my old job at the radio.
[Ming Johanson]
And the radio mines.
[Kira Carlin]
Radio mines, where I was mining radio.
[Ming Johanson]
It Never gets old. No matter how many times we tell that joke, it’s golden each time.
[Kira Carlin]
Where I was working as a radio producer and you with the talent and still are the talent on a couple of radio shows here and there.
[Ming Johanson]
Surely you figured out I’m pretending this whole time.
[Kira Carlin]
Haha Yes, Imposter syndrome. Yeah. So that’s kind of how we got here. And then you kidnapped me out of my job, and now I work for you.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
How did that happen?
[Ming Johanson]
I pay you money.
[Kira Carlin]
I know right, it’s great
[Ming Johanson]
It’s hysterical. Like a responsible adult.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh, God Heaven forbid
[Ming Johanson]
I pay employees and I pay taxes…Allegedly
[Kira Carlin]
Oh, taxes.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, Hi Marvin, that’s a shout-out to my accountant. Um…Thank you for keeping me out of prison… This is not going well.
[Kira Carlin]
I was trying to think of the person who made that look cool, and I was about to say, Margaret Thatcher. And then I was like, No, she should have been in prison but wasn’t. I’m thinking of, who am I thinking of?
[Ming Johanson]
I don’t know Alan Bond.
[Kira Carlin]
White Lady, Home Network?
[Ming Johanson]
Oh, Margaret Stewart. Martha Stewart.
[Kira Carlin]
Martha Stewart, that’s the thinking of. No, Margaret Thatcher just should have been in prison.
[Ming Johanson]
So we thought we would talk about marketing and business from the person who’s been in the business the longest and the…
[Kira Carlin]
Least long.
[Ming Johanson]
A person who’s been in the business not so long. And also we like tea, so we drink lots of tea. Today I am drinking my standard. What I feel is very boring. Lemon, ginger, tea because it just, I feel like I’m healthy when I drink it.
[Kira Carlin]
That makes sense because it’s basically flavoured water.
[Ming Johanson]
I’m pretty sure there’s tea in there, I think.
[Kira Carlin]
I’m going to have to check the box now. I’m not going to be able to sleep if I don’t do that. Meanwhile, I have rooibos with milk and honey. [which is yummy yummy]
[Ming Johanson]
Mm yummy, yummy. So we thought we’d bring interesting, look, we’re going to try and have more interesting teas.
[Kira Carlin]
Rather than what was just in Ming’s pantry.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. Which, admittedly, I have interesting teas in my pantry. I just couldn’t be bothered digging in my pantry, which isn’t really a pantry. And that’s another story for another day.
[Kira Carlin]
So the purpose of what we wanted to do here was to talk a little bit about digital marketing and about why it seems so complicated and why it actually isn’t so complicated. A lot of the time.
[Ming Johanson]
I think it’s complicated because there are lots of people shouting into the void, saying lots of different things. And it speaks very much to your first week in our business. Like you’ve now been in that business for like a year and a half now. But I remember very clearly your first week in the business, which was ‘ugh a help! I’ve fallen into a hole and you had Googled something? I think about SEO at the time.
[Kira Carlin]
I googled SEO. Which was a mistake, nobody do that.
[Ming Johanson]
And I had specifically said to you before you started Googling to not Google it, which then you took a cue to Google it.
[Kira Carlin]
Of course, I did! Look so basically what happened is I was not in digital at all. I was a journalist. Right. I was, I had no idea what I was doing when you hired me.
[Ming Johanson]
I feel like we’re all there, that’s fine!
[Kira Carlin]
So being the adorable little overachiever that I am, I was like, Right, I am going to get up to speed by myself, in a week, on the internet. So I started Googling. You were like, don’t, don’t do that. And so I did it. And I came back to you and I was like, Why is this happening?
[Ming Johanson]
I’m curious about what you actually found. Like what? What was it that you actually found about SEO?
[Kira Carlin]
So SEO was where I started because it seemed like a good place to begin. I knew what it was and what it was supposed to do, but I didn’t really have too many ideas about how it did it. So I found everything right through from the scary early 2000s, like shove a bunch of keywords in something and send a bunch of buttons to it…
[Ming Johanson]
Oh Yeah
[Kira Carlin]
Right through to, a complicated strange formula on how many keywords per thing you should be putting in, lists of the 240-something points that make up SEO, like it was just all contradicting itself and it was all way too complicated. So I came back to you and I was like, You remember how you told me not to Google that thing? Well, I Googled the thing.
[Ming Johanson]
So I remember and this is something that I say to people quite often, is that SEO is really about building evidence to Google or Bing… not that many people Bing it, but if you happen to Bing it…
[Kira Carlin]
If you happen to Bing it, don’t!
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah but essentially what you’re doing is you’re building evidence that you are real to search engines based off the back of the fact that SEO 10 years 20 years ago now, (because we’ve been doing that for a while) used to be you would send some of the black hat, what we call black hat practice and black hat practice is bad practice for SEO.
[Ming Johanson]
It would be building fake websites that would have a bunch of keywords in it, and then you would send fake bots through that website to your website and it would look like you had a bunch of traffic and Google being the glorious superpower that they are, you know, constantly trying to improve the search experience. And what that means is that’s always going to be geared around people and really what you’re doing is you’re providing as much evidence as possible to prove that you are real.
[Kira Carlin]
So I think if we go back a step here, I think what often gets missed in the SEO puzzle, because a lot of small business owners, a lot of business owners generally look at it and go, okay, well, the Internet says, I need this thing. I don’t really know why I need it. The point of search engine optimisation is for your thing, your business, or your service so you’re not for profit or whatever it is to appear as high as possible when it’s searched for when you’re looking for the specific thing or the kind of thing, So if I was looking for builders or.
[Ming Johanson]
Have jet skis.
[Kira Carlin]
Jet skis or anything, yeah. You want your thing to appear as high as possible on the Google search rankings because let’s be real. Nobody’s looking past page two for literally anything and probably not past the first half of page one.
[Ming Johanson]
So I’m going to say cynics, cynical people will go to page two. There are not as many cynical people as you might think looking for your thing. So you really have to try to at least get to page one. And the differentiation between the number one ranking and the number two ranking is an ocean’s worth of traffic difference.
[Kira Carlin]
The running joke for us internally is that if you want to bury a body, you hide it on page five of Google because ain’t no one finding it there.
[Ming Johanson]
Yep.
[Kira Carlin]
So if you want your thing to move up the rankings, SEO is the way to do it there are a lot of different ways that can happen and a lot of people throw a lot and I do mean a lot of money. Yeah, that happened. But that is not the only way to make that happen.
[Ming Johanson]
No. And it’s like so one of the things that I think is often missed because, in our industry, people tend to work in industry silos. So you have the Google advertising people that all work together and they don’t really do anything other than Google advertising. You get the SEO people who will do the SEO bit and they don’t really talk to anybody either.
And then you get the web people and they don’t talk to anyone at all. And then you get like, you know, all of it is quite fragmented if you’re dealing with it, with lots of different, which again is fine if you know what you’re actually dealing with. If you don’t, you can kind of trust your marketing people to coordinate with each other, which really doesn’t happen as much as it should.
So one of the things that we know from testing, from measuring, from reports, because the best thing about all of this is we can measure all of this, is that if your website is properly optimised for search terms and like so, one of the things that you can easily do is optimise for misspellings, misspellings of your company name.
If people are spelling your company name wrong. Chances are you’ll actually rank for that if you SEO for it. And it seems like such a weird thing to SEO for, but even SEO-ing a company name often gets missed. And so your competitors and we had this with a doctor’s surgery where they had somebody in the middle of the pandemic decided to SEO for their actual doctor surgery name and branded everything to look almost identical. And so people didn’t actually know that they were booking with somebody else.
[Kira Carlin]
Until they had already done it. And by then they didn’t care because they had booked somebody. Another thing that we see quite often is, terms that don’t apply…our lawyer clients get very cross with us because we.
[Ming Johanson]
This is my favourite conversation
[Kira Carlin]
I know, We set them on our terms like ‘attorney’. Which don’t exist as terms in Australia. We don’t refer to lawyers as attorneys. There is no, it’s not a protected term here.
[Ming Johanson]
Well but they don’t, they don’t refer to themselves as attorneys.
[Kira Carlin]
So we watch a lot of American television in this country and lots of people when they’re looking for somebody to handle their family law, custody situation or their property settlement or whatever it is they need, they will look for an attorney because they don’t know to.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, absolutely.
[Kira Carlin]
So we SEO for that. We set it up for that.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Because why wouldn’t you want to get that traffic?
[Ming Johanson]
So one of the things I was sort of saying before and alluding to before is that with these different silos. So let’s take Google ads and SEO, the thing with SEO is if you are training your website and training Google on all the search terms that you want to be found for, then when you turn on Google ads, it actually lowers the cost of your ads because you’re doing half of the work.
Well, not half. It’s different work, right? You’re not spending time playing whack-a-mole on keywords that are completely irrelevant to you because Google has gone through your website, looked at all the keywords that you’re currently SEO’d for, and then paired it off with ads and then paired that with the search terms that your customers are actually searching for.
Because that’s another thing. It’s those adjacent key phrases that are connected to your search terms. They’re not talking of those two industry spaces is a real challenge.
[Kira Carlin]
It is a real problem that we see quite a lot is that things have been set up so that they don’t speak to each other. They don’t speak to each other well. And the tricky thing about SEO is it’s not taken from one source. It’s not ‘I have turned on the SEO button and therefore now my SEO is good’’.
[Ming Johanson]
God, I wish it was that easy.
[Kira Carlin]
I know, right? How many points is it now? It’s like 240-something points of different stuff that it’s looking for.
[Ming Johanson]
So many! So you know things like image file names and having things like hyphens instead of underscores with your file names, which is such an obscure thing. I said that to one of our clients the other day and he was like, “Oh, is that a thing?” So to clarify that little bit is an underscore connecting the word. So it means it’s just one big janky web that nobody can really understand, whereas hyphens are red as spaces.
[Kira Carlin]
So Google is looking for all these different points, like do your images have alt text? Do your images have proper names on them hyphens instead of underscores things like how often your website is updated? So if you’re releasing content all the time, Google will check that and go “Oh, it’s been updated”.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh, shit. I didn’t check the website. I best get on that
[Kira Carlin]
And because it’s active it will push it up the ranking. So one of the quickest ways to push your website up the rankings is to be pushing out blogs on just anything to do with your business.
[Ming Johanson]
Adjacent, to like certainly having adjacent content or like I think the way that I form that question for most of our clients is what’s the annoying conversation that you could really just write an article about and then send them a link to.
[Kira Carlin]
And then Never Have it again?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. And it would save you time and resources to have to keep repeating it like, my mum’s losing her hearing and it’s driving me mental because I really hate repeating myself, I guess.
But I’m in the same space with what I do for industry is that I have the same conversation and I’d rather skip to the next bit because the next bit of the conversation is actually the important bit, but people are, you know, kind of held back because of then that grasps of knowledge.
[Kira Carlin]
But it’s a thing we do a lot for clients is that we write all of these things about their industry because they are so enmeshed in their own stuff that they don’t understand which bits might be useful for people until they stop and think, Well, I get asked about this all the time.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So, you know, other things that might occur is. Yeah, so you’ve, you’ve already mentioned the regular consistency of posting content, which can be very heavy work. There’s a lot of work to do with that backlink and what backlinks are links to other websites that are talking about the same topic or similar topic or adjacent topic.
And I think that’s, you know, that was the benefit of me being in the media a lot was, I was talking about stuff in the media and then I could refer to the media piece, which is an extremely trusted Internet source, and then link to it from my website.
[Kira Carlin]
One that I use all the time, particularly when we’re dealing with slightly more difficult topics. Like we did a lot of work, we do a lot of work with lawyers and people like that. If we’re talking about a slightly more touchy subject, like a restraining order, how to get one or custody matters or things like that, I will always add the lifeline and beyond blue numbers which…
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Is something that we should be doing anyway, just as a good practice, but also because I’m out linking to a trusted stable source that’s good for your SEO as well.
[Ming Johanson]
Absolutely.
[Kira Carlin]
So, you know, doing good mental health hygiene is.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah but like you also might and this might sound completely left field for people. You also might want to write a list of the top ten. Let’s say photographers, the top ten photographers in Perth. And you happen to be on that list, right? It was a wild suggestion. You know, and you can have a bit of a tongue-in-cheek sort of conversation about that as well, you know, or you can also be on a directory listing and be voted that way and then, you know, credibly put that on your website.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly.
[Ming Johanson]
Things like video content on your website because it’ll keep people on there for longer. There’s a thing called a ‘bounce rate’. So bounce rate is the percentage of people that will never come back to your website. Now, that might be high because you might be a plumber or an electrician, and for the most part, people will go to that website for the phone number. And so that’s going to naturally read to Google as They only went on the website for like 3 seconds to click a phone number and then they were gone.
[Kira Carlin]
And of course, Google doesn’t have the context. And at that moment there was water pouring through the ceiling from their upstairs bathroom. Google doesn’t know that.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. As opposed to, you know, an article going what do I do when water is falling from my ceiling?”
[Kira Carlin]
Shortest article ever? “Phone us!”
[Ming Johanson]
Run, run, then find us.
[Kira Carlin]
So it all plays a part, but the content and updating your website frequently is a big part of that. It will make Google and cross-posting to your social media. So you write a blog piece and then you put it everywhere.
[Ming Johanson]
I think the benefit of that is it’s also so it’s an activity we call ‘high impact activity’ because it’s a big piece of content that you can then chop into smaller pieces for your social media. So you can cut out a piece of it and put it on your socials. And it doesn’t have to go anywhere. It can just live on your social media.
But then like the third version of that piece goes to your website because you still also have to annoyingly play by the social media rules, which is don’t leave our platform. But then when they do leave and they are coming from social media platforms and one of the things that we learnt, or I quite learnt by accident in the early days of my business was, so just to give you a bit of context, I had a website, I did my website. I actively told people I didn’t have a website and I told people to go to my social media, go to my Facebook, and follow me on Facebook. And that happened for probably the first two years of my business, which I’ve been in business for 12 years now.
And what happened from that was I was regularly posting on social media, I was building an audience, and everybody was a very loyal follower of my staff. And then by the time I did have a website and I was writing blogs and writing articles, everybody would go there, read them, and then go and read the next article. And so they were on my website for 4 minutes 50, which is like an internet lifetime.
[Kira Carlin]
Vampires have risen and fallen!
[Ming Johanson]
Online. Yeah, definitely. And so that would give a lot of credibility to Google. Oh, this traffic that’s coming from your social media. First of all, it’s valid traffic because it’s hard for a bot to discern what’s going on in the noise of social media and then direct itself to your website. So that was one piece was we were getting valid traffic.
The second piece was I was staying there for a really long time and this is yeah, 12 years ago I was getting a bounce rate of less than 2% and when I was talking to people who were the SEO experts at the time, they were like, That’s unheard of. You’re, you’re a unicorn. And that’s actually where the unicorn term came out.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. So simple things like outbound links and links make a lot of difference. So linking back to other blogs you’ve written or other parts of your website that people can go to that you can offramp people towards. If you don’t give them anywhere to go, they’re going to leave.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So when we say Offramp, what do we mean?
[Kira Carlin]
We mean somewhere else to go. It’s kind of like when you get off the freeway.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah
[Kira Carlin]
You’re heading in a direction if you give people a call to action or another thing to do, if they’re looking for something to do, you’ve given them an option. You’ve given them a direction.
[Ming Johanson]
Well, they were already on your website. If they’re already on your website and you’ve already got their eyes, you’ve got their attention. And there’s clearly something that you’ve written that has gotten their attention, that’s landed them there in the first place. I think a lot of people are quite scared to ask because they’re like, I’m manipulating people with the marketing to make people do the things and so you’re not making anybody do anything that they don’t already want to do in the first place.
[Kira Carlin]
Giving them an option.
[Ming Johanson]
Exactly
[Kira Carlin]
You’re telling them what they can do next but no one’s making them do it.
[Ming Johanson]
I think that’s good. I think I think we’re good. I don’t know how to end the episode
[Kira Carlin]
Me neither.
[Ming Johanson]
I guess we’re going to pre-empt the next episode.
[Kira Carlin]
I guess we’ll probably do that! So I think we talked about UX design, user experience and things.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So, the next episode will be about UX design, which is the user experience for those that don’t know the acronyms that we all decided to make up to make your lives hard.
[Ming Johanson]
So we’re going to talk about that in the next episode. Uh, yeah. Come, come check it out and subscribe and download and do all the things that you’re supposed to do on Spotify to make this go to people, I guess. And also, if you need to have a conversation with us about marketing, of course, reach out. You can find us both on LinkedIn. Kira, what is your name on LinkedIn? It’s the same as your real name.
[Kira Carlin]
It is, isn’t it! Kira Carlin, find me on LinkedIn.
[Ming Johanson]
And I’m Ming Johanson.
[Kira Carlin]
Go get yourself an interesting cup of tea.
