Speaker 1: 0:00

All right, folks, welcome to another exciting episode of the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Today we're doing something special again. I'm back as your host, ready to dive into the world of SEO. I'm Tori Barker, coo of Buzzworthy Marketing, and I have the pleasure of interviewing the mastermind behind our show, michael Bozinski. In this episode, we're going to uncover the secrets of SEO, the backbone of digital marketing. We'll explore why SEO is crucial for business owners, break down the basics every business should know and debunk some common myths and misconceptions. Michael will also share his insights on SEO strategy, the importance of content, the key metrics to track and the latest trends shaping the SEO landscape. So buckle up and get ready for an informative and engaging discussion that will boost your understanding of SEO and help you elevate your digital presence. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 0:53

Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show.

Speaker 1: 1:01

Hey Buzz, welcome on the show.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Welcome to my own show, what yes?

Speaker 1: 1:07

I'm taking over again, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:11

Oh my gosh. You know I thought after Kristoff. You know I was like, okay, I'm back in control. And then now I'm back in the hot seat. What are we talking about today?

Speaker 1: 1:20

Today is your favorite subject. I think we're going to talk about a marketer's mindset as it pertains to SEO.

Speaker 2: 1:30

SEO. What is that? Yes, you're right, it is my favorite topic. You know why it's my favorite topic.

Speaker 1: 1:35

Yes, tell us why.

Speaker 2: 1:37

I think it's my favorite topic because it is the most authentic way of getting visibility for somebody's company in a way that is most profitable, because if you have people searching for what you do when they need that service, to me that's like a marketer's dream, right.

Speaker 1: 1:58

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:59

Like don't you wish like people would just like text you every time they actually need you? They don't know, right? Not everybody has your phone number to text you, right, and so it's kind of like the ominous text message machine is the search engine results page and then you never know who you're going to find right, but you always seem to find the right people, yeah. So that's why I love it.

Speaker 1: 2:25

Okay, so let's just take a step back. That's fantastic foundation of why you love it. But for those who may not know, can you explain, like in high level, what is SEO, what does it stand for, what does it do?

Speaker 2: 2:43

Search engine optimization, which is a fancy way of saying showing up on Google. And yes, I'm just going to talk Google, because Google is the monster, it is the gorilla in the room, it is the only one that really matters when it comes to it, and if you can make it work for Google, you're most likely you're showing up on the other ones anyway. So, when you have 68% of the market share in your search engine and another I wanna say another 18 or 20%, 60, 88. No, it's higher than that. It's like 20 something percent in your second search engine called YouTube. So when you own 92%, so it comes out to like 24%, when you own 92% of the market share, who are you going to pay attention to, right? Yeah, so search engine optimization in the methodology is a way of teaching the search algorithms how to rank your content for the topics and the questions, the topics you talk about and the questions you answer. I think that's the simplest way of saying it.

Speaker 1: 4:02

So you alluded to it a little bit earlier. But why is it so important for business owners to know about SEO, care about SEO and implement SEO into their business?

Speaker 2: 4:14

So SEO is a marketing tool. So a lot of people, you know they'll turn to advertising when they think they need visibility. And we I think we talked about this the last time you took over my show about the three crises of the modern day business right, we have the visibility, the identity and the focus and visibility. And SEO solves that visibility issue right In an organic way. And the reason that I like to lean on it first, even though it is a longer game for small businesses, it is the. It is the. The long game is the answer.

Speaker 2: 4:51

In the short term, you can always network a little bit more. Right, you can always work through your referrals. You can always upsell your current clients. There's always something gorilla that you can do. But in your marketing, there are a few, very few things you can do organically that have the power of search engine optimization. And in search, visibility is an exponential return on investment, meaning that you're going to invest a long time or not a long time, but you know I mean the first year you're gonna invest a lot of enter time, energy or money one of the one of those and get very little results. But when it hits, it catches really hard and it just has this exponential hockey stick of return on investment in year two, year three and so on, if you keep up with it right.

Speaker 1: 5:39

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 5:39

And so what we do for our clients is allow that content then to get that visibility. And now, with that traffic, we're testing the marketing, the marketing message right. Getting visibility is great, but if people don't react to that visibility, your marketing, then you know that you need to change the marketing right. So if I show a bunch of people your message and nobody reacts to it, then we have to change the message right. And then if they do react to it but they don't convert, then we need to change the marketing behind the message right. And so many people want to go well, we know what we want, we think we know right, and really what. And so they go directly to advertising.

Speaker 2: 6:22

I was just on a call today, a woman who has a profit optimization right, and I was asking her so what are you doing for your marketing? And she was saying that you know organic networking, referrals, those types of things, but they're in year three. So now they're starting to look at their marketing. This is a great time to do that, because now you're entering into the growth phase, right, You're out of that startup phase.

Speaker 2: 6:45

When you're in growth phase, you want everything fast, because three years doesn't seem that long, right, and you're like I don't want to spend another three years getting to you know, doubling what I got, I want to do it next year. But for small businesses that are in that three to five year mark, doubling up in a year can be a huge strain to you in. And I'm not going to talk about the operational strains, I'm going to talk about the marketing strains, because to do that really fast, that means you have to get a lot of visibility, and and visibility fast equals money yeah through, your company doesn't usually have a lot of money to burn.

Speaker 2: 7:19

When I say burn, I mean literally set it on fire, because if you haven't proven your messaging through organic traffic or through hard and fast market research, you're now just throwing. You're just basically wrapping dollars around your business card and throw them in the street. Right, because you don't know yeah, you know who's going to drive down the street the whole anyways. Right, and so many people are so fast to throw money at something at their business, thinking that, oh well, there's social media ads or PPC and all that other stuff. It's fine, right, it's like eh, yes, and no, right, you have to test it. And so it's a really good way of finding the people who are actually looking for you. How do they respond to your call to action, how do they respond to your offer? And once that is doing really well, then that'll create the growth you're looking for, and then, from what you learn there, the winners of those then get the money to amplify.

Speaker 2: 8:20

So just think of organic is a marketing. Right? All of your search, your content marketing, social media all of this is marketing. That's why they call it search marketing. That's why they call it social media marketing right. Then you have social ads and pay-per-click or Google ads right. Ads or any type of advertising, is a um, is a uh, a megaphone, okay. So are you going to amplify the unknown, like whether they're winners or not, or are you going to find what did work organically in your marketing and then and then ample and paid for that to be amplified? I'd rather pay for the things that I know are going to work in, paying to get it out in front of people, versus guessing with my, with my dollars.

Speaker 1: 9:10

You know what I think is really interesting? You, we talk about the SEO strategy and how it works and all that stuff, but it's interesting when we first start working with a client, and we recently had this experience where we go through the research phase and there's keywords that the client or the business thinks that they're going to be found for, versus what the consumer is actually looking for.

Speaker 1: 9:37

And so that goes directly to that point. Right, if we were to market to what we thought people were looking for, then we're just, you know, you know, putting a megaphone out to an empty room versus doing that research and why? That's why it's so important, because then we, we fully understand what the consumer is actually searching for and we put or serve that up into their you know, their feed. Basically 100%.

Speaker 2: 10:04

I think that I mean we think we understand what. Well, let me, let me back up. Most of the traffic you're going to get from, uh, from search engine optimization uh, or search marketing, if you will, organic search marketing is our people, who don't know who you are. This is unbranded marketing, right. It takes a lot of money to be known by a lot of people. Right, a top of mind awareness marketing.

Speaker 2: 10:30

I don't even know what the numbers are for Coca-Cola and Pepsi and all of those household brands have spent decades some almost a century now spending billions on them and at some point it's going to be trillions for companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola over time. Right, to stay on top right, but you don't have billions and trillions of dollars to do that with right. And so if you can take your finite resources and get in front of people who don't even know you exist, but now know that you have a solution or you have the authority to help them, that's 10 times more important. At that moment, when you're in pain and you go to the emergency room, do you ask for the credentials of the doctor?

Speaker 1: 11:16

No.

Speaker 2: 11:19

You go to the doctor whoever's there is helping you right when they're in enough pain, for the solution that you provide is to get rid of that pain. They don't care who you are, necessarily, if the pain is really great, now if you have a nicety, yeah, you're going to have to get more creative with that. But most businesses serve one purpose is to solve problems for their clients.

Speaker 1: 11:47

That's it right. I have an operational.

Speaker 2: 11:48

Yeah, I have an operational problem. I have an HR problem. I have a financial problem. I have a sales problem. I have a marketing problem right, I have a leadership problem. I need help with these things, right. The fulfillment problem right, if I'm using freelancers, I have a fulfillment problem.

Speaker 2: 12:05

Right, all of those lead to pain problems or pain in business. So if we're focused on the pains and then understand the symptoms that create the pains and then reverse engineer, what would a person with these symptoms and these pains type into the Google to find out how to get rid of pain? Or sometimes they don't know what pain, yeah. Or sometimes they don't know what they they. They, they see the symptoms. Or they don't know what's causing the pain, right, so they are problem. They're not problem aware, right, so they only know that, so it's like. So what questions are we asking about the symptoms? Right, why can't I pay my bills every month? Give a cashflow problem. Ooh, cashflow problem. How do I solve a cashflow problem? Oh, you talk to Bob, right? Okay, bob's got a solution to your problem.

Speaker 2: 12:58

So, once they're problem aware, they're what we call in commercial intent, sometimes even transactional intent. We won't go too far into the science of this. We're talking about the mindset. The mindset is to help them, for people who don't understand what their problem is, to get them in the informational stage where they're like I know my symptoms of my problem and get them to be problem aware. And as they find that problem, you need to be right next to that information about the problem as a solution. So now they are problem and brand aware. Yeah, they didn't know you existed because they don't need you, because they didn't. They didn't know they needed you because they didn't understand the problem Exactly.

Speaker 2: 13:40

Now some people come in. Some people come in and they're and they're pretty smart, like you know, I've been in business for 19 years and you know when I run into a problem. I'm like I've been in business for 19 years and you know when I run into a problem. I'm like I know what that problem is and I know I don't know who, but I know what. Yeah, right, so now I'm going to go to the internet, I'm going to go to the Google and I'm going to type in my pain, who helps me with? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And now I'm going to look at the brands Right, and now I'm in what we call commercial intent. I'm now looking at each of these brands going. Which brand is going to help me with my problem, right, okay, so when we're choosing the mindset behind, choosing what content to put out there, I always say start at the commercial end, because there's a lot of people who are problem aware and then work your way up to informational intent, people who are only symptom aware.

Speaker 1: 14:31

Yeah, so let's talk about the content and specifically, the strategy behind the content and how that is so integral to the SEO that we're putting out there for consumers to find us.

Speaker 2: 14:44

That's a good question. And very recently, google has created. That's a good question. And very recently um, google has created this eeat framework, right um, and it's your expertise, right um, your authority, your trustworthiness and your what's the other e? I always forget the other e. They added it experience, expertise, experience, authority and trust. It used to just be eat yeah so I keep forgetting.

Speaker 2: 15:12

It's kind of like them changing google business profile to from google business, my, my google business to google maps. I mean, it's just like geez, make up your mind already, right? So anyway, so long story short is you have the expertise, you have experience, you have authority and trust. So to do that, you need to now not only write good content that answers specific questions right, like we talked about the, the key words, right, and and being being in front of people when they ask the right questions with the right intent, right, right, but now you have. Now you have to show google that not only can you answer this, but you have authority. You have expertise, right, you are trustworthy enough to then give this information in front of somebody who is going to trust you to solve the problem behind that question, right? So that EAT is a big deal, because what it does is it creates a topical demand.

Speaker 2: 16:06

So I'm a marketer, I have to have the expertise, the experience and the authority and the trustworthiness of marketing, and I got to prove that to an algorithm who doesn't know me, right, and only looks at you know, only looks at numbers, zeros and ones and all that other stuff, to say, yes, you have authority. So there's a lot of more signals now. So, while SEO itself and the content side has gotten a lot easier with AI helping us answer questions and dot dot dot, but now it's not just enough to answer the questions. Now you have to say I understand the answers, I have authority over the answers. I've experienced answering and solving for the problems. These questions answer All of the things right, I am trustworthy enough to be doing business with because, remember, for most of us, when we go to Google, there's a big chunk of the time we're technically in a commercial or transactional state. Right, we're looking to solve a problem, and when other people solve our problems, it usually costs money.

Speaker 1: 17:14

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:15

Right. So when we're comparing who we're going to do it, we're in a commercial state. When we're just, we don't care who it is, whoever the first one is, I'm in a transactional state, right, yeah, I'm looking to buy, right. So the mindset comes around, the holistic look at things and so at Buzzworthy. Now what we're doing is creating content marketing engines versus just doing SEO, because SEO by itself is not enough anymore. You've got to have the whole ecosystem feeding itself and creating a great identity for the people, a focused set of content on the topic that you're trying to have authority over right and be trusted with, and show your expertise and your experience with right, and then you have to have the signal that other people trust you with those types of things and that will create that visibility. Right, and that's what we're looking for in SEO is just visibility for people who are searching for the solutions that you provide.

Speaker 1: 18:17

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was so well put. I think we're going to like stamp that for sure, because people really need to go back and listen to that, because that is the whole picture. That's exactly what it is, and I think just from this conversation, it kind of almost builds its own case on why SEO takes so long. Because if you're thinking about the whole EAT acronym and what's involved in that, and how do you build authority, how do you build expertise Well, that doesn't happen overnight in life, right? So why would we expect technology to be able to rank immediately?

Speaker 2: 18:57

right.

Speaker 1: 18:58

It's the longevity and it's the investment in yourself and your business to get that visibility from the content that you're creating. So I think, yeah, we just-.

Speaker 2: 19:08

I love that we just solved that problem.

Speaker 2: 19:12

Well, it's easy enough to say what it is right. It's doing it right. The problem is this, and this is why people fail in SEO they never stick in for the long run. Yeah, and in content marketing is all of content marketing out there, I don't care what kind you're doing, it takes time, yeah, right, like you. Just you said it perfectly. It just takes time because people don't trust you over overnight unless somebody else lends their trust to you and that's a referral. Yep, right, and it's very organic, it's and that's a growth mechanism.

Speaker 2: 19:45

Search engine visibility is can be a scaling mechanism, right, if you get enough visibility on on on google or in youtube or wherever you want are showing up, you can get more traffic to your website and then, and then, um, if it's converting correctly, get more leads and you can handle that's a scalability issue.

Speaker 2: 20:10

Yeah, right, when you're taking referrals and like, if for me personally, if I'm in the collecting referrals and having referral partners and JVs and all the other stuff, and I start, and now I'm at that profitable level to where I can now budget for marketing, that is when I start my SEO. Yeah, because I know it's going to be another six to 12 months before I start seeing the return on those investments. In the meantime, I now have hot referrals coming in on a regular basis. But guess what? People are awesome until they're not Every referral partner that you have. 99% of them will stop giving you referrals at some point. Okay, whether they go out of business, they find a new JVV or a JV sorry joint venture. Their business goes under themselves. They get bought out. There's all sorts of reasons why your referral partners disappear, and there's a lot of people who do remarketing to their current clients and get referrals that way, and that's great too, but it's not scalable.

Speaker 1: 21:16

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 21:17

I have not heard one client, not one client. I haven't heard of a story and and, and. Please put in the comments if you have, or email me at buzz, at buzzworthybiz, if you have a case study where somebody scaled eight figures just using referrals from their current clients, nothing else, right, it's an ecosystem, right. And so it's like, yes, there's, but you're relying on other people to think about you, yeah, while they're out and about in their day, right? So you ask a hundred people for referrals, how many people are giving you referrals? Right? Because if you only talk to 10, you might get one. Right, if you talk to a hundred, you might get 10. And then what's your close rate on those? Because some of those people are not qualified, some of those people are not in the market for it, some people are not a great fit, some people some of them can't afford you, right? All of the reasons why they can't buy from you. That's why the numbers are there and that's why it's not scalable. It's not that people won't refer you, it's just that you're not going to be able to say yes to all of the ones that you do get. Yeah, and some of those people won't be able to say yes to you, just the way it is. Yeah, and scalability is about numbers.

Speaker 2: 22:23

And now, not everybody's trying to scale their business. They might have a lifestyle business. That's great, yeah, but if you have referrals, where do you think they're going? When they get a referral from you, they're gonna do their research the google. So if you're not showing if, if they're not, if you're not even showing up on google for your own brand now this is a now, because now they're brand aware, yeah, so they're gonna go look for you on the brand and you they can't find you under your own brand. Where does your trust factor come in?

Speaker 2: 22:52

yeah where's your authority right? Where's your expertise and your experience? It goes down the drain right. Same thing with social media. If they go to social media first, right, but you know, if you're a B2B, a lot of times they will look at both, and you just got to know that you have to be present for people to say yes, mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: 23:17

Now let's wrap up with a final question, kind of put a pretty bow on this. And let's talk about how do we know that we're being successful with our SEO, and are there key metrics that you should be looking at to understand that growth and know when you're scaling and know that you're headed in the right direction?

Speaker 2: 23:42

That's a good question. So you get what you measure right and we have the 50-50 marketing paradox out there that says that 50% of what you're doing in your marketing is working. You just don't know which 50%.

Speaker 2: 23:54

So if you're out there doing seo and you don't, are not actually measuring the outcomes of that, even in the early stages, when that seems to be zero all across the board, um, you're doing it wrong yeah right, you have to see that um and so, to answer your question, the metrics that I start with is one your traffic, organic traffic, and there's ways to set up your Google analytics to where you can get just that number. What is my organic traffic? Now, what I tell all my folks and what I say in my book, the rule 26 is that you need to make sure that that organic traffic is not a bunch of bots. So you need to filter that bot out. And there's a setting in your Google analytics. You're going to go five steps down. Maybe we can put together a and a how to on this Tori to and put it in our show notes to to show people where to click. There's one little button that says filter bots. Filter the bots. You can you actually can Google it guys. And um and so, first is that traffic? So first is the traffic, and say, okay, how much organic tracking am I starting with versus how much organic traffic am I getting month over month?

Speaker 2: 25:08

And then, once you're in a year, you always want to look year over year to make sure that you're looking at seasonalities of your business. Now, some people are year-round businesses, but you'll be surprised how seasonal like you'll have dips in and we, we all have them right. August for B2B marketing is like the worst, hence why I'm going to Ireland. He buys anything in August. Now I know. So that's a stat I didn't even know. Okay, so there's that. Another one you want to take a look at is, once you start getting the traffic is, what is your conversion rate? Because you can have all the traffic in the world, but if nobody's converting into leads, you've just wasted all that time, energy and money and nothing to eat. Yes, no pun intended, but every pun intended, okay. So those are my first two that I would start with.

Speaker 2: 26:07

Okay, there's some other ones that, if you have the right tools, you can also look at what keywords you're ranking for and what intents they are, what type of search intent those keywords have with the users. Right, because you want to have a high density of or, yes, a high density of commercial and transactional keywords to rank. Okay, because if you have a lot of informational, if you haven't reverse engineered how to get somebody from an informational state to a commercial, to a transactional state, you got a lot of work right. But if your website is like most, where it's more of a brochure than it is an actual nurturing engine, then you want to get them at the commercial and transactional intent, so there's not as much nurturing, right, right? So that is the next level stuff.

Speaker 2: 27:00

We do have a platform called dizio that actually tracks all that stuff and shows you which pages and all the other stuff that goes along with it. If you're interested in that, I'm sure we can put a link to diziobiz at D I Z Y O. Yep or no, d d-z geez, I didn't even say it. D-y-z-i-o dot biz, geez, louise, I cannot talk today, so d-y-z-i-o dot biz, check that out. There's a diy. We also have a cohort that we walk through, or walk all everybody through that as well. Um, and then, um, I would say that if you can just start with those three and just focus on getting the traffic, getting the rankings, getting the traffic and getting the conversions and you just did those three right there you're going to be in really good shape anywhere between six and 12 months from now.

Speaker 1: 27:47

That's fantastic. I think you know great information. Everyone should check out those resources for sure. We're always here to help. And yeah, any final thoughts, Buzz.

Speaker 2: 28:00

Start now. So many people talk about. Well, I'm thinking about doing SEO right, and the thing is, if there's nothing else you learned today is that SEO is a long game, and I think I've thrown out some very big number of months that some people will have to go through. Right, because if your competition for the keywords that you're looking to compete with and you haven't done any SEO, guess what? You have a lot of catching up to do to your competition.

Speaker 2: 28:25

That doesn't happen overnight, okay, conversely, even if you have a small market share that you're trying to get on a very niche service, google has to recognize you as an authority now, so it's not just enough to rank for it Now, yes, you can rank quickly for certain keywords, but very few keywords and I mean a minute amount of keywords that are out there that have any actual commercial value, have low competition, and so, with the competition comes time, because you're going to have to beat them out, right. And so, therefore, I say, if you're not already doing something in SEO, even if it's just putting blogs on your website right now and not worrying about optimizing them for SEO, just creating content and getting it on your website, start doing that today, yesterday, last week. Right is never too early to just start getting it out there, because you can always optimize later.