SEO Made Simple with the Alaska MEP

Live with Alaska MEP

Live Summary

Are you ready to Stop Being the Best Kept Secret and have Google work for you?

The Alaska MEP offers the SEO Building Blocks You Need To Get Started — And Keep Going! Are you frustrated with the lack of leads from your website? Does just the phrase “SEO” intimidate you? Does your marketing team lack the time and resources to learn, master, and implement SEO best practices? Have you started using some SEO tactics but aren’t sure how to know if they’re working? Have you lost trust in SEO agencies after being promised results with nothing to show for your investment? Join the Alaska MEP, eCommerce Evangelist for Manufacturers Curt Anderson - Founder of B2Btail, and SEO Expert Nicole Donnelly - Founder and CEO of DMG Digital as we discuss SEO made simple for Alaska's makers and manufacturers.

To learn more about how the Alaska MEP can assist your business, connect with us online: https://alaska-mep.com

Key Highlights

• The definition of a soulmate. 2:13

• What are the risks of using Google search? 5:23

• How important is it to understand the problem? 8:00

• How important are backlinks and time on website? 10:29

• What is AI and what does it mean? 18:05

• How to use AI as a research buddy. 20:02

• How to create a great customer experience. 22:05

• How to create a content calendar. 24:42

Transcription

Sami Jo Lewis 0:07

Thanks for joining us for our first live. My name is Samie Jo Lewis and I am the Client Services Manager for the Alaska Manufacturing Extension Partnership. And our mission is to help advance manufacturers in Alaska and I'm here with my dear friend and partner for Anderson. He is the eCommerce expert for the Alaska MEP. Thanks for being here. Curt

Curt Anderson 0:31

Sami jo man, I couldn't sleep last night. I'm so excited to get together. We're here today to talk about SEO strategies made simple for manufacturers and you and your team in the last year. Such amazing work, but let's just dive right in. I want to give a big intro to my partner, boy just this is just so excited. Nicole Donnelly from DMG Digital SEO expert, she's coming to us right outside of our state our nation's capital. Nicole, how are you?

Nicole Donnelly 1:01

What is happening? Hi, I am so excited to be here on the inaugural Alaska MEP show. This is so exciting think I'm so thank you for letting me be your first gas. This is amazing and wonderful. I'm doing great. It's a beautiful spring day in Virginia. Little rainy but we've got beautiful green trees. I am so excited to talk all about SEO. Let's do this. This is awesome. What's going on?

Sami Jo Lewis 1:29

Thanks so much, Nicole. Yeah, we're so excited to have you and talk about SEO made simple. So dive right in the first question. We wanted to know how does manufacturer begin their SEO journey?

Speaker 3 1:40

Great question. Okay. And this answer may surprise people right when you think SEO, people probably think of this acronym is really crazy. Like what is SEO mean? What is what does it stand for? I think people have this impression that it's a super technical, crazy, weird stuff that happens like behind the scenes, you know, and that is part of it. But the very first step to successful SEO is understanding who your soulmate is. Okay? What is a soulmate you know, soulmate is that person that just, you just connect with so well they get you, you get them and as Curt likes to say you have this dream collision, and you're just both like in it to win it and you're both you both of you have kind of like you know, so if you're a business owner, your soulmate is that person is just dying to have what it is that you offer. They have this terrible problem, and they need a solution and they're just searching relentlessly trying to find someone who can help them solve it. That is your soulmate, right? So in my case, I own a content marketing agency. We work specifically and exclusively with manufacturers. And so our soulmate is that solo marketer at the manufacturing company who's wearing a lot of hats, they're stressed, they're overwhelmed. They don't have time to do this content marketing thing, and they just want someone to take it off of their plate. They don't have to worry about it. solve that pain for them. So that's where we come in. Our company comes in and we say, hey, you know what, you don't have to worry about this. We're gonna take care of it for you. No pain, no gain. We just been for an hour. We're gonna give you your content for a month. So that is who our soulmate is. That's who we speak to. And when they start working with us, it was like Oh, I'm so happy. Don't worry about this anymore. You're saving my life. So that is so as businesses, that's the first thing you need to think about before you even start going into the technical aspects of SEO is knowing who your soulmate is. And you know you can start to understand that by putting together a buyer's persona. And there's several ways that you can craft that but that together, you know, we really recommend that you actually talk to your customers, you know, so if you're a small business, I'm sure you have a handful of customers that you can talk to and really take the time to reach out to them in a non sales way. Right? So not a sales call. We're really just trying to understand their pains or you know, their problems and having a conversation with them and really trying to dive deep and figure out who it is that they are. What do they love to do? You know what keeps them up at night? You know, what makes them wake up early in the morning. You know, what's what's what are their problems, pain points, all of that. So that is the very first step is knowing who your buyer is your soulmate.

Curt Anderson 4:41

Nicole, that's fantastic. So again, just kind of recap the ideal buyer persona. And so for many manufacturers that somebody in purchasing, it might be an engineer. So you know, so for folks listening, you know, like just really think about like who you resonate with you hit you hit those homeruns with the cold looks alright, so step one, know your ideal buyer know that soulmate. Number two boy there, you know, like, where do we start like keywords right? We need to understand like, were those keywords now you have just a wonderful catchphrase that you teach your clients when you do webinars workshops, it's called RIKs Can you please share with why why is your keyword strategy so important? And what are risks?

Nicole Donnelly 5:25

Yeah, yes, RIKs, it's not my uncle. It's not my brother's name. This is ridiculously important keywords. Okay. So I'm sure everyone out there has used Google Search before. I mean, I can't think of one person even my girl my eight year old daughter, that's the phrase, let's search it up until she says, let's search it up. Let's go to Google. So let's search it up. Let's do a search for this. Right everybody knows Google right? So what when we think ridiculously important keywords what we mean is what are those phrases that your soulmate is going to type into search when they want to search something? What is it that they are going to type? Right? So, you know, be thinking about what those key phrases are. You know, so for example, in my for my company, one of the key phrases that my soulmate may be typing is SEO for manufacturers, or content marketing for manufacturers. You know, so that was with these two examples in my specific industry, you know, but it's obviously it's different. So you have to think about who your soulmate is. We have some other clients for example, that sell dust collection. equipment. So their soulmates are maintenance managers, right? They're selling directly to the people who are managing the plant. And so those maintenance managers who are looking to, you know, fill up you know, find that filter bags and parts for their dust collection system. They're going to type in filter socks for my dust collector, right? So that would be one of the core risks. Ridiculously important keywords have three, you want to be looking at three main things you want to make sure that the keyword that you're searching gets a lot of decent amount of traffic doesn't need to be massive, but a decent amount of traffic. You also want to make sure that it's not a competitive keyword. That's kind of magic. And there are tools that you can use that will help you identify those two things so you can figure those out. The biggest one we like to recommend is free, which is current Anderson's favorite word on the planet. Google Keyword Planner. So anybody has access to the keyword planner, you can go there, and you can get an analysis and you can type in any keyword that you think is important, and it'll tell you what are the related keywords that are similar to this. How much traffic are these other keywords getting? And how competitive are they meaning how many other people are already ranking for this keyword or trying to rank for this keyword. So the sweet spot is to find one that has a decent amount of volume. And that's also fairly low, not super competitive. I don't know what do you think Kurt? Well,

Curt Anderson 8:03

I would love for you to chime in a little bit. You know, we have found that many manufacturers who don't speak a certain language or lingo we're internally we know this word inside and out and we know this process or like drink, breathe and sleep. This particular keyword. However, that soulmate doesn't know that keyword they know the problem. Can you walk us through, like how important it is for manufacturers to understand the problem as opposed to the solution?

Nicole Donnelly 8:30

And that's a great question. I think a lot of times in your business, you're so close to your product. You're so close to what it is that you offer, that you really aren't really thinking about it from the buyer from the end users perspective, right. So in the example I just mentioned, we have you know, if you're working with me, and I'm a dust collection company and I sell filter bags, that's how I know my product. I know it as a filter back, right that's that's that's how we speak about it. That's the jargon that we use this maintenance manager. He doesn't want to he sees this filter. He doesn't think of it as a filter bag. It looks like a big, huge long sock to him. So he's gonna go to Google and he's going to search filter socks, right because that's what he's about. So you want to try to put yourself in the mind of your customer and ways you can do this is talk to your sales team and ask them when they call in. What are they asking for? What words are they using? What are they looking for? And you can you can use the information from your sales team to help you figure out what they are searching for on the web. But the other thing for you mentioned that's really important is just you're really trying to identify what is the problem that they're having, and sometimes they're not looking for a product. They're they're typing in a problem, you know, so in the case of this dust collector, right, maybe the dust collector is not working and they're getting a lot of dust in the plant. So they're not going to search, you know, filter bags or filter socks, they may be searching, you know, I'm having dust over all over my planet. How do I get rid of this dust? So you got to be thinking about what are the problems that they're having. And those can be really awesome works for you because you can really identify and step in search for those problems, then you're really going to be able to help them very early in that process of trying to understand the solution.

Curt Anderson 10:22

Great answer. I love that. See me What do you think next? What's the next step or the next tactic that we want to tackle? Your were you thinking there?

Sami Jo Lewis 10:31

No, thank you so much for explaining what RIKs are those ridiculously important keywords? What other factors need to be considered when you're developing your SEO strategy? Can you speak to a little bit on backlinks and time on website and

Nicole Donnelly 10:47

how important that is? Yeah, yes, that is such a great question. So Google has this magic algorithm. Okay. We don't know what this algorithm is made of. We have some ideas, but it's top secret. Google's not going to share it because that's their proprietary algorithm. Okay. Now, algorithm is a big word. Basically, that means is this is a formula that we will use to decide which pages are going to rank at the top of search, and are going to be, you know, really at the top of the page and as a business owner, you want to know what those ranking factors are. You want to know, at least have an idea of what Google considers to be important on your page, so that you can make Google happy. Okay, if you make Google happy, then you're going to rank higher, but most importantly, you want to make your customers happy. And that's what Google's algorithm is all about. They're all about how can we create the best experience for the user? So if you're making Google happy, you're making the visitor happy, right? So there's several factors that you need to be thinking about on your webpages that are going to help make that Google algorithm sing and give your you know, make it easier for you to rank higher. And one of those things that you want to be thinking about is the speed of your site. That is so huge today is how fast is your site loading? You may think what what does that have to do with anything but it all comes down to visitor experience, right? If your site is taking a long time to load, people are gonna bounce people don't want to wait around for that anymore. So you want to be as a as a business making sure that your your your load time is really lightning fast. And there's tools that you can access with free tools, you can measure that. You want to make sure your website is mobile friendly. You know, everyone's on their phone these days. You know, looking looking things up. So is your site set up to be mobile friendly and have a really nice experience because that can be very different on desktop and on mobile. So those are two things that you want to be thinking about. And then you know, some of the other things that we talked about, we talked about good each, right so what is what the heck does that mean? So that traditionally there's been three core criteria that we'll use it for ranking, and that's e a t, expertise, authority and trust, expertise, authority and trust. Those are the most important ranking criteria. Okay. expertise is basically Google's assessing your site to see who is this person, are they really an expert? Most what certifications do they have? What's their background? You know, so if there's crawling a page, they want to see what is the expertise? Is this something that's coming from someone who really knows what they're talking about? The second is authority. And this is has to do with your domain authority. And domain authority is just kind of like a ranking criteria that you measure how authoritative your site is, and you can influence this by getting what's called backlinks. Okay? So anytime you have another authoritative website, linking to your site, so they have a lovely, beautiful URL on their site that links back to your website. Google sees that as authority authority coming to your site, right? So the more things that you could get to your website, the more authoritative Google sees your site, but those backlinks be coming from authoritative sites, right? So for example, a backlink that's coming from a really well known and reputable website like LinkedIn, or Microsoft, or a really well known company that has a really strong reputation. You get a backlink from a company like that. That's huge. That's going to increase your reputation as an authoritative site. Right. Other examples would be like if you're getting a backlink from a university, do same thing. So authority has to do with how many backlinks you're getting, and what is the quality of those backlinks. And Google looks at that to measure and see how portait of your site is. And the last key is trust. How well can I trust this or the last letter of his trust? How well how trust in the site, and things that Google looks at here. So foolproof? Do you have reviews on your site from users who use your product? You know, do you have case studies, those kinds of things Google assesses to see is this a site that really trusted so those are the traditional three, three ranking factors, but there's a new era block, so it's no longer EA T. It's now a t so it just keeps you know, they just keep upping the ante here on the block is is extremely relevant today and it has to do it to experience E for experience. So Google not only wants to know is are you an expert? Are you an authority? Can I trust you? But have you what is your experience? Have you actually done something that helps solve this problem on this related topic that I'm searching for? Right? So here, they don't want to just know that you went to school to be a mechanic, they want to hear your stories about what actually fix, you know, cars, you know, so but you know, so that I would be the last person that you that's looking for not only your education, your expertise, but show me how you did it. And that's going to become even more and more important in the years to come because of AI and we'll talk about that a little bit more. But AI is is is changing the landscape of SEO and marketing as we know it and a lot of ways and so being able to show your experience on your website is going to be a really big and important differentiator for you when it comes to ranking for SEO. So, yes,

Curt Anderson 16:39

well, that's perfect. And so for manufacturers out there, you know, like this baffling thing, you know, so like your local chamber of commerce, any trade associations that you belong to do the Alaska

Nicole Donnelly 16:50

MEP,

Curt Anderson 16:52

any opportunity that you get in the coal mentioned all those social media platforms, YouTube, LinkedIn, if you're posting anywhere else on Twitter, or what have you, you can get those links. What is it? It's just like, hey, we're going to share some information. We're sharing a video or sharing a blog post. Those are great opportunities for quality links coming back to your site. See me Joe, you're on fire with these wonderful questions. What do you have next for us?

Sami Jo Lewis 17:17

So absolutely. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much. I think I learned a lot I was unaware that they added another acronym with with eat. So thank you so much for diving into that and explaining that and you mentioned AI, and the relevance so that has today and I would just love to dive deeper. To learn more about how she's an SEO strategy today.

Nicole Donnelly 17:37

Absolutely great question. So if you've been under a rock, you know that there's AI, completely disrupting every industry. So every industry is being affected by the incredible advances that are happening now with AI. And one of the things that's impacting marketing and SEO specifically, is generative AI, which is text. artifice, right. What is what does that mean? Well, basically, there's these open source models, language models, that are basically fed on all of the data that's out there on the internet. And they've been trained to be able to generate new text based on any question that you type into the chat bot. For example, usually you've gone to a search engine and you'll type something into the search bar and you'll get a list of links that you can go and research with new church etc. All you have to do is just go to their chatbot similar to what you would see on any website, and you can ask it a question and pull up an answer for you. That's text based. Just like a synopsis answer, right? That what we what business owners with AI is how can you leverage it? But you also want to be really careful because anything that's degraded from your AI, by design derivative, it's not original. It's not authentic. It's basically a combination of everything that's already been published created on the web, right? So I think it can be really tempting for small business owners to think Man, I could just go into AI and I need to create, you know, a blog post about, you know, handrails, or I need to create a blog post about my granola that I manufacture. I can just go to the Chatbot and I can just say, write a blog post all about the benefit of, you know, handmade handrails, and it will create a blog post for you. But that utterly soulless. Okay, it's to have you're not going to include anything that's authentic about the way that you uniquely make, right. And so it can be really tempting for business owners to think I could just take the shortcut and create content on my website by just going to this AI chat bot. And the thing is that that is not going to be an authentic, authentic representation of your brand. And on top of that Google is able to identify and will the future particularly be able to flag this kind of content is to being from AI. And so you want to make sure it's original, but AI can be used for helpful things. So we like to use AI for example, as a research money. So if you want to learn about a specific topic, or if you want to understand something, for example, about your customers, maybe some of the demographics, research, any sort of topic, you can go to the Chatbot and in seconds, you'll be able to learn and understand about something that used to be used to maybe you have to sort through pages of search results right so it's a great for a recent being a research for repurposing something you've already created. So like for example, this lovely event we're doing has gonna have a transcript at the end. tech space transcript and you can take that transcript and repurpose it and turn it into some, some that kind of a thing, something that already exists. So it's great for taking something that already exists and repurposing it or using it as a research buddy. But if you're trying to create anything original we highly, highly recommend that you steer clear of trying to take that route sector reflect on you and your authentic brand voice. And that is what's going to make you stand out to your soulmates is what makes you uniquely you and what your unique point of view is on the problem that you solve for them.

Sami Jo Lewis 21:37

Every day you pointing that out because I definitely can see the temptations of wanting to go and really utilize that super heavily and so yeah, thank you so much for acknowledging that and pointing that out because I can see where it can definitely be poses on authentic when people are gonna be researching your website and trying to learn more about you.

Nicole Donnelly 21:55

Thank you. You don't want your brand to be soulless. Who wants to add gotta show that personality off.

Curt Anderson 22:05

People. This has been just so helpful, so informational, so educational, if you could take us home we have one last question for you before we wrap up. You have a really powerful system that you do with your manufacturers because for gym membership, they have to show up on a regular basis. Sami Jo, I know you did the gym on a regular basis before you hit the gym on a regular basis which we didn't have to but we all we all we're all working out on a regular basis. That's what it is. Right? It's like getting that treadmill membership. But you know, for that manufacturer out there, it's like, Man, I just I don't know what to do. I'm not gonna sit here. I didn't go to journalism school. I'm not going to take off blogs. What system do you have worked so well for airlines?

Nicole Donnelly 22:51

Yes. SEO is really all about as we've talked about, it's not rocket science. It's really all about is helping your customers. knowing who your soulmate is and figuring out I can help them showing up for them digitally answering your questions easily. They come to your website, they get answered right away. That's all great SEO is just creating a great customer experience and just answering those problems. And so what you need to be thinking about is how to create content for your for your customers. On a regular mod going basis that answers their problems, so that they come to your site as a trusted place to help them and when they're ready and able to reach out and want to buy from you they will because you have built that relationship with trust over time, right. So what are processes and we learn this through trial and error we used to try to create blog posts for our clients by going directly to their subject matter experts. Were a lot of engineers very busy, very, very busy people. The last thing they want to do is write a blog post Okay, and if you are running a small business, I am the last thing you want to do is sit down and write a blog post and you got 50 fire but you got to put out nobody wants to write a blog post. That's why AI is so tempting for people. So what we've what we developed through this painful process of trying to attract SMEs just like not giving us a time of day we're like, okay, they're not gonna write this for us. We're gonna have to hold their hand a little bit. And basically what you do is you interview your subject matter experts on the topic. So, you want to identify first and foremost, what are the top questions that your soulmates are having? List them out, create a strategy, your first step, create a list of all those tough questions. This is the easiest place to start. And if you don't know ask yourself, what are you hearing from your customers over and over and over again? Just think if your salespeople are answering the same question 20 times in a day, how much easier and faster and more efficient is your business going to be? If you can create a piece of content on your website? The answer is that question that is scaling your sales team. Now they don't have to answer that question 50 times they can focus on more important high level tasks. First Step Create your content calendar. And that content calendar is a list of all of those questions to answer. Next step, figure out for each question who's the best person on your team to answer that question, okay. And all you got to do is schedule 30 minutes with that you have a standing meeting with them and they're super busy, literally make it part of your standing meeting. Say okay, and our meeting today I'm just gonna ask you some questions on this topic. And you just on the Zoom recording, record them talking, you ask them five questions about the topic, and if their subject matter expert they don't even think about it. They're just gonna be able to answer all those questions right there on the spot and report it use what's called otter AI, love AI. It's a transcription tool that does live transcription. And you can turn that on at the beginning of the interview and it will transcribe in real time what they're saying and honor is free, another free tool that you can use. So by combining that now you have a beautiful transcript straight from the mouth of your subject matter expert, this beautiful video recording that you can use and that is the foundation of your content into 30 minutes. And now you've got to do is repurpose that content. So you can literally take that transcript and turn it into multiple blog posts or brought ending on how much content you get. And then you can use your video content. If you have the resources. You can clip it out to show to shorts. So and then it just takes a half an hour and all you're doing is repurposing that content, turning into blocks, turning it into video and turning it in also into little small little social media clips. And it's all sourced from that one piece of long form content from that one interview. So the way we like to say this is you get a month's worth of content in one hour. And so you just have to commit one hour a month, you know, 30 minutes to an hour and you get a bunch of other content. And now you're building that content engine that is serving your customers. So every month, you're putting out new fresh content, you're, you know, reminding of it, reminding them of it over and over again, when they go to social media. They're gonna see that message from you over and over again week after week. So that they remember you they come to your site, you build that trust with them, because that's what we're doing. We're trying to build trust with your customers and nothing builds trust better than educating them, helping them informing them on a problem that you can help them solve in a non salesy way.

Sami Jo Lewis 27:48

Wonderful, no, that's amazing. I know I'm sold over here. You know, it sounds awfully familiar. That's something that we might be and the SEO for Alaska. I'm excited to be able to talk with you today Nicole and take all your expertise and hopefully, our listeners out there are also going to be interested in SEO and building who to reach out to you. So I know I'm really appreciative. I'm gonna be taking all of these tools utilize them for the last game as well.

Nicole Donnelly 28:19

Yeah, and I think, you know, the Alaskan MVP is doing such great work supporting, you know, your manufacturers. So if you need help with SEO, if you really just want to be able to get yourself out there more, and learn how you can mark yourself please reach out to the last game up they can help position you for success. So I'm honored and excited to be your guest. Thank you for having me on. What a fun time. It's an email on SEO and I get to like talk bad about AI. Anyway, this has been great. Thank you Sammy job. So happy to be your first guest and I wish you very much success as you go on this livestream journey. You are a natural. You are such a natural this you're just a wonderful host so articulate so voice. It's gonna be great. It's a great, great day for you so awesome.

Sami Jo Lewis 29:10

Thank you so much, Nicole. I love having you as our first live. Please continue to come back. Check us out. We'll be doing live bi weekly on Thursdays at noon. And thank you so much for Kurt for partnering with me on this and we learned so much so thanks so much.

Nicole Donnelly 29:24

Thank you. Thanks, guys.