SEO is so important! While you may have heard the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you may be unclear on how it can help you. We are going to share the main principles of SEO and how it helps businesses grow leaps and bounds.
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Sarah: Good morning! Give me an S.
Glyna: S!
Sarah: Give me an E.
Glyna: E!
Sarah: Give me an O.
Glyna: O!
Sarah: What’s that spell?
Glyna: SEO! Okay. What just happened?
Sarah: We’re feeling like cheerleaders this morning.
Glyna: We are very cheery for eight o’clock in the morning, I’ll tell you that!
Sarah: We are very cheerful about SEO!
Glyna: That is true! That is true! That’s something that I can definitely get cheery about. Well, welcome to Marketing Mix, everybody. Every week we do different segments highlighting all different kinds of digital marketing topics. We do some interviews, tips, trends, Q&A. You just never know what we’re going to come up with.
Sarah: That is right. Okay. Let me get all of our stuff up. We’re ready to go. We are pumped up. But first, let me show you where you can subscribe to follow us for all of our great videos. As always we’re on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast, Marketing and a Mic.
Glyna: Yes. All right. I’m excited!
Sarah: Yes! Yes! So get to it. Now I know that you are especially excited about this segment. So I want to ask you, what is your favorite piece of our digital marketing services?
Glyna: I talked right when the guy made the noise. Put it back on there. The best part of it, and I’m blabbing over here.
Sarah: I know. We’re going to be crying, laughing and all of our makeup is going.
Glyna: I know. I am crying because I was laughing so hard. Let’s get a grip.
Sarah: Let’s get a grip. Okay. Let’s start right from the top. What is SEO?
Glyna: Right. That’s a very broad question, but basically a complete recipe of strategies, actions, and best practices, all of which improve your website’s position in the search engines. So SEO stands for search engine optimization.
Sarah: Yes. And the best practices is key, right? I mean, there’s a lot of right things and criteria that you have to do.
Glyna: Well, yeah, there is. And I’m going to turn this down a little bit because it looks like I’m echoing some. But yes, there are. We’ve been doing this a long time and there’s a big difference in somebody that just started and they think they know what they’re doing to having a firm like ours that’s been studying SEO for 10 years-
Sarah: Right.
Glyna: … keeping up with the trends and the leading edges of SEO.
Sarah: Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So I wanted to ask you now, why is it one of your favorite things?
Glyna: Well, this is really easy for me to talk about because it’s my favorite thing because we have seen businesses that have just opened up go from zero to basically million-dollar businesses because of SEO. My favorite thing is to start off with, and it doesn’t have to be a new business but a new business that’s just starting to use SEO, and then get them so profitable that that just completely changes their business. It’s just amazing and it’s just so fun. We had a couple of instances. We’ve worked with a company here recently who they were able to buy two more trucks and a large part of it was because of what we’ve done with SEO. I’ve seen a brand new roofing business from opening their doors that go from zero to multimillion-dollar company. So, to be a part of something like that is amazing and it makes you feel so good. And that’s why I do marketing is to help businesses.
Sarah: Yeah. And that’s a great, great story because we actually just found that out yesterday, which was so wonderful. This company that we started working with not too long ago and now they’re having to order more trucks because they’ve got more customers and that’s exactly the point. So, I wanted to ask you how SEO works, but I would say we would say a broad statement would be, if you want customers to find your business online, then you need SEO. And that’s the basics of that.
Glyna: Yeah. And there’s so much involved. When we first started 10 years ago, it was so easy to do SEO. I mean, it wouldn’t take us any time at all to get people ranking and all of that, but it’s changed so much that it would be impossible for me to explain in 30 minutes how it works.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, the rules are constantly changing and that’s a lot. From the direction of the search engines, they will change the rules. So you have to stay current on that and all the best practices and know what to do. So that leads me to my next question which is, how does SEO work? And that’s a loaded question, so good luck answering.
Glyna: How does SEO work? Well, basically everybody has their phone, right? You have your phone. Everybody’s carrying their phone around and they use it for everything to search for products and services that they want to buy. So if you have a company that’s doing SEO correctly, they will make sure that your business shows up when people are looking for what you do on the internet. That’s about the easiest way that I can explain it.
Sarah: So, do search engines have a way of determining which sites rank higher based on that specific criteria? Is that how it is? That search engine, if you meet all that criteria, then they almost in a way will reward you.
Glyna: Yes. Yeah.
Sarah: And so it’s up to us to know what that criteria is and then when we do that, that helps our customers to rank higher. And obviously you want to rank higher because us as customers, when we’re online and we’re searching for something, we’re going to go for the ones that meet what we’re looking for and it almost builds a credibility, right? If you see those ones that are those businesses that are continually showing up.
Glyna: Yeah.
Sarah: It builds that credibility of, “Okay, this company is one of the first or just ranks a lot higher and keeps showing up continually.” In my mind, it builds credibility.
Glyna: It does. And there’s a trust factor there because it’s like that first impression. If I’m looking for a plumber and I search for plumber and I see the top few plumbers, to me they must be doing something right. They care about their business enough to make sure that they’re showing up when people are searching. So I mean, they’re investing in their business and to me that means a lot, especially as a business owner, to say, that’s somebody that I feel a little bit more confident about calling.
Sarah: Right. Yeah, absolutely. So let me ask you this. Why would you say SEO is so important for business? I think we scratched the surface, but I mean, it truly is from that credibility factor.
Glyna: Yeah. The credibility and I mean, you can build a beautiful website. You can have all those things going on, but if nobody can find it, that’s what SEO does. It helps people find you, your company, your beautiful website, so that they can see what you have to offer.
Sarah: Right.
Glyna: And see why you compare to other businesses. There’s a lot of business out there. You wouldn’t believe the number of searches just for, let’s say, heating and air companies a month. I mean, there’s thousands of searches a month. And if you’re not doing SEO correctly, you’re not going to get a chance at any of that business.
Sarah: Right.
Glyna: Because the companies that are doing SEO correctly and showing up in the search engine results are going to be the ones that are getting the business.
Sarah: Right. And that’s maybe sometimes a misconception is it’s not just magic. It’s not just my website’s up and therefore I’m online and everybody’s going to find me. Well, no, you’re competing against billions of content and businesses and other things that are all out there. And the search engines are really just going to give that consumer or whoever that customer that’s looking for something, the best match. And it’s not just magic of like, “Well, I’m a heating and air company so naturally I’ll pop up because they’re searching for that.” No. It’s a lot more than that.
Glyna: Yeah. There’s a misconception, and that happens a lot when we build websites for people. And it makes sense because it’s usually their first thing that they do on the internet is build a website. But they automatically think just because we build them a website, that people are going to be able to find them, and that’s not true. There’s this piece of the pie that’s missing and it’s SEO, which is very important.
Sarah: Right. So how fast can you see results, would you say? This is again, it’s a really good question because it’s not like a light switch. Turn it on.
Glyna: It isn’t. Not if you do it correctly, okay?
Sarah: Right.
Glyna: There are people out there doing what we would call black hat SEO and doing things incorrectly that could get you results fairly quickly, but it will go away as soon as the search engines figure out that they’re doing stuff that’s not quite the right way of doing things, especially as far as Google is concerned.
Sarah: Yeah. People underestimate how smart those search engines are. If you’re not doing things ethically, they’ll find you.
Glyna: You can’t gain the system. Not anymore. You used to be able to gain the system a little bit easier, but I would say we’ve seen people get calls in from our SEO month one, but that’s not usually what we set up for expectations. Normally, if you can stick with it to month three, stuff is going to start clicking and the cool thing about SEO is the longer you do it, the more results you get.
Sarah: Okay. So the longer you do it, it will build results. So that’s what leads me to this question, which is why is SEO like building equity?
Glyna: Well, think of a home. When you first buy your home, you paid all this money and it’s worth what you paid for, but it’s not really building equity. So the longer you have it and you make your payments on time and all that good stuff, you’re building equity in that home. It’s the same thing with SEO for your business. At the beginning, there’s a lot of work to be done, but the more you do it, the longer you do it, the more correctly that is being done, it’s building equity in your business and it’s going to make you money.
Sarah: Okay. So it’s three months. We would say, we usually give our customers, say, about three months until you’ll start gaining traction, so to speak.
Glyna: Yeah.
Sarah: Okay. And then the longer you run, then you’re going to get more promising results. So, okay, that makes-
Glyna: Well, I would say if the company knows what they’re doing. I will tell you a quick little story, and this is just to give you a-
Sarah: I love stories.
Glyna: You know me. I’ve got 10 years’ worth of them.
Sarah: You’ve got a lot of stories.
Glyna: I’m going to tell this story but first I want to say hi to Gayle. She’s watching. And say hi to Lavonne and Lavonne, wow, that’s a loaded question. Oh. She wants to know, “How can I get a company’s name to pop up first in the Google search?” Well, no one should be promising that they can get you first on a Google search. Our bottom line is we do a lot of things on the internet, not just Google. We put you in every search engine, every directory that’s possible known to man. And all of the things that we do in our recipe will get you more phone calls. That’s what we’re all about. We don’t worry so much about ranking anymore because you can be ranking number one right now, look this afternoon or this evening, and then you’ve fallen off. So it just moves so much. So we, really, our motto is more calls, more business, and that’s what we concentrate on. So the story I was going to tell is that we recently came upon a company that called us because they wanted to compare what they were paying for to what we do with our services. They liked what they heard so they started doing business with us and they found out that they had been paying a company to do SEO for over a year and when we ran a scan, they were only, I think it was 37%, effective on the internet. And they wondered why they weren’t getting any calls. I mean, I think they’d gotten four calls in a month. Something like that. It was just crazy. And after we started working with them for a little while, we get them up to 90-some percent saturation on the internet or visibility on the internet. And we ended up turning that into, I believe it was 94 calls. I can’t remember exactly, but I mean, that’s a huge difference. Anyway.
Sarah: It shows two things. One, the power of SEO and two, how not all other agencies know what they’re doing and can promise something and not deliver, and that’s very key. So that’s why we say that, how do you know that you’re getting results, which we’ll get into that in a minute, but what would you look for? But how do you know it’s working? How do you know it’s working? You should be getting more calls.
Glyna: Yes.
Sarah: You should be getting more calls. You should be getting more-
Glyna: Bottom line. What do we say? We can’t take clicks to the bank.
Sarah: You can’t take clicks to the bank.
Glyna: People will claim, “Well, we got you so many clicks. We got you so many views. We got you all this.” Guess what? You can take money to the bank, which is what we’re going to bring you.
Sarah: Right.
Glyna: Because we bring more calls, which equals more business. Anyway. Shameless plug.
Sarah: Exactly. Well, okay. Can any business use SEO?
Glyna: Yes. Every business can use some aspect of SEO. Everyone can optimize their website. Everyone can put their company out on the internet and all the search engines, all of those things. Now, as far as making money in SEO, or we’ll get into making a profit center here in just a minute, but it seems to work better, we found, for home service businesses. Not saying that medical businesses and all of that, it won’t work, but it works really well for a company who has a higher threshold as far as how much their services cost, if that makes sense. So every business should be doing something with SEO, just to make sure you have your best shot at showing up on the internet and the search engines, but it does work better for some types of industries than other.
Sarah: That makes sense.
Glyna: And it’s a case by case basis. As you said yesterday, it’s like we want to concentrate on one, we may want to concentrate on one type of industry, but we have all kinds of customers. We’re using it for a lot of different industries.
Sarah: Yes. And because there’s so many pieces to SEO, it should be used in one way or another, because there’s just so much to it so anybody can really benefit from it. Okay. So I heard that you tell people that you create your own profit center with SEO. So what do you mean by that? How does SEO create a profit center?
Glyna: This is a really, really cool thing about it and if I can get this drilled in people’s heads and make them understand this, it’s so true. It can make your business money and turn into a profit center, making you profits for your business. Basically with SEO, when we start out, our first goal is to pay for ourselves. I mean, it can get expensive to do SEO if you’re doing it correctly, but if we can’t pay for ourselves then we shouldn’t be doing SEO for you. The second thing is let’s keep on doing SEO and start making you money. And that’s what I mean by creating a profit center. If it’s done correctly, it should be your biggest moneymaker for your business. SEO or your SEO company should be making you more money than anything else.
Sarah: Correct. Yes. So now I want to ask you this. Could I just do SEO myself? Could I just go to the university of Google and find out about SEO and then just say, “Oh, I’m an SEO expert and I can do this now?”
Glyna: Well, you could. You could, if you don’t have anything else to do. I compare it to getting a doctorate. You say, “Can I go to university of Google?” Compare it to getting a doctorate in something versus I’m going to take a quick online course. Sure, you could learn it, but golly, as soon as you learn it, it changes. So it’s really hard to keep up and be effective day-to-day in SEO. So you could do it yourself.
Sarah: It’s a full time job.
Glyna: Yeah. That’s exactly right.
Sarah: So, okay. Are there any things that I can do myself, though, just to help with my internet presence?
Glyna: Yeah. I think I mentioned a little bit before. You definitely need a good website platform. We’re WordPress people. We love WordPress just because it gives you the best opportunity to optimize your website for search engines. So I would definitely say that you want to have a good website. You definitely want to have a good social media marketing plan. You’ll need to be consistent. You need to be paying attention to your channels that you’re posting on and just make sure that you’re being effective there. And I was starting to think of one other thing.
Sarah: Probably reviews. I mean-
Glyna: Aah!
Sarah: Well, yeah. I mean, you got to saturate yourself, really.
Glyna: Yeah. The reviews are huge. There’s just so much as far as your internet presence goes, but reviews are golden, especially on Google. And you need to have a Google listing. Oh my gosh. I’m on a mission to tell everybody. Everybody used to say, “I need to be in the yellow pages.” That’s a long time ago probably, but put that to the side and-
Sarah: I’m like, “What’s the yellow pages, Glyna?”
Glyna: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you need to have a Google listing. If your business doesn’t have a Google listing, you really don’t exist on the internet.
Sarah: So what’s a Google listing, for those who don’t know?
Glyna: Yes. Well, you can Google Google My Business and it will walk you through setting it up. It’s called Google My Business listing. So basically when people are searching for your company, like if somebody put Fusion One Marketing in, our listing comes up and you can see all the information about our business and see our reviews, which is huge. I don’t know about you, but I don’t buy anything unless people have good reviews and I’m-
Sarah: Yeah, good reviews and current reviews.
Glyna: Ah. That’s a good thing. Yeah. That’s a whole ‘nother segment.
Sarah: Yes. Okay. So that would be one of the first places to start, would be Google My Business. Get your listing up.
Glyna: Yep.
Sarah: Okay. So how do I know if it’s working? That is the key question.
Glyna: Yeah. And we’ve already touched on it a little bit, but it does amaze me that people don’t know what they’re paying for. Let me tell you, if your phone is not ringing when someone is claiming that they’re doing SEO, if you don’t know if you’re getting more business, then it’s probably not working. I take the stats. We track everything just to make sure that we have all of that information for people. And I take our customers that information, but at the same time, numbers are just numbers. They need to know and feel, “Yeah, our phone is busy. It’s a lot busier.”
Sarah: Right. Exactly. People are calling them. That’s what we, we’ll say shameless plug, but we think it’s very important to track where all your marketing dollars are going and we do that and it holds us accountable and it’s also our way of showing exactly the results of all of our marketing efforts. So it’s huge. So what can we do to… Let’s do one more shameless plug about how great Fusion One is. I’ll do it all day long. I know Glyna. I have no shame. I’m telling you, every week we hear customers, our clients, call us and they’re like, “This is working. This is great. These are going on.” That is everything to us. I mean, it truly is. That’s what our goal is, is to make all of our clients look good, get business, make more money. And so-
Glyna: It’s exciting. I mean, it’s-
Sarah: It is so exciting.
Glyna: Yeah.
Sarah: Absolutely. So we’re going to wrap this up.
Glyna: Wow, is that everything?
Sarah: I hope everybody got a little bit more understanding about what SEO is and that we wanted to drive home the point of how important it is for your business.
Glyna: Yes, absolutely. And of course, I’ll be glad to talk to anybody about SEO. I could talk about SEO all day long just because I think it’s the key to most businesses. So hit us up and contact us and I’d be glad to have a chat with you just to see if it’s something that would help your business.
Sarah: Yes. Very good. And don’t forget on Friday, we’re returning for BizTalk at 8:00 AM with our special guest Kerri Bailey with Child’s Play Therapy Center. It’s going to be a great one. So thanks everyone for tuning in and we’ll catch you next time.
Glyna: Bye!
Sarah: Bye!