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Jacob Kettner of First Rank SEO talks to Sean about what is working for small biz online in 2023.

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Sean Corbett:
Hello, everybody. Sean Corbett here again, Websites.ca marketing. We have most of our audience’s favorite topic today, SEO, and we’re joined by a repeated guest for us, Jacob Kettner. And Jacob, I understand that you’re putting together a course for business owners and maybe even sort of marketers working within the business, how to do some comprehensive SEO. Is that right?

Jacob Kettner:
Yeah. That’s right, Sean. I think it’s something that we’ve seen so much of as SEO has become more popular is that maybe when I got started with SEO a decade ago, it was a fairly low competition space and it was fairly easy to rank for things. And now being more competitive in some of the major areas, sometimes that sticker price to work with an agency to play the SEO game is prohibitively expensive for some newer, smaller businesses. So I really want to help open up, kind of pull back the veil on SEO. I don’t think it needs to be like this secret society type industry. And help internal marketing people, business owners, really whoever wants to learn, learn best practices and how they can benefit from SEO internally.

Sean Corbett:
Perfect. So, yeah. So everybody listening, if you’re ready to do better on Google, then this is going to be the podcast episode for you. So I’ll jump right into it, Jacob. I was looking over some of the pre-course landing page before we got on this recording, and I found a really interesting line that jumped out to me. So the line was, “The majority of SEO is about content structure and digital PR.” Could you just expand a little bit on that statement for our audience?

Jacob Kettner:
Yeah, for sure. So the concept of SEO is very simple. Google wants to display the best results that give their users the best answers that they’re looking for at the top so that people continue to use Google and get results they’re looking for and click on their ads and make them money. So our job is really just to understand what factors Google’s looking at to assess quality or relevance. And it mainly falls into two buckets, really. I guess three buckets. But the content comes down to relevancy and how well the content on the page answers the query that somebody’s typed in. And not just the query, but also what their next query might be.
For example, if you’re searching for real estate prices in Vancouver, maybe the next thing you’re going to search is schools in Vancouver or weather in Vancouver, and so getting all of the information that somebody might need onto a page.
And then the authority side of things, it’s what we talk about as off-page SEO. So when I said digital PR, how do we get other websites or properties online to mention or reference or link back to our content? And the more sites and the more relevant those sites are and the higher quality they are that are referencing and linking back to our site, the more credibility we get in Google’s eyes. So to boil down over 200 ranking factors that Google looks at, it basically comes down to content quality and digital PR.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. I think people hear the words Google ranking factor, they start picturing maybe tech wizardry and programming and all this kind of stuff. But obviously what you’re saying is it’s a lot more psychology, manually sitting down, actually picturing what the customer or potential customer is looking for, and then where I want to go next. And that’s why I think it’s actually, for me, in many ways, doing SEO in-house, under the guidance, of course, of someone like yourself, can be even more beneficial than having an agency. Because the agency has to then go and get in the brain of the business owner, who has to go and get in the brain of their ideal customers. So it’s one step removed, right? It’s kind of hard for an agency. That first stage is digging into that, not doing technical programming wizardry type stuff.

Jacob Kettner:
Right. And I mean, there is a technical component, but it’s easier. It’s more complicated, but for a developer, it’s easier because it’s quite black and white. It’s sites they need to load in under a second, ideally. They need to be mobile responsive. They need to be secure. There’s all these technical things that yes, they need to be done, but it’s almost the easy part, because it’s objective, right?

Sean Corbett:
Again, no psychology involved with that. No personal knowledge in the niche industry is involved in that. They just have to know what they have to do. Don’t even have to really know much about the customer or the target.

Jacob Kettner:
Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
Okay, cool. Well, so with that out of the way, I guess we don’t want you to give away the whole thing here. Mostly we’re just looking for an overview. But when we’re talking about the course that you’re going to put on, what are the main issues that you’ll be covering, and why do you think small businesses struggle with them in the first place?

Jacob Kettner:
Yeah, so I think I have two answers for you here. One of them is, and it doesn’t sound super exciting or sexy, but it’s understanding keywords and search intent and competition. Because when businesses come in to work with First Rank on the agency side, oftentimes they come in with what we call a broad keyword target. They say, okay, I’m a pooper scooper. I clean up dog poop around your house. So I want to rank for dog poop cleanup. Not that that doesn’t make sense, but oftentimes that… And I chose a very low competition example, so maybe that’s an easy thing to go after, is trying to be silly, but we could be a lot more specific. We could get down to what types of dogs they clean up poop after, what neighborhoods they work in. Are they inexpensive option or a premium option, or what are people looking for? Does somebody specifically want, do they want a male pooper scooper or a female pooper scooper? Again, horrible example. But breaking down.
And oftentimes a business will have a specialty. So if we think about something like a little bit more realistic, say a dentist. Ranking at the top of Google for dentist in a city, say Calgary, sure, it’ll drive lots of business, but it’s going to be very competitive and you’re going to be competing against people hiring agencies with high budgets. Versus if you’re a dentist that specializes on a very specific procedure. Maybe you use a freezing technique that nobody else uses or you specialize in implants or something, really breaking down those search terms and then building the site around those categories and driving the most targeted traffic. Staying away from the big competition.
And the other side is Google business profiles. So they’re just getting masses. So basically when you do a search… Well, more and more people are searching directly in Google Maps. We’ve seen that increase every year. But even searching in regular Google, you still get the three maps listings at the top usually. And those are highly influenced by reviews as well as location of the users. So they’re great for local businesses that serve people in their neighborhoods or surrounding neighborhoods because really a strong focus on review generation there and a few other processes that you can follow fairly simply can have by far the biggest return on investment of any SEO activity.

Sean Corbett:
And to clarify in that maps point, so let’s say I’m out driving, and like you said, they’re searching right within maps. So I’m in my car, I pull out my phone, I don’t even type in near me. I go right to maps and I type in whatever it is, the service or business that I want, type of business that I want. Is it true that even if the closest business to me doesn’t have as many good reviews isn’t listed in the top three on the maps pack, is Google still going to show it to me because it’s the closest?

Jacob Kettner:
No, it’s not entirely true, but it is if there were no other factors, then it would. So basically you can think of location relevance as an overlay over everything else. So one listing might be likely to rank better because it has good SEO. It has lots of off page mentions and citations and whatnot, and it’s got lots of reviews and positive reviews. And then you take the location overlay and you put it on top of that. So that one, say the best Google profile in the city, I’m in Winnipeg, say the best Google profile for pooper scoopers in Winnipeg is in far, far on the north side of the city. If there was no location overlay, it would rank number one all the way across the city. Because there’s a location overlay, it’ll rank number one for maybe, depending on the industry and competition, say 10 kilometers around the location. But that means that if there’s a weak profile that’s within that 10 kilometer radius, even if you were closer to that one, it’ll still get beat out by the stronger profile.

Sean Corbett:
Got it. So that’s still why it’s so, so important to get in there and beef up the profile. Why do you think that small businesses struggle with that? Because it’s like it’s listing their address, putting up a picture of their logo, making sure the hours are accurate. Unless I’m missing something, obviously, it doesn’t seem like it’s that much of a big ask.

Jacob Kettner:
I agree completely.

Sean Corbett:
It’s a good thing that it’s a big ask, because then you get to come in and get paid handsomely for helping them. But still, why do you think?

Jacob Kettner:
It’s not difficult. I think a lot of smaller businesses are just so focused on providing the service that they provide or the quality of their service, managing people. There’s so many things that go into running a business, and even in a dedicated marketing department, they can be working on graphics, flyers, Facebook, whatever. So I think it’s just something that gets overlooked, not because it’s difficult, but because I think people underestimate the impact. And the reviews like today, and I’ve talked about this on your podcast before, but if today your top competitor has a hundred reviews and you have five, you’re six months away from having more reviews than them with a good review generation strategy. And in five years from now, if you were not proactive about that today, now your top competitor has 5,000 reviews, and it’s becomes insurmountable. So it’s a huge opportunity right now to beef up those review profiles.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, I mean that’s a big takeaway someone can take from our talk today is that it just has to go on the priority list and then it has to get done. Like you said, not super difficult, but actually has to be targeted, and then has to be done.

Jacob Kettner:
Generally in both of my businesses, there’s many softwares that do it, I don’t want to plug my own, but we developed a software that also does it, but just that plugs into a CRM or an accounting software and automatically sends out those requests when the customer’s finished and gets back the feedback from them. If it’s something that a human has to think about and remember, it often doesn’t get done.

Sean Corbett:
Oh no, that sounds helpful. Please do plug it. How can people find that?

Jacob Kettner:
It’s called First Rank Reviews. Firstrankreviews.com, and basically automates that outreach process and then also has an optional internal feedback form that you can send people to first where they can give feedback about their experience. And then we can choose whether or not we want to ask for a public Google review based on whether or not they had a positive experience internally. So.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. And that hooks up with, say, HubSpot, Keep, all that kind of stuff.

Jacob Kettner:
It connects through Zapier, so pretty much a lot of small businesses we work with don’t… So Yes, it would connect with HubSpot through Zapier, but a lot of businesses that don’t have CRMs would connect it to QuickBooks Online or Zero or something, and that works as well.

Sean Corbett:
Okay, awesome. Yeah. And then for people who don’t know, obviously just listing Zapier is something you should just Google. Z-A-P-I-E-R. It’s a way to connect disparate softwares. Very, very handy. And in many cases for basic connections, it’s free. So that’s something we want to put on your radar as well. Glad you brought that up.
So I didn’t mean to derail you, Jacob. We were talking about some of the main issues, and we’re settling on the business profile and stuff like that. Are there other big issues covered in the course that we haven’t spoken about yet today?

Jacob Kettner:
Those are some big ones. We do talk a bit about just website security. I think that oftentimes businesses don’t realize that… They’re like, why would anybody want to hack our website? There’s no sensitive information there. They can’t get any money for it. Why would you hack a local roofer’s website? And what they don’t realize is that, and I’m sure you see this at websites.ca, you probably have clients come in that didn’t have their sites managed with you where they’ve been hacked, and they basically, it’s software. It’s not a human being like, oh, I want hack this site. It’s software that finds vulnerabilities on mass generally with the content management systems, and then puts up pages. Actually, a really fun thing to do if you want to find hack sites in your city, it’s not that much fun. But if you go to Google and you search Cialis city name.

Sean Corbett:
Right? Yeah, yeah.

Jacob Kettner:
Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, whatever. Generally at least half of the listings on the first page are going to be local businesses to that city. It’s going to be a local roof or a dentist that don’t even know that their site’s been hacked-

Sean Corbett:
They just spam it with Cialia links, or they actually need to wreck the entire website?

Jacob Kettner:
No, they build these hidden pages on it, and they’re usually pretty advanced, so that depending on how you access them, you see different things. Google sees these spun content and whatnot, and anyway, it’s generally part of a black hat SEO ploy for them to rank for some kind of drug or something. So anyway, it’s fairly easy to secure sites. I know that websites.ca has great hosting and security, but it’s something that we definitely talk about is how to make sure that doesn’t happen, because after it’s cleaned up, there’s a lot of SEO cleanup leftover afterward from spammy links that were built to pages and whatnot.

Sean Corbett:
That’s interesting you bring that up because just this week alone, I think two DDoS attacks on us, and I hadn’t seen that for a while. So yeah, it’s definitely out there. Okay, cool. No, that’s a good overview to have then.
So to wrap it up, I always ask anytime we have an SEO professional, I always ask you, what’s one fairly new tactic that’s getting really good results right now that maybe people weren’t thinking about six months to a year ago?

Jacob Kettner:
That’s a good question.

Sean Corbett:
I know I sort of put you on the spot there.

Jacob Kettner:
Yeah. No, I’m trying to think because it’s, again, I’ve been in SEO for about 10 years, and it’s shifted so much from being tactic-based where it was, okay, well what’s working this month and how can we trick Google, into really being more about how can we build a high quality site that’s going to be great for users, and Google’s going to recognize that and rank us.
I think probably the biggest thing that’s happening right now is related to… About a year and a half, two years ago, Google started pushing EAT, so it stands for expertise, authority, trustworthiness. And this was to prevent a lot of these affiliate sites that would be promoting health tips or drugs without having any experience in that space. So they’re looking a lot more for authors on blog posts, and then having those authors have author bio pages, and then having the LinkedIn Pro profile of that person actually have some credibility and link to the website. And they just added another E, I think in December for experience. So now it’s EEAT. And I believe that this is really to combat AI-generated content, because with ChatGPT and all the AI craze right now, it’s impossible for an AI to write content that it has experience in. So I think it plays into the same thing, but it’s going to be more and more about showing that the author of a page has the credibility to be writing that page. That would probably be a big focus for 2023.

Sean Corbett:
Would that be sort of signals from other places like say, getting interviewed by a trusted source two years ago on the same topic? How would they measure? How would you build a paper trail or a digital crumbs of that experience?

Jacob Kettner:
Yeah. No, it is that, and partly you can highlight it to Google in schema, which is like go on the back of the website. So even when this podcast goes live, I might add schema to my bio page that says, I’ve been interviewed on the websites.ca podcast, or I’ve spoken at an industry conference. So if there’s not stuff like that, we will often go back to even education or prior work. If you’re a dentist, where did you go to school? Things like that. And then maybe in trades if you’re a roofer, maybe before you started your company, you worked for another roofing company and maybe we add that in there. So we just try to give Google as many ways as we can for them, both through schema and having that be concurrent with what’s on other profiles. So if the author bio page-

Sean Corbett:
Or LinkedIn or even something, right?

Jacob Kettner:
LinkedIn. Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
Okay. So that kind of matches, let’s say when you do local signals and stuff to help your business profile and show up on maps. Now you are going to have to do experience signals sprinkled all around the internet.

Jacob Kettner:
Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
Interesting. Okay, that’s good to know. Jacob, I know your main agency page is firstrank.ca, which we can put a link in the description, but what would be the best place for people to go if they want to get on the waiting list for your upcoming SEO course?

Jacob Kettner:
Yeah, so the course we will be launching sometime in spring, probably in April or May.

Sean Corbett:
Okay.

Jacob Kettner:
And so the website is firstrank.academy, and right now it’s just a landing page where you can sign up for updates, but then we’ll send out an email once it launches. There’s a few training grants across the country in different provinces that will cover large percentage of the cost as well. But last time we ran this, the training grant, at least the one in Manitoba, filled up in like 48 hours from the time it opened, and a lot of people missed it. So it would be a great idea to put your name on the list and then we can send out an email as soon as that opens if it’s something that some businesses might be interested in applying for to cover the cost of the course.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’d be great. Well, we’re going to put this episode out before the end of January, so folks who are listening, you have advanced notice now. I would get in now like Jacob said, and then he can keep you updated what’s going on and stay in touch and all things like that.
So last word goes to you. Is there anything you want to sort of put a fine point on for SEO starting in 2023 here?

Jacob Kettner:
You know what, I’d just say it’s a great time to start. When was the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago was. The second best time was today. So I think it can feel insurmountable, like there’s so much established competition and it’s just not going to be part of a marketing strategy, but it’s amazing how time flies by, and if you get the right building blocks in place today, it’s going to pay off in spades in the future.

Sean Corbett:
Lovely. Jacob, thanks so much for being on here today.

Jacob Kettner:
Thanks for having me back, Sean. I really appreciate it.

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