An SEO Expert's Warning: Don't Build Your Website on Their Land (Wix, Squarespace)

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build podcast, building a website, setting it up for SEO, and developing content in order to launch your marketing strategy is extremely important for any successful business. It's also one of the most underappreciated aspects of your business.

Sean Weisbrot: That's why I invited Kevin Geary, CEO of Digital Gravy, which specializes in websites and SEO, to sit down and talk with me about the nuances of doing it intelligently. He's also the founder of Digital Ambition, which helps companies learn how to start, grow, or scale their businesses online. Altogether, he has over 15 years of experience in these areas, which makes him a great person to spill the beans on this topic. We specifically talk about what types of websites are there, like landing pages, one pages, full websites, etc.

Sean Weisbrot: Which is the world's best website framework to use. What kind of pages and content must you have? What is a responsive website? What is SEO? What's the difference between global and local SEO? What are backlinks? What is domain authority? What are keywords? How do you rank on Google for them? The difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords, the value of having shorter versus longer articles. And most importantly, what's the difference between doing a website yourself and having a specialist design and develop one for you? This episode is extremely important, informative, and I know you'll come away with tons of great ideas for how to make your business better because of it. So, without further ado, let's start the show.

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome to We Live to Build. My name is Sean Weisbrot and I'm an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor based in Asia for over 12 years. Join us every week to fast-track your personal growth so you can meet the ever-increasing demands of the company or companies you are passionately building. Time waits for no one. So, let's get started now.

Sean Weisbrot: what it is you do right now that makes you the right person to be talking about this topic?

Kevin Geary: Yeah. So, I have, you know, 15-plus years of experience in web design SEO, both national global SEO and local SEO for small businesses. And I have, you know, the heart of a teacher. So, I don't like to hide any information away. It's one thing that my clients really like about me. Whenever they have a question, whenever they don't understand the concept, uh, even if they're not my client, you know, even a prospect, you know, I'll spend an hour with them, just making sure that they're educated on the topics so that when it comes time to make a decision for their business, they're able to make the best decision possible. So, I feel like I'm someone that people can trust. I have the experience and I'm willing to, you know, tell it like it is and, uh, help you get results.

Sean Weisbrot: I love that you approach it from the point of view of a teacher. I find that in my own businesses in the past, when I would spend extra time with people telling them my knowledge without charging them for it, it made them more likely to want to work with me because I wasn't worried about them going away and doing it on their own because they can see, you know, what you're talking about.

Sean Weisbrot: And I think that's something that everyone can take away, that when you try to hide your knowledge or hoard it, you're going to actually make it harder for people to trust you. So, I commend you on having that mentality. It's something I do myself. So, let's talk a little bit about what are the different types of websites.

Kevin Geary: So, you have your typical small business website where let's say you're just starting a business and a lot of, uh, businesses are in this position where or they, you know, they, they have a business and they've had it for a long time, but maybe they get most of their business offline. They don't really use their website as a tool for getting business. And so, their website is very outdated. So, you're either starting a brand-new business or you have an existing business, but you're not doing a lot of marketing online. Therefore, you think a website for your business is basically like a digital brochure. So, it's just 4 or 5 pages.

Kevin Geary: It just kind of tells the person exactly what a physical brochure would tell them, except it's digital and it has a website address, and that's really all it serves to do. That's probably the most popular type of website, the one that I come across almost all the time. Then there's a much more robust website, which is actually acting as like the central hub of an online marketing strategy. And so that's going to be a website that's probably dozens and dozens if not hundreds, sometimes even thousands of pages deep. If you start incorporating content marketing and blogging and things like that. Right. That's how a website actually should be. If you want to use your website as a tool to grow a business, then there's more focused websites.

Kevin Geary: You can have a one-page website, or you can have a landing page. These are I would only recommend these things if you're doing it for a very specific reason a one-page website, for example. If you're going to use that to try to represent or grow a business, you're going to have to be prepared to spend a lot of money on advertising and marketing outside of the website to get people there, and then hopefully it has one very specific, like call to action, thing that you're asking the person to do because there's nowhere else they can go and they're not going to find you on Google with your one-page website.

Kevin Geary: Google's not interested in ranking one-page websites, so that's why I say you have to have a strategy layer on top of that. If you're going to go with a one-page website. Landing pages, on the other hand, are very popular in the PPC world. So, if you are doing pay-per-click advertising, that's what PPC stands for, then it will. It would make sense to have just a landing page to drive traffic to, or perhaps even a one-page website in that regard to drive traffic to that using PPC. But again, that's pairing it with another strategy.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's assume the people listening are interested in these larger websites that are central for marketing, have content and are used as a tool. What is 1 or 2 examples of websites, not ones that you've made, but ones that you've seen online that you're absolutely in love with that are fantastic examples that could go look at.

Kevin Geary: Somebody playing the actual game, uh, really, really well. And it's a company that I personally like. It's a company that I used to use for video hosting when I was heavily into content marketing for myself. It's commonly called Wistia. And if you go to their site, you're going to notice that they have a really fresh design, really friendly approach to what they do. It gives you all the information around video hosting as a service. So, all of the things that you would be looking for if you are thinking about hosting videos on the internet and perhaps embedding those videos on your website, all of the analytics, you can track around that. But the big thing, the key thing that I want you to look at when you go to their site is how they're using it for marketing, and how they use their website as a tool to drive massive amounts of traffic.

Kevin Geary: And so specifically, if you go to their library or their education side of their website and start to read all of their articles on how to produce videos, how to write scripts for videos. So, it's not just, hey, here's our tool, it's the best one for video hosting. It's we're also going to educate. On how to create the best videos, how to make videos for marketing your business, and so on. And so, they provide the education component. And if you look at the marketing layer there, it's we're going to provide all this education that ranks on Google for all these terms that people are searching for around video, so that when they arrive and we start to build trust and educate them, it's a simple call to action of, by the way, do you need somewhere to host your videos? What we do that right. And so, we've just educated you about all this video marketing stuff. Now host your videos with us. It's a very seamless, uh, but very effective play.

Sean Weisbrot: Great. Thanks. And you mentioned some words like keywords and Google and Rank. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But before we do that, I want to talk about the types of website frameworks. I think WordPress is probably the most well-known, but there's other ones like Drupal and Joomla. And if you could take a little bit of time and talk about what the best use for each of them would be.

Kevin Geary: Yeah. I mean, at some point it's going to come down to the preference of the developer. Now, if you aren't a developer and you're trying to create your own website, which we can talk about the pros and cons of that, I think what you're going to find is in terms of platform comparison, uh, for people who are not deep into website design and development, they're going to be looking at things like Wix and Squarespace and Shopify and WordPress. Those are the main platforms you're going to be looking at. For me and my recommendation, the platform that we use exclusively, the platform we recommend exclusively, it's WordPress, and specifically it's WordPress.org, not WordPress.com.

Kevin Geary: So WordPress.com is like a hosted version of WordPress, more like a Wix, Squarespace with themes and all of that. WordPress.org is a self-hosted version of WordPress that you actually install on a server, or a lot of web hosts install it for you, and then you can create whatever you want there. But it's much more open-source. There's a lot more options with it. It's a lot more scalable. Um, so that's what we build on, uh, Wix and Squarespace and Webflow, all of these other platforms have, you know, the inherent problem of being proprietary closed systems. So, when you are building a site on Squarespace, number one, you don't own your website.

Kevin Geary: Squarespace owns your website, you're building it on their land, right? And they make the rules and they provide the tools, and there's no add-on tools available, like whatever they choose to give you or not give you, that's what you're stuck with. Whereas WordPress is an open-source environment where you can add plugins from developers all around the world to add functionality to your site, it's limitless and there isn't any central authority controlling it. It's completely open-source. Build a website that you actually own. Control your hosting. Control the platform you're building on. Don't go build on somebody else's land.

Kevin Geary: Don't go build on Shopify or Wix or Squarespace or any of these other platforms that you don't have control over. That's number one. And then make sure you have room to scale your business and add on the features that you may. Need to add on in the future, even if you don't need them now. If you can't add them in the future and it forces you to leave the platform. I can't tell you how many websites I've had to migrate from Wix and migrate from Squarespace, because the business gets to a point where it's like, well, we're big now. We want to do this and this and this, and it's like, ah, well, you can't do that on Squarespace. You can't do that on Wix. We got to move the whole site now, and it's a huge cost. And it's a huge problem. So, start with WordPress build from there.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I totally agree. I've been using WordPress exclusively myself for the different websites I've used in my own businesses and hobbies in the past, so I'm glad that you use that exclusively with your clients. So, when you're building a business website, what is the most common kinds of pages and content that you see or that people ask for?

Kevin Geary: Do your standard pages, home page, about page, contact page, all of that? Uh, the most important pages of a website. There's going to be two sides to this, but really three sides, especially if you get into local businesses. Uh, but service pages are the big one, right? What does this business offer people? And so, one of the mistakes that people make with service pages is they list the obvious and they forget about all of the, uh, we'll call them sub-service pages. Right. Let's take an example of a roofing company, a roof repair, roof replacement, or roof inspection. Those are all services. And so, you need pages for each of those services.

Kevin Geary: So, if we back up and say the first mistake that businesses make is they list all their services on one page and that's it. So, they create this main services page and they have a blurb for each service that they offer. And that's the extent of what they talk about. That's a big problem. It's a big problem from an SEO perspective. It's a big problem from user experience. Because someone arrives on your site, you're trying to sell them on your services. If you were talking to somebody in daily life and they were like, what do you do? And you're like, oh, I repair roofs and they're like, oh, cool, my roof needs replacement. Like, can you help me out? You know, how does this process work? But you only have one paragraph to explain it to me. Like that's basically what a service page is.

Kevin Geary: If you're listing all your services on one page, you have one paragraph to sell the person on your service. You need an entire page to sell the person on the service. You got to go into detail about the entire process. The frequently asked questions, like everything they might want to know about that service should be on a page. So, making dedicated service pages, that's one. And then sub-service pages and sub-service pages are somewhat about the user experience, but really about SEO and getting your website ranking in Google and showing Google that you're the most robust website on this topic. And so instead of just making a roof repair page, it would go into a metal roof repair, right? Uh, asphalt roof repair.

Kevin Geary: So, all these different types of roof repair that you do and making a page for each of those as well, because if you look on Google, you look at the search terms and the search volume. There are lots of people searching for specific things. If I have a tile roof, I might very well go type in tile roof repair. I want to find somebody who specializes. Is in tile roofs. And so, if you don't have a page that is talking about that topic, you're not going to rank for it and people aren't going to find you. So that would be like a sub-service page. All right. So, if your main pages get your service pages your sub-service pages next would be your service area pages.

Kevin Geary: This would be local businesses. You want to make a page for every area that you serve. So, for example, if I had a business in Georgia and my service areas were like Atlanta and Alpharetta and Roswell and Duluth, I need to make a page for each of those areas, each of those cities, because people are searching within those cities. And if I have representation in those cities, then I'm more likely to show up number one in those cities. So that would be another type of page that you would want if your local business, and then the next area of your website would be the content side, the article side, the information side.

Kevin Geary: And this is what we call top of the funnel pages where you're teaching somebody, you're bringing they're not ready to buy yet, but they're interested and they need to understand what you do, and they need to understand more about all of the things related in your industry. So that's where you create article-based content, video-based content, and have a section for that.

Sean Weisbrot: And so that's what you would call the blog.

Kevin Geary: You know I don't like the word blog because it does. It never had a business connotation to start with. I really don't think it still does. It's not a web blog. That's what it used to stand for. It is an article repository. It's a resource. It's a library that you're creating.

Sean Weisbrot: So, what would be a better name for it than a blog?

Kevin Geary: Can the navigation we typically, you know, would use a term like learn because that's what you're giving people. Like you're giving people education around this in this industry, or you're giving them resources that they can really put to use to help them understand what's going on, tips and tricks, that kind of thing.

Sean Weisbrot: What is a footer? Why is it necessary and how can it be valuable for companies?

Kevin Geary: So, a footer is the very bottom of a website. And that's the section typically where you're going to find lots and lots of links like it's kind of like you got through all the content. You got to the very bottom. There's really nothing else to do here except find what you're what else you're looking for on the site. So, it's kind of a centralized, kind of like the navigation at the top. You're kind of sandwiching people in. So, the navigation at the top of the header is like the top piece of bread. Then you have all the meat in the middle.

Kevin Geary: And then at the very bottom, you got your last piece of bread where it's like, well, what do you want to do next? You know, uh, and so you're kind of just using that as a routing area. It's routing people by showing them, here's all of our services. Here's the links to our, you know, about our company privacy policies. All the legal stuff is what you're going to typically find in the footer. But it is very important. It's very important to think about the layout of the footer, what's contained in the footer and what you're trying to get people to do on the website and direct them to the most, uh, what we call the highest priority money pages on a website.

Sean Weisbrot: At what point would a company decide to add an SSL certificate? This is the Https. It's the lock on your website when you see it. You know, when you're looking at the domain name.

Kevin Geary: I mean, every website now needs an SSL certificate, especially if you're hoping to get ranked on Google at any point. And Google Now prioritizes SSL security. So if the choice is between your ranking and your competitor's ranking, and you have the SSL certificate and your competitor doesn't, it's going to be ding against them. It's going to be a plus in your column.

Kevin Geary: Uh, that is something that Google looks at heavily and it's something that they've publicly stated. They don't state a lot publicly about how their algorithm works, but that is something they've publicly stated needs to be happening. And they specifically said, if your website has a contact form on any page, uh, or any form where a user is going to submit information, the entire website needs to be under SSL protection.

Sean Weisbrot: That's really interesting. I wasn't aware of that. I mean, all of the websites I've ever had had SSL certificates, but I didn't realize that Google ranked them better because of it. So that's a fantastic little tidbit. Thanks.

Kevin Geary: Yeah. Well, it's also a trust symbol to the visitors. And of course, Google is looking at trust primarily in the ranking algorithm. It's are you, uh, knowledgeable on the topic. Like did you create really good content here and are you trustworthy? If we have to boil it down to the two biggest things, that's the two.

Kevin Geary: And SSL, uh, makes the user experience more trustworthy. So, Google has that as a big ranking factor. And for anybody wondering, you should not have to pay for SSL certificates anymore. This is pretty much free from any relevant web host out there. They're going to install the certificate for you and it's going to be no charge to you.

Sean Weisbrot: What is a responsive website?

Kevin Geary: So, a responsive website is a website that responds and adapts to the device the visitor is using. So, if you are on a computer it looks one way. But if I pull out my phone and go to the same website, it looks different. And it's not a different website. It's just that the way the website is coded it, first it detects the browser size or the device size, and then it conforms based on rules in the way that it was programmed to that device size.

Kevin Geary: Uh, so it'll stack items on top of each other instead of having them next to each other. The padding will change inside of containers. The font sizes and headings will all change based on the viewport. Uh, so that's what a responsive website is. Uh, that's also pretty much a requirement now for Google rankings. If your website's not responsive, Google's pretty much going to start ignoring you. Uh, more and more as the years go by.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's get to the meat of what you do. What is SEO?

Kevin Geary: So, SEO is getting found on search engines. If you are a business, and we can just keep using the roofing industry as an example, thousands and thousands of people around the United States or around the world, wherever your local area is, wherever your service area is, really is what you should be worried about. Thousands of people are going on to Google and they're looking for what you provide. And there really is if we just, you know, stop there and think about the psychology of that prospect there is no better prospect, except there's only one category of prospect that's better and that's a referral prospect.

Kevin Geary: So, if somebody has used you and somebody like, dude, do you know anybody that can repair my roof? It's all messed up. I need somebody I can trust and the neighbors, like, you've got to use this company. They're amazing. Okay, there's they're a lock for, like, getting that business right. That's the highest quality category that there is. The second highest quality category is search traffic. Because the person's literally looking right now for what you offer, and you're either going to come up in front of them or you're not going to come up in front of them, and you're either going to come up in front of them, or your competitor is going to come up in front of them.

Kevin Geary: You definitely don't want your competitor coming up and you're not coming up. So, if you think about it, you got all these people searching on Google primarily, but Bing and Yahoo and DuckDuckGo and all these other search engines still exist, and we're going to try to rank on those as well. If somebody's searching for roof repair, I want my roofing company to show up. And so, what I do is I have to create a website that ends up ranking, hopefully, number one on Google and all of these other search engines. So now we have to get into the discussion of, well, how exactly do we do that? Because there's going to be a thousand companies in my area that all have a roofing website for their roofing company.

Kevin Geary: And because roof repair is obvious, they're going to have a service page that says roof repair, that talks all about how they're the best at roof repair. And so, we have to understand from Google's perspective what Google's trying to accomplish here. Google wants to serve. They have a top ten. Obviously, that's page one. They want to serve in that spot. Number one, the best roofing company close to that person, so that when that person searches for roof repair, they don't come across a scam. They don't come across a shady company with bad reviews. They don't come across a brand-new roofing company that doesn't have any experience.

Kevin Geary: They come across the roofing company with the absolute, hands down, unquestioned best reputation. So, there's a lot of things that we have to do in order to get to that. Number one spot. Number one, we have to create a really good website that's a really good user experience. So, when people arrive, they're able to find what they're looking for. Everything feels trustworthy and they want to make a transaction. On top of that, we also have to build trust. And the number one way that you build trust online is by getting other websites to link to your website.

Kevin Geary: So that's often called link building. Now link building is might be like an active thing that you do as like a tactic like I'm going to go build links from I'm going to create partnerships with these other websites or relationships with these other websites, get them to link to me using various tactics, or I just focus on building a really good brand, and over time people are going to naturally link to me. And that's another form of link building. But if you have a website that has a thousand other websites pointing to it, there's only in Google's eyes. There's really only like, you know, a few reasons why another website might link to your website. And primarily like the biggest one is they like what you do and they want to.

Kevin Geary: Mind you, to other people that or they're referencing you for some important reason. Therefore, it's like a vote of confidence for your site. And so, if you have a thousand websites linking to you and your competitor has 100 websites linking to you, Google's going to prefer you over your competitor all day long against any keyword, in any category, whatever. Right? Like they're just going to prioritize you so you get to rank easier than that other site just because you have a thousand other sites voting for you, and your competitor only has 100 sites voting for them.

Kevin Geary: Now, the quality of the website does come into play. The quality of content does come into play. What also comes into play is the robustness of the website, which is what we talked about earlier. Google has no interest in ranking a one-page website or a five-page website because there's not enough there for Google to chew on to understand that you're the best in the game. When you create a very robust website where you've got five service pages like top-level service pages, and then each of those has five sub-service pages. So, you're like going into detail on all of these services.

Kevin Geary: And then you've got a library of content built around your expertise and your experience in this industry. And you've been doing that live. You've been adding content to that library for three years. You've added a piece of content every single week for three years. So, I don't know. That's 150. So, some odd extra pages that have been effectively added to your website for Google to crawl through and understand. Wow, you really are an expert at roofing. You really are the best resource. Then you have all these reviews and you have not just reviews on your website, but you have third-party reviews.

Kevin Geary: You have 15 reviews, five-star reviews on Google. You've got ten over here on Facebook, you've got 30 over here on Yelp and 20 on Trustpilot. And the Better Business Bureau has ranked you and you're part of your Chamber of Commerce. These are all signals that go back to Google and say, this is the best resource for roofing in this area. Show them number one. So, it's all of that combined is what SEO is.

Sean Weisbrot: That's a very fantastic explanation. Thank you. One thing that we talked about earlier on our intro call that I don't think you specifically touched on, was the difference between global SEO and local SEO.

Kevin Geary: Yeah. So global SEO is if we think more like a product-based business, it's probably the or an information-based business, uh, which is very popular for online businesses. Right. We, you know, selling information, selling online courses, things like that. Anytime you're selling something where the location of the buyer doesn't really matter, then you can take more of a national or global SEO approach. That is, if I sell widgets and I ship to everywhere in the United States, I want to show up for people who are in New York and in Florida and in Washington and in Texas. Doesn't matter to me where they're searching.

Kevin Geary: And so, I can create tons and tons of content around widgets and I can show. Up all over the place. And that's cool. And Google understands and search engines in general, but Google is you know, they're the top dog for a reason. Uh, mainly because of their data mining and the way that they've structured their algorithm, and the way that they've approached SEO in general. They know what a national business is versus a small local business. They know that a company that sells widgets can sell widgets to anybody in the United States. So, they're going to rank them anywhere in the United States.

Kevin Geary: But for roofing, if we go back to that, Google knows that a roofing contractor can't sell a roof repair. If they're stationed in Atlanta, they can't sell roof repair to somebody in California. It's just not it's not how it works. They you got to be in the area of the roof that you're repairing. And so, Google is not going to show ever an Atlanta-based roofing company in California unless they have a second office in California and teams out there in California. Right. So that's how you think about local SEO. Local SEO is about dominating your local market where we get and that's where we get back into service area pages.

Kevin Geary: And national SEO is very heavy into content marketing because that content marketing has a nationwide or even a global reach. Whereas if I was a small local roofer, I wouldn't be creating as much article-based content targeting anybody in the United States. I'd want to create hyper-local content. So, I might create like if I was in Miami, I might talk about how hurricanes can cause roof damage. And here's how to know if your roof was damaged in a hurricane and like, stuff that's more specific to Miami, if that makes sense.

Sean Weisbrot: What is domain authority? I'm sure it's something related to what you've said before, but you didn't maybe say that word specifically. So, what is domain authority and how do you improve it?

Kevin Geary: Yeah. So, domain authority it's a first of all it's a third-party metric. So, it's not there is no official Google metric of domain authority. Uh, but if you look at software and applications that attempt to understand Google's algorithm and rank sites according to what the theory is around how Google's algorithm works, sites like Hrefs, there's a few others. Hrefs is my software of choice. They're going to assign ratings to your domain in general, and then to individual pages on your site as well. You can have overall domain authority, but you can have page authority as well.

Kevin Geary: A page like your home page is going to have the highest page authority, typically, because that's where most of the links are going to go. Then there's also, um, you know, articles that you might write that maybe they go viral. That page has a much higher page authority than other pages on your site. That's getting a little technical, but domain authority overall is driven, like I said earlier, by the number of backlinks that you have from other websites, the number of votes that other websites on the internet are giving to your site. That's not the only metric, but it's probably by far the biggest metric. But, uh, in terms of Google, they're looking at everything. They're looking at brand awareness.

Kevin Geary: Uh, so another one, it's probably not going to show up in the domain authority ratings that are given to you, but is definitely something that Google looks at. It's called brand query searches. So, if, uh, if I have Joe Schmo s roofing company and people are going to Google because maybe I have a billboard, maybe, uh, a lot of people are talking about me in the area. Uh, they don't know what my website is, but they know my name. And so, they go to Google and they literally type in my name, Joe Schmo's roofing service. Google tracks that Google is comparing businesses, right?

Kevin Geary: So, if one business has 500 people a month searching for Joe Schmo Roofing service, and this other business has ten people a month searching for their brand name, what does that tell Google? It tells Google that this brand that's getting 500 a month is much more prominent in this area, much more well known in this area than this other brand that's only getting ten searches a month for their brand name. And so that's the same thing with Google. Well, if they're more prominent in the area, that must be for a reason. So, let's go ahead and prioritize them in the search. So that might not show up in any metric reports. But it's definitely something that Google looks at.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's go back a little bit to more of the SEO, where I've heard of the term long tail keyword before, but it doesn't really make much sense to me. So, what exactly is the long tail keyword?

Kevin Geary: So, it's kind of what we talked about earlier when we talked about sub-service pages. So, if you think about uh, we can do a simple breakdown. Roofing is like a category of all of these different roofing-related services. So that's like a short tail as you can get as broad as you can get. So, we have a roofing company. We made a page called roofing and roofing could cover like all these different things related to roofing. So that's short tail if we want to get a longer tail and along. The word long tail has no actual like container that it fits in. So, it's just relative.

Kevin Geary: So relative to roofing you have roof repair which is more specific. So, it's a longer tail because roof repair lives inside the container of roofing along with roof replacement and roof inspection and all of these other things. So that's like think of that maybe as a medium tail. And so long tail would be like where we start to get more specific. So, we talk about tile roof repair. That's more longer tail then even longer tail than that. It's like hire a tile roof contractor. Right. So that's someone looking for roof repair. But they're making this search very, very specific. Like they literally want to hire somebody who's an expert in tile roofing. That's where you start to get even longer tail.

Kevin Geary: Uh, so it's in some industries, it doesn't even end there. It gets more and more specific in product-based SEO. If somebody typed in shoes, that would be a short tail, as you can get. I have no idea what kind of shoes they're looking for. They might be looking for boots, running shoes, whatever. But if we. Then go the next level where it might be like Nike shoes. Okay, well, at least I know what brand they're looking for. They're looking for Nike shoes. That's the longer tail. Then they might type in white Nike shoes. Right. So now I know what color they're looking for. And then they might say buy white Nike shoes or best price white Nike shoes. Or they might type in a specific version of Nike shoes. That's where it's starting to get longer tail. So longer tail just means more specific. Short tail means more broad. And then it's all relevant to, you know, the industry and what you're selling.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm going to attempt to summarize an SEO strategy based on what you've explained so far. So it seems to me like and correct me if I'm wrong, the best SEO strategy would be to look for words that other people are searching for, and then create as many pages and as much content as possible that utilizes the words that people are searching for so that you can rank on Google for them while trying to get other websites to point back to those pages, so that Google gives them more authority so that people are more likely to find you and therefore contact you, correct?

Kevin Geary: Yes, there are some intricacies in there that have to be sorted out, but at a high level that's exactly what you're trying to do. There are difficulties in doing that because there is probably the most important thing that very few people talk about is called search intent. And that's what is the intent of the searcher? Why are they typing in what they're typing in? And this is why long tail becomes very important, and why long tail is often even though it's lower volume. And we should talk about that. You know, the more specific you get in the keywords you're targeting, the less volume there's going to be. And beginners often say, well, I'm not going to target that term because there's not as much volume I want to go after this term over here that has a lot more volume.

Kevin Geary: The reason it has a lot more volume is because it's a lot more broad. It's less specific. And the problem with less specific is that we don't know what the intent of the searcher is. And if we don't know what the intent of the searcher is, we can't create a page that serves them. And if we can't create a page that serves them, Google is never going to rank you. So that's the thing is, if you don't match the search intent and Google knows what the search intent is, if you don't match the search intent, it doesn't matter how optimized your pages, it doesn't matter how many backlinks you get. It doesn't matter how big your brand is, you are not going to rank for that term.

Kevin Geary: And so, if we think about something like Nike shoes, first of all, if somebody just typed in Nike shoes, I don't know, we can go through all the case scenarios of why they're typing in Nike shoes. Maybe they are interested in buying Nike shoes, maybe they're researching Nike shoes, maybe they're looking for the brand Nike and their website. We have no idea why they're typing that. There's no clue as to why they're typing that in. So, we can't possibly create a page. And Google's default is going to say, hey, somebody typed in Nike shoes, I'm giving them Nike's website. Here you go. That's all. That's what we got for you, right? And you can probably verify that by going to Google and typing in Nike shoes. You're going to get Nike's website. All right.

Kevin Geary: So, moving on. If they say best Nike shoes. Now I got a little bit more to go on. Right now, I can create an article that ranks all the best, but I still is still kind of iffy, you know, from an SEO standpoint and a strategy standpoint for me, I may not target that term or I would target variations of that term. I would say somebody typing in best Nike running shoes, because that gives me more specificity to go on. Now it's easier for me to create the top ten best Nike running shoes. Right? And then there might be best Nike tennis shoes. And I can make another list for that. And but now I know what the person is actually looking for. And I can create content that serves them. And Google knows why that person's typing that in. They're going to rank content that is specific to that query. Thank you for clarifying that. Definitely wasn't aware of all the nuances. One other specific thing that I want to ask is the length of the content.

Sean Weisbrot: I've heard that Google prefers articles that are over 700 words or 1000 or 2000. I'm. I'm very curious as to the purpose and the length of the content as well.

Kevin Geary: Yeah, this is kind of like Long Tail where it's a concept. It's not a defined thing that fits inside any like specific measurement. Let's say you went to a roof repair and you analyze the length of the top ten pages. And it came out that the average was 1200 words. If I want to create a page that competes, I definitely don't want to go less than 1200 words because my content's not going to be as robust, and I'm not going to be able to fit in the amount, the topic coverage that other pages have fit in.

Kevin Geary: So, you know, I might be forced to leave out some things like FAQs and things like that. So, I want to go more. Now, I don't necessarily want to double that if I like going, you know, way out of that range because somebody told me, hey, longer content's better. It's got to be 2000 words. Well, Google's ranking sites that are 1200 words. If I go to 2400 words, that doesn't mean Google is going to see me as a priority. Maybe they've determined that people don't want pages that long, because Google in the ranking process is always testing pages, and this is what people will refer to as the Google Dance, where if you start to get towards page one, maybe you're on page two, position like 13, 14, 15.

Kevin Geary: Somewhere in there, Google will periodically take your site and just pop it onto page one, like into position five or 2 or 3 or whatever, and they'll just watch how people interact with it. And if people interact really well with it, they'll keep you there. And if people don't interact really well with it, they'll take you back out and put you back where you were. And that'll happen multiple times. And Google's always running these experiments, right? So, it's very likely if all of the top ten have an average of 1200 words, Google's probably tested sites that were 2400 words and 3500 words and this and that, and they're not there anymore, right?

Kevin Geary: The average is the average for a reason. So, if I want to rank in the top ten, I might go 1400 words. 1500 words just cover the topic really well, be kind of in that range, but better, and then see what happens from there. And if I'm not getting the movement I want, then I might test going longer. I might even test going shorter. There's a kind of a game you're playing as well, trying to figure out how to fit in.

Sean Weisbrot: In the eyes of Google, all of the thought process and this research and the testing that goes into this is incredible. I do appreciate the conversation and I am learning a lot. What's the difference between someone doing a website themselves and having a specialist like yourself designing and developing one for their business?

Kevin Geary: Yeah. So, the best way that I can explain it is people are in their own business and often offline. They might be a good salesman for their business, but when you try to tackle a website, there's a lot of different disciplines that come into play. So, there's an online marketing strategy and what we call UX user experience design strategy and framework, right, for how people are going to use your website, just like we've talked about with SEO, there's different tips and tricks and rules and guidelines and things to create the best experience that leads to a conversion possible.

Kevin Geary: If you don't know anything about that, it's like assembling a, you know, a house without instructions, right? You're just like, oh, I think this piece should go here, and you're just gluing stuff together. And at the end of the day, you don't end up with a working model. Right? And so that happens all the time. So, there's just big user experience issues that are created when people do their own websites. Then there's the discipline of UI design, which is user interface design. That's actually how your website looks. That's what people refer to as web design.

Kevin Geary: Web design is an all-encompassing thing that is like multiple disciplines, but the design part of it is UI design, and that's making it look pretty and making it look professional and making it look trustworthy. And if you don't have any design skills, then you're probably going to make mistakes in that department as well. Now, that is somewhat limited these days because you can get a theme. Somebody professionally designed this theme, you can install it on your site, you can just fill out the content. At least it doesn't look terrible. Unfortunately, it looks like every other website, like it has no personality. It doesn't really usually match your brand essence as we call it.

Kevin Geary: So, there's issues in that department as you alter the theme because you don't understand design, you're going to break obvious design rules. You're not going to know that you're breaking them, and things just aren't going to look that great. At the end of the day. There's another discipline of copywriting. And this is how you sell with words. So, you can't just get on and say, well, I'm just going to type out about my service. I'm going to tell people how great I am, and I'm going to expect this all to work out. That's what every business owner does when they write their own copy, because they're not a copywriter. That's a discipline. There's specialists at copywriting that understand how to put words together in such a way that it really builds trust, gets people to understand the product, the process, and gets them to a conversion.

Kevin Geary: I would argue. And we can look at data, that that's probably one of the most. Important parts of a website because there are websites that are just atrociously ugly, that have amazing copy and convert really, really well. And on the flip side, there are gorgeous websites that can't convert a soul because they don't say the right things and it's not structured properly. So, you have to find people who have these disciplines to come together and create a winning website. Otherwise, you're just going to have something that you're guessing and it's going to end up being a mediocre digital brochure, as we talked about, and it's just not going to get the job done.

Kevin Geary: And unfortunately, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy where you put a website together yourself, you don't have any experience in any of these disciplines, so you don't do it very well, and then your website doesn't work and you don't tell yourself, oh, well, I don't have experience in these areas. Of course, it doesn't work. You say websites don't really work. That's not really like what my business needs to be focused on. And this is especially true if you have had a lot of success offline like you haven't needed the internet before. To make your business successful, you try to go online with this mediocre brochure that you've created and it doesn't work. And you say, I see my business is a really fit for this. I should just be focused on my offline stuff.

Kevin Geary: And really, it's no, no, no, no. There's like potential to annex your business online. You just don't have any experience in these disciplines. And it's like sending for these offline business owners. It would be like hiring a kid off the street who has no experience in sales, and then sending him to ten corporations in the area and saying, hey, you know, go get me some leads, right? Go get me some sales. And it's like, this dude is just going to wander in. He has no experience, no expertise. He's just going to flap his lips and like, what do you expect to come out of that? Like that's what you're doing with yourself. Done web design. You have no idea what you're doing. You're just piecing this stuff together in the way that you think it might work. And really everybody is like, well, what are you doing? Like, you know, they're looking at you from the outside and they can tell, obviously, like this isn't done right.

Sean Weisbrot: That's a great explanation. I love how you broke down the UI, the UX and the copywriting, and it's something that my company has had an issue with specifically on the actual app design. Not really the website design where we had, you know, one designer do something and then give us a design, we apply the design, and then we realized later on that we wanted something better. Plus, we had developed more features. And so, we had to basically hire a new designer because that one was now too busy to continue working with us.

Sean Weisbrot: And so in between those two designers, the team was basically piecing things together in each of the screens, and it became a mess. And now we've got a horrible, ugly-looking system. However, we are working with a fantastic designer who is creating a design system and making it really easy for us to build something that is copy and paste-able, basically between the different UI elements and things like that. So, we are actually on the road to recovery.

Kevin Geary: Yeah. And that's a great point. It's something that people don't think about just to give people kind of a taste of what the actual process looks like, because if somebody sits down and build their own website, they're going to open Squarespace. They're going to. In Wix, they're going to choose a template. They're going to start filling it out like there's not much thought that goes into it. It's just like, I need to get this done. I'm doing the best I can.

Kevin Geary: But if you handed the project over to an agency, the very first thing that they would do is they would dive into the SEO research and they would say, well, hold on, first of all, before we build anything, what terms are we targeting? What pages are we going to use to target those terms? What's the architecture of the website going to look like? What's our URL structure look like? So, we can make everything consistent. How are we going to nest everything? So, for example your domain.com slash services, that's where all your services are going to be. Slash roofing. Because roofing is a short-tail term slash roof repair. That's the next page in because that's part of roofing slash tile roof repair.

Kevin Geary: So, I'm three levels deep now. And I'm creating these pages because I'm targeting very specific terms. And I'm creating site structure a site architecture that is organized and replicable. Because if you just create service pages all over the place, Google is going to have a very tough time crawling your website, just figuring out like what page is related to what other page, how do we like, how does Google this is not people coming to the website. It's little robots and they go from page to page digesting the information, and they're trying to make sense of it, and they're trying to build a map in their mind for how this website is structured.

Kevin Geary: Well, if you didn't build the map before you started building, you don't have a map. You just have pages that are randomly all over the place. There is no architecture to the website, and Google says that's not a great website. We don't want to send people here. They're not going to be able to navigate their way around. Our bots can't even navigate their way around. Right? So, we start from the very beginning of what's the site architecture, what are the keywords, what pages are we going to create? And we create what's called a sitemap.

Kevin Geary: And so, we create this SEO-optimized sitemap. That's the game plan for the website. The next thing we do is we start doing UX design. And UX design is not making things look pretty or what's it going to say. It's what is the layout of every single page. How are we going to present content based on the page? So, if I know I'm creating a home page, I need to figure out what's the layout of this home page going to look like. What is the layout of a service page going to look like? And then we start to build in content okay. Now that we kind of understand the layout and we're kind of doing this side by side.

Kevin Geary: So, the layout and the content are often happening at the same time, or at least like a draft of the content. So now we're figuring out what it's going to say. We still haven't built anything. We're just planning and wireframing, which is like a blueprint, and figuring out what we're going to communicate to people. And then we'll have a professional copywriter come in or someone from our copywriting team and we'll say, this is pretty much what we want to communicate. Now, you make it really good, right? And they'll make it really good.

Kevin Geary: So now we know what the layout is supposed to be, what the site structure is supposed to be, what it's supposed to say. We hand all of that to a designer and we say, hey, your expertise is design. Make this all look pretty, right? So, they come in, they make it all look pretty. Now it's kind of like a final website, but nothing's actually been built. Because now we have to take the design. We say, all right, this is exactly what we want to build. It's exactly how we want it to look. And like you said, the designer, if they're good, created a design system. So, it's like, what are quotes supposed to look like? What are headings supposed to look like? What are testimonial cards supposed to look like?

Kevin Geary: What are service cards supposed to look like? What's the footer supposed to look like? What's the navigation supposed to look like on every single page? So that this is all consistent across the entire website? It doesn't matter how many pages we add, it's all going to be super consistent. What are the margins? What are the padding? What's all the spacing? All of those rules get kind of written out. And then we take all of that and we hand it to a developer. We say, here is what we want to exist online. You build it and then the developer builds it. And now the website exists. That's the process. A real website goes through that nobody ever thinks about or considers.

Sean Weisbrot: This has all been very fantastic. I'm sure I've missed something, so I'm curious to know what something I haven't asked that you wish I would.

Kevin Geary: If you have a serious business and you have serious aspirations with your business, why you would want to hand websites to a professional and actually invest the money? It's going to be an investment because when you do it right, like you just saw, there's a lot of areas of expertise, there's a lot of hands on the pot. And it kind of, uh, indirectly draws attention to a big mistake that a lot of people make, which is hiring freelancers. Uh, freelancers are okay at some points. But for the management, the like, especially if you're creating a website, uh, and you're doing it right for the first time ever, you want to put that in the hands of an agency that you trust, not a freelancer.

Kevin Geary: Freelancers are very flaky, like you said you were working with one. Hey, I'm too busy now. Right? Sorry, I can't. I can't do this anymore, all right? That happens with freelancers all the time. Um, freelancers often, uh, are chasing the next dollar, so, you know, because often, especially if they're newer, like, they're living paycheck to paycheck and, like, they're working on your project. But when the money runs out, I can't keep working on your project where there's no more money. I gotta go find the next project so I can keep my, you know, my bills paid. Um, so they go get the next, uh, check, and suddenly you're kind of on the back burner now, right?

Kevin Geary: That happens all the time. Or they take on too much work at once, and now they're doing the work of five people, and the things are like stuck in the mud, going really slow with your product. All of this stuff happens over and over and over with freelancers. But agencies have more resources. They have more people. There are people dedicated to your project. They get paid no matter what. So, it's like, you know, they're going to keep working on your project until it's done. They're going to keep it on time.

Kevin Geary: Um, so I would tell people, don't do it yourself, have an agency do it where all of these areas of expertise come together and it's not shouldered on one person who, by the way, no one person is amazing at all those different areas, right? They're probably good at 1 or 2 and they're missing some expertise. And the experience in these other areas, and they're just kind of doing their best. An agency is supposed to hire the best in all of these areas, and bring everybody together to create the best possible website. So, I want everybody to think about doing that. If you are a serious business, if you're not a serious business or you're a hobby, build yourself a website on Wix or Squarespace or whatever. If you are serious, make the investment. Have an agency and a team do it.