* The following transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Stewart Gandolf:
Hello, everybody. Good morning. If you're on the West Coast, Good afternoon. If you're on the East Coast, welcome to health care, How to win first place on Google and so that's the goal. Pretty much everybody wants to be on top of Google. Fun fact, I remember speaking to a group of about 300 practitioners a few years ago. Asked out of them, who wants to be number one?

Stewart Gandolf:
Everybody put one. Of course, he was the guy to ask to argue with everything. He didn't want to be number one, but everything else, 299 out of 300 wanted to be number one. So well, assume since you're taking the time to watch the webinar, you're one of the 299 that want to be have an aggressive competitive position. So my name is Stuart Gandalf.

Stewart Gandolf:
I'll do introductions in just a minute. The in case you're wondering if you're in the right place, this webinar is all about ASCO. This is we're going to cover a lot of ground. We wrote this and designed this webinar for people that have either zero experience with webinar or a site with SEO or lots of experience with ASCO.

Stewart Gandolf:
So we try to give certainly we have some basic principles on here. I think what we find is a lot of our clients have knowledge of SEO, but they've never had it really put together for them in a package where they can understand the context and how all these things fit together. So that's what we try to do here is provide some really good depth, but also breadth and more of a context for how this fits, particularly in the very unique world of health care, which is so vital to our success here.

Stewart Gandolf:
So we I mentioned health care, really any health care entity, this webinar is appropriate for us. So we do, for example, a lot of work with multi-location, you know, dozens or hundreds of locations, specialty practices or dental practices, addiction hospitals, health systems, long term care plans, pharma device, cell sales. Today, these days, telehealth. And then in terms of that level of people on this webinar, definitely we have some CEOs signed up that are trying to understand how this fits, how they can direct team, how they can hire and how they can work with vendors, CMO's and then marketing team members as well.

Stewart Gandolf:
So pretty broad mix looking over. We've got a really actually terrific list of attendees here today. You're in some good company, so a pretty broad variety of people, but it's all about, okay, how do we create a winning strategy on Google? And we'll talk about that in a moment. So I again, I'm Stuart Danoff. I founded Health Care Success back in 2006 2006 with a partner and two years later after that, I bought him out.

Stewart Gandolf:
And so I'm the CEO of the company today. I've been doing this for more than 20 years that I did this for quite some time, spoken at lots of venues and so forth. So Grant here is a sub subspecialists in ACA and so Grant, I'll go and let you introduce yourself.

Grant Simmons:
Yeah. Hi. Hi to everyone out there and thanks very much. And I think that's a great overview. We have a lot to cover and there's probably a lot more we won't have time to cover. But there is something I've been engaged with since before Google trying to show up and Yahoo! Directors and things like that. I've been fortunate enough to speak at conferences around the world, mainly around SEO, large sites, enterprise, multi-location.

Grant Simmons:
I had some health care conferences as well. I was a regional V.P. at Homestyle, comes out a site with 110 million pages trying to show up in search. I had my own agency in Los Angeles and also was the agency record for one of the largest addiction treatment centers in the country with 300 locations. So I love SEO.

Grant Simmons:
I love the idea of health care, SEO and how that fits into everything. And I'm really looking forward to sharing some of that knowledge with you guys that I very good.

Stewart Gandolf:
I did neglect at the beginning to tell you that we will be recording this so hard. If you want to watch the whole thing, the recording will be available and could share it with your colleagues. There will be back and forth between Grant and me. I've been doing this for so long teaching this topic because it's my passion.

Stewart Gandolf:
I love Echo too, so we're going to share the podium today and we will have time for Q&A at the end and actually have also a little offer for those of you that make it to the end. So let's just get started. Just another quick comment of our firm. Health care success is truly integrated. SEO is a key pillar of our expertise for a truly integrated, traditional digital strategy.

Stewart Gandolf:
And again, these are some of the clients, many of whom we talked about earlier through this conference is for. So on the SEO Essentials side, Grant, I want to take up this.

Grant Simmons:
Part so I often get a question you have asked me what is actually and I think this is the most succinct way of explaining it, the process of earning traffic. So that means that Google doesn't just give stuff freely. You have to earn traffic from the organic or natural search results on search engines. And what we're going to go in today is how we earn it.

Grant Simmons:
And I think the important thing next slide place is while we talk about, you know, search traffic, we're really talking about Google, hence the name of this webinar. Yeah, that's right. Number one on Google, they pretty much on a global standpoint, have the lion's share of the market for search. Now in the US, Bing has a little bit more than they see obviously around 20% overall when you look at the numbers.

Grant Simmons:
But Google really is the big dog and we want to make sure we understand how Google thinks, how Google ranks different websites and how we can shop high in those results. And we're going to give you a little bit of insight into those results as well and how they're kind of formulated. So you can go to the next slide, please to it.

Grant Simmons:
So this is for folks that obviously everyone, pretty much everyone searches on Google, but you don't always understand how they break down the search results. So there is the PPC ads, which are paid ads that generally appear at the top of the page. They can also pay at the bottom on the white rail in certain instances. Then there is the local park.

Grant Simmons:
So the local park is algorithmically inserted into a page when Google believes that the searches intent is around a local entity, our local business. So now it's been called everything from the the seven pack when there were seven locations to now at the local park. Generally there's three or four locations. And then I see more, you'll see a map show up with those different business locations on them after that.

Grant Simmons:
And there's always a lot of different, you know, search elements that can appear in search results. You have generally the natural search results after that. And as you can see here, PPC, Germany at the foot of the page and then search is related to, which is a really good source of understanding what Google believes the actual search query was about.

Grant Simmons:
So generally those are related and generally a close match to that original query. And next page place you can also see on mobile, obviously there's less real estate, but there's much more focus on local results because generally, you know, local intent is driven by mobile devices. So we're always thinking about that. You know, how do you shop on mobile?

Grant Simmons:
There's generally less of a snippets and less of that blue area that shows up. And sometimes you can see here more of a description of that particular site. Google really has focused on mobile first, as has been a key to, you know, searcher intent over the last ten years, really. And so we are obviously always thinking about, especially for our location based businesses.

Grant Simmons:
Next slide, please. There's some other elements that also fit into a page. So there are people also ask which is, you know, where people are asking questions. These are not actually real people's questions. They're algorithmically produced by Google where they think this is what people might be asking for. And it's really also interesting to tie that into how people are thinking and the kind of intent they have.

Grant Simmons:
And there's also a featured snippet I come to this last because I remember doing a conference presentation about four years ago in the UK that really was to learn how to get Position zero. This featured snippet. Now it is a lot more difficult because a lot of people understand how to get it, but it really is about featuring something that is succinct and likely to answer the query that users asking.

Grant Simmons:
So we really try and look at optimizing pages for that feature snippet as well. You do get click stories. You can say their citations there. And I also know that probably some of you have seen the recent updates from Google around a different results layout. They're still going to have citations that go back to the original site. So SEO isn't going anywhere.

Grant Simmons:
So, you know, we look at this as being the key and core functions of that page. There's not just this on the on the site as well. Next page, please. The results also show up what we call knowledge panels. Now, knowledge panels can be about specific entities. So entities are people, places, things, concepts. So knowledge panels are triggered When Google believes that there is an entity like a business or there's a particular topic like in this case, a condition where they can answer something within the search results from their knowledge graph and knowledge graph is a particular like an encyclopedia where each thing has a specific entry.

Grant Simmons:
It's known, it's unique and so when that those two criteria come together, Google generally presents a knowledge graph and your business should be unique based on the address, based on your specialty. And same thing with the conditions in medical field and treatments and things like that, they generally trigger a knowledge panel next, one place. So all these different things and over the last 15 years, the actual search results have got really busy with lots of these different featured elements that come and go within in the actual search results are the Serbs.

Grant Simmons:
So where you show really does matter. So from a organic standpoint and local practice standpoint, you know, the hierarchy show obviously the more clicks you like this again. And so this is on the left hand side is how many clicks or the percentage of clicks you get on the lower portion is the position that you're in. Obviously, there's a big difference between being in position one and position two.

Grant Simmons:
And once again, the trailing off until your end position 10 to 20. So we really try to make sure our clients and websites and you guys should make sure you check and make sure your websites are showing up in those top 3 to 5 positions. All right. I'm going to hand it back to Stuart.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yep. Thank you. A very good overview. So one of the something that's been created for a number of years and we'll talk about that in a moment, is the idea of the SEO Periodic table of elements excuse me. So this is broken down because when people talk about SEO, I find that unless they really understand this topic, they focus on, for example, the technical side of it, or they've heard about the technical and it's all just computer stuff.

Stewart Gandolf:
And I hand off SEO to i.t as it is going to solve our is showing up on Google problems and it's a lot more complex than that. Google of course has a algorithm that they will not share with the public and even if they did, it changes all the time anyway. But it has probably hundreds of variables that it counts.

Stewart Gandolf:
But this is broken down. This is a way of saying from search engine land, Danny Sullivan came up with this concept years ago. So how do we make this digestible? It's really hard to respond to hundreds of algorithms. Yes. How do we categorize it in a way that we can understand what really are the levers to fall? So this is a fun fact.

Stewart Gandolf:
You can look it up. It's the periodic table. But to go through this, we're going to want to cover this just for a few moments, and then we'll cover this throughout the presentation graph here. Actually going back and it's funny.

Grant Simmons:
In 2014, in London, I was actually on stage with Danny, Danny Sullivan, Israeli major. He now works for Google. But the periodic table has been around for a long time. It is a living document. It evolves, as I say, evolves and it's really pulled from search engine lines, best practice as well as polling some of the top CEOs in the world as far as factors and how weighted they might be.

Grant Simmons:
And I've been fortunate enough to be part of that panel a few times. So.

Stewart Gandolf:
Right. So there are some names that keep coming up in search of a lot Danny Sullivan's line that these are people that are the start of Google that had Googlers on the other side. So in any of us breaking this down a little bit further and again, we're going to go into more detail here. But the if you're looking at some of the major groups of factors within the Google algorithm, the first one to consider is content.

Stewart Gandolf:
And we're going to talk a lot about content today and Google Cares a whole bunch about the quality of the content. Is it well researched? So that answer questions people have, how deep is it and what are the keywords to the keywords match? What's in the content is that natural? Google is looking for natural results that are intuitive and written for the user.

Stewart Gandolf:
Not trying to game, not trying to play them, is it crash? So for example, we have thousands of blogs with our own company. We practice what we created and mentioned this in the opening of many, many of our clients probably have find this organically on Google. We've been since the day I started the company. We wanted to be number one on Google and have been for many years.

Stewart Gandolf:
And so the point there is even with blog posts we wrote five years ago, we'll go back and freshen that love back and look at our sites. Or if a blog post drops a couple of points on the scale for readership, we'll go back and freshen it up. So we want to think about freshness is there. Multimedia involves architecture, meaning things like site speed.

Stewart Gandolf:
Is the site secure? Is there duplicate content? How is it structure, How are the URLs built? That's all part of this. Again, we'll be covering a lot of these issues in more detail in a few minutes. The HTML side, we'll be talking a little bit about schema tags, description tags, Title tags, Head to head page wise to tie headline tags.

Stewart Gandolf:
The reputation of the Web site. Is that a good website or is kind of a sleazy category? And we'll talk again get more about that. Are there links to the website? Are there what's the user experience and then what do you are? We're not talking about this much today, but are you trying to game Google? So these are called foxes.

Stewart Gandolf:
Are you trying to do things like cloaking or putting in fake content or keyword stuffing or hiding the type of keywords or any one of millions of games they play? So these are some of the key factors. So it's not a technical issue, it's not a content issue. It's all of these things and it has to be all thought through strategically and it's a moving stuff.

Stewart Gandolf:
The grant you're in a cover or I'll cover this like.

Grant Simmons:
This, I guess, but yeah, so obviously nothing is static when it comes to Google. These are some of the major updates that happen. Google says there's, you know, hundreds of updates a year, but there's some pretty major ones. You know, Panda was was primarily against content in content. I think we mean content that doesn't have much value. I want to underscore what Stuart said.

Grant Simmons:
When we're talking about health care content is is king That content can be lifesaving. And so Google has a much higher tolerance for quality when it comes to a way to be your money or your life queries. And we talk about that a little bit later where there is financial or health or some other quotient of it. So find out from a theme content standpoint, it's now rolled into the major algorithm updates.

Grant Simmons:
And so we have to make sure our quality of content for health care related issues is very high and we have in-house watches that do a lot of that stuff. But we also interview our doctors, our clients to make sure that we have great content, deep content, valuable content. Penguin was another one. I'm just going to get really quickly focused on link quality.

Grant Simmons:
This was really easy. Back in the day, Google was built on links as being votes for a site, so it was very easy to gain by sending more links to a site. So as we go through these updates, what we see is Google is focusing more on quality on known entities, so elements that they understand or like food's a better understanding of health care related issues, better understand the quality of healthcare content and better understanding what users are actually searching for so they can provide better results.

Grant Simmons:
And next slide, please. And once again, I talked a lot about this in 2013. It's not new, but when Google starts to introduce these new major, what are called core updates, we really have to watch as Axios. It's not an excuse to save jobs because of that core update you've dropped because you have followed some bad practices prior to that.

Grant Simmons:
Next slide, please. And that's really the key thing following best practices, the best defense against any Google update, and they publish some guidelines. There's a quality writers guideline that's published that we can share out of this call. But really what they're really humans are looking for when they look at a site to assess whether a site is good, bad or ugly.

Grant Simmons:
So when we we we look at these is actually our host, We're not going to pretend we're absolute total subject matter experts on everything medical. We're not doctors. We have a lot of you know, a lot of institutional knowledge around medicine, medical practices. But what most things we actually always do is looking at competitors, competitive analysis, content gap analysis.

Grant Simmons:
What what are our competitors doing that we're not? What is Google saying as being a gap in particular content structure? So high performance now always delivering the best experience and opportunity analysis. You know, obviously we want to how can we get to number one, how can you beat your competition? So these two main components are content quality and content delivery.

Grant Simmons:
They're the primary differentiators in almost every site we look at almost every client we bring on board, either the quality of content is below par. It doesn't cover all the topics completely or how they're delivering it. It's really hard to find the best content or their best content is hidden from search engines or it's really slow, so it's not a great experience.

Grant Simmons:
Next slide. Place. Right. You want to talk about content quality?

Stewart Gandolf:
Sure. I guess the key here is that, you know, we talked about going back to the periodic table. Google is just fanatical about content and the idea that it's relevant and useful. There are entire multibillion dollar franchise relies on users going to Google first and trusting Google. And so that's what this is all about. So when we think about content, then just like it says Yammer bullets, you know, we want to answer all the questions.

Stewart Gandolf:
We want to have better content and a better experience than our our users do. We want to make sure that we are pruning out the low value content. And we're going to talk about this idea of, you know, he mentioned or Grant mentioned a moment ago, your money or your life, health care truly is a special category. Misinformation about how to play solitaire is not a big deal.

Stewart Gandolf:
Somebody who has the game or well, misinformation about health care is a big deal. People die, right? So and there's a lot of misinformation out there. And so Google takes special attention to. All right, how do we evaluate it? How do we reward the sites that have that show? They have experience, expertise, authority and trust. Now, you can imagine this is really difficult when you have a brand new website.

Stewart Gandolf:
You have zero experience, expertise, authority and trust. When you start, even if you know the Mayo Clinic starts a new website, they have a lot of all those things, but they don't have they haven't proven it with a brand new URL. So we are looking at that. There's lots of strategies to build this, but these are all important parts, but it all starts with quality.

Stewart Gandolf:
Good. Grant, go.

Grant Simmons:
Ahead. And as far as content delivery, this is where it gets a little bit more technical generally. And like you said, it's not one or the other, but Google has to be able to for your site, understand your site. And so we look at trying to make sure that we build out at least imperfect each experience. That means the fastest we can often get questions asked How far should I be, what the answer is, How fast can you make?

Grant Simmons:
Because you want to make sure for users it's a great experience. And by the same token, we also talk about minimal distractions. So one of the elements of our user experience, one of the elements that Google is looking for is all the distractions on the page, like ads or excessive internal links or things like that. We want to make sure that it's really focused that users have a great experience and that structured for information discovery means all of their links to deeper topics.

Grant Simmons:
You know, all we just linking everywhere and we see this a lot where we inherit a site and we take a look and one page that really is key on a particular treatment has 20 different links to various areas. The site where all it needs to do is probably have a call to action and may be one link to an outside reference or something like that.

Grant Simmons:
We want to make sure that we're structuring a site for information discovery and we want to mark it out. So make sure that search engines can understand why. Using context, I'm going to talk a little bit about schema by using context within the page, within the page code so that search engines really understand and are completely unambiguous and what the page is about.

Grant Simmons:
Next slide, please. So there's there's three types of SEO that we're going to cover today on page. Obviously things that are on page of page things are off the site and local SEO, which is its own category for very good reasons. As you're.

Stewart Gandolf:
Sure. So on the on page side, we talked a little bit about content before, and I just want to reiterate that the Google is fanatical. I've been to the Google complex and Mountain View multiple times as well as in New York, and it's part of their religion really ground. Haven't you found that? That's definitely it's a big deal relevant content and relevancy to the user.

Stewart Gandolf:
And so when we look at content, what does that mean? What is the, you know, content is thrown around a lot. So the idea of a page pages are oftentimes services or facts about the pharmaceutical, about the product or facts about the or if you're a provider, about the providers or about the services you provide or about the conditions or trade.

Stewart Gandolf:
And so all all the pages are those are typically pages. Blog posts are essentially sort of equivalents of newsletters and articles. And so the combination of pages and post are big forms of content on a page, but there's also ebooks or white papers or webinars, video podcasts, demographics. You can see tools, case studies, all these things and give content.

Stewart Gandolf:
And a lot of these things can be designed with SEO in mind. So for example, many times we started thinking beyond the scope of today's meeting. But you know, thinking about an infographic could be used in multiple instances. It can be used for part of the SCA, it could be shared on social media, it could be with paid social media.

Stewart Gandolf:
As many times we're looking to leverage content and again, it all comes down to quality for our company. Our philosophy is all about really, really having strong content. One thing that we're not going to talk about much today, but we will in subsequent webinars, this chat CBT, many of you have heard about this idea of automated content or, you know, using link for our blog farms.

Stewart Gandolf:
So they create lots and lots of low quality content. So our philosophy on this is first of all, in health care in particular, it has to be quality. So if you want to use, for example, chat CBT as a place to start for ideation, great, knock yourself out. And Google's come out, by the way, very interestingly recently and said that they care about the quality more than they care about the source.

Stewart Gandolf:
So it's we SEO fans. The voters were a little surprised at that because we just assumed Google would say it's evil, but they didn't really come out and say it's even better. So they at the end of the day, it's all about quality content. So I just want to reiterate that this idea of scamming Google are coming out just like, you know, suddenly creating 50 blog posts in 50 minutes using chat CBT that is really likely to hurt you and grant enough.

Stewart Gandolf:
The other thing else to say about quality on this, because it's such a tough topic today.

Grant Simmons:
I think the key thing is we often say so you have a conditions our treatment page and we just see a wall of text. Now that might be quality, but quality is about answering the user query. And so sometimes a graphic or a table or something that's additive. So the actual page can be much better. And, you know, we are not surprised when we say that wall of text that's explaining a really complex procedure to a user that wants to understand it simply and adding a graphic in there adds to the quality component, the quality quotient of that page.

Grant Simmons:
So it's not just about text, it's about all these different elements adding every element that's on a page.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah, this is such a deep topic. And so as it just going through this, the one of the key things that our team thinks about and we recommend your team thinks about if you have one, is, you know, you're not just writing for the you're writing for in most cases Google one to the patient three other providers for could be donors or other stakeholders five or could be employees.

Stewart Gandolf:
Your writing needs to write for many different kinds of audiences. It could be for different levels. If you're on a B2B site, which we work on, a lot of B2B as well, could be for, you know, the executives that doer is like, Who are you writing for? And then how does this all fit together? And so the content part is vital and a fun fact where people ask us to do websites, you know, the content is often at least half the price, right?

Stewart Gandolf:
Because it's like there's all the design is all the development, the content is huge. That's where that's the hugely labor intensive part. So when you create good content, what we're really looking for is building authority. And one of the fun facts is when you're searching companies by name, when you get these kinds of listings where you have citations about them not on the page site, but on the organic side, this is telling you that you have an authority site.

Stewart Gandolf:
Google is saying when it gives multiple links for a given entity, it's just one little signal. It's not an official thing. But you'll notice the more authoritative sites will have multiple links when you search them by name. And that's really the goal is to build authority, granular delivery.

Grant Simmons:
Yeah, I want to tie that back to what we talked about already. So great quality. You know, if great quality content falls in a forest and no one's around, does it make a sound now? Does it rank on Google? The answer is no. You've got to make sure the technical side is taken care of. And I would suggest everyone looks at their site as a user is the first thing I say.

Grant Simmons:
And if you get kind of a little bit annoyed because you can't get your content quick enough, your users are probably thinking the same thing in your own dogfood is really important. But you know, once Google can find your content and has a great experience excuse me a great experience on the page, i.e. the speed is great, the page loads correctly, there's no layout shifts as as the page loads.

Grant Simmons:
So it's a great experience like that. Then it can start to look at what what's in the page. So we also add title tags, inscription tags. You hear a lot of essay about those things. If you imagine that Google is a massive library and it wants to present the most relevant titles of books, you can understand the importance of a title tag.

Grant Simmons:
It really should say exactly what that page is about. It doesn't have to ramble. It doesn't have to go into too much detail. It should really just be succinct, like the title of a book. And we often say, say that that title is is massively long or too short, so it doesn't give enough context. A great example is if you're a dermatologist and you have an office in New York, then obviously your title tag is going to say sunlight dermatologist.

Grant Simmons:
In New York, it can't just say dermatologist. And so those kind of details are really important for a subspecialty or things like that to make sure that charging time explains that. And the reason I spend so much time on that, it's it's one of the the biggest levers that you can pull that helps both search engines and uses a click through GSI better the description tag shows up in the search results as well.

Grant Simmons:
It's in code you don't see on the page, but it's also important for click through right from the search results to make sure your description tag is really clear, concise and relevant. Tell people what's going to be on that page. Most of the other things that are really important to search engines are really important to users. Mobile freshness that's just talking about how fresh is your content, how fresh is the mobile experience?

Grant Simmons:
All tags for images. That's obviously an accessibility thing that's really important for health care sites and sites that are outside of the US that certainly in California there's accessibility requirements. So you want to make sure that things like old tags for images and other in content elements to make sure screen readers can understand the page is important. And Google looks at these, you know, they're not massive factors, but they're small factors to make sure page shows up semantic Markup.

Grant Simmons:
Just making sure your page is structured just like a book. Again, you kind of scan a page having headers so you can stop, read and understand. It's really important from a structured standpoint for Google to understand the page better. And most of these other things are around how you get around the site. So all their internal links to the proper pages from from connected pages is the anchor text descriptive.

Grant Simmons:
So someone and Google knows what you're going to click through to when you click through site doesn't mean you just pull anchor text that isn't relevant to the target page. You want to make sure it's relevant. The structure, the organization, these are really, really key. Information. Architecture is a whole webinar by itself, but you got to make sure that it's really easy for users and search engines to understand how your site is structured, actually, though.

Grant Simmons:
So MAP helps with Discovery. It's a file that lives on your server. And then the last few things are really around this Google understand, and this Google Trust site exists. It's just a fancy way of saying, is your site secure? A ten year reputation is have you always been around a long time? Has the content gained and garnered a lot of links and schema?

Grant Simmons:
We haven't got the slide and I think that schema is really about income ID we've disambiguation is the key. If I say riverbank, that's really clear. If I say financial bank, it's really clear. But if I just have the word bank on the page, I want to make sure Google has the context of what kind of bank I'm talking about.

Grant Simmons:
And there's very there's a lot of medical terms that have the same ambiguous problems. Next slide, please. So we talked about the schema schema. If you go to schema, the org, you will be presented with a lot of information that no one below your CTO is going to understand. It's really just about structuring data so that Google understands what a name is, what an address is, what a concept on a pages, people, places, things.

Grant Simmons:
These are all known entities that we want to make sure Google understands. Schema markup is complex, relatively easy to get right, really easy to get wrong. We see that a lot and it's often something where you're sending the wrong information back to Google. And it's really tough to to make sure Google understands your page correctly. So I will be open for lots of questions of this because this is a webinar itself, but schema is important to get it right.

Grant Simmons:
There's local business schema, there's medical business schema, there's physician type schema, there's treatment type schema, there's lots of different schema that ties into a medical organization we want to make sure is adequately represent it within your site. We've got a few more slides. Design mobile First, we know this is sort of our content delivery. Is the mobile expense great.

Grant Simmons:
Are you having large images or videos optimized for mobile phone or mobile experience? We see a lot now different screens. We're seeing cars, we see tablets, we see a lot of different opportunities to to represent your site. You want to make sure it presents well on every single screen. So we test and make sure that works. Speed is always important from a user standpoint.

Grant Simmons:
It was proven by Amazon with a large study that an additional second oversight speeds out the site load so as slower by one second it was about a ten or percent reduction in conversion rates. Imagine what that can do to your medical practice when someone has to wait around to fill out a particular form. We want to make sure the site is fast, the experiences is seamless and as fast as feasible.

Grant Simmons:
We mentioned accelerated mobile pages there and it's initiated by Google. Just to speed up the web a little bit. And Google gives you tools to understand how fast you suggest There's a few different tools. This is a web that there was a Google site that just assesses both the SEO best practices, accessibility or performance. I believe this was a concept when we took them on board.

Grant Simmons:
Is that watch to it?

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah.

Grant Simmons:
Yeah. So our performance informative 11 out of 100 is not ideal. The details. Yeah. In any in any sphere that's not good and and the the elements down the bottom that part of what Google calls core web vitals they report on that they've said it's an important factor, especially for tiebreakers when two sides are very similar from a quality standpoint.

Grant Simmons:
Sites generally with better core web vitals, better speed, better experience are going to outrank their competitors. Next slide, please.

Stewart Gandolf:
So I'll take this one quickly. Thank you, Grant. That was awesome. And like Grant said, each of these topics could be for webinar. So we're trying to move very quickly. We're already at about 38 minutes and into a webinar, so recognize that we're not trying to teach you everything we know. We're just trying to give you the context for how this all fits together.

Stewart Gandolf:
So the one thing that's really critical and this is a fun fact, Google the billions and billions and billions of dollars with Google initiated with one key idea and I actually read this book, that's how much of a session wrote I am. This book is about the founding of Google. And the main insight was that they noticed Sergey Brin and Larry Page noticed and and understood that the most important research papers out there were cited later by others, and they were cited later by other professors or other scientists and lots of other noted people.

Stewart Gandolf:
And that must be an important page because it's being cited by others. So that was the idea of a backlink. And that's one of the key, key factors of how Google became Google was the idea that if you have more links, you must be more important. So in those very early days, it was mostly or often largely about the number of links, the quantity, but the quantity today people gained it within about 30 seconds.

Stewart Gandolf:
And so it's not just about quantity for quality. So, for example, a link from the New York Times or I don't know, ESPN or whatever is good, a link from, you know, a Tibetan bed and breakfast not so good or from a porn site, much worse. So getting links, quality links to your site, prospective links, especially again in health care is important.

Stewart Gandolf:
And there's this again is yet another whole webinar of how do you earn links, how do you get them, how do you find better people? But it's really comes down to getting relevant quality links. Google's answer is we'll just write good stuff and people will find you. Yeah, you can also write to Santa. I mean, the you can you know, we do do that a lot.

Stewart Gandolf:
But there are strategies you can do, especially in the later stages of an SEO program to help build the link quantity and, quality. And you know, one of the things that Grant reminded me of the other day of the reasonable surfer model, which is Google, there is saying, okay, what a reasonable surfer do to follow this. And that's why the anchor text or the texts over the link when you're clicking from website.

Stewart Gandolf:
The other is so important and Grant, we're kind of accelerating over there because we have so much to cover, but here would be local. You want to talk about local solutions?

Grant Simmons:
Yeah. Just as every link is not created equal, every business is not created equal either. But we should try and make sure the business shows up in the best like possible cities. If you put signage outside your business to say, Here I am, we want to make sure you represent really well on Google. That fact on the top is is pretty amazing.

Grant Simmons:
Naomi Price searches are up 85%. That's 85% over really large based. So it's not like it's 85% over two searches. There's a lot of you know, physicians name may or dialysis near me and things like that. We just did some research for a client that showed that that increased by about 30% over the course of four months, that that's a really important knowledge to have and that Nima is driven by the separate algorithm that understands where a user is actually searching from it, understands their local businesses and kind of the distance they are from that business and understands a lot about that business.

Grant Simmons:
If you filled out your Google business profile correctly, so Google business profile, it's free. Every business should have one has a name, address, phone number. A category is really key to make sure your top of the line category, but it's really important to make sure you keep that fresh as well with fresh posts, images. People want to see what's happening inside your your practice.

Grant Simmons:
And so making sure the imagery inside that is fresh, high quality is is really important. There's also a matter of local citations. You can CCI, local citations are really local directories and it's everything from, you know, MapQuest, which probably some of you guys remember as a go to mapping app to Apple Maps and Bing Maps and and Yext and Yelp and things like that.

Grant Simmons:
Really big citations are really important from everyone. And those citations have to be consistent. Name, address, phone number, locations, everything should be consistent. It's often something we also say, which is this inconsistency where maybe your mailing address is very slightly different from the address from Google my business. And that certainly affects the reputation and and it certainly affects the proximity searches.

Grant Simmons:
So we want to make sure all that is correct. I put down the by the experienced expertise authority contrast eight. This is kind of a very much to do with the medical practice addiction clinics, facilities, residential facilities and things like this. We want to make sure this is really exact from a Google my business standpoint, because the Google business profile is such a great indicator of those traffic signals that is normally the first place we look.

Grant Simmons:
If there's any kind of mismatch or you're not showing up above a competitor in that local bank, we want to make sure that this is really set in so you can show up in that local back higher than your competitors. Next slide place. And so so this is a tool that we have actually within this site. You can do a local test.

Grant Simmons:
I think you have a story around this to it.

Stewart Gandolf:
I know this is really common, this particular one. We did a webinar about an SEO one on one webinar just before the pandemic or just beginning of the pandemic. So for fun, I just went back to the same location to see how they were acting, and it's pretty much the same. So this tool just basically essentially tells how consistent are your locations showing up across things like Bing or Facebook or Yelp or City Search?

Stewart Gandolf:
Because again, Google is trying to figure out what's the source of truth out there. And when you have listings that are with different names, even slightly different names, Doctor Joe Wang versus Doctor Wang, M.D., these are Google doesn't understand that it needs to be consistent across the Web. And so for local, we don't want to confuse Google or confuse Google is not a happy Google we've talked on.

Stewart Gandolf:
If it's okay, Grandma is going to take it up from here. The reviews are also really important. It's part of not just from an SEO standpoint, but from a standpoint of having a, you know, if you are going to buy something. Right? So today in the map, because the map park is so prominent, the reviews on Google are especially important, right?

Stewart Gandolf:
Because people are going straight through searching for someone near me. Those reviews are really vital. And so you want to make sure that you have in most cases, you know, the businesses work with or larger. So they have, you know, dozens or hundreds of locations or whatever. It's hard with one location to keep this control across 50 directories.

Stewart Gandolf:
It's really hard when you have hundreds of locations across 50 directories. So you want to make sure you have software and systems in place to make sure you're monitoring reviews in real time, you're able to generate reviews, you're able to respond to reviews and to scale this. It's all about scale. Yet another whole seminar we can talk about.

Stewart Gandolf:
But review management is a key area and directly and indirectly you access zero, so on the multi-location IRA, I guess actually Grant, you're an expert on the site enterprise level. You want to talk about this?

Grant Simmons:
No worries. So for folks out there that have multi-location businesses, it obviously is more complex. And you know, we say we have one site, but we have 30 locations, so essentially 30 sites Can 30 opportunity of showing up to 30 different users based on their location. So we when we dig in and then you should be doing this is looking at competitors for each and every location so that the local park is really obviously a great resource to look at.

Grant Simmons:
But also we're looking at other folks within the results in the organic search results and in page results that are showing up for those local queries. So that in itself is is a bigger challenge. You know, where do you focus? So the 8020 rule generally works, which is focus on the, you know, the 20% of your business that are driving 88% of your business.

Grant Simmons:
We start there because there's lots of learnings that we had to help us scale. And that's always the case that we see the biggest challenges. There's someone trying is one size fits all, but you might find that all 50 allocations need one strategy, 10% is location need, not the strategy. So to make sure that we're really focusing the right strategy throughout locations based on the competitive set they're going up against.

Grant Simmons:
We talk here about also the reputation management and online listings. So we've covered that, but that's even more important in Multi-Location to make sure they're all correct because one that will affect the rest of the site, a lack of reputation in one area can bleed into other areas as well. The proof and market attribution. Also another problem is we're looking at the whole site and we don't say there's one location here that's really important you that's not doing well at all.

Grant Simmons:
So we're looking over all around now. How is that area doing? How is it going to affect on a billboard that went up or local advertising or radio spot or is it buried in the site in some other way? So you want to make sure that all the different marketing channels we can assess to contribute how that affects your organic traffic, organic visibility and obviously conversions and critically important create scan solutions.

Grant Simmons:
I just talked about. The Scout solutions does not mean one size fits all. Scout solutions means understanding. Everything is different and then making sure you can you can group things that might be the most similar together. So we aimed to scale. So it's not just someone that has five locations that it's important that someone has 50 or 100 locations.

Grant Simmons:
It's really important to make sure you have a separate strategy, but a strategy that you can scale effectively. Next slide points. And then part of that is looking at the site architecture as well at scale. So we also see that more often that locations might be in the main navigation but then are buried throughout the site. We're going to make sure that everything can be found.

Grant Simmons:
Content silos are about building out tropical authority in one particular place, a key page, a pillar page, and then supporting content. Pillars and clusters follow the same kind of idea. You might have heard of Hub and spoke, but it's really about one main meaty piece of content that then if you want to dive a little bit deeper into a particular topic, a subtopic, then your link off to that particular page.

Grant Simmons:
But making sure the internal link structure is really clear for users and search engines. Second, their way back to the main page site, maps and hierarchies. All this is generally stuff that we fix when we find a site because generally it's not organized correctly in that information architecture. Still, we have to do another webinar about that. Navigation. Yeah, navigation duplicate content also challenges when you get not just sites that you tend to exacerbate the problem of content, it's very similar.

Grant Simmons:
So when you start creating a scale, the people also ask, and if I is answering the right questions on the right pages, not having one, I fake you for the whole site. We're really trying to dig in and making sure facts speak when they ask questions and those are tied together. So you're answering the question on the correct page for the user.

Grant Simmons:
I think people content is a big issue. Yes. To it.

Stewart Gandolf:
Now. So this is an example. Some of the things we're talking about today and grandma sort of secretly giggling at all the things we see that are pretty much like the Dirty Dozen. That's another webinar, the ten or 12 things we see that are screwed up on those sites. Focus. So, you know, one of the things that I for example, earlier Grant referred to title tags.

Stewart Gandolf:
And when people ask me to review a site and to audit for SEO if I don't see like the first thing I look at is their title tags so they don't have title tags. It's all the same title. And like fail, there's nothing else you can do if you don't have those basics on this. I had a surge in not scrubbing out before surgery.

Stewart Gandolf:
There's nothing that doesn't matter what you do after that, you know. So this is another one, another common mistake that we see as duplicate content. This was somebody I worked with years ago that and that still doing some of the same stuff, I'm sure. But this is a fun fact. They were paying for SEO, but it turned they're putting the same blog post on 50 different websites and that's duplicate content and that's Google views.

Stewart Gandolf:
That is plagiarism. So not only is it doesn't help you, it actually hurt you. So I'm going to take us to the end here and just cover some major points and then Grant and I will be available for some Q&A in the last 10 minutes or so. So some things I want you to think about is really SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.

Stewart Gandolf:
Sometimes we hit a home run and a grand slam off the first test. That's not going to happen very often, so you shouldn't expect that. And we have to recognize that it's a marathon. You really to mix metaphors, it's a long term building. When does SEO end? Well, I don't know. I started the company in 2006 and I knew about SEO for our website every week, but it never ends.

Stewart Gandolf:
If you're right, if you want to win and you don't have to, you have to do all this stuff. You just want to be on top of what's otherwise. It doesn't matter if you only want to be a winner. It's a long term investment, but you need to continually invest in and build leadership. And think about it. If you are a leading pharma company or device company and you want to have that be perceived as the leader in your category, if you're a provider and you want to be the leader not just in your professionals, but to Google and there are millions of variables here, one thing that Grant, when we were building this slide,

Stewart Gandolf:
suggested, it is to remind people that it's not a quick fix, but there are quick fixes. In other words, when we work with a client, oftentimes, you know, there's you know, I don't know hundreds of tasks we want to do. Once we take on a new client, we'll figure out those ones that are both high impact and relatively easy laughs, not just low hanging fruit.

Stewart Gandolf:
Low hanging fruit. That'll give a big, big boost to the Web site. So there won't be hundreds of those, but we will be focusing and recommend that you focus on the things that make a difference early on. If you're thinking about SEO, you know, just make sure that you're thinking whether it's you're looking at us or somebody else.

Stewart Gandolf:
And some of the things we recommend people consider is do they have experience in your vertical? And that's really critical because health care is a whole nother animal. And, you know, multi-location providers is a little different animal within that. So thinking through, if they really understand your vertical, do they understand and can they handle enterprise level sites like, you know, it's you can right kind of run out of things to do with three pages on a website, but there is hundreds of thousands.

Stewart Gandolf:
It gets complex very, very quickly, even dozens Can you know, you start thinking about the future. Can you actually talk to the people who are doing the work or do you just have sort of the manager speaking? When do they have a deep expertise and technical? Do they have content and do they have strong content and do they have writers that are experts writing it or are they using blog forums?

Stewart Gandolf:
Many times are secretly using blog farms to write the content that they're reselling to you? Are they do they help with the programing can integrate with your technology. These are those last two bullet points are really hard and important for you to consider, hard to find well, and important for you to consider as the price too good to be true.

Stewart Gandolf:
Are they advocating black hat strategies that they are run? In other words, trying to fool Google or some special trick? And you know, what's the reputation? So we're going to do the Q&A in just a moment here. But so if you're interested in us from our standpoint and and having us work with you, I invite you to ask us and for a free SEO checkup, what I will do is send it to this email address.

Stewart Gandolf:
I'll put it to my team one of our team members will review your site, take a quick look at it, see if this seems like a good fit and set up a time to talk with you. It won't be a full audit this way, but this is a good way. They can oftentimes spot some of the low hanging fruit and some of the things that we would change immediately.

Stewart Gandolf:
And that's you have a nagging feeling like, is everything we're doing wrong all the time? And and sadly still grand. I would say about half the sites we look at are pretty much dead on arrival, even if they're big sites and they take trips. So there's a lot of mistakes to be made. And anyway, so that's available to you.

Stewart Gandolf:
So Q&A, let's take a look and see what we have for Q&A.

Grant Simmons:
I think I answered some of them already.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yep, yep. So we've already been answering questions along the way.

Grant Simmons:
I multitask.

Stewart Gandolf:
All right. So great. Well, that's that's awesome. So what while we're waiting for, if anybody else has questions, why answer them? And if not, we'll go ahead and close. I would like to go back to since we didn't cover tax equity and debt, that is such a hot topic for us. SEO and content. So Grant, I would love to get any additional feedback you have on that.

Grant Simmons:
So I think there's a couple of things for those that aren't aware of how that how that works exactly. It's obviously a large language model that essentially you type a question in conversationally, you type of question and understands what you're typing. It gives you a response back. And that response can vary in quality and generally it's really good foundational and response in a conversational way.

Grant Simmons:
And so it's really good for repetitive or simple tasks that you might do, like, you know, write me a topical tag specifically about this page or topic. The challenge is it's like anything garbage in, garbage out. So if you are not putting in a prompt, as is called, the request that is really detailed, you're generally going to get a generic response out there.

Grant Simmons:
Everyone else will have as well. So in the effort of getting unique, you need to have a better expertise at building a prompt that's going to give you a better output.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah, I'd say it's kind of like if you know what you're doing, it's kind of giving a gun to a baby. Probably not a good idea, right? But it's still a functioning tool, but it's probably not a good idea. And you can make them say pretty quickly. The next question we have, I think, which is great. I love you to answer these and I can add color commentary and I have a specific discussion on this one, too.

Stewart Gandolf:
But how does Google crack down on black SEO?

Grant Simmons:
Sure. So the first thing is the most obvious thing is it doesn't see everything on the web every minute of the day in every corner of the world. So some people can get away with some black hat. SEO now black in series against Google guidelines, you know, hiding content on the page and link spamming, things like that. So has it cracked down?

Grant Simmons:
It can go as far as completely removing the site from the index. So you cannot be found. So that's how how Google can crack down. As far as the the extreme, it has to find your site. It has to understand that your sign's black. It has to be a report that goes in and so they can crack down by discovering bad links, bad links.

Grant Simmons:
Now they mostly ignore, so there's no value in building out copious amount of links if it's egregious. Like I said, though, just the index your your site is really bad. But most things around black content like keyword stopping and things like that, they just won't rank the page. So you might still end up showing up on page 25 of the Google search results and they say, Where do websites go to die?

Grant Simmons:
It's page two of Google or page one of Bing now. So yeah, so hopefully that answers your question. As far as black NSL and how Google cracked down.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah, I'll give another couple examples. It turns out that, you know, the algorithms are set up to catch the black hat stuff and the stuff. Nothing last very long and most of the things people talk about as new have been around for a decade or more for the Black Hat stuff. But the so the either catches a lot of the black hat and it can kind of lies to varying degrees.

Stewart Gandolf:
But there's also humans and it's one of the conferences I think two years ago probably was topcon Google was there and someone was talking about some black hat in the audience about like, you know, how proud they were of their black hat. And then the guy from Google on the podium said really well duly noted that. So they actually you know they don't report it.

Stewart Gandolf:
You Rinzler reported JCPenney was one of the most egregious failures a few years ago. They had a bunch of black hats. They didn't understand what they were paying for. They were delisted during the Christmas season. And you look at that. So there's been some pretty bad examples out there. And then interestingly, even negative ASCO, we have we have this one point where people were sending a lot of bad things to our site.

Stewart Gandolf:
We didn't know who they were. We figured it out eventually. And then Google came out with something called the disavow tool. And I knew I was a nerd and I jumped in there with the disavow tool so we could disavow those bad links when that trust is announcing that. So anyway, right. This is a it's not we don't see it every day, but it does happen and it's something that you don't for one one.

Stewart Gandolf:
Let's take a look at the next question. Brandon, If you read ahead of me on this one, I'm.

Grant Simmons:
Actually I'm actually answering the the video question. So essentially we create patient education videos with our provider. Okay. Two places in multiple locations on the web was that perceived by Google as duplicate content. So typically content is a penalty, but only one piece of content is likely to show up. Okay, using these to drive traffic back to your site, that's one thing, but you're not likely to have multiple of the same videos show up in search results.

Grant Simmons:
So it does help with page engagement. I answered another question. Does every page you guys have video on a page, but it won't generate more traffic by having multiple videos pushed out there. If it's the same video just in different venues on the web, it can help with traffic. And traffic is great. You know, directly clips from where that video is is housed.

Grant Simmons:
So it's great for marketing. It's Not necessarily a bad thing pressure and not necessarily a bonus for a CEO.

Stewart Gandolf:
So while Grant is going to respond to the next one to a similar topic for those of you that are wondering, we are sharing slides and the recording after the webinar that I'll be provided to you. Another question just came up before I turn this back over to Grant is how familiar are you with behavioral health? Very, very, very we do lots of behavioral health and addiction.

Stewart Gandolf:
The grant, you know, we talked about the next question is similar. If you could read through that real quick while I'm talking.

Grant Simmons:
It's about plagiarism. You know, we have a partnership with a local family magazine supplying blog post to support on our own site. If they list the blog post, exact same content. Well, author, will it be considered plagiarism? Do we need to supplement the summary set before blog post? So and yeah, plagiarism different kettle of fish. Now Google looks for uniqueness of content.

Grant Simmons:
So plagiarism in its true sense, what it is is trying to find the source of truth. So who is the authority? So generally what we recommend is if you publish it on your website first and then syndicate it out a few days or a week later, show you that magazine or to external partners, you will be seen as the authority.

Grant Simmons:
There's also a matter of adding in a canonical tag to the actual page content that canonical tag in can reference your site, say the original blog post. And so Google will assign the value from that on that website for that particular article back to the original article. So the idea of a canonical is it's the single point of truth for want of a better term.

Grant Simmons:
And so yes, but I would always publish first on your site and then syndicate later to any of the partners you want. It won't be considered duplicate content plagiarism, but if you are the single source of truth, that's great. And I'm assuming that those articles have links back to your site, which once again reinforce is the fact that you are the authority, the point of truth.

Grant Simmons:
So that is going to help your original article rank better on your site. That answers it, not as simple as just saying yes or no, but hopefully that clarifies.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah. And I think that the the whole whether it's just duplicate content doesn't help you or hurt you. This is a kind of a moving target over the years. And generally, yes, it's not it's not going to cover the first one to present, and that's what we want to handle. But anything Google does looks at is deceptive. If they're assuming it's deceptive, that's a whole different issue.

Stewart Gandolf:
So at the end of the day, whether it's not going to help or outright hurts you, these kinds of things, we just recommend following best practices. You can avoid all of this if you follow best practices and you understand the implications of everything you do. So, for example, we will be just began putting our content out on LinkedIn because like this come from has changed a lot over the years and we'll make sure we publish our content on our blog.

Stewart Gandolf:
First, we don't want our content showing up on LinkedIn property we don't control. We'll published it on our blog a week or two later will publish it anyway. So those are the kinds of things you want to think through very carefully. Another question we had about how do you identify if your agency is using blackjack techniques or strategies?

Stewart Gandolf:
Great question.

Grant Simmons:
Yeah. Well, first of all, if I had to take a quick look, that that always helps. We can let you know. But generally it's going to be in your link profile. So we talked about quality of links. So certainly it's easy to identify that using some tools out there, traps so majestic. So look at your link graph will send recipes and those guys, you can look at that and you can see toxicity, toxicity of links.

Grant Simmons:
You can also see velocity. So if it's grown really quickly, generally that's a signal. Unless there was a particular event, why you would gain those those many links quickly. So so that something that you can say quality of links. The other thing is, you know black hat there's a lot of on site factors for Black Hat. He would stop saying things like that that you can say that's a lot easier and a lot easier for Google to ignore.

Grant Simmons:
So the main thing is if you're seeing your site drop in the rankings, that's the outcome of either not following your best practices or following bad practices. So the outcome generally is what we look at and then we're backtrack kind of forensically to see why that might be, why that particular page had a whole load of links, bad links donated or links that were low value or, you know, just if that particular page has any kind of signals that might look back, it's trying to spam Google.

Grant Simmons:
So that can be internal link signals as well. And you know, I've seen sites, sites that have anchor text back to their home page that the mentions there, key keywords, you know, So you have something that says like psychology goes back to their home page. It's an internal link from every single page there in context. That's silly. That might not hurt you.

Grant Simmons:
So it's definitely helping and Google might see that as a negative signal. So having a quick look at that, but certainly start with the link profile.

Stewart Gandolf:
Yeah, I was going to say that kind of makes you remember this one we recently worked with, say, reproductive in San Diego with multiple locations and first thing we saw was evidence of all kinds of black hats. So they were unwittingly appearing within minutes like, okay, these links are suspect. The way this is structured, this is suspect. So, you know, without doing a full audit, oftentimes we can see we could sniff it pretty quickly.

Stewart Gandolf:
So that's it does happen. It's not every day, but it definitely happens on a pretty regular basis. We'll see that. And, you know, one of the challenges is I think that some practice, some businesses and SEO can be very littered with good and bad. It's really sadly all across the board. There's a whole lot of bad, either unethical or incompetent or both players in the field, sadly.

Stewart Gandolf:
And the reason we see these kinds of things and sometimes they could be even one that's trying to be more legitimate, but if they're they don't have the respect of the or the relationship, they, you know, their clients keep saying we want to be our number one. So they just got desperate and start trying things. That's going to be in trouble.

Stewart Gandolf:
You have to look at this long term. This is not something that you really want to have to mess around with because, you know, once you get in trouble, it's really hard to dig out of the hole. So I'm going to wrap up there. You guys have been great. We've had lots of great questions and some nice compliments on the chat here, so we definitely appreciate that.

Stewart Gandolf:
We will be doing more of these today. You know, we talked about some really advanced ones and I told Grant when we were talking about it off line that we wanted to start with one that gave cover a lot of ground, that gave context to really understand this and this is deep is how as deep as a lot of people need to go or want to go.

Stewart Gandolf:
But each of these categories can be talked about in far more detail. So we appreciate your time today and thank you very much for attending.

Grant Simmons:
Thank you.