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

Stewart Gandolf:
Hello, everybody. Hi, I'm Stewart Gandalf. Welcome to SEO for the C-suite and other executive leadership. I'm going to be working today. Thank you to time for introducing us a moment ago with Grant Simmons. So Grant, you can jump on the screen here today. We're going to talk about SEO again. And if you could switch to the next slide, you're.

Stewart Gandolf:
So this webinar today is the second in a series of SEO webinars we'll be doing throughout the rest of this year and into the beginning of next year. So we'll be covering multiple webinars on SEO from varying points of view. It's a very rich topic. It's an important part of what we do for our clients and such an educator wants to be sharing pieces of an enormous wealth of knowledge.

Stewart Gandolf:
And I, as many of you know that, who've been following me for a while, echoes one of my favorite areas of expertise. So last webinar we did was a few weeks ago that was entitled Health Cresco How to Win First Place on Google. And essentially you can think of that as the ASCO fundamentals of the ASCO. How does it work?

Stewart Gandolf:
Webinars. So we spent a lot of time there sharing. How does ASCO actually work, What does it take to rank? What are the key factors? Today we're talking a little bit different perspective. We're going to be talking about SEO for the C-suite and in other words, the patients and Grant would be leading most of today. Last time was really interactive.

Stewart Gandolf:
Today when be taking lead, it's more why should we do SEO at all? What does this even matter? So those kinds of questions. And so this meeting is designed for either the C-suite or people that need to convince the C-suite that SEO is a good idea and usually it is a good idea. Not always so grand. I'll be sharing some of that today as well.

Stewart Gandolf:
So that's the purpose of today's presentation is all about why, as opposed to the how, if you already have seen the other presentation, that'll be a tiny bit of duplication just to reiterate support principles, if you're interested in mechanics, I urge you to watch the previous webinar as well and stay tuned. They'll be more aggressive scribing. We'll be doing more SEO based webinars and many others.

Stewart Gandolf:
Next webinar is coming up on August 3rd. There we'll be talking about how to create an exceptional health care brand. So we're pivoting away from ASCO. Let's talk about branding. That'll be another fantastic webinar. Very excited about that one. Later this show will be covering page, social page, search, multi-location marketing, many, many different topics, but these are just some of the ones that are most current.

Stewart Gandolf:
Next slide. So you're going to late today and why don't you just take it from here and then we'll jump right?

Grant Simmons:
So hi, thank you everyone for tuning in. We've got some entertaining and very valuable information tonight. You know, these are the questions that we plan on asking and answering what is actually are just the fundamentals of Stewart said, going out to some of the elements that we talked about last week. What are the critical success factors, the best practices now?

Grant Simmons:
Is there even an opportunity? You know, all people actually searching and clicking on the organic results? Yeah. What strategies should you adopt the metrics that must be track to demonstrate success Now, how long does it take to get. That's the question we get asked a lot. And I know if you're an internal stakeholder, you probably get asked that a lot.

Grant Simmons:
You know, how long is this essay going to take? You know, how much do you need to invest in itself to actually make a difference? The common mistakes you need to avoid and building a chain to make sure that you can execute on this. So introductions. Well, first off, in case you don't know, Stewart, just do an intro for yourself, please.

Stewart Gandolf:
I would say and I'm Stewart. I'm CEO of Path to Success. I've been doing marketing in health care for over two decades. Co-Founder of Health Care Success. Love what I do in terms of speaking and writing on the topic as well. And we've built our own company through SEO and by educating. And so this is a long tradition that we are continuing.

Grant Simmons:
Grant Yeah, and up to over 25 years experience in Asia, yet right before Google actually exists, I was doing this. I actually had help when I was doing I've been very lucky to speak around the world on SEO topics, content marketing. I just did it. For me, it's really I'm passionate how this works in a lot of different healthcare spaces and once again, I love to share.

Grant Simmons:
I love to teach. And so any questions after this? Please reach out to me and I'll hope to answer them for you.

Stewart Gandolf:
By the way, just another housekeeping detail on health care success in case you don't know it, we've been one of the leaders in health care marketing. We've been doing this again for this. The company itself has been around for 17 years. We are truly an integrated agency, meaning that and this is really unique. There are companies that are really more sort of digital marketing focused search and SEO.

Stewart Gandolf:
There are branding companies, there are a lot of agencies that say they're integrated, but most of those are really focused on either digital or branding. We are unique in that we do both as well as strategy, patient experience, physician referral building, lots of different things. So you can take a look at us if you don't know us already.

Stewart Gandolf:
One of the final bit of housekeeping before we dive straight into the content, this webinar will be recorded. So if you're registered, you'll see this afterwards. If you're watching this on the replay, obviously you're seeing the recording as well as we will have a Q&A section at the end. So stay tuned for that as well. Go ahead. Right.

Grant Simmons:
So far. So the answers to the questions that we posed, I know this is kind of fundamental, but it felt kind of like half a webinar if we didn't actually explain why SEO is at the very highest level, it's about earning traffic from organic or natural search results within Google set. And we say Google, and it's mostly Google because Google is obviously the lion's share around the world, around the country.

Grant Simmons:
So round about 88 to 95, it varies obviously based on amount of traffic. So traffic comes from Google. Now this might change based on where you're located, you know, where multi-location, sometimes abroad or other things is different variations. But Google is the main focus of what we do, and their service is quite unique. A list of blue links was the original SERP.

Grant Simmons:
Now that there's a lot richer areas within there, like local results, we're focusing today on this kind of middle section, the natural organic search results. This is what looks like a mobile app, once again, a little bit more compact with the Google Quote cards. And we just want to make sure that when we're optimizing for search, this is where we're going to shop.

Grant Simmons:
This is where we're going to get our traffic from. And it does make a difference where you appear in the search results. So on the left hand side is position one. You can see a massive spike as far as clicks as you go down to position 20, you're getting very few from a percentage of clicks. So the higher you show up is better.

Grant Simmons:
Obviously. But we want to make sure that when we're optimizing, there's a stage, we're not always going to show up away. Number one, there's a progression to our SEO that you start off, you know, not showing up. So they might be in position 30, 2010 and they need to visit the top five or top ten positions. So this is really once again the nuts and bolts of what SEO is optimizing your websites that Google understands your content provides the most relevant resource for users to get their questions answered.

Grant Simmons:
So I've said many years ago, I see Google we look at as a search engine. It's really an answer engine. So you put normally your problem, your issue, your need as far as information into Google, and they're going to give you the best answers that they think about and the best answers for them, the ones that are very logically presented in an experience that satisfying.

Grant Simmons:
And that's the most important thing. When people get your website, that's one thing. For once they're there, they've got to have a great experience. And Google was able to to monitor and measure some of those onsite experiences as well. So what are the critical factors? The best SEO, you've probably seen this if you tuned in last week, this is the periodic table.

Grant Simmons:
It really breaks down the different factors of SEO so you can better understand what it is now. You don't have to jump into all of this. We provided a high level thing here which is really content, which is obviously on page content. It's images, it's copy, it's everything else like that and how it's formatted. Architecture, really looking at how the site is structured, I just email what's on page.

Grant Simmons:
Reputation is around building expertise and authority on the web links. So inbound links to your site. User experience, as you mentioned, really important to Google and toxins. Here are really stuff you do are pretty bad that Google is found out because you know search engines have been around quite a while now and Google really understands when people are trying to game the system.

Grant Simmons:
Now, they don't always understand, by the way. But ultimately, if you try something bad, you're going to see something bad happen eventually. So we try to avoid all these toxins. Now, within those elements, obviously, that don't always stay the same and these are some of the bigger changes since 2020. That's been over 30 updates, major updates, including core updates, link spam, helpful content, local search.

Grant Simmons:
There's actually, you know, Google, as mentioned within their Twitter account, that there are hundreds of changes that happened, hundreds of tests that happened every day. So sometimes you can look at searches in the morning and it might be a little bit different in the afternoon. It's because Google is testing. And then I would test every single search result for every single person.

Grant Simmons:
They're generally doing split tests, whether we're basically trying a little test with someone. If that group they see clicks more or is better experienced, better satisfying, then they'll roll out to more of the general audience. So lots of updates happening. So what do we do about it? Look, this is a question we hear a lot, which is might you say we're hitting a recent Google update.

Grant Simmons:
That's why we lost traffic. Now, that's a very easy answer to give. We lost traffic because of Google Update. But the thing is, if you're doing it right, these updates don't affect you. Now, in an update, one site wins, one site loses because there's only some results in the search results. So we have to make sure that we follow the best practices, and that's our best defense against any kind of Google Update.

Grant Simmons:
And Google publishes their best practices within their search blog and they give an idea of what you should be doing. Obviously, as Axios, our goal is not just to follow those tactics that are given, but to look at overall strategy for what's going to work best for you in your particular competitive environment. So a lot of the SEO effort is around looking at that competition.

Grant Simmons:
You know, what are our competitors doing well, what is being rewarded by Google? What is the gaps in your content that you might have? What are you missing? What's the site performance? So in a zero sum game, sometimes if all content remains equal, maybe it's the site experience that differentiates your site or the site the same number one from your site position to and then the opportunity analysis.

Grant Simmons:
A big thing. How can you beat competition? Because like we said, you can't just copy it and expect to be number one. There's lots of different factors that contribute to why one one site is number one and one site's number two. From my perspective and based on my experience, the big differentiators are coverage of content and quality of content.

Grant Simmons:
So making sure that you cover a topic completely. And the second thing is content availability and delivery. That real site experience of how people experience your site. The goal is to have the most satisfying experience for users and for Google. Now we just talked about best practices there. We've gone through quite, quite a lot. So for those fundamentals, we're going to get into some examples as well.

Grant Simmons:
When we look at these best practices. So research is really important, as we said, to get an idea of the competition to make sure we're better elevating the most important content and removing or hiding the low value content. Once again, you want to make sure you show really good stuff to Google the best stuff this line to satisfy users and some of that sometimes is keeping it fresh.

Grant Simmons:
It is an updated procedure or an updated treatment. You want to make sure that that's reflected in your content. Now, why why is this really important for medical organizations? It's important because there's a different level of optimization, a different level of quality. The Google expects from health, wealth and happiness. Right? That's your money or your life type queries.

Grant Simmons:
And that's reflected in their many algorithms that look at experience. So has the person actually done this? Are they experienced in their expertise? All they recognize expert and this can be recognized expert locally in particular vertical in a particular procedure. It could be anything an authority of a trusted by other folks. So they recommended frequently. And is there a trust factor?

Grant Simmons:
Trust factor often comes from reviews, often comes from links from, you know, trustworthy resources. But really that EASA, you might hear hear of it when people say, yeah, we need to improve our eight. Well, they're talking about his experience, expertise, authority and trust.

Stewart Gandolf:
So I actually have that for a second grant. So I would like to make a content commentary. So in the old days you've been doing this for a long time in health care success. When we started this, this the issues I want to refer to as elevate the most important content and remove the high and low value. Today, most of the clients and most of the businesses out there that are of any size at all have hundreds or thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands or more pages on their website.

Stewart Gandolf:
So many times most people confuse SEO. I think it's only the technical stuff they hear about our program or handles all that. And that's such a misunderstanding. Oftentimes when we take an existing client where it's in a competitive niche, our first focus is what do you do with all this content? How do we curate this? How do we show Google what's important?

Stewart Gandolf:
How do we leverage what you already have? Because that's where the real juice is and how do we make sure we have good content, how do we make sure we have authority? So just it's a it's a big aha moment for a lot of people. We put it this way, it's the content. You know, they said it's the economy, stupid, it's the content stupid, right?

Stewart Gandolf:
The content really matters. And this is the leverage point that we have to really take into account. So all the technical stuff we're going to talk about later is very important. But at the end of day we will the client, the technical stuff is helping Google see it more easily, but the content is the core of this anyway.

Grant Simmons:
So I know that that's really good. I love that, you know, it's the content stupid. You know, I often say, you know, it's the user stupid, not the stupid user. So.

Stewart Gandolf:
You know, you could say they're not problem.

Grant Simmons:
We'll create these content for users primarily in search engine secondary. So and when we talk about content coverage and quality. So exactly the point is we often find when we get to a site that there isn't that deep research being done, it's just touching the very top level and the experience side of it. When you have, you know, doctors, patients, medical knowledge on the topic, that really does playing very well to Google's algorithms.

Grant Simmons:
So we want to make sure that that experience quotient is really, really kind of highlighted on a website. And we talked about very briefly the monetary life, because medical content has to be correct, has to be professionally written, has to have a very high trust factor to it. We want to make sure that we do. And just so you know, we have in-house content writers with deep experience in health topics.

Grant Simmons:
We often interview the doctors and patients within our clients. So it's just to make sure that we have a good insight into actually what's happening within the practice, within the particular procedure and things like this. So that being said, this an example from a fibroid site. Yeah, in this particular page it's going to have a complete coverage of what elements make up the perfect fibroids page.

Grant Simmons:
Now on any topic, any medical topic, you want to make sure there's actually deep research done and you're not just scratching the surface. And research means looking at data points, looking at what images should be in there, looking at what other illustrations or video or anything else should be in that page to make it the most satisfying experience, the most complete answer for that particular topic.

Grant Simmons:
So another thing that we get asked about best practices, internal linking. So the question we had actually from a client last year, I read online, I should think back to our home page, maybe pages, the most important keyword is anchor text. Anchor text is that clickable element that you see from an internal link. Well, links. I said before, it's about the use a stupid links of four uses.

Grant Simmons:
First the anchor to actually describe what use you like to find a link to the home page you like say home. So as soon as you pass over to this idea of making something specifically for a search engine without thinking about the user, that's when you start to pass into that toxins area of the periodic table for SEO.

Grant Simmons:
So as you start to move into that, we're going to do this primary for search engines. We don't really care about users. That's when you start having problems. Internal linking is one of those factors. So we talk about internal link, we talk about content availability and delivery, we talk about experience. Overall. We want to make sure we organize our content logically is so in that fibroids page, they had an internal navigation, kind of a key to what's on the page that's might for humans.

Grant Simmons:
So you can easily click and go through a certain section of the right that also helps search engines because they can more easily find what's on the page. So we want to make sure that that's important, that links users first. Simple URLs, easy for humans and machines to understand. My said the user experience is least imperfect. I say that because sometimes the juice is not worth the squeeze for that last 1% and share is very an incremental discipline, but we want to make sure we get least imperfect.

Grant Simmons:
We don't focus on small things that aren't going to make that much The difference. Speed is major schema markup is this technical stuff that Google can understand, but it was on the page and obviously we want to make sure we serve and collect information securely, not just over secure connection steps, but also make sure we have a compliant, really key, once again, very specialized.

Grant Simmons:
The medical field. There's an example here of available in delivery. So the competitive analysis to our advantage gaps and peer reviews, that's really important. So you can see on the right hand side a well-organized hierarchy of navigation that covers the main topics that users would want to find and also makes it very easy for surgeons to find keeping the euro simple.

Grant Simmons:
So we can see here this is quite a complex URL as far as lots of different categories, lots of different forward slashes for a user. At first glance, what is it exactly about consulting or executive search? So we want to make sure we keep the use of the structure as simple as possible. Now, when when you're a leader within the organization and someone comes there, we're going to change our euro structure.

Grant Simmons:
The first thing you've got to think about is when you change a euro structure that has the potential to confuse users and search engines uses if they bookmarked that particular URL and search engines because they they have bookmarked an index URL, they will keep coming back to that URL. So you've got to be really careful if someone comes to you and recommends changing the website structure that you think about what that means.

Grant Simmons:
From a standpoint of short term hits midterm, it's a long term. It's sometimes you just want to change a couple of pages. You don't change the whole site, but you want to be really careful when you do that. Next, we've got another example of a great menu structure way to match substance abuse, mental health addiction that breaks down to the different substance abuse disorders.

Grant Simmons:
So I think it's really important there to think about top navigation is really key, but having in page navigation is also really important so that search engine can find stop. Users can easily navigate to things. The last thing here is making sure your site is performing fast. And it's really important from a search experience standpoint to make sure your size files from a user experience.

Grant Simmons:
It's even more important. These are some metrics. So this is publish actually from Google. They have a great resource. They think like Google. They've given this information which basically says the slower a page loads, the more likely someone is just to leave your site. So here, one, two, 3 seconds, probability 32%, that goes all the way up to 123% when it goes close up to ten, 10 seconds.

Grant Simmons:
So think about that. Now, we talked about also the zero sum game to lose someone else's got to win sometimes a tie break might be the speed of your site. So it might be that for users where they give up on your site and they go to someone and they experience it faster or not. So on the right hand side, I've got some benchmarks around different industries.

Grant Simmons:
Health care, as you can see that the average health care site is loading in about five, five and a half seconds. So it's important to know that if you want to be better from a speed, take that off the list of things you have to fix. If you're below 5 seconds, you're probably pretty good in the health care space.

Grant Simmons:
That doesn't say you shouldn't try to make it faster, but at some point we get to that. That same idea of the last 20% might not be worth the squeeze. So think about this. From a health care standpoint, this site should load 5 seconds or less. The faster is, the more likely people are to keep exploring your site.

Grant Simmons:
All right. What are the common mistakes we need to avoid now? So you already mentioned one where we say content is buried. But you know, what I say most is all clients or prospects or when we do our competitive analysis, we test on mobile devices. And the biggest issue we say is things that clickable I to see my hand click elements too close together.

Grant Simmons:
Google tells us what that means is if you have a fat finger, you can push two things rather than one. That's often one of the biggest problems we see in the mobile experience. Small fonts. So people can't rate it, especially if you're targeting an older audience. You might show your site has font size to make sense to your audience.

Grant Simmons:
Once again, always think about users big images. Now we're not saying Big Engine is a great big it just can cause your site to slow down, to cause the load to slow down. It also can push valuable content away from the user's purview so they get to a site, they see this beautiful big picture, they don't know anything else is on the page.

Grant Simmons:
You have to scroll to find it. Sometimes there's also the scroll issues where someone is scrolling. It keeps going Well, I used to really sticky. When you scroll, you want to make sure this experience is really great and Google is looking at this. So once again, I always recommend CEOs. They praise leadership within organization. Eat your own dogfood and that place.

Grant Simmons:
It means use your own site on a mobile device and think about from a user perspective what you'd expect to find and how easy the process is. This is something else that and for any marketers out there on this call, thank you for being here. Mark. It's a great profession. Seth Godin is probably someone you know well. He's been in the business a long time talking about usability and users, and so he wrote a great book.

Grant Simmons:
It has to be 15 years ago now, the big red faced way he talks about when someone gets to your website, can they find the banana? This is the monkey wandered into a room. The main thing is looking for the banana. So a user is going to get your site with an expectation of what they expect to find and is it easy for them to find it?

Grant Simmons:
So we've talked about site speed as being a challenge when you go to the page and people might leave, but it's also our navigation elements. What's most important on the page visually is there are links there. Someone can easily find what they need to find. So we want to make sure and you should might show once again by eating your own dog food that the site experienced an engagement is really good.

Grant Simmons:
So that said, easy to find the Banana.

Stewart Gandolf:
Classic in a book in the early days of internet was told Don't make me think that, don't make me think. And so that client or users today do not want to think. They want it to be intuitive fast, easy, and they have insanely small levels of patients. It will bounce more likely than not when they come to a site.

Stewart Gandolf:
So it's very, very important to make everything as easy to find as possible for humans. And then Google as well.

Grant Simmons:
I'm reaching back to Dan Crew that wrote that book, my book, I think.

Stewart Gandolf:
So that's one of the classics, right? I have.

Grant Simmons:
It is with the Eisenberg Brothers that when they talk about usability and. Okay, one of the other things that we often cite, you know, someone come to us and we'll look and we'll say that they have very similar content across one or multiple sites they may own. So sometimes it's okay to have the same kinds of insights on some of them.

Grant Simmons:
It's terrible to have the same content. The sites. Well, the bottom line is you want to rank. So if you want to rank and position one, as we say, that gets the most traffic, you know, your content has to be unique. So you have exactly the same content in various parts of your site versus average site, even if it's the main boilerplate that is the majority of content on a page, you want to make sure you get that fixed.

Grant Simmons:
So I generally look at something like this. So this is a particular client on a share with these folks where they had lots of different sites that basically had all the same content. They were syndicating their blog content. So there's ways around them. So it's, you know, there's one site that's primarily the major site there and you can see what Google stimulus I Google has these various public relations folks and for want of a better word, evangelist and jumble is one of them.

Grant Simmons:
So he says if you have the same content on multiple pages and we won't show these pages, we try and pick one of them and show that. So sometimes it's not valuable to have the same content across to the site. But as he goes on to say he does recognize there's going to be some similar content on some pages, I would just say when you're looking at a page, make sure that the boilerplate or the similar content is the minority of the content on the page, much more important, valuable content that's unique and differentiated.

Grant Simmons:
Another issue we see a lot and once again, as as a stakeholder within within your actual company, what you want to make sure as you're going through the site and seeing if there's any for or for pages. So any pages not found, you clicking on links and you go through and you basically say, I just found I was just doing a live analysis for a prospect and as I'm going through there, four or five of the clicks that I made within the site show me up for a four page, a page not found.

Grant Simmons:
Now why is that? Probably someone's removed the content and hasn't told search engines or uses where to go next. Sometimes you know a page the URL is changed. As we said before, if you change your URLs, you've got to make sure that search can still find the original content and essentially this is just a really bad user experience.

Grant Simmons:
We want to make sure you're the stakeholders. Everyone else is looking at the site and making sure nothing is broken within that user experience. We also so Stewart alluded to this, there are a lot of people who think SDL is just about technical. Now technical is important. Don't get me wrong, it's kind of the price of entry. You want to make sure your site is very performant, fast paced and I would say easy for search engine to crawl, but this is one of the examples we often see about hiding valuable content.

Grant Simmons:
So the charts on the left, the numbers on the bottom shows the number of clicks it takes to get to that web page from the homepage. That's important. Google has said. John Moody, in fact, said most important pages should be just a few clicks from your homepage and links potentially, it should appear on your home page for the most important pages.

Grant Simmons:
So think about that all from pages and pages that don't have any links to them but can be discovered by search engines. Sometimes they're discovered by links coming in. Sometimes I discovered in what we call an exemplar site map, which lists out all the pages within the site. But this is essentially a terrible experience when people can't find the content they want.

Grant Simmons:
And once once they get to a page from a search engine, there's no way to understand how that fits into the overall site. So home page links to important pages. Important place of business should not be blog posts. Ideally, they should be really important service pages, treatment pages, and location pages. These are the things that are important. So once again, you eat your own dog food.

Grant Simmons:
Look at your site through this line of users. First, can they find what they're looking for? Can they find the banana site? Big question we ask around the viability and profitability ratio is all prospective customers and patients actually searching online for health care solutions. Now, first off, when you look at that search results, when we showed the search results originally, the organic result still gets about 80% of the clicks within within the website show and the Google search, there's paid search results, there's local results.

Grant Simmons:
There's other elements in that search results as well. But still, about 80% of clicks go to organic results. Why is that important? Because Google has health cost, of course, from a couple years ago. But David Fineberg said 7% of Google's daily searches were health related. That's 70,000 a minute. So when people ask me, is their search volume, should I actually do SEO?

Grant Simmons:
All people searching for my product service as a treatment, I say a resounding yes. Now, how does that break down? It breaks down by how people are searching on the right hand side. Some data from Pew Research Center. So 66% have looked online, are looking for specific disease or medical problems. So of that 70,000 type queries, mostly 66% of those are looking to specific disease or medical problem.

Grant Simmons:
Now, I always say this to our clients as well. People search for their problem. You have to demonstrate that you understand that problem and you have a solution for it. So really important to understand that people don't naturally search for your solution. They don't search for certain lies, a treatment that they might never heard of. They will search for spider bite.

Grant Simmons:
And so you want to make sure that you're ranking for both the problem and the solution. As you can see, the highest kind of search volume of health related queries. And you can see all the way down this list, everyone's looking for everything from doctors and other health professionals like, you know, a location or specific clinic or specific doctor all the way down to memory loss, dementia, Alzheimer's.

Grant Simmons:
So searching for problems for other people in their life or problems they might think they have. So these are really key components of what people are searching for. One of the big things I want to highlight on this slides was namely queries. So this title is actually a couple years old, but may or may queries those kind of things like Nephrologist near me or someone searching for a knee, knee doctor name because people don't always use the right words.

Grant Simmons:
That's doubled since 2015 and this was in 2020. So since the slides have been pulled, I would say that near me time queries are probably quadrupled since 2015, not in a recent, you know, prospect meeting we were having. We demonstrated that 80% of their queries were specific to near May. Now they were very location specific, but that's really key because Google will then localize a near me query.

Grant Simmons:
Don't have put near me in Virginia Beach where I'm based. Google will know based on your actual device, the location device what near me means to you. So. Well, that was a bit confusing, but what near me means to you is different. For what near me means to someone that's located across the city or across the country. All right, let's get into this.

Grant Simmons:
So when someone presents a certain SEO strategy to you, should you a dovetail? What's the best strategy? You should up your business. Now, I just talked about locations. This is generally when we work with multi-location practices. Obviously, this is really important to have a local strategy. A local strategy is all about building out really robust location pages and geo modifying queries within your site specific to the location you might be in and ensure the name and address and phone number are consistent across the web.

Grant Simmons:
This is called citations and there's a number of tools to make sure, wherever you mentioned on the web that the name, the address, the phone number is consistent. And then the big thing for local business, Google business profile, this is a free page, quote unquote page, a free listing that Google gives you. You can see on the right hand side, it's quite robust and there's elements that you can add to make it even more robust.

Grant Simmons:
Things like questions and answers, things like reviews, things like a description, things, a category. These are really important things that you can have control over for Google, my business or Google business profile. Essentially, you want to be your location expert with this kind of strategy, which means any time someone types in a location and your particular expertise, you should show up and any time someone types in something where Google is geo targeting that query, you should show up just for that expertise.

Grant Simmons:
Now, there's also content strategy and there's some big players in this space like Mayo Clinic, like Wave M.D., the Ready just build up I think slightly pre their medical knowledge. Now this is about being really broad around lots of different medical categories or in a single vertical being really broad as far as digging into that content. Now it's great.

Grant Simmons:
It doesn't always tie into a typical revenue model. Sometimes this is purely for branding or authority building and things like that. But we look at this as being a particular strategy, though not probably on national level unless you're a national brand. And that's where, you know, this strategy can sometimes make sense to be an absolute authority across the topics when you're expert.

Grant Simmons:
So I say go broad or gung ho. However, Google also loves niches. I love people that are specialized and focused on one thing really well. Now, in this particular instance, it's really good if you're doing a location strategy for a single location, it's really good if you want to do a very narrow vertical niche. As I said, you're going to be comprehensively covering just one specific treatment or comprehensively covering one specific symptom that can work really well for that.

Grant Simmons:
They can then offer the solutions to offer off offer that. There's an example here, a dentist for seniors with a targeting of Tucson. There's ten searches a month, so that search volume is ten, such as a month. That might not seem like a lot, but for some local practices, getting ten additional clients patients prospects a month is quite valuable.

Grant Simmons:
And so from my perspective, I don't throw this out the window saying in this strategy is bad. Sometimes in this strategy count as a vertical as opposed just location. In that sense, becoming an absolute niche expert can mean winning nationally as well as totally winning locally.

Stewart Gandolf:
Can I jump on graph please then? So the Absolutely. Sometimes we are looking at, for example, dentistry seniors that maybe a business that's focused on that's high value because seniors have bigger Democrats. So that's a strategic imperative for that business. We work with pharma companies who are working after going after CPAs or rare disease states. So that's a very different kind of search.

Stewart Gandolf:
But again, very small research volume, but a very high value. It could be doctors, it could be administrators from hospitals or searching from the B2B standpoint or manufacturers. So all these principles apply. We're using some local providers examples so many times working with, you know, SaaS companies or telehealth companies or, you know, consulting companies or pharma device. The bigger point here is that there and for our business, there are very key terms that we feel like are very important to maybe ten or 30 searches, but we want to be there.

Stewart Gandolf:
And that's where the SEO strategy comes up is what's high value, Where can we compete? That's the strategy behind the SEO versus just trying to get rankings like what are we ranking for? So I just want to say there's more to that discussion where we really want to do this very thoughtfully and carefully. And it's not just a question of getting numbers, it's what numbers do you want to throw out?

Grant Simmons:
Definitely around value. So this is one of the questions that we were asked by my customer, which is I read online only the backlinks doing a series of backlinks and links into the site. They were the original mind ranking factor for go. You know, as far as the more links you got highly ranked. Obviously Google found out really quickly that search and SEO folks can actually gain that quite easily by buying links.

Grant Simmons:
So that that is much more depressed now as a ranking factor. So if someone comes to you and said we need to buy links, you've got to be very strategic because buying links can also hurt your website if they're the wrong links, low quality, low relevance and things like that. So a link strategy and there are still cases where very competitive and very timely type things.

Grant Simmons:
It makes sense in a medical space. Not really. And we don't generally recommend a link county strategy. So as we said, most of these strategies, so this is just a few of them. There's more, but this is the high level of locations, niche abroad, content driven, link driven. Now every site is different and we look at every site differently now, but there are common issues and growth opportunities that generally most strategies come up with different elements from these different types of strategy.

Grant Simmons:
So so what is the million dollar question? Not literally big. It's heavily how much you need to invest.

Stewart Gandolf:
Literally.

Grant Simmons:
Yeah, it could be some like ability. And so how much do you need to invest in Seattle? So if I had a dollar for every time I've heard something like this, I would be very rich. So there's lots of offshore companies offering. So it would be very cheaply. Now I always say what's promised and what's delivered as far as value isn't always the same thing.

Grant Simmons:
So yes, and SEO services can be quite expensive, especially from offshore companies, but more often or not, you don't have the same experience, expertise and understanding accountability that you do from an onshore company that has great experience in the medical niche. So the health care expertise is really valuable. And you can say this is just some of the folks we work with.

Grant Simmons:
But the main thing I say to folks is, yeah, you've hired an offshore company and they've basically destroyed your SEO. You're not going to get it back just by changing a couple of things. It takes a long time sometimes to get your SEO back. If you've done some bad things in Google Eyes and bad things in users eyes so that you know you've lost your rankings or your rankings have dropped.

Grant Simmons:
You know, we look at this as a full discovery process is key to success. There's there's a very high level expertise needed in multi-location, and the complexity and competitive nature of a mine site can always make a difference. And you see here, I've given a number here that the number, you know, $5,000 a month, that's reasonable to expect.

Grant Simmons:
The someone isn't just a vendor, they're an actual partner. There's someone, to Stewart's point, that understands what your key metrics are, that understands what's important to your business and goes beyond just the tactical of we're going to change the title tag here. Anything else? They're actually understanding the for strategic goals of the business to generate revenue or visibility or other things that are important to the business.

Grant Simmons:
Now, the caveats are, of course, is competition. Number of locations, complexity and urgency can increase costs and as I mentioned below, your money or your life, because medical is so important to Google to get right, anything here can can basically mean if you don't do it right, Google will definitely penalize you by not showing not showing your site and rankings.

Grant Simmons:
You don't want that to happen because getting it back is tough.

Stewart Gandolf:
And out of that, the competition and the urgency are huge factors there. So depending on the niche, if you're an addiction and you want to be ranked nationally, bring your checkbook. It's going to be a whole lot more than that. But these numbers are determined by the marketplace. So it's not like we want to sell a bunch of SEO services.

Stewart Gandolf:
It's like what's required to get to the objective just like anything else in sense. So these are the kind of the entry point where true partnerships are available, but that doesn't mean that applies for every case.

Grant Simmons:
All right. Well, what metrics can we track to demonstrate success? So as as a stakeholder in your company, obviously, you need to know what's important to your business, and then you need to know what SEO can deliver. So more often than not, SEO is measured apples and oranges against paid search or billboards or other things like that. And the metrics are different because some things we can affect and obviously a lot of things are dependent on Google understanding the value of the content have or the content we produce understand the value of experience.

Grant Simmons:
So we can't control everything. So there are certain measures that we think are really important from a search standpoint to be measured against. And these are things that should be important to your business, to conversions. Now it's great to drive traffic, but if it's not converting traffic, is there real value there or there may be from engagement standpoint?

Grant Simmons:
Hi. Are people requesting directions? Yeah, they're not converting exactly, but they're looking for directions or are they looking, submitting reviews or things like that. So sometimes if conversions on the idea will go, then engagement can bring traffic obviously is a big thing that we can look at, but the value of traffic is generally in what action they use.

Grant Simmons:
It takes next to some folks and gestures as point. They might just be looking for brand awareness or affinity with a brand. Sometimes pharma companies are doing websites just to introduce informational stuff to patients or prospects, so sometimes that's important to show up. Links We mentioned the link strategy. You know, some some very close links are important and so, you know, some metrics that can be measured against the number of links you've generated through great quality content and impressions.

Grant Simmons:
It really works back to the latter of what we call our value. You need to get impressions in the search results to be able to get clicks and but really comes down to the first thing is impressions is the first element you're indexed. Then Google will show you up in search results, earning impressions, and then you're in clicks out of that.

Grant Simmons:
And then the last thing I say is lower value and lowest values rankings. Rankings don't really mean anything. They are an end to a means You have to rank to be able to get click to drive traffic to your site to get conversions. But it shouldn't be main goal just to rank number one for a query. Like we said, no one searches for Do we ever want to show up for a query that no one's searching for.

Grant Simmons:
So this is a question was asked Now do we want to shop in Google for search, create a zero search body? And the answer is if the CEO says it's important, yes, sometimes that's a worthy goal or worthy metric that's worth showing. And that could be a vanity term specific to the company, sometimes just a tagline, things like that.

Grant Simmons:
So things can be important to a business that aren't necessarily important from a conversion standpoint or actually a monetary monetary standpoint. So one of the last questions we're going to we're going to ask and answer here is how long does SEO take to get results? You know, there's there's a lot of ways that I can answer this, but we just talked about the idea of indexation to ranking to impressions to clinch the conversions.

Grant Simmons:
That's kind of the path. It's a marathon, not a sprint, which means it's not something that you turn on and turn off my page search. It is a perfect long term investment and a branding opportunity and really good for getting visibility of content. It might push out my videos or white papers or things like that. And the last thing I always say is when we take on a client, we do our deep discovery, and during that discovery process, we find some low hanging fruit, what we call it, which is a quick fix, quick fix with no effort.

Grant Simmons:
So there are quick fixes. Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's a quick fix. So you still have to have Google recognize that change. You still have to have, you know, that re indexed everything else. So so with these caveats, how long is actually like I'm trying not to skirt around the answer and so I defer to Google. So Joe Miller again from Google, a really great video you can search for.

Grant Simmons:
How long does actually take for new pages? So he says when a new page is, they probably say anywhere from 7 hours to several weeks for it to be indexed. So think about that. You've just published this brilliant piece of content and a tree falls in the forest. Is someone going to hear it? So you probably just brilliant content.

Grant Simmons:
Is anyone ever going to read it? Well, there are certain things that Echo's experience shows can do to make the process a bit. You can't call Google up and say, I need you to show this page up in now, but you can do special things like it talks about important links being on your home page, making sure there's links to this content to make sure that that the site's performance.

Grant Simmons:
So when you say technical issues might prevent speed indexation and it has to be valuable, it has to be unique, has to be great. As we said before, if you publish duplicate content or content the same, it's liable not to rank. So really it can be weeks or months or days, it can be hours. But generally we say if you publish content, it's valuable, it's unique, it's it's performant.

Grant Simmons:
As far as the site is great, you have the right internal link into it. So it's easy for Google to discover. Then it can take a week to two weeks generally to show up. Overall rankings can take months because you have to make sure the platform is performing. You have to make sure the content is valuable. So inheriting a bad site can take a lot longer.

Grant Simmons:
But once the site is performing, introducing new content should be a week to two weeks before this ranking. And so how do you build initial change? Get the results you want? Well, a little bit tongue in cheek here because obviously you can choose have a success. But if you're looking and you're analyzing the ideal partner, not vendor, but a partner to do it, did that experience in the medical vertical and specific to the medical specialty, can they handle enterprise level assignments?

Grant Simmons:
If you are multi-location or you're a large site like content Web site, can you talk to the people actually doing the work? Well, I don't just give webinars. I actually dig in to every single client every month to make sure we're delivering what we need to deliver and the opportunities are being captured. That deep technical expertise, that's my need to fix the site.

Grant Simmons:
And it's like anything when you say about the plumber that charges you China, 50 bucks for 5 minutes when they bang against the pipe, you know, it's essentially $4.5 for the minutes of training and it's $245, the experienced nowhere to bang. So are things same thing in SEO sometimes having the expense of knowing where to look first can help in making sure the process is speedier.

Grant Simmons:
So the other elements that help with programing integrate with the technology stack and we talked about is the pricing too good to be true difference in value and price? And what are the companies saying about them? So referrals, references and things like that and all they have it advocating the Black Cat, which is essentially those toxic tactics of advocating for those because short term they can work long term, it can destroy your business.

Grant Simmons:
And that is what I have asked you. It might be a wrap. I want to thank everyone for being here. Yeah, I'd.

Stewart Gandolf:
Add a couple of points to that. Also, that's not on the books. There would be. Do they show up in the other cells? That's fine. We get calls, aunts and, uncles and what do you know what I see? It's like, why not just find a seller? I guess I found you on Google also. You know, having some credibility is like Grandma was saying, eat your own dog food is a help.

Stewart Gandolf:
So at this point, we can take some. We have time for a couple of questions and I've got a thought starter actually back up for a second here. So the one before that, if you're interested in having talking to us or our team, either Grant or one of the other people in our team and just essentially requested free SEO check up, we're going to do some look at the website for discussion around your goals for talk around some of the issues we talked about today.

Stewart Gandolf:
So feel free to send us an email about that. Give us a call if you're interested in that. Finally, on the last slide here for Q&A, I invite if we have any questions, please let us know before while we're waiting to see if anybody has some additional questions. Grant But I'd like to talk about with you, as you and I can have a little fireside chat here about, you know, your experience with the C-suite.

Stewart Gandolf:
So the whole topic of this webinar today was about C-suite, and hopefully I've answered most of the questions. But if we were, you know, when we're talking to the C-suite, as we often are, you know, what are some of the things that you find the C-suite is very interested in today, perhaps more than in the past? Like what are the really critical executive questions we talked about a lot to bring the user are the viewers today to a focal point?

Stewart Gandolf:
What kinds of things are likely to be really top of mind?

Grant Simmons:
Yeah, well, I think most the stuff we covered most of the conversation in right. You know, I need to invest in what I'm like to get back. I think some of the real timely topics around I hear a lot about JPT. Can I can I leverage that to help me write content and things like that? You know, because obviously some of the largest challenges as the sea level is scale profitable, let's say now return on that investment prioritization of people or prioritization of resources.

Grant Simmons:
I think those things are always top of mind. That hasn't changed since I spoke to my first CEO, which was in G.E. back in the day, probably 25 years ago. But those questions are still valid and relevant. The other thing is, and I don't want to be coarse, I won't be, but, you know, all my team telling me what I want to hear or my team telling me the truth.

Grant Simmons:
Now, we're not saying that in every organization that that's necessarily true or false, but that's a question that a lot of C-suite asked because they don't have the deep expertise in SEO to understand what is good, bad and ugly. And so from our perspective, sometimes we can we can answer those questions really quickly, really well, and so they can understand whether, you know, they're getting the whole truth and nothing but the truth or they're getting just, you know, something that might be telling somewhat of the truth and not really what's happening holistically with their SEO campaigns.

Stewart Gandolf:
Now. And I would say a lot of times they're working with people that may be sort of the vice president level where they have or, you know, on the marketing team, but they still don't they still have to sell the case to the CEO. And so I would say for those people, if you're in that situation, it really does come down to our allies setting expectations carefully.

Stewart Gandolf:
So actually about what's real. And, you know, sometimes I'll say, well, do you want to be there or not in the day, you know, especially for keywords that are central to your business. Do you want to be there or not? Do you want somebody else to be there? Because there's that that has value, right? If you're not showing up for your own niche, that's a problem for me because you know, it's not a question of people finding your line looking for you, but doing their due diligence on you.

Stewart Gandolf:
And if you're not showing up to the terms and your competitors are, that's not good. That's a real craft.

Grant Simmons:
Yeah, that is a couple of questions here, actually. And just to your point, within two weeks before a surgery, about 60% of folks actually search about their doctor, the surgery and other stuff. So it's interesting to understand that the people search in time. And if you don't show up, it's a challenge. So one of the questions we have is what are the factors to be considered for a thorough comparative analysis?

Grant Simmons:
And it's a great question. So the main the main thing first off is understanding who your competition. So you have competition within your vertical that you know about and then you have search competitors. So the first thing to look at is go into Google and type in a few of your key terms to see who turns out. So it might not be in a local business, it might be a local competition in want to be the dentist across the road or the brain surgeon surgeon there across the city.

Grant Simmons:
It might be a national brand. So the first thing is competitive analysis. Understand who competition is. Secondly, you see what they rank for and does that align with your particular business? So you can do that by leveraging some tools like same brush or eye traps to give kind of competitive analysis, similar web things like that to understand what they're ranking for.

Grant Simmons:
And the next thing is from a competitive analysis standpoint is where are the gaps in the content that they have versus the content you have now? That's primarily what you're looking at as far as what you show up for and who shows up the terms you want to show up for. There's other things like the link graph, there's other things like brand awareness, There's other things like, you know, internal link, you know, or efficiency or the performance of their site.

Grant Simmons:
Those are all kind of secondary and tertiary. I really look at the content first as being the key consideration of a competitor analysis. So we're looking at who it is, where they're showing up for what you're not showing up for that you should do based on that competition.

Stewart Gandolf:
Very good. Another question about the Google business profile when a couple minutes we have available, which I to touch on that show.

Grant Simmons:
Any suggestions? My view of the Google business profile. It's it's the same thing in looking at the Google business profile there is a breakdown of different elements that you're likely to see there. Everything from directions to photographs to posts to the main category to reviews. The idea will Google business profile when it shows up in the search results has all those.

Grant Simmons:
So to get all those in there, there are a few things you can do if you go to the Google business profile, you go into your Google business profile, you'll see there are many different categories that you can jump through everything from times, closing times to upload photos. I suggest you fill out as much of that as is relevant.

Grant Simmons:
You then inspire your happy patients, Happy customers to give a review on Google and other platforms, because that's also a really important component of reputation and click right from that Google business profile might show your location is 100% correct, not just on your Google business profile, but across the Web. And one of the major things within Google business profile is that category and subcategory.

Grant Simmons:
Just make sure that's really relevant to you. You can start to type in and will make suggestions. Try a lot before you decide because Google is always adding new categories in there, but you want to make sure every adequately reflects the the niche that you're in, because that's one of the major factors of whether you're going to show up and whether your profile is going to show up for generic search queries.

Grant Simmons:
But that's probably a Google business profile in a nutshell.

Stewart Gandolf:
Very good. Well, hey, Grant, I tell you what, this has been fun as always, working with you and appreciate your content and flexibility if you're interested in, you know, our help, let us know. We are very proud of our team and our skills in this category, so looking forward to talking to you. Thanks, Grant. Again, our next webinar will be about branding, a completely different set of posts and content, but this has been fun and thank you to the nice comments.

Stewart Gandolf:
We're going to in the comments as well.

Grant Simmons:
Thanks everyone. Thanks very much. I take care. Just.