Missy Young 0:00
Welcome to the social feed podcast. I’m your host Missy, thank you for listening. In this episode. If you are a business owner and you’re wondering how the heck do I get Google to see me? We’re going to tell you all about what you should be looking for online. We give you tips, tricks, and some really great advice from Ruth Tambornino and Sam O’Byrne, who are a digital brand strategist at Hubbard Interactive. So let’s get into this week’s episode number 98. Auditing your online brand. So what’s the first thing you should be doing when you are auditing your online brand?Ruth Tambornino 0:31
I would say the first thing that’s that you should do is use an incognito window. A lot of people think that they’re coming up really well in search results for their business. But the reality is that they go to their website 12 times a day. So Google just keeps bringing them up at the top of the search result go I’m doing great. Yeah, yeah, it’s a false sense of vanity actually. So what you want to do is in case you don’t know what a incognito window is, is at the top right. corner of your screen, there’s like three dots, you click on that. And there’s an option for a new incognito window and the screens going to be black, so you know that you’re in the right spot. And that has zero cookies, no save data or anything. So it’s going to be a true search result. So you want to start there and just google yourself and see what happens. or Google your industry, maybe not your own website. And then also, maybe have some friends or you can do it yourself, but you want to search from different locations as well. So searching from the same location that you’re sitting in, is obviously going to bring up a search result. That’s because that’s near me, right? So that’s number one. That’s where you guys start. Yeah,Sam O’Byrne 1:43
I couldn’t agree more with that. giving yourself a search and to ruse point search both for your name and you know, possibly your name in quotations, maybe even your phone number or address, um, see how those things pop up or somebody might be searching for you, as well as searching for some of your top products. Top products or service lines, see if you’re showing up in some of those searches that you expect you should be. See where you’re showing up if it’s page two, or three or four might not necessarily be so valuable. And once you kind of can get to that, that basic, you know, how do I feel about my my search rankings or where I show up, then you can get into this a lot of tools that we use to really identify how many keywords are ranking for what those are and things. But oftentimes, the best place to start is just give yourself a Google search. Yeah,Missy Young 2:26
what’s like a good report card? Like you type in your name incognito mode, and you’re in the top 10? Or maybe your list says five? Is that good? Is that bad? Obviously, there’s room for improvement there.Ruth Tambornino 2:36
I would say that you want to be on page one for sure.

Sam O’Byrne 2:40
Yeah, I’d say if anything, if you’re searching for your own name, you want to have multiple listings on page one, you want to show up multiple times from different ways. One might be your website. Another might be a social property, or even depending on your industry, you might want your Yelp reviews to show up or your reviews from another another location. So it’s all those things where if you’re searching for your own branded name, I hope that it There’s multiple results that should show up on that first page. If you’re searching for your services, your main service lines you want those be first page, but you should expect to have more competition there too. So you might be, you know, two or three, even if somebody else is number one, that’s not the end of the world. But if you’re searching for your own brand and name, I’m definitely hoping you’re showing up right away. And again, multiple times

Pat Laeger 3:21
what’s what’s more important searching for your own name or searching for products or services that you offer?

Ruth Tambornino 3:27
That’s a great question. And it all depends on the business. And I would say as well, you want to be googling your competitors to to see how they’re coming up, because it isn’t just about how you’re showing up. It’s what it’s what are they doing, which also can give you some strategy on Hey, they’re doing this maybe I should be doing that too.

Sam O’Byrne 3:45
Yeah, and I would say that what tourists point one is it more important than the other. If you have a lot of brand recognition in the space, if everybody knows your name, then you definitely better be showing up for your name. But if you want to be reaching out to people who never heard of you before, then Those services are your product lines are going to be extremely important because if they don’t know your name, and that’s the only way you’re coming up in search, then you’ll never be able to expand your audience through searches on Google Yahoo. Bing,

Missy Young 4:12
so I searched for, like car dealer near me. And I get, you know, auto Mart, Sally’s automotive, Metro motor sales. But those are all in the map section, right? And then Luther auto, which is a pretty big dealership and town is down. It’s still on the first page, but it’s in the in the more organic section. How do you get in the map section? And how important is that?

Ruth Tambornino 4:32
Well, it’s really important, especially as we’re seeing more of those car dealership near me searches. So it’s actually become a lot more important than it even was maybe a year ago. But it’s important to remember that the map section and the organic section both have their own algorithms. So just because you’ve mastered one or the other doesn’t mean you’ve mastered both of them. So I will also say that you’ll see those rotate, just like the organic search Does so just because you’re coming up on the first page of the maps, you might not be tomorrow or next week or whatever. So this is an ongoing process that you want to be monitoring all the time.

Sam O’Byrne 5:09
You bet. I would say that as far as making sure you do show up in the map section. First thing is most businesses that have a physical location probably already have a maps listing, it’s important to make sure that you control it though. If it’s if it’s your business, you find yourself in maps, but you don’t actually have control of that, you will actually have the ability to go in there and say, This is mine. Google will go through a process to confirm oftentimes, they might send a physical postcard to the address listed things like that with a code on it. But it is important that you have control of that and that you use that to the best of your ability, add images that that you’ve added in, make sure that all of your about information there is accurate and optimized, make sure that your hours are accurate. Another thing is just like you can place ads and organic or above organic search results. You can place ads in the maps as well. So if you’re not showing up there, it’s important to Find a way to I guess that brings in another point of reviews on Google Maps are extremely important. No matter how great you feel like your web presences. If somebody’s going to find you a maps, a lot of times, the only thing to look at is that that those review numbers, and then they’ll they’ll decide what business they’re going with. If you have a 2.5. And you’re right, next, someone who’s got a 4.5 chances are, they’re gonna go see your competitor there.

Ruth Tambornino 6:23
Yeah, that brings up another good point about conversion. So coming up on the first page is great. But if people aren’t compelled to select you for various reasons, having the right content, having an SEO strategy, those are all really important, just to make sure that you’re actually getting people to engage with you. The other thing too, as far as placement goes, is we see a giant jump in conversions if you’re in the top three to five positions versus those five to 10 positions. So and it’s it’s harder for us to get a client when we’re doing SEO for them from page it’s harder for it’s easier. For us to get them from page to page one or even page four to page one, that it is for us to get them from position eight to position for that. So getting moving up that first page is is quite a challenge.

Missy Young 7:11
When you guys have talked about reviews, does the number of reviews you have factor into that algorithm? Like the more reviews, the higher you’ll show up? Or is that more just a vanity thing? So definitely, yes.

Sam O’Byrne 7:25
Yeah, so the number of reviews definitely matters. Google wants to make sure people are having a positive experience. Yeah. Because if people are using Google search, and then they find a business on Google search and have a terrible experience, some people might actually blame Google on Google does want that to happen. So yeah, if you have a larger number of reviews that are all mostly positive, Google is more likely to show you than a competitor

when they have the opportunity to show both of you.

Missy Young 7:51
So let’s move to the clients websites. So if you’re listening and you know you have your website, what are some updates or teach me some cheat tools you can use to make sure that set up for success. To be shown on Google,

Ruth Tambornino 8:02
one that I really liked, because it’s super easy is just think with Google, just, you know, you can just literally Google that. And you can do a speed test. For those of you who need a little help, that’s okay, if you do. But you’re just going to put your URL in there, and it’s going to run a report card for you. And it’s going to give you some information that may not make sense to you. But it’s going to make sense to a developer. If your site’s really slow or whatnot, it’s going to give you a picture of things you can do to to improve that, that you can share with the developer. That’s an easy first step.

Sam O’Byrne 8:32
Yeah. And I really like that because making sure that you have a good mobile sites feed in particular, is a big ranking factor for Google. So if you run one of those speed tests, like Ruth said, that should give you both a desktop and mobile score. And even if it does spit out a lot of recommendations that you might not directly understand. Hopefully, you have a web developer who can help you out and make some of those changes. Another tool that I might recommend right away would be well, when we’re talking about free tools, would be spy food spy FQ I’m sorry.

But anyways, it is a great tool because it can allow you to see up, you know, the number of the volume of organic keywords that you rank for, where those are within those top 50. As well as what some of those keywords are. The other big benefit, despite who is you can run your competitors websites through there too. And see, if there’s a big competitor in your space. And they’re doing things better than you, you can start seeing what areas they might be edging you out on. Now, with the free version, you only get some results. And if you want to pay for I think they might even do 30 days free trial, which might be enough for a small business, not for an agency like us. But for small business that might be enough. That kind of tool can give you a lot of great ideas on what you’re doing well, and if there if you’re not ranking for your service areas, maybe you better start writing some content about those and getting them online. What kind

Pat Laeger 9:57
of what kind of stuff is Google Looking for, like you said, page load speed? Like, is it number of pages on the website? Is it amount of videos, texts? Like what? What sort of stuff is Google really looking for?

Ruth Tambornino 10:10
It’s all of those things. I was just gonna say that another tool that that would be really invaluable to pay attention to is just your Google Analytics. Because user experience is where I mean, it’s probably in the top, you know, to Yeah, of what Google’s gauging. So those page views, the bounce rate, how how long somebody stays on your site, do they come back, all of those things are playing into it. And Google Analytics is free, for a reason, because they’re also capturing all your data and probably using it but but you still, that’s literally the richest information you’re going to get as far as how people are engaging, and how are they finding you?

Sam O’Byrne 10:47
You bet. And as far as the, you know, what ranking metrics are most important Google, there’s some, you know, well over 200 different items that they that they take into consideration with those rankings. And you have to remember that those are they’re taking those into consideration for both you and every other of those, you know, 3 billion listings that come up when somebody searches for something. So it’s important, they do take care of some of those big ones that are, you know, like page load speed, is it mobile friendly. Also, as far as the content goes, you want to make sure it is readable by Google, a lot of times people will upload an image their site, and those uploaded as you know, jpg 7438 dot image, or whatever. And if they do that, then Google when it’s reading through the site will look at that image as as blank space. And the only information it has is, you know, image 143782. jpg, or whatever I just said. And it won’t say that this is an image of, you know, a family in front of a home. So oftentimes, making sure that you feed that information to Google is really important. Which brings up another point of ADA compliance if you have a website that somebody who’s blind couldn’t use, for example, that can also have have impact. So you need to make sure that something like a screen reader Somebody who’s blind is using your site, it’s gonna be able to go through and read all the content to them. And Google Doc you if it’s not if it’s not a DA compliant, or if you’re trying to trick Google, they’ll also dock you for those things to how does

Missy Young 12:12
Google is there like another cheat tool that you can use to make to see if your site is a DA compliant or anything like that.

Ruth Tambornino 12:19
So

this is going to become a huge focus of conversation in the next probably, I mean, it already has become more and more but I would think in the next 18 months, we’re going to be hearing even more about it. And and the requirements are so vague, that it’s really difficult for just about any business. The first businesses that have been affected really by it, I would think are the health care industry and also legal, those are the ones that have been, I think making a huge migration to become a DA compliant. Whereas some of our you know e commerce and things like that are a little slower on the on the adoption rate there

Sam O’Byrne 12:59
you Yeah, if you for what it’s worth, there aren’t a lot of super easy tools for checking everything with ADA compliance. There are some for checking certain areas. For example, if you’re, you know, for users who are blue, green, or if sorry, red green color blind, eight, Adobe offers tools that allow you to make sure there’s enough contrast between your color and the backgrounds, the text color in the background, things like that. So that even if you are colorblind, it would show up appropriately. What I would recommend for that is a Google WCAG. Two point O those are the web access or website content accessibility guidelines.

Ruth Tambornino 13:34
Sounds fun. Yep.

Sam O’Byrne 13:36
Super fun. If

Ruth Tambornino 13:37
you have insomnia, you just pulled that out.

Sam O’Byrne 13:40
That does give you kind of the three main tiers of ADA compliance, everything from as I mentioned earlier, making sure that somebody who has a screen reader could that screen reader could read all the content to them all the way through to the top tier Where’s if you are doing a live video, it creates closed captioning for audiences who are You don’t necessarily need to hit every single one of those. But I would say that in those guidelines, they’re broken out by a double A and triple A, if you can hit all the double A ones, which most medium and small businesses can, you’ll be in good shape. If you’re a Coca Cola of the world, you better be hitting those triple A’s too. But

Ruth Tambornino 14:17
well, it does. I think the your, your online profile does play into how important this is. We actually have a client right now who was redoing their website. And it’s a giant project because they had a person trying to purchase a ticket on their website and was unable to do so because of a site issue that they had and file a lawsuit actually one. So it’s not, it is something that matters. It’s just something we’re going to start hearing more and more about because, sadly, that community of people who’ve kind of had to tolerate not being able to, you know, read things or whatever, they’re big, they’re gaining a voice, which is a great thing. Yeah. You definitely want that. We all we want Avoid lawsuits if we can and maybe just be more proactive, but it is it’s a really it’s a hot topic that I think it’s just going to gain more momentum.

Sam O’Byrne 15:08
Yeah. Especially with, you know, people accidentally discriminating if you only allow applications online, but then you have somebody who’s colorblind is cannot can’t go through your website or a blog can go through your website, you know, are you discriminating against that person? You kind of are, you know, not intentionally, but it’s one of those things that needs to be be taken care of just like having a handicap accessible building. You should it should be something that should be thought about every time you build a new website,

Missy Young 15:30
as long as we’re talking about all these super fun, regulations.

gd PR compliance, can you talk a little bit about what that is and what you need to do? Yeah,

Ruth Tambornino 15:43
just hide.

Sam O’Byrne 15:47
So yeah, with the GDPR it’s all around data privacy, and right now it’s a it’s those are laws that really only affect users located in Europe. If you have people coming from Europe, coming to your site, be sure to either block them so they stopped coming or, or get up on those those regulations really quickly because you do need to allow them to have access to all the information you’re collecting and the ability to to tell you, they don’t want you to collect it, or what means you want to collect it for so at its most basic, that’s pretty much GDPR. But it’s one of those things where it’s, it is an extremely complex, it’s so complex that they’re currently companies that all they do is GDPR compliance, consulting. So if you do work heavily in Europe, I would recommend contacting one of them and making sure your legal team or continental lawyer about it as well, because the fines can be astronomical and forth even though right now it’s only European users. America is likely to follow suit at some point once Congress gets their stuff together. So maybe and

Ruth Tambornino 16:53
I would also say that we’re seeing more and more websites and any consumer is seeing more and more that are just that’s popping up with You know, you gotta click that I agree to your you know, except the cookie. Yeah, you know, which is just a smart thing to do. So I would say as a business owner, just go through that step so that you are just covering yourself it’s

Missy Young 17:12
not that hard to hover interactive. com and our role to help our legal team was like you need to put verbiage on the bottom of your site about Yeah, so just like, Oh, I want to bring this up during this podcast.

Ruth Tambornino 17:23
Yeah. Sadly,

Pat Laeger 17:25
it’s kind of annoying from a user standpoint whenever I go to a new way. Except I’m

Ruth Tambornino 17:30
like rebellious a little bit. So I don’t really like to click the Yes Okay, you can have my information but you do,

Pat Laeger 17:38
I guess gotta go along with and it makes sense to me like, I want to make sure I’m giving my any info that they might get to the right people and not the wrong people. But still, it’s one extra clicks

Ruth Tambornino 17:48
voluntarily saying yes, you can have all my information. The truth is they have it anyway. So

Missy Young 17:55
yeah, so we talked a lot about keywords coming up in searches, using those keywords. blogging has been a huge thing that you to talk about constantly with clients. Tell me a little bit more about how someone can start a blog. And what’s the best way to get that content out there.

Sam O’Byrne 18:10
What I always recommend for a client to start a blog is come up with your top five or 10 frequently asked questions and write an article about them. It’s the easiest content free to write because you already know the answers. But then thinking with search terms in mind, so that the art is can I write this thing where it’s going to be SEO friendly, but also be consumer friendly? And that’s not always easy to do. But that’s where I would start with blogging. Yeah, I think that’s that’s a really great point, starting with those frequently asked questions, because it’s likely that people are searching for those as well. The other thing to note about blogging is creating a content calendar planning it out. A lot of times we’ll have clients were like, yeah, I run a blog and there, they started out good and they wrote three or four topics, then it just sat by the wayside because they were busy running their business. So if you write out a content calendar and have dates with specific categories, Want to write about specific topics you want to write about, you’re going to be much more likely to follow through with that content. I’d say Another thing to note about blog writing or any you know, I guess really blog writing particular is have a mixture of content have some that’s evergreen content like those FAQs or or you know, 10 things to help your basement never flood whatever that whatever your industry is. Something that’s winning might switch at any time as well as here and now content. Like we just hired missy. Missy is the best social strategist this side of the Mississippi.

Pat Laeger 19:31
I’m lying, different,

Ruth Tambornino 19:34
different podcast.

Sam O’Byrne 19:37
But it is important to have a mixture of those content that stuff that’s going to be forever there as well as some of you know if you have press releases or new products, things that are more important today than forever. Having that mixture of content does feel more natural to people than just having, you know 40 BuzzFeed articles in a row.

Missy Young 19:53
How long should have blog be?

Ruth Tambornino 19:56
That’s actually changed it like six months ago, it was like 200 50 to 500 words. And now Google’s looking for more like White Paper Type 1500 word type blog. So we still on average are sticking to the to 50 to 500. blog or word count for our blogs. But we are seeing more and more need for that longer. But it has to be strategic. I mean, you don’t just, you know, nobody’s going to read a novel. And you have to remember that, if you’re writing papers like that, it’s literally just for the search engines. It’s not for your consumer, because it’s unlikely anybody’s actually going to take the time to read all that unless you’ve got an extremely interesting topic, which certainly there’s some out there, but

Sam O’Byrne 20:36
yeah, I would say Tachyon to that, you know, write it as long as it’s necessary for the topic. You know, don’t don’t don’t just lengthen it just because you have to link those keywords in there saying, Yeah, just do do what feels natural, because again, people need to read it, if you want them to be engaging. Or if you’re writing it just for for the search engines, then you know, you might be a little bit longer but you Then you don’t want it to be you’re around an 80 page novel, if it’s never gonna be useful to anyone that’s not a productive use of your time

Pat Laeger 21:06
is the so you say you’re writing a blog for more so for the search engines, then then the user, if that page rarely gets visited on your site, is that going to hurt you in search results at all?

Ruth Tambornino 21:17
You know, my, my thought on on this whole thing is if you’re thinking about a topic, and you’re not sure if it’s valuable, type it into Google and see what the search results look like, if there’s 3 million websites that address that content, that might be a good one to

Sam O’Byrne 21:30
write. You know, you know, that’s, yeah, you can also use the tools like Google Trends and see if people are talking about that are searching for those topics already. So I would say, Yeah, I’d agree with that, you know, writing content just for SEO, if nobody’s coming to the site, it won’t necessarily hurt you, but it’s not necessarily gonna help you either. You do want to write content that is going to generally have people coming to the site and sticking around off of based off of what they’re reading.

Ruth Tambornino 21:54
So you could start with Google Analytics First, look at your pages, figure out how much traffic goes to each page. Start with the highest traffic pages, that would be a good place to start. Yeah, which

Sam O’Byrne 22:03
of those content pieces are keeping people around,

Missy Young 22:05
we had a client that we had worked with, and they had a recipe on their site about lactation cookies for a recipe for this was for a birthing center, obviously. And it was the highest visited, like blog on their site. So then they focused on more recipes from that, but I was like, interesting that that is what people are going to, like shock factor, are they Okay, are

Pat Laeger 22:29
they the only one who has content like

Ruth Tambornino 22:33
that later? Yeah.

Pat Laeger 22:36
incognito window.

Missy Young 22:40
So the other thing that I think is a huge trend, not even a trend, it’s just kind of part of naturally what everyone’s doing now is video blogs. Yes. How does that affect search? Because it’s not actual text. And what does that look like?

Sam O’Byrne 22:54
So I will say that with video, Google is actively working on trying to get their algorithms to Pull content directly from video so they can index the video that said, they’re working on it. They were also working on Google Glass couple years ago. And here we are, I would say that the best thing you can do is if you do have a video like that, make sure that a you have closed captioning. If it’s one that you’ve pre recorded, and you you know, write out the transcript of what was there if you can, if you can take the time, and add that as a closed caption or even have a transcript of what was what was read that that’s readable by Google,

Ruth Tambornino 23:24
even just titling your content correctly, can help. So I mean, it doesn’t even have to be overly complicated. It’s just rather than video ABC. It should be titled something that someone would search for. The other thing we kind of skipped over with the blogs was the snippets and the increase of volume of leveraging that kind of content for your website. It’s a way for especially if you’re in a really competitive heading, it’s a way for you to win some SEO without having this 18 month strategy. You know, if you can write the

Missy Young 23:57
so when you say snippets, like what part are

Ruth Tambornino 23:59
you so much When you search for something like, how do I fix my sink, and then you get these results of people also searched for, and those kinds of things, if you’re writing content like that, those while we’re all doing it, we just didn’t realize what they were. But But everybody, I mean, at least me, but I mean, you start all of a sudden you’re an hour later, you’ve looked at 25 different things because it’s intriguing and it’s a right in line with what you were looking for. And you finally find what you’re, you know, what you intended for. So,

Sam O’Byrne 24:28
yeah, and those featured snippets, it’s like I just googled, you know, best TVs 2019 and an article from PC mag comes up and it shows it shows a little bit of the article right there in the snippet in the search results. And I guarantee you that particular article is you know, considerably more traffic than anything else on this page, because it has the most real estate on the page. So anytime you have a you know, to roost point, if you can write content for for example, if you have a if you have something in your industry that is regularly searched for Nobody has possession of that event snippet, write a piece, write a blog that answers that question directly. And if you can get a lot of traffic to that, you might take that event snippet spot and then boom, that’s a huge boon to your traffic. Or if you look at some of those questions, and the what’s in that event snippet is from 2014, or 2013 is an old piece of content. Right? That because Google also wants up something real relevant and recent.

Pat Laeger 25:22
That’s a huge point, Ruth, is that what gets hit when you do a voice search for something? Say, Alexa? What’s the best TV for 2019? Is that event snippet going to bed?

Sam O’Byrne 25:33
It is what Alexa is going to read to you. Yeah, exactly. Same as a, OK, Google is gonna do the same thing. So if you are the one that invents of it, that means that Google trust that you’re the, you know, authoritative source for this particular question. And yeah, they’ll it’ll get read right off to you and again, now more people will go into voice search or using those devices that’s an even even more beneficial in just in a different way. Because you know, through your Alexia not likely to come visit my website, but still a few other ones. providing that information. It’s still a

Ruth Tambornino 26:01
whole nother conversation.

Missy Young 26:04
podcast.

Ruth Tambornino 26:06
Yeah, for sure.

Missy Young 26:08
Um, go back, jump back to the video piece. So you mentioned like putting the transcript on there. So I mean, sort of to record the video, because we talked about doing that with us podcasts like we should have a transcript on socially podcast. com. Yeah.

Pat Laeger 26:20
It’s not easy to type

Missy Young 26:21
that out. There are a couple tools though they use,

Ruth Tambornino 26:25
like

Missy Young 26:26
those tools that maybe you could use.

Pat Laeger 26:29
Yeah. So otter Ott er, is a good one that I’ve used before. It’s a app you can download on your phone and just hit record at the beginning of a meeting or your video recording or this podcast. I haven’t going on my phone right now to test it out and equal, and they do that one does a pretty good job. Sometimes it misses punctuation, and it doesn’t always recognize different speakers. And so you should proofread that but for you know, half an hour podcast episode that we’re doing, how detailed Are we going to be going through everything but for Two to three minute video that you’re putting on your website. Yeah, that’s definitely something you can go through and proofread. Even if you’re using one of those free tools, but there are paid ones as well. That you could actually Rev. com is one of them that that we’ve used, and you actually send your file to someone to

Ruth Tambornino 27:18
get a high schooler to do this.

Missy Young 27:22
Like an intern for

Sam O’Byrne 27:25
you pay per minute a video basically, and then they type it and send that transcript or those captions back to you. And so you know, that a real person is seeing those, so it’s going to be more accurate, but you’d have to pay a little bit of money for it. And again, that’s that’s important because you know, as of right now, with the podcast, we’re missing an entire audience of people who might be deaf. Whereas if we have that transcript on there, they could read through what’s what we’re what we’re talking about, and they could read through that information. Same with, same with we posted a video about something and we don’t you know, if we don’t have closed captioning on there, you know, that’s, that’s a lost audience, and an underserved audience too. So doing those things right. Will will help your rankings for that piece of content.

Missy Young 28:02
And then as far as embedding that video onto your site, do you guys recommend upload it to a YouTube channel and embedding it because of, you know, Google, obviously? Or would you do it just regulate? Just upload it to the site?

Ruth Tambornino 28:15
I would usually save embed it right in the site. But that doesn’t, I don’t know that there’s a hard fast okay.

Sam O’Byrne 28:22
to that one, I’d say I’d say it depends on the content. You know, if you’ve been bedded just on your site, and it’s just yours, there’s a couple of benefits to that. One is, you know, at the end of that video, it’s not going to show somebody else’s related content. And five minutes later, they’re watching somebody try to eat his own fist. You know, whatever they

Ruth Tambornino 28:37
are, they’re on somebody else’s website. Now. I mean, you don’t control that user really, if they’re, if it’s done differently, but you know, again,

Pat Laeger 28:45
lots of questions about you just going

Sam O’Byrne 28:48
What are you watching? And the second side of this argument is that you know, it is it can be beneficial to post them on YouTube because YouTube is a searchable by Google. It’s an owned by Google Well as if somebody might stumble upon your site based on the YouTube video then if you do it that way, because somebody because it would be again, indexed by Google. So I would say it depends on the concept. You could do both.

Ruth Tambornino 29:10
I mean, it’s not like one or the other. Really? You bet.

Missy Young 29:13
Yeah, exactly. And then Ruth, and you’re talking about those column snippets? So above that, Sam when you pull that up, there’s those Google Shopping ads. Yeah, yes. So let’s talk about that a little bit cuz that’s probably holder section of that. So those who have ecommerce, tell me about that.

Ruth Tambornino 29:28
Yeah, these are extremely effective, as you mean, we all know,

you don’t even go down the page anymore if you see the pictures. So we’ve got, you know, some clients that we work with that are are doing these ads, and they’re extremely effective, but they’re also very time consuming. Depending on how many skews you have this could be not even worth it. In some cases, I would say you would probably want to start with your top sellers, maybe your 10 top sellers and experiment with those that way.

Sam O’Byrne 30:00
Yeah. And it is worth noting that those are purchased spots, you know, just like

Ruth Tambornino 30:05
part of an AdWords Can you

Sam O’Byrne 30:06
basically You bet. And to this point you might even something you might want to put a, you know, an intern on or something because you can get stuck in XL hell for a while, try trying to set all that information up and feed it directly to Google appropriately so pulls the right image with the right text with the right link with the right pricing and all that so it can be it can be a beast, but they’re extremely effective for e commerce call. Yeah,

Ruth Tambornino 30:29
the other the other caveat there too is what are you using for your e commerce or your point of sale? So you know, those all have to play well together too. So that factors? Yeah.

Missy Young 30:40
Is there any other advice? We’ve talked about a lot of different things. So so far, a lot of like free cheat tools and and tips. But is there any other piece of advice you guys would give for someone who’s just really looking to do a deep dive audit for their brand?

Sam O’Byrne 30:53
Um, I guess I would say there’s two other areas that we’ve never really talked about for your digital footprint that are Huge one being social media. Obviously you want to make sure that you have strong social channels a strong brand and can be viewed to talk about that and think you might know a little about. But the other side is your local listings for any company that’s got physical locations that can be a big piece. And what I mean by that is, if you’re on Yellow Pages com or dex calm or

Pat Laeger 31:21
wait, those are still around,

Sam O’Byrne 31:23
say, yes, they search Citysearch, yes, Yelp, Yelp, it’s one of those things where you’re going to be on those whether you realize it or not. And it’s important to make sure that information is accurate has again the right address, and it’s all listed the same way. So you’re not 123 fake st st in one, but 123, fake St. STRET. And another you want to make sure that it’s it’s all the exact same phone number, the exact same address the exact same way that they list your business name. So it is important to go through that there are some tools to do that. None of them for free. that I know of anyways, but there are some like Yext is one that jumps out at me Yandex where you could you could pull one of those audits, it’ll say Yep, you listed it correctly and 90%. But these 10% needed an adjustment. And you can auto auto push that to repopulate all those sites. So it is worth wild and are worth noting that those local local indexing is important to

Missy Young 32:14
know, how do you guys stay up to date with all the changes with the algorithm? There’s certain sites you go to newsletters, you subscribe to give a shout out to the people listening because I need it to

Ruth Tambornino 32:23
help me out here. Search Engine Land is a huge one that I follow. And I get regular updates from I mean, Google sends out great content.

Sam O’Byrne 32:31
Yeah, I think with

Ruth Tambornino 32:32
Google, like you said with Google is a great resource. Sam’s probably got someone Yeah,

Sam O’Byrne 32:36
another one. I I go to those same two quite a bit. But another one that I go to regularly is Seo. Maz? Oh, yeah. Yeah, the Maas blog, they they even do a tracker where every time there’s an update to Google’s algorithm. They try and notate what changes they saw with their clients. So we might say this, this update had a had a strong effect on mobiles, non mobile friendly websites so this had a strong effect. sites that do with dentistry. So that can be there’s a great tracker tool on Ma’s calm that that you can use as well. But I would say Search Engine Land is a big one. They have varied opinions as to how they do.

Ruth Tambornino 33:12
They also it’s digestible. So you don’t have to be extremely techie to really understand what they’re talking about. But they oftentimes will know about things that are coming to not don’t necessarily know, in detail, but they kind of get water dropped like this is coming. And Google’s going to turn everything upside down again. So they’re, they’re a good resource. That’s my probably my big but I would also say we rely on each other, and we rely on our partners to know Yeah, because you can’t be an expert in everything. There’s just no way. Yeah, just try to stay as up to date as possible.

Missy Young 33:47
We’ll make sure to include all the links we talked about in today’s podcast at the show notes at socially podcast.com slash ep 98. Thank you guys so much for being on today.

Ruth Tambornino 33:55
Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

Pat Laeger 33:57
One thing I want to mention before we wrap this up is that we’re basically doing all of this that we talked about today on an individual level at our next Hubbard digital Academy, which is December 9 at Earl brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn center, Minnesota, and Ruth and then one of our other her interactive employees, Gina Anderson will be doing brand audits and going through a lot of these tools with specific brands. So if you’re overwhelmed by all of this and just need someone to talk to about it, as well as attend a bunch of great sessions throughout the day on video and influencer marketing and social media, and stuff that we didn’t get into today, but Harvard digital Academy is going to be a great opportunity for you to just learn in and dive into this world. And then we’re also doing these free brand audits as well. If you buy a ticket and right now, just for listeners of this podcast, we have a special discount code for you. We will give you 50% off the ticket price for HD a go to Hubbard digital academy. com Buy your tickets and use the promo code podcast 50 podcast 50 you’ll get half off your registration. And that’s December night. So we’ve sold out in the past, so don’t wait too long.

Missy Young 35:07
That sounds like you’ve done that a few times. Oh, wow, that radio is coming out. Make sure to subscribe to the social feed podcast with Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast player to get a brand new episode delivered right to every Wednesday. We’d love to hear what you guys think about these episodes, go to facebook and join our group. Search for social feed podcast and let us know what you think or give us rating and review on Apple podcasts. Thank you for listening. We’ll see you next week.

Announcer 35:31
The social feed is a production of Hubbard interactive with music provided by Minneapolis based artist john at well