the master plan in dominating local search results

www.SmallBizInternetMarketing.com.au 1

THE MASTER PLAN

Dominate local search.

Background

Pete: Good morning, everybody. My name is

Pete Williams and for those of you who don’t

know Dave, Dave Jenyns over there.

Welcome to the Small Business Internet

Marketing Workshop today. We’re going to

cover a lot of ground. But before we do, I just

want to share with you a story about two kids from Boston, Massachusetts. One young kid

is name Billy and the other young kid is Johnny. Billy is one of those kids that no matter

what’s going on his life, he’s always sad. No matter what’s happening, he is always

disappointed and grumpy, and sad. Johnny, on the other hand, is one of those really

bubbly kids who the kids just love hanging out with, the three-year-olds. It didn’t matter

what’s going on, he’s always happy and running around and smiling.

A couple of scientists or researchers from one of the prestigious universities in

Massachusetts recently decided to run a study on these two kids to get an idea of what is

causing their happiness and their sadness, and try to get an idea of what is happening.

What they did is they took the two kids into one of the lecture halls at the university over

there in Massachusetts and actually decided to see if their environment would change the

way they were in attitudes. So they took Billy, the first little kid, and said, ok, Billy, let’s go

down the hall and we’ll go into this room. In this room are going to be amazing toys. So

they took him down there and opened it up.

There were red racing cars. There were little water pistols. There were Xboxes and Wiis, and

every toy you can imagine. Basically, the entire Christmas list. So they said, Billy, half an

hour to an hour, go and play. Do what you need to do, and we’ll just come back and check

in an hour. So they left him there and grabbed Johnny, the happy, bubbly kid. They said

the exact same thing. We’ll take you down to the other end of the hall and put you into a

different room. That room was full of horse manure, nothing but horse manure. There you

go, Johnny. You’ve got an hour. Have some fun in the bunch of horse manure.


An hour went by. And throughout, the scientists are looking through the reverse mirrors

and all that sort of thing you see on sci-fi TV shows. Here’s Billy for the whole hour, plays

with one toy, starts crying, plays with another toy and throws it and breaks it. After about

half an hour, they said, we can’t wait the whole hour. This is just very strange. So they

opened the door and went in and sat down with Billy and said, Billy, what’s going on? You

seem to be upset. When you first came in here, you smiled because you were excited

about all these toys and now you’re crying and sad.

Every single toy had a problem. The red fire engine wasn’t red enough. The water pistol

didn’t shoot far enough. Every single toy had a problem. They sat there and scratched their

heads and said, this is a bit strange. Obviously, there is something a bit deeper here and

we’ll worry about it later. They went down the hall and thought, half an hour in a room

with horse manure is enough for one little three-year-old. They went in to see what

happened there, and they opened the door and walked in. There’s Billy throwing the

manure everywhere, having an absolute ball.

The manure is hitting the fan. It is all over the place. They turned around and scratched

their heads again, and they were as perplexed as they were when they saw Billy. Ok,

Johnny, come here a sec. Buddy, what’s going on? He was wiping the manure off his face

and having a great time. What’s going on here, man? He said, I’m having fun like you told

me to. What do you mean? Ok, that’s great. But you’re in a room full of horse manure. How

can you be having fun? He turned to them with a look of, you idiots, and said, with all this

in here, there has got to be a pony some place.

I guess what I’m trying to say with that story is that throughout today’s session and even

through life, always look for the pony. As Dave said earlier, at the end of the day, we want

to hear some of the pony moments you’ve had. So look through today and always try to

find that pony. Because I guarantee for every one of you and your business, there are going

to be two or three ponies today that you can go home and ride.


Pete Williams Entrepreneur, Author, and Marketer

Before we get into the whole workshop

material, I thought it was worth giving a bit of

background about myself, and about Dave as

well, to get an idea of how we started and

where we are and why we’re here today. From

my perspective, I’ll start with another quick

story. When I was 21 years old, I’d just got back from living in Florida, which was a great

time for a 21-year-old living in South Beach, which was a lot of fun.

I came back with a plan to move back to the US when I got another green card. At the time

I was working with Athlete’s Foot in the US and during university back in Australia. I helped

them run a store in Werribee which had just opened. It was a pretty slow store, so I spent a

lot of time behind the counter reading books and mucking around a little bit. I was reading

a book called ‘The One Minute Millionaire.‘ Has anyone read ‘The One Minute Millionaire?‘ Did

you enjoy it? An awesome book.

In there, it tells a story about a guy in the 1980s, early ’90s, in New York, New Jersey who

bought all the old timber that was part of the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge that goes

across the Hudson. He made some certificates up for the history of the Brooklyn Bridge and

a piece of the timber. He sold them for $20 each and he made about $2,000,000 by selling

used bits of timber. My eyes lit up in exactly the same way.

I said, this is a pretty good idea. What can be done here? So I started thinking about what

material in Melbourne can I actually rip this idea off and use myself? At that time, the MCG

was undergoing redevelopment for the Commonwealth Games we had here seven or

eight years ago. I tracked down the wrecking company that was doing the demolition of

the G. I came across them, spoke to them and said, have you got any timber left? Because

the Ponsford Stand was being pulled down and was actually made of timber. I had this

idea. I could do the same thing.

When speaking to them, they said, not only do we have the timber, we’ve got a lot of the

old MCC crested carpet that was in the members’ dining room. For those of you who know,

it is really an ugly carpet but it’s rather prestigious. It’s got the MCC crest all over it and

things like that. Instantly, I thought, sports memorabilia.


I went down the next day and bought basically

everything that was left at the warehouse at the time

and made a series of memorabilia pieces up with a

photo of the MCG, a piece of the crested carpet, a

plaque of limited edition, and then proceeded to write a

press release. ‘Twenty-one Year old Sells the MCG For

Under $500’. It went absolutely ballistic. Channel 7

News, Herald Sun and a bunch of different things, which I guess was a steppingstone for

me from an entrepreneurial aspect. Off the back of that, I got a book deal, wrote it four or

five years ago called ‘How to Turn Your Million-Dollar Idea Into A Reality.’ I’ve got a few to

give out today if anyone wants to buy one later. From there, I’ve just gone on to build a

number of different companies, a lot of them in the telco space.

At Infinity Telecommunications, we install and sell phone systems up and down the east

coast of Australia. We have a bunch of other small business units under that. We have a

website, Simply Headsets, which does about $200,000 a month of headsets, literally office

headsets from an e-commerce perspective. Most of the businesses I have for the four or

five different companies are primarily web-lead generation businesses. It’s a multimillion-

dollar company that does all its business primarily off referrals and internet leads. So that’s

where I come from. I thought Dave should give a bit of his story as well so we get some

context there and we can get into it.


David Jenyns The Complete Entrepreneur

David: Just to get an idea, has anyone read The

‘One Minute Millionaire?’ Well, I was reading

that same book as well and I was 21 at the

time. I came across this idea of Paul Hartunian

who was selling the Brooklyn Bridge and I

thought, how can I replicate that here in

Australia? I was driving past the MCG. At that time, they were doing the redevelopment of

the Ponsford Stand and I thought, this is a really good idea, I can’t believe no one else has

had this idea.

So I contacted the wrecking company. Firstly, my idea was I thought I’d get pieces of the

bricks from the actual thing and mail out bricks to people. I was probably not the smartest

tack in the box. I then ended up contacting the wrecking company and they said, look we

have pieces of the carpet, we have pieces of the wood. Maybe you should come down and

get that. So I went down there and loaded up Mum’s car with all this material and took it

home. I actually had a workshop that was up in Brisbane. It was Brad Sugars’ Billionaire

boot camp. So I flew up for that.

I had everything all set up. I had everything ready. I’d written my press release, ‘21-Year-

Old Melbourne Man Sells MCG for Under $24.95.’ I was going to sell my little pieces of the

wood. I was up on the Gold Coast and I had a few people call me up and say, hey, Dave,

have you given this wood to anyone else? I said no. And they said, someone is doing the

exact same thing down in Melbourne at the moment. I was planning to launch everything

when I got back. As you can imagine at the time, I was pretty gutted and Pete was my

arch-nemesis and rival.

Then we found our circle collided a few times at different conferences and that type of

thing, and we built up a little bit of a relationship. We started rock climbing together. We

had similar interests in the business and that type of thing as well. We formed a really good

relationship. We’ve kept in contact now and I suppose that brings us up to speed with how

we met and tried to make the lemons into lemonade.


I ended up still getting a lot of media coverage. When I

got back, I did the same thing. The media got a little bit

confused because it was both a 21-year-old launching

and selling bits of the MCG. They probably thought I was

Pete as well. That was one of my springboards to, again,

getting into the entrepreneurial game.

I have always been a little bit entrepreneurial. When I

was back at my school, Melbourne High, there was a guy there who used to trade the stock

market. He used to come into class and he’d tell me how much he’d made during science.

He’d made $500 here, $300 there. Just like a problem gambler, I suppose he would just tell

me about his winning trades, not necessarily his losing trades.

I thought, maybe this stock market thing is what I need to get into. I left school. Against all

the advice of my friends and family, I took out a $5,000 loan and did one of those weekend

become-a-super-trader courses where you go and learn the secrets of the stock market,

and then you start trading Monday morning. I quickly found out that it probably wasn’t as

easy as that and I realized that you needed to develop a trading float so you had a little bit

of cash to trade. So that went on and I suppose, to cut a long story short, I ended up

creating an info product in the stock market niche. Then I got interested in marketing and

internet marketing, and how to market that product online.

What you’re going to learn about today, you can have the best product in the world but

unless anybody knows about it, it’s not worth anything. That’s where I got interested in Jay

Abrahams, Dan Kennedy, all of the classic greats from direct mail, and then I shifted into

the internet space. Running alongside of that, a friend and I set up a rock and roll clothing

music store selling everything from AC/DC T-shirts through to Metallica T-shirts. We built it

up to three stores, about to franchise, got all the franchise docs done, dominate the

website online. You can search just about any band name and add the word merch after it,

and we come up number one.

From there, we got a lot of people saying, how is it that you’re doing what you’re doing

online? As a team, we sat down and said, there’s such a demand here because a lot of

people want to know how it is that we do what we do. So we brought everything that we

were doing in the stock market niche to local business.


As you’d imagine, the stock market niche, anything make money is a hypercompetitive

niche. So when we were bringing the strategies that we were applying over there, we

brought it to local business, working with dentists and working with audit consulting and

things like that. There are a few clients here today. We just absolutely dominated with it.

That was when Melbourne SEO Services was formed at the start of this year, and we

haven’t looked back since. It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster.

Pete: I’ll leave you in Dave’s capable hands.

David: Actually there was one other thing I was going to ask. I know Pete can be a little bit

modest at times. You left out you got some awards as well. You have to tell us about some

of those.

Pete: Last year, I was global runner-up in JCI’s Creative Entrepreneur of the Year awards. It

was pretty cool. I got to go to Tunisia. I had to look on the map where that was too. Then

I’m currently one of the finalists in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards this

year. This is all for the telco work and the real-world business, and the headaches that go

with staff and all the fun work. But I’m not going to talk about that today.

David: I think that’s what I like most about Pete and the way that we work. We work in real-

world businesses. You get a lot of people in the internet marketing space who are just

selling shovels to the people trying to mine the gold. But we’ve got real-world businesses

and that’s effectively how we learned this material. We’ve applied it and now we’re

bringing it into the internet marketing space.

Pete: So there’s not going to be a pitch fest or anything like that because unless you want

to buy a phone system, I don’t really have much to sell you guys. I can sell a headset. I’ll

leave you in Dave’s capable hands for the first session and we’ll get stuck into the gold. Get

your pens ready.

David: Excellent. The first thing that I wanted to do is just set the stage for you here. For

those of you who haven’t seen it, this is a video that Ben recorded and was a huge success.

When we decided that we were going to launch SEO Services, we had a little bit of a

brainstorm in the office. We thought, how are we going to get in front of these people and

make them understand that we know what it is that we’re doing?


There’s a huge shift, no one is using the Yellow Pages anymore to find business. Everything

is going online. So masterminding with Ben and one of the other guys in the office, we

came up with this idea to hit the streets and find out how people are finding local

businesses and products and services. I thought it might be a good way to start.

[Google vs. Yellow Pages video]

There we go. So that was the video that Ben brainstormed and masterminded that

launched Melbourne SEO Services. We ended up doing a press release for that one and it

ended up going extremely well, as you can imagine. So that’s what today’s all about.

Everybody’s starting to use the internet now to find local businesses and I want to take you

through pretty much how to dominate local search.

The right business

The first thing I wanted to talk about though,

was just the idea of making sure that you’re

building a good value business and you’re

promoting something that you believe in.

When I first got started in internet marketing a

long time ago, I tried promoting little $17 e-

books and trying to sell these public domain works that were many-years old. I look back

now on those times and think, I wasn’t really building anything of value there and I wasn’t

looking at adding something to other people’s lives. The best thing you can do, and good

advice on what to start with, is really start to promote something that you believe in.

Then once you find that business, and I know a few of you already have those businesses,

what we’ll try and do and what we’ll take you through today is to make sure that we

position you as the expert. When someone jumps on Google and they see you appear in

Places, the organic search and AdWords, automatically you’re the expert. People don’t

understand, as you saw in that video before, what causes a website to get to the top of

Google. They just trust that what it is that it is giving is the best and right choice. People

don’t understand.

By you being here, that’s like putting yourself at the front of the pack. A lot of people on

the street have no idea what SEO and search engine marketing is. Once you position

yourself as the expert, you can then start to take the lion’s share. When we went in and

analyzed the competitive landscape for the SEO market, I looked at what some of the other

businesses are doing. And when we put our value offering together, we didn’t put


ourselves as a super-cheap SEO company. We positioned ourselves as the expert because I

know we’ve got the content. I think once you start to prove yourself, you can charge that

premium price and take most of the business.

Dominate page number1

What we’ll be looking at today like I said, is

dominating these few places: Places, which

used to be Google Local, they’ve changed it

now to Google Places. I’ll show you how to get

your website to come up on that, and then

what are the algorithms behind that to make

sure you come up the top. Pete will be talking about AdWords and I’ll also be talking about

organic search. As you can see there, that is actually one of our clients at the moment, the

dentist. You can see him number one for the local Maps and you can also see him, we’re

currently working him up in the organic search as well.

Our business flow

The first thing that I wanted to talk about is just

map out exactly how we work with a client.

Now, I don’t want to hold anything back. I’m

going to tell you exactly, when a client comes

to me, this is exactly how we work with them.

When we first started with Melbourne SEO

Services, it was very much centered around SEO. I used that as an introduction to these

businesses to try and get some quick results. And then once they came on board, really

what we do is we provide a complete online internet marketing solution because we do a

whole lot more. SEO is just a little bit of the gateway drug.

Here’s the actual process that I go through with working with a client. I suppose the reason

I tell you this is a long time ago when I did a speed reading course, one of the first things

they recommend you do when you read through a book is to make sure that you read

through it really quickly. What that does, just skim through the pages, it’s almost like it sets

up, if you imagine this metaphor, a tree and all the branches coming off it are the core

parts of what it is that you’re going to be learning today. Once you’ve got those core

branches in place, it’s easy to hang the ideas, the leaves, off these branches.


So I’ll give you an overview here of how I work with a client. So then, throughout the day,

you can start to make sure you hang the leaves and the ideas in the right spot.

Understand products / services

So when a client first comes to me, the first thing, I need to make sure that I fully

understand the product and service. I need to get inside the mind of the target market,

what they’re going to be searching and to do that I first need to know what it is that we’re

trying to sell.

Research target market / competition / keywords

After we look at the products and services, shift to the target market. Like I said, get inside

their head. I like to create a little bit of an avatar. And this is something I got from Eben

Pagan, who’s another internet marketer, this idea of creating the ideal client, the perfect

client of who it is that you’re trying to attract. Give that person a name. Write down their

demographics. Write a story about them and explain their entire situation so you can get

into the mind of that person. When you create any marketing online, you always write as if

you’re writing to that person. That means you’ll connect with your potential prospect on a

much deeper level.

Pete: I was going to jump in there for two seconds and actually give you a real-world

example that we use in our telco company. We’ve got two avatars of our clients. One is a

28-year-old female who is a receptionist/office administrator who actually works for an

eight-person accounting firm. She has no idea about phone systems but is asked to get

three quotes. We do half our marketing to that person. The other half is a 45- year-old male

or female who runs the accounting firm, doesn’t know about phone systems but wants to

get one in quickly. That’s it.

So our marketing is targeted to those two people. I can even give you names. I can give

you what they wear and all that sort of thing, which we do as a bit of a joke to make the

session fun in the office. It’s all about getting a specific idea of who the person is because

you can’t market to everyone. The way an 18-year-old female responds, to a 55-year-old

male, to a 35-year-old mum, to a 28-year-old guy, is completely different. So the message

to market match has to be there. You have to actually know who your target market is and

actually really draw it up. I hope you guys actually take that and literally go home and write

up some actual ideas and do it because it makes a big difference.


David: Yes, and it’s good because it ends up setting the structure for everything that you

do. So then you really start to dig into researching that target market, finding out who your

competitors are. Once you know that person and really get in their mind, start to think

well, what are the keywords that they’re going to be typing into the search engine, so that

we can make sure that we’re targeting the right keywords.

Build a website

Then after that, I look at building a website with them. If they’ve got a website, we might

just take over their existing website and say, hey give us the FTP details. Give us your

cPanel. We’ll jump in there and make the changes. Otherwise, if they don’t have a website

and they’re coming to us fresh, we’ll suggest a WordPress install.

Install Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Then we’ll look at installing Google Analytics very early on. A lot of this material that I just

talked about, these are just the big branches and we’ll go deeper into these. But Google

Analytics, just to make sure that we’ve got a good baseline. We want to install Google

Analytics from day one so that we make sure we monitor the stats for the website. So that

way, we can see what it is that we’re trying to improve. You can’t improve what it is that

you don’t measure.

We also have a look at Webmaster Tools as well. Webmaster Tools is something that I think

a lot of SEO companies and internet marketers don’t use enough of. You really do get

some valuable information in there as to what pages are indexed, what pages are getting

links and those types of things.

Onpage optimization / conversion / enquiry form

After that, then I’ll look at the onpage optimization for the client. We’ve already done our

keyword research, so we’ll pick out which pages we’re going to optimize for what keyword.

Then I’ll also look at, this is everything that is happening on the website. We look at the

conversion. Conversion is something Pete will go through, how to improve the conversion

and make sure the client picks the phone up and calls you, and making sure that every

page has one primary focus and objective. Usually, I’ll put an enquiry form throughout the

website as well. On every page, obviously, I want either someone to submit an enquiry or I

want them to pick up the phone and call the business.


Google Places, Google AdWords and quick cash: promo / customer reactivation

After that, we list them on Google Places, and that’s making sure they get put into the

Maps. Then we do Google AdWords. And then we also do some quick-cash type work.

When a client first comes on board, one of the things you want to do to make sure you

retain that client is get them as quick results as possible. Typically, now I know with

Heather we had some quick results early on with SEO. We popped her website up and it

happened within a couple of weeks. Sometimes it can take longer. When a client comes to

me usually for organic search, I will educate them and say, it’s going to take between two

to three months before we see this.

This is something that we’re starting to build in now, the idea that we need to get the

client a quick turnaround as quickly as possible. One of the quickest ways you can do that

is through AdWords, which Pete will go through. Some other ideas are, if the client already

has a database, what are some of the things you can do by putting together an offering to

try and make sure that you just get some quick cash. The quicker that I can get a client to

see the results, they’re going to stick with us longer term. That is like Wave 1.

Off page SEO

The second part is we then start to look at

doing off page SEO. So that’s when we start to

do all of our link building and all of that type of

work.

Video marketing

Then we look at integrating video marketing.

Video marketing is pretty much the way everything on the web is going, and we’ve got a

session where we’ll go through how I do video. A lot of my clients, when they come to the

Melbourne SEO website, comment on the idea that the video connects. A lot of people

when they pick up the phone and talk to me, they feel like they already know me because

I’ve already educated them on the process of what it is that I do and I’ve also told the story

about who I am. So video marketing is absolutely key.


White paper, build database and autoresponders

Then we look at building a white paper and building up a database and an autoresponder

series for the client. Again, these we will go into a lot more detail. But the idea of the white

paper is so we can build up the database, so we can continue to market to them. You’ll find

when you look at the Google Analytics stats, some websites might have bounce rates of

40%, 50%. Half the people who are visiting the website just leave and they never come

back. So we need a way to capture that so that we can continue to build that. I suppose

that’s coming from my old-school direct mail days, the money is in that database.

Especially in the stock market niche, Meagan can say, whenever we launch a product and I

do it in the stock market space, it does incredibly well. And I don’t even need at this point

any joint venture partners or anything like that because we’ve built up that business and I

can promote to that list. So if you’ve got a small and local business, that’s what we want to

do for you.

Then integrating autoresponders to make sure that there is sequential follow-up so that

you’re constantly staying in contact with that client and you’re not manually sending

things out to them but they’re getting regular e-mails to their e-mail box that educates

them to you. You’ll navigate them around the website, hey, go check out the About Us

page, go check out the services, here’s a new testimonial, that type of thing.

Web 2.0: Twitter / Facebook / foursquare

Then we have a look at the Web 2.0 and analyze whether or not we think Web 2.0 is

appropriate for that type of business. It’s not appropriate for all businesses. It has to do

with coming back to that target market and determining whether or not our target market

is using those services.

Press release

Then we look at doing press releases. Press releases are really good. We use them mainly

for SEO. Pete’s going to talk about how he uses it for getting media coverage as well, so

there’s a double whammy effect there from doing a press release.


Regular blogging: top questions / interview experts / Google alerts

Then we build in a component and build in systems to make sure there is regular blogging

going on in the website because for SEO, it’s all about building pages. The more pages you

have, the more tickets you have in the search engine lottery. So basically we just keep on

building pages on these blogs. There are a few different ways I try and educate the client.

We can either handle that in-house but it is better if we can educate them on how to do it

and then they can implement it in their own business.

Build info product

The final piece of the puzzle, up until that point, is all about building a really solid

structure, a sound online business. And then at that point, and this doesn’t work for every

business, but I like to educate them on the idea of building info products. So if it does work

for your business, creating a DVD set, maybe writing a manual or something like that.

Typically, if you’re selling information, I’m not talking about just a normal book that you

might pick up at Borders, I’m talking about, for instance, a home-study course. You can put

high margins on those things.

A lot of our product, the delivery cost might only be $50, but we’ll sell it for close to $1,000.

That’s the type of thing where you can start to systematize and break down your business

into these info products. So when a client does start to work with you, you’ve got a bit

more of a back end.

Ideally, there will be a time when you will step out of the business because your info

business might take over your normal business. I think that’s ultimately what we want. You

don’t want to be stuck in the business the whole time. At least I like to build businesses

that run themselves, and then you can go off and do the things that you want to do. On a

really broad picture, that’s the way and the exact process that I work through with a client

when they come on board.


How search engines work

What we’ll have a look at now is just talk about

the way search engines work.

Just to get a little bit of an idea, some people

have been through the SEO Method in one of

my other workshops. I break down in a lot

more detail the way the search engines work

but really when you’re dealing with local business, we don’t need to go really deep into it

because the local business space isn’t a very competitive space. As long as we understand

the way search engines work, we can do a few things and get 80% of the rewards.

Based the way research reports work

The way search engines work, the whole algorithm is based on the way that research

reports work. When a research report is written in a particular industry, the way that

research report gains weight in an industry is once other people start to reference that

research report in their research reports. So the more that people start referencing and

saying, as Dave said in his paper XYZ and the conclusions that he came to, just like he said

that, I agree or I concur, it’s almost like that vote for that report. And the more votes that

something gets, the more authoritative that report gets.

The same thing when we drag that back to search engines. That’s exactly the way the

search engines work. Your website is like your report and then the other reports out there

are other people’s websites. When they reference you, then that’s going to boost your

website up the rankings.

Google's goal is to provide the best user experience

The ultimate goal of Google is obviously it just wants to provide the best user experience.

Regardless whether it’s Places, AdWords, organic search, it just wants to make sure that it

gives the best and most relevant information to the searcher. The reason it does that, it

knows if it does that, it’ll keep their eyeballs. Google is really in the eyeballs game. They

want to have as many eyeballs on their website as possible, and then they can sell the ad

space and sell those eyeballs to advertisers.


Google is quite transparent in a lot of things. If you have a look at a YouTube channel

where Matt Cutts, their lead spokesperson, tells a lot about the way the algorithm works

and lots of things you can learn. They’ll educate you on what it is that you should be doing.

What you want to do is just make sure, this comes back to the idea of building a good

value business that you can believe in and then you promote. Then if you just follow these

standard rules of thumb that we’re going to go through, you’ll be head and shoulders

above the rest.

Places, AdWords, organic are different but it's all about the keywords

At the core of all of the three places we’re going to dominate are Places, AdWords and

organic. It all comes back to keywords. The algorithm that determines what comes up

where does vary in each of the different areas, and we’ll talk about that. At the core of it,

that’s why you need to make sure you get that avatar right. Because once you get the

avatar right, then you can make sure that you’re building the right keywords to target the

right person.

Understanding keyword targets

I just wanted to talk about keywords and how I

do keyword selection. Understanding the

keywords, I suppose there are two types of

keywords that a lot of people think about.

Browsing phrase vs. buying phrase

There are browsing phrases and then there are

buying phrases. A browsing phrase is, if someone has typed camera in Google, and

imagine getting into the head space, almost imagine drifting out of your mind and then

drifting down into the searcher. What is the searcher thinking? They’re probably thinking, I

just want some general information about cameras. I’m still in the research mode. I’m not

at the point yet where I’m going to make a purchase.

That’s going to be vastly different from someone who is using a buying phrase. A buying

phrase might be the Sony Handycam HDR-S11. That’s when I’m looking for specific model

and I know exactly what it is that I’m going after. So when we target keywords, typically

speaking, the browsing phrases may have a higher number of searches but they’re not

going to convert nearly as highly as one of these more targeted, longer tail phrases.


When I have a look at working with local business, the same sort of thing applies and I try

and get in the head space of what would the person who wants to find a dentist be

looking for. They might not necessarily type dentist. They’re looking for a dentist in a

specific area. A lot of what we actually do with local business, it’s all about geographic

targeting and making sure we’re targeting the right suburbs and the right spaces.

So again just talking about imagining yourself drifting out of your head, down into your

searcher, and imagine yourself as you are that person. That’s the best advice I can give you

on that.

Building your keywords

As far as the way I build keywords for local

businesses, it varies significantly when I

compare the way that I build keywords for the

stock market niche and some of the other

niches that I operate in, relative to local

business.

How is local business different? Traffic + conversions

When we first started working with a few clients, we installed Google Analytics and I was

monitoring the stats. I’m used to dealing with websites that are getting over a thousand

unique visitors a day because I’m in these hypercompetitive niches.

Then I come to the dentist’s website, and then I see a spike. Sure we doubled the traffic

and you’re now getting 30 uniques a day. But in my mind, I’m sitting there saying, what’s

going on here? Then when I talk to the client, the client is absolutely over the moon

because they’re so much more highly targeted. If someone is searching ‘dentist South

Yarra,’ they’ve got a real need that they want solved right now and they convert incredibly

highly. So when you compare doing local search and local online marketing, you can get a

lot less traffic but they’ll convert at a lot higher rate.

Identify top services / products

So the way that I actually go through and identify what keywords I’m going to work with

for a particular client, we already have an idea as part of that initial research to find out

what are their top products and services. I make sure that I understand those products and

services.


Use Google free keyword tool / Market Samurai

Then I jump over to the Google free keyword tool. If you haven’t seen that, just head over

to Google and search Google free keyword tool and it will be the number one listing. Or

you can use Market Samurai. You can get away with using the Google free keyword tool,

it’s free, it’s a good place to start. Once you say, yes, this is something that I want to get

into, you might look at investing in Market Samurai.

Question: Could you explain really quickly what the keyword tool actually does?

Answer: Yes, let’s just quickly pop over to Google.

So the main reason I use this, I’ll go for the root

product and service that the client is offering. So

it might be root canal or it might be ISO

consulting. I’ll find out what the root service is

they’re looking for, and then I’ll search it within this free keyword tool to determine if it’s

something that someone is searching. Now, how this varies when I compare local business

to my stock market business, I do a lot deeper analysis to determine what keywords I can

go after based on how much competition there is.

Like I said, in the SEO space and also the stock market space, we’re going after some pretty

big competitors. So I need to make sure I’m picking the right keywords that someone else

hasn’t built a whole lot of back links to and done a lot of SEO work. But when I work with

local business, it’s completely different. You should be able to dominate, Melbourne, insert

industry name, like that. I’ll always go for the most competitive phrases I can find.

So for example, having a look, you can turn on some columns and turn off columns. I’m

just having a look under customized columns here. Just make sure you turn on your global

monthly view. If I have a look here, these are the types of phrases. I just want to make sure

that I’ve got phrases that people are actually searching for. So if I had a decision that I

needed to make, am I going to choose implant dentists or am I going to choose cosmetic

dentists because I’ve only got a certain number of pages that I can optimize on the website

until we start building the blog with them. I’ll go for cosmetic dentists.


So in the local space, I always go for the most competitive term that I can because we’ll just

drop in the area modifier in front and you should have no worries going for it. If you think

about the psychology of the way we selected Melbourne SEO Services, think about that.

We went for Melbourne SEO Services, we dominated that space almost straight away for

Melbourne SEO Services and we’ve only been in the SEO space for a few months after the

start of this year.

We’re already in position number one for that. The good thing about targeting the

keywords as I’m teaching you how to do it now is then, once you do that, all of your link

building benefit that you’ve been funneling back to that page going for Melbourne SEO

Services, we can now break the word down and go for the tighter niche which is SEO

services.

We’ve already got Melbourne SEO Services and all of that link building and good work that

I’m going to go through this afternoon. All of it still applies and runs over to this keyword

because it is like a broken-down version of it. So now you can see we’re going for SEO

space and just under the Maps, and we’re on Google Local there. When you consider we’re

going up against SEO companies here in Australia, we’ve been online for three months and

we’re already just behind LTSEO - Mark and Dan, I’m coming for you. We’ll get that spot. I

think if you keep that in mind, going after these local markets, it’s a walk in the park.

Target best keywords and add area modifiers

You need to just target the best keywords and add the modifiers. With the modifiers, I’d

start off by going for Melbourne as your modifier if you’re in Melbourne, or whatever the

biggest area is in your local area. Then later on, we will go for the suburbs. You might go

for Preston. You might go for Doncaster. All those types of things. But we’ll do that in the

blog once we start to build ongoing work.

Question: With the modifiers, and you just mentioned suburbs, how do you name or group suburbs? Is Eastern suburbs too big?

Answer: You have to again, go out of your mind and drop down into the user. If you can

imagine the user typing in Eastern suburbs printer, then that’s maybe something you

target with. I think people would be going more, not so much area but more specific, a

suburb name. So Doncaster, Templestowe, Greensborough. The way that I start it is, I look

where the local business is, I bring it up on Google Maps, I look around that area and

identify what suburbs are within a five or 10-kilometer radius and they’re the ones that I

start targeting first.


Pete: I was going to say, to take it back a level for those who don’t know the whole

keyword SEO relationship, the way that I like to think how Google works, is a bucket

system. It’s a very basic way; I think in simple ways. Every time someone searches

something in Google, whether it be dentist South Yarra, dentist Melbourne, they’re

separate buckets. Every single search phrase types into a separate bucket in Google.

Basically what Google does, it will send little spiders to crawl the web and they just get to

websites through links and follow that. They actually read the pages on your website and

then look at those pages and the words that are on the website and work out what bucket

it should fit in.

So they’ll say, this page talks about dentist Melbourne. I’ll put it in a dentist Melbourne

bucket. Then I will look at dentist South Yarra, I’ll put that in the dentist South Yarra bucket.

Then basically what happens is, it’s the links and the votes that Dave spoke about before

and we’ll go deeper into later, that actually works out where you rank in that bucket.

So what you’re actually trying to do is work out which bucket you want your site to actually

be in. By saying I want to be in dentist South Melbourne, I want to be in dentist South

Yarra, dentist Port Melbourne, whatever it might be, you’ve got to make sure that your site

is actually going to show Google that you’re going to be in those buckets. So if people are

going to search for, are people looking in the bucket, dentist Eastern suburbs? That’s what

that keyword research tool will show you, how many people are actually looking for that

word? How many people actually go for that bucket and look in it? Does that make sense

to a lot of people?

David: You’ll find at the moment we’re still putting those branches into place and

everything will start to fall together as well. One particular client that I first started to work

with, it’s funny, working with a client when they’ve worked previously with an SEO

company, there are a lot of people out there who don’t really know what it is that they’re

doing. They’re still fumbling around and not understanding what the target market client

is.


Don’t tell me, show me

We started working with Barney’s a little while

ago and the keywords that they were targeting

were stickers, brochures. Now here’s a printing

company and he’s actually a print broking

company. So we talked about, well, what is

your target market really going after? He

wanted to have people looking for print broking, print services and those types of

keywords. It was a different target market to what it was the previous SEO company was

targeting.

So we jumped in and rejigged the keywords that we’re going after and he’s now starting to

get the clients that he was after because we’re now targeting the right keywords. We put

some different modifiers and things like that in there for areas.

The perfect domain name

I suppose when I think of building a website,

and you go back to, I talked about how I work

with a client. Firstly I understand the target

market. The next thing that I do is I look at their

products and services and I do the keyword

research like I talked about. Then if they haven’t

got a website, then I’ll look to register the

domain name and help build it up.

Brand domain vs. keyword domain

I wanted to talk briefly about what you should be doing with your domain names. With the

domain name, typically if it’s a local business, unless you’re starting a business from

scratch, it might be a good idea and what you’ll learn and walk away with from today, you

might want to build your business name around some keywords that your searchers are

looking for, because that way you can incorporate it into your domain name and

throughout your website. If you’ve already got a business, and the business is already

named, typically, I’d just go for the brand name.

You can still rank a website for any particular phrase even if the keyword isn’t in the

domain name. Sometimes if the keyword is in the domain name, you’ll just get some quick


wins, easy wins. Again coming back to Melbourne SEO Services, that’s why we built the

name around Melbourne SEO Services.

2-3 words long and avoid hyphens

Usually I go for two to three words long, I avoid using hyphens and it’s probably not the

best example, Melbourne SEO Services. We thought about this after the fact. We probably

should have gone for .com.au. We did register the .com.au because it does play a little part

in the algorithm but we’d already started building links to it and I thought, we’re past the

point of no return here, let’s just build it on .com. So if I had my time again I’d go .com.au.

Especially for local business you’ll find, especially when you’re looking for local business

that is area-specific, it’ll help in the organic searches and also help in your Google Places

listing as well.

Go for .com.au mainly because that is what everybody knows. Up until recently, to register

a .com.au name has been quite difficult, you’d have to have a registered business name in

the name of the domain name that you wanted to register. The rules have been relaxed a

little bit more. You still have to have a registered ABN number here in Australia, so it makes

it quite difficult for people overseas to come in here and purchase our domain names. This

is brilliant because now we can get really good domain names.

If you compare other industries with .com over in the States and things like that, you try

and get ‘painter La Jolla’ or lajollapainting.com and they’re all gone. All the suburb-type

things are gone. But here in Australia, because of that little hurdle, there’s still a massive

hole there that people can still jump into. We’ve just registered a whole lot of domain

names which is Melbourne and then, insert industry name, .com.au. We’re getting

.com.au’s. You want to go for .com.au because that’s what sticks in the mind.

That said thought, .net.au. Look, if you can’t get your perfect match do that, and then .org

if you’re more of an organization or some sort of charity or something like that.

Question: Someone was advising me the other day about creating I guess you could call them phantom websites with names of your products, various products that you’re

offering and having that linked to your website as a way of building ranking. Is that something that you guys do? For example mine would be melbourneinternalauditing.com.au which has nothing behind it

except it just links back to my website.


Answer: Some people will register those domain names because domain names that have

the keyword in it can rank really quickly and you don’t have to do that much to it. So they

will put what’s known as a 301 redirect and when someone clicks on it, all it does is

redirect back to your main site. It is a strategy that you can look at. Often though I find, the

best thing that you could do is maybe pick out three or four keywords or your prime

products and services, register those domain names and you might build up a little bit of a

mini network. So rather than doing redirects, install blogs on each one of those.

It’s probably a little bit more of an advanced strategy and only if you’re going after

competitive markets. When I think of my stock market niche, I’ll build up a whole network

of websites to help my money site, my primary website rank. I’ll go into a little bit more

detail when we talk about off-page optimization, but for most local markets, I’d probably

not worry right from the start.

It’s probably better just to focus in because often if you try and be sneaky and register too

many domain names, you spread yourself too wide, and you would have got so much

better bang for your buck if you focused on one domain name, did all your linking and all

that sort of goodness there and then built up the back end and going for those longer tail

phrases through the blog.

Question: Just on that point, I was of the understanding that if you did buy domains names and put nothing behind them, and directed them off to your site, that Google was now

smart enough to say, we know what you’re doing. Is that true?

Answer: Some of them will still rank if it’s got the keyword in there and you can do some

link building to them to get them ranked. I think they’ll wise up to it because if you think

about it, again, coming back to the idea of what’s Google’s intent? It wants to provide the

best user experience. I think it’s an ok strategy and it will work and it still works at the

moment, but the longevity of it over a long time is doubtful, I agree.

So that’s why typically I don’t recommend 301 redirects. I recommend building a blog on

the back end, building it out adding value and then using that as a feeder site, a site that

drives the traffic back to your primary site. Good point there.

Question: Do you always lead with the geo modifier?


Answer: When you look at doing some keyword research, we’ve tried swapping, having the

geo modifier up the back, SEO services Melbourne versus Melbourne SEO services. Google

will lump the two together so it’s hard to get the Analytics to break it apart. In these spaces

it’s still not very competitive, so at the moment, I would think in my mind, I would say, if I

can get a .com.au, that’s my primary preference. It doesn’t really matter either side but,

let’s say one side’s gone, like melbourneseoservices.com.au is gone, shift the keyword over

to the other side seoservicesmelbourne.com.au, because I like the idea of .com.au.

At the moment it is still very early days. I think over time, if I look at some of our other

spaces, sometimes if you do a keyword search and the keywords are in a different order,

you’ll get two different results on the results pages. I think it’s still very early days. In time

that will happen though.

Pete: I just want to touch on the buying domain material. I think it is a wise move to be

buying up domains right now in your niche and in your space and just doing 301 redirect,

not for any other benefit than just owning the space. Forget the link benefit that you may

or may not get, it’s actually wise to be going and buying as many domains as you can

because it is $25 a year. Go and buy 10, $250 a year, it’s going to stop your competitors.

Back in the 1930s, if you could buy a beach front property for $10,000, you’d do it. It’s one

of those things, you do it while you can because there’s not much competition out there.

There are people out there who are literally building business models around ranking for

Melbourne dentist and then just selling the leads. They’re not actually dentists themselves,

they are just building web-based portals and selling leads and they’re coming quickly. So I

think it’s wise to go out there and grab some of these domains that Dave’s talking about,

so you just actually own the property.

David: Yes, and the idea as well, when you actually come to develop the site and build the

blog on the back end, if you’ve registered that domain name a long time ago, you might

just register the domain name, install the WordPress blog, put up one piece of content, so

that way Google can say, yes, there’s content on this website, let it age. That way when you

do come round to developing these separate networks, if it’s something that you want to

do, then you’ve aged these domain names and it’ll just make the SEO that little bit easier.

Question: When you say age the domain name, if you buy a domain name and just hang onto it, don’t do anything with it, does that age it, or do you have to do something with it

to age it?

David: Just owning it will age it.


Question: You don’t have to post it somewhere?

David: Yes, the way that I handle it is, I will register the domain name. Initially when you

throw it up, you might as well put the 301 redirect to get all that goodness going over.

Then when you’ve got a little bit of time, just put one article in there so that way, one

page, doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just put an article up there on topic. That way

when Google spiders the website it will say, ah, this website has content and of value, and

then over time, that’s the best way I find to age it. Just registering it will age it as well.

Pete: Google just basically likes maturity of the domain. So if you buy a domain name and

put a website up, they’re not going to rank it straight away for the term you’re trying to

rank for. One of the many factors in the algorithm is that the site has been around for a

while and a one-page site is enough to tick that box out of the five million boxes that make

up the algorithm. So it’s one of the things you should do.

Building a strong structure

David: Once we do that, then I start to work with

building the client’s website up. Usually if you’re

a local business, they’re the areas I’ll have tabs

for. If you have a look on Melbourne SEO

Services, that’s what we’ve got: a home page, a

services page, a client’s page which is a little bit

of a testimonials type page, and the About page which tells your story, the Contact page,

and then a blog on the back end. I’ll talk only briefly about these.

Home, Services Clients, About, Contact, Blog

On the home page, usually I like to make that the primary area that I’ll capture the lead. I’ll

encourage them to sign up for their free white paper, I’ll introduce the idea of what our

product and service offers. I’ll usually do that through a video and then a little bit of

supporting text beneath it. Then I’ll have a services page. You might just have one services

page that lists all of the services that you do and then later on you’ll look at building out

individual pages for each service.


The way the Google works, we want to make sure that each page should only be optimized

for one keyword. When we first assign keywords to these top-level pages here, you want to

go for your big-money phrases, the ones that go, these are getting lots of searches. Then

you add your modifier in front: Melbourne SEO services, ISO consultant Melbourne and

then you make sure that those big-money phrases get optimized for each one of those

pages. I’ll talk a little bit about optimizing in a sec. You might have individual pages for the

services as I mentioned.

Jump over and you have a look at Melbourne SEO

Services. Some of our clients, for obvious reasons, we

can’t share their websites. Some clients are happy for

me to talk about it but if you follow this same sort of

structure, for most businesses, this will work. We

have, services, clients and we have the workshop in

up the top there and the About Us.

The About Us is really important, you want to position yourself as the expert, tell your

story. People don’t do business with other businesses. They do business with people. They

want to connect with the people. So when you go to Melbourne SEO Services and you

navigate round, it’s all about connecting and building up who I am and what it is that we

offer. You want to do that on your About Us page as well.

There are subtle things that you might not even notice, and this is what Ben has brought

to Melbourne SEO Services, we’re constantly doing branding. These colours are matching

our logo up the top here. There are a few subtle little things like that which all ties in and

gives it a polished look.

Easy as 1, 2, 3

1st Tier Primary money phrase / domain

The way that I’ll structure this, I’ll just draw it up really

quickly. If we think of our primary money phrase, it’s

going to be your home page. You’ll optimize your

home page for that primary keyword. So figure out

what your biggest product and service is that you’re

going to be offering, then you put your keyword

modifier in front and that’s what you’ll optimize page

one for, your home page.


2nd Tier - Primary services + modifiers / pages

Then you have the second tier pages that I talked about which are your About, your

services, your testimonials, those types of things. What you want to do at that point, you’ll

think, what are my other big products and services? Even though the About Us page may

not be to do with that product and service, I’ll still optimize that page for that.

So SEO experts might be one keyword that we decided, yes, that is something we want to

go after. So it might be Melbourne SEO experts and then I’ll optimize the About page, I’ll

optimize the Contact Us page. All of these pages, these top tier pages, they’ve become part

of your top website navigation, so they’re going to get most of the links from Google. So

it’s a good idea to have these primary phrases that you want to rank for as close to this

home page as possible.

3rd Tier - Longer tail + suburbs / blog

The final one, which is the third tier, is build a blog and underneath that you’ll start to post

regular content which are going to be all the third tier type keywords which will be, for

example, dentist, Doncaster, those suburb type keywords. From a structure point of view,

that is how we set it up.

Onpage SEO

The last thing that I will talk about is just a little bit

with onpage optimization. To break it down into those

steps: step one, get clear on who your target market is,

step two, identify what it is that is your biggest product

and service is that they’re targeting. Then you’ll create

your website, you’ll assign those keywords to the

pages on your website and then you do the last thing

which is called on page optimization.

1 page... 1-2 keywords and unique page titles

Onpage optimization is basically taking the keyword that we’ve identified and then making

sure that we put it in the right places throughout the website so when Google comes to

crawl that website it says, oh, this website is about Melbourne dentists or dentists South

Yarra and pretty much it is educating Google that, yes, this page is about the keyword that

we’re trying to optimize for.


You’ll pick the keyword and then all you have to do is, every page should only be

optimized for one keyword and maybe a couple of variations of that keyword. Some

people I’ve seen optimize and they’ll try and go for six or seven different keywords. If you

do that, Google will just get confused and it won’t know what it is that you’re trying to

optimize for. So get really clear and laser-focused on what keywords you’re going after.

Then you might have some slight variations of that keyword.

Let’s have a quick look.

Pete: While Dave’s doing that, I’ll give you some

context. This is what Google reads on your website. It

doesn’t actually read the pretty pictures and all that

material, it reads the text behind it, so it’s important,

we’ll talk about this throughout the day, the things

that the user doesn’t necessarily see that Google

actually reads.

David: Yes, and so for my website here on the home page, the secondary keywords really

are just variations of that primary phrase that I’m going after. The primary phrase I’m going

after is Melbourne SEO Services, that is front and center. Then my variations are SEO

Services, Melbourne search engine optimization. So you can see really they’re just

variations on that primary and that’s the way that you should be looking at doing your

keywords.

Then you just want to make sure that you grab that keyword and you put it into the title

tag. I’ll probably send out a little tutorial for you guys after this workshop where I can break

down and actually maybe have a look at a webpage and say, here’s where the title tag

goes, what a meta description is. But you take that keyword, you make sure the keyword is

in the title tag, you make sure it’s in the meta description and the meta description is what

appears in Google’s search results.


Meta description (160) & meta keywords

The meta description is something really key.

You want to make sure that you write that

from a copywriting point of view. I lifted my

mind, I dropped myself into the person

searching and I thought what it is that they’re going to be looking for. Number one,

Melbourne SEO Services, they’ve typed in Melbourne SEO Services so I want to give that to

them front and centre straight away.

Then basically what I like to do is, in the description it’s almost like an extra sales point.

Want your website to be in position number one on Google? Of course, that’s why they’re

looking for SEO Services. So it’s really important that you make sure that this is optimized

and you also put the keyword in that meta description as well.

300 words minimum

Make sure that there is a minimum of 300 words on the page. Google likes to make sure

there is some content on there. We talked about this the other night. A lot of people when

they first start building webpages, they might build them completely in Flash. Search

engines can’t read Flash. So you want to make sure there is actual content. By Flash I mean,

if I had a website that just had a video, Google can’t read that video. So you want to make

sure that you’ve got some content and text that Google can read. Have a minimum of 300

words.

Keyword density (x3 per 500 words)

Keyword density is just how many times the keyword appear throughout the text on the

page. You just don’t want to have that keyword spammed in there. I don’t want to say,

Melbourne SEO Services is the number one SEO firm. Melbourne SEO Services can get you

the results that you need. Melbourne SEO Services… It’s not natural.

Whenever I think of SEO, I think usability as number one as well. You always want to think

about the user because that is in line with what Google thinks. Google wants to provide

the user with the best experience. So when you create everything that you do, make sure

you create it with the user in mind and then SEO comes second.

Question: From a usability point of view, I find it’s good as a user, not to have too much text. If I go to a website where there are thousands of words, I’ll just click away because I just can’t deal with it, it’s too much. But it seems as if Google wants there to be quite a lot of text. A lot of websites which rank well have a lot of text. How do you balance that, the

usability versus making Google happy?


David: Yes, and we’ve all been to those long form sales letter pages where you have to

scroll 20 minutes just to get to the bottom and they’ve just written tons of material. I think

there is a little bit of a shift away. I’m the same, I don’t read long form sales letters. I like to

see a bit of a combination between video and text. You definitely want to have both. You

can rank a website even if it doesn’t have any text on the page. You’re right, you’ll do

better if you have some text on the page.

Just try and be as concise as you can be, but it really does depend on what the topic is. If

I’m writing a post for my blog, I don’t mind if the copy is a little bit longer. If it’s for the

individual products and services page like on Melbourne SEO, you’ll see underneath the

video, there is some text there. Find that balance. I don’t know if you’ve got anything to

add to that, Pete.

Pete: Talking from a conversion perspective, let’s forget SEO, that’s Dave’s focus, it all

comes down to the product and the niche. In terms of the telco material, we’re selling

$10,000, $15,000 phone systems. People want to read material before they spend $10,000.

So this comes down to testing and split testing and that kind of thing which I’m going to

touch on in my next presentation. It always comes down to working out what you’re

selling and what it’s worth. If someone’s going to buy a $10 dog leash, they’re not going to

read 25 paragraphs, yes, it’s red, it’s this length, it’s going to fit, perfect, I’m done. It just

comes down to what you’re selling.

H1 tags, bold, italics, image tags and keywords in URLs

David: What I’ll do, I’ll create a little tutorial for you guys, you just want to make sure you

put the keyword on the page. There are a few other html formatting tags here in your H1

tag and bold and italics. This is the type of thing, if I create a video for you, if you’ve got a

web guy, just tell him to watch the video before he actually goes ahead and makes your

page. Then if you can embed your keyword into the domain name, the URL, that’s good as

well, melbourneseoservices/seo.html is good.

Pete: I’m just going to do a soapbox rant on the whole designer thing. Don’t rely on your

website designers to know these things. A couple of years ago now it would be, we hired a

web developer who came straight out of university, so she did a three-year course in web

development and came to us.


The first day she built a site in Flash which basically means Google can’t read it. We started

talking about SEO and explaining this to her and how it works, and she had never heard of

it. A three-year university degree on web development and had no idea about these sorts

of things, about conversion, about SEO, about html and that kind of thing. She knew how

to build a site in html but not what to do to make it work.

So you’ve got to be very careful. Don’t trust your designers necessarily because they like to

do pretty things, not effective things. Their egos are all about making things look pretty.

They don’t care if it’s going to convert at the back end, they want it to look pretty and get

paid. So you need to be really careful about that.

David: Excellent. I suppose for the last part, if there are any questions. It will all start to

come together once we start to add all of the different pieces together. My goal for today

is just to make sure that I give you an absolutely massive brain dump and then when you

get to the point of actually needing to implement the material, things will just pop up in

your mind. You won’t know where it came from and you’ll say, yes, I remember Dave

mentioning something about the keyword in the title tag. There will be different moments

like that.

So today I’m just going to give you as much information as I can, and it will all trickle in

and then afterwards as well, we’ll have the option for the DVDs so you can dig into this a

little bit deeper. Has anyone got any questions for that first one?

Question: I was just wondering if you can give some reasons for using WordPress as a base of a site as opposed to something like Drupal.

David: Basically WordPress is just a content management system which allows you to

create pages and it is really easy to do. Drupal, Joomla!, there are a whole lot of other

content management systems out there. The reason that we focus in on WordPress is it’s

open source. A lot of people are creating different plug-ins and a lot of people are working

on that particular software and it’s very easy to use. It tries to make it as easy for the user as

possible.

Things like Drupal and Joomla! are fantastic if you’re building community sites and things

like that. To actually get in and change things, you need to know a little bit of

programming, that type of thing. So I think it just depends on the client. Usually I like to

educate the client so that they can use their backend CMS system and then they can make

changes as they need it. There is nothing wrong with Joomla! or Drupal.


Pete: On the telco company, for all our big sites like the ones with 2,000 pages and bigger

than that, they’re all done on Joomla! which is very similar to Drupal. For the smaller sites

we use WordPress because it is quicker and easier.

Question: My question is with that information that you get on the back end of a website, is it as simple as going to the number one ranking business in your keyword and seeing what keywords they’ve optimized and putting that into yours? If you’ve got a 100-ton

gorilla in your industry, can you use their own name to help your search rankings increase?

David: Yes, so a couple of points there. The first thing, doing competitor analysis is one of

the key parts. And when I first mapped out that structure, doing the competitor analysis is

key. Find out what you competitors are doing, what they’re targeting and what Google

thinks their website’s about as well. You go to the free keyword tool and you drop your

competitor’s URL in there and Google will say, hey, here is a list of keywords that we think

are associated with your competition. That helps build that list. So yes, looking at

competition is good.

As far as trying to ride on the coat tails of their keyword, you’ll probably just need to keep

in the back of your mind for trademark-type issues. Pete might talk briefly about the idea

of, you could go figure out what your competitor’s brand name is and then bid on the

keyword in AdWords.

Pete: Just be careful about cease and desist letters, I’ve had a few sent my way for doing

some creative things like that. You can try it but if you know it’s going to be the wrong

thing, don’t do it just from a personal, ethical and moral standpoint. Just be aware that you

may find that going after people’s business names if they’re trademarked, obviously it’s a

legal issue, you can’t. It’s deception and that sort of thing.

Question: Just from that perspective, I’m in the health industry, is it worthwhile going onto the ABS, Australian Bureau of Statistics and finding out what areas of health people are

most having problems with and using that as a keyword?

David: It’s definitely a good place to start when you’re building your keyword list. Use that

but then you also want to bring it back to the Google free keyword tool. You might think

here are products and services that they’re interested in but it might not be keywords that

they’re searching for. So if you have a look, the difference between someone searching

pergola and verandah, I have another friend who does SEO for clients and he was saying

people don’t search for verandah, even though they want a verandah, they search pergola.


So it’s understanding that market language and then making sure. That’s why you always

go back to Google free keyword tool to make sure you’re targeting keywords that people

are searching.

Pete: Also from a high-level business perspective, because obviously what we’re talking

about today is just internet marketing which is a small piece of the whole marketing pie. I

think that’s a good thing to do just for your whole business, to get an idea of where your

business is going, what to focus on and what services are needed, that sort of thing is just

smart business research from a high-level perspective.

David: Ok, let’s wrap that.

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