Brush up on your SEO skills with some pointers and insight from Jesse Witham of Search Marketing Agency. He will detail: What is the difference between “On-Page SEO” and “Off-Page SEO”? How do I know if my SEO campaigns are working well? How can I use SEO as a tool for reputation management and promote myself? Thanks to Comcast for powering #50PGHSummerStories!
Transcription:
Everybody, so this is an episode, you cannot miss very excited about today's guest really pumped as always to be doing our summer 50 PGH tech stories with Comcast and we're hanging out with Jesse with him today from search marketing agency. And we're talking about all things SEO, which I find completely fascinating. And that's why I think it's so important to be paying attention to this episode of our 50 stories with Comcast here because it just changes I think, every day. And something that you were doing six months ago is probably not what you should be doing today. And so I always get pumped to have experts in this field because I'm always amazed that they can stay on top of these topics. And Jesse Witham is one of those guys. He's gonna tell us a little bit about some things going on when it comes to on and off page SEO and really using SEO as a way to you know, just be able to promote yourself or executives within your organization, so forth. So Jesse, I really appreciate you taking the time to be part of our 50 stories today. Hey, man.
Yeah. Thanks for having me on Jonathan. I really appreciate it. I love the show.
Thank you, man. I appreciate it. So what's your background real fast? What got you all like razzmatazz about SEO? What made you say this is how I'm spending my life?
Yeah, I've actually I've actually done in my, my whole life going on 20 years, you know, we've been 18 years in this business. I started out back in high school learning how to, you know, code websites, basically. And so that's what got me into it was doing affiliate programs, affiliate management, which kind of led into SEO, web design, things of that nature. And then, you know, early 2000s, I started, you know, my company. And so we've just been focusing on on SEO and digital marketing ever since.
Very cool. Tell me a little bit about the agency. I mean, how many folks do you have working with you and who are some of the unique kind of key verticals that you kind of concentrate on or anything like that?
Yeah. So we're actually fairly new to Pittsburgh. So I just relocated here. A couple years ago from LA, and so I still have plenty of people out there working for me, we're growing the team here in Pittsburgh. In terms of verticals, you know, we don't really specialize in one or the other. But since we're a business based on referrals, more than anything else, you know, we kind of have gone down certain lines, we have a lot of attorneys, education, health care. And e commerce, obviously, is probably the biggest piece, we've sell things online.
And the thing that I think is probably pretty fascinating, but what you do is like, there isn't one case, it's exactly the same as people have different targets, they have different identities and different goals. And so your job gets pretty tricky, because you have to kind of learn all that and figure out how to optimize that and that they're looking for. And that is no easy task these days. I remember back in the early days, Vizio was like have a title tag on your page. Yeah, it was all about keyword density at one point making sure certain there's certain number of words that you're trying to rank for. It gets more More complex, as the algorithms get more complex in the Edit net, the web continues to grow. So you've been part of that since day one, which has to be very exciting. So you definitely know the ins and the outs of this.
Yeah, it's one of those things, you know, with with every new Google algorithm update is a whole new set of rules you have to follow, you know, so, you know, that used to be that, you know, link building didn't matter now, it's like link building is the main thing that matters. And you know, there's this people who focus on one key word makes up their entire business, other people, you know, that have a catalog of products, they may have 100,000 keywords, they're monitoring, you know, and every and everything in between. So you really have to look at everything on a case by case basis and then go from there is how often do these algorithms change? I mean, it seems I know it's not daily, but it seems like it to me but it seems like it's quite often.
Yeah, I mean, once a year usually you'll see like a major major Indian really a game yeah. Yeah, you know, maybe like every every like year or two You know, probably if you had to average it out of last 20 years, probably every 18 months, there's been a major update. And usually when those happen is when you see, you know, companies scramble, and some are big winners and other people who have ranked for the last, you know, year and a half straight will say, Oh my God, my rankings are just, you know, all tanking, all of a sudden, other people will wake up one morning, and they're ranking better than they ever have been like, Whoa, yeah, words must have worked. Yeah. So you know, we're always, we're always kind of dreading what's around the corner when it's update season. As you can see, I mean, is there like a warning for this delay? When you first were making an announcement, it was just kind of slowly leak out. And you start seeing the differences?
Yeah, there's no warning, but it's also not slowly. It's not slowly it's what you wake up one morning and you're like, what happened? Yeah, what just happened here? And that's usually how it goes and you know, your phone's ringing off the hook of you clients like you. It makes it hard to plan a vacation. Hmm.
Yeah, absolutely. So let's jump into this. So before we were talking about why I was like ages you weren't even talking about today, you sent me some some points. And the points you sent me I think are just so cool to talk about. So I think I bet you many of our listeners and beaver viewers today have not heard about this. I think this is great for us to kind of check this a little bit. Yeah. So what is the difference between, you know, on page SEO and off page SEO? Like, exactly both and why they're different?
Yeah, I mean, that's it's a big question. And you kind of touched on earlier, when you said back in the day, if you just have a title tag that was optimized, you could rank using that, right. But as its progressed update after update after update, there's now 300 different aspects of on page SEO that you have to look at 300. I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot of things that go into it. So there's really two sides to the SEO coin when it comes to ranking for something competitive, right? If you're trying to rank for your own brand name, that should be easy. And nothing really goes into it. But you're trying to rank for something that's going to make your company millions of dollars, or there's millions of people competing for that term. It gets very intense. So first part is on page SEO, which is the things like the title tags, the meta tags, the keyword density, the things you mentioned, right? But it goes further, you got to optimize the code, you got to optimize the content, image metadata, how fast your site is loading. You know, there's so many things that go into how optimized is the page itself, right.
So Google strikes against you if your page loads too slowly, right? Yes, definitely. Like it's not a good experience to the user. So it's exactly, exactly things like you know, things like bounce rate, factor into SEO. If Google sees that people are bouncing fast, they say this content must not be loading fast, or it's not relevant or it's not relevant enough. So even if you haven't perfectly optimized if you have a high bounce rate, you'll lose rankings. stick to it. So I mean, we could talk for hours on that. But there's so many different things like that. That's on page SEO. Okay. And so let's, once you have your page completely optimized on page, that's when you Google a term, and you see, okay, I'm looking at one through 10 of 5.5 million results, you know, that means 5.5 million results are in one way or another optimized for that. Okay, now, who's going to rank number one versus number 10? versus number 10,000? Right has to do with off page SEO? Hmm. Which is think of it as kind of like a voting system. And it all comes down to link building. Have you heard of link building? That's right. Yes. So that's, that's what it is. Once you have a page optimized, every link that you can get from a third party an outside source, okay, accounts is basically like a vote of confidence. Ah, I see. Okay, in Google and it increases a very key metric called Domain Authority. And at the end of the day, the higher you domain authority ranking, the more Google is going to pay attention to your content and want to rank it higher. And so let's say, you know, Company A and Company B, sell the same product, they're equally optimized for that on page, if one of them has 100 sites linking to it, and the other site has 1000 linking to it. They're gonna outrank them all day for every term. Absolutely. So a big part of what we do is, you know, companies will contact us and say, Hey, you know, we're on page three, or we're on page 10. We want to get to page one. How do we do that? We thought we were already optimized. You've put together a link building campaign and you get people that link to you every single day, you get more and more links built up, and you'll slowly rise up the rankings just due to that alone.
So that to me seems like such a difficult task. That's why you got to call pros and for something like that, because I really like and I know Google is gonna send if you're trying to game it. I know back in the day, there were things you could build fake links, and it would look like a throw link to a bit Google smart. They'll sniff that stuff out. I bet. Yeah, it requires a really dedicated campaign in order to get those backlinks. Right.
Yeah, good point. I mean, because it is it is nuanced like that. I mean, you can't just get a ton of spammy links from, you know, Facebook overnight and have it work, you really need to build what's called contextual links, where it's like links from content that's related to you. Okay. You know, not all links are created equal. If somebody in a Twitter post links to you, that's good. It's not a bad thing. But if someone from the Pittsburgh post Gazette writes an article about your industry and links to you, right, that's fantastic. That's where Google is going to say, okay, we trust this newspaper, they wrote a good piece of content, and this is the company they chose to link to, right. We're going to fly up in the rankings if you get something like that. So that's what we do is we go out and we find, you know, publications that are already trusted in the industry. Okay, place links to the website that we want to increase. Very good. Cool. Yeah, interesting.
So who are these crazy people writing these algorithms? It just blows my mind. Like, it's me. It's like alien technology. I think they might be on another planet or very least they're in a bunker somewhere in Silicon Valley, or in Mountain View, right? You don't know who they are.
And oh, my goodness. Now I understand the difference about this. So on the page are optimized, but then off the page, it's all about getting those good, credible backlinks that match tool, and that they have they related to your type of content and that that that is the magic right there because it gives you that domain authority.
Like you have to have both. Okay, you have to first first step is optimize your site. Once it's optimized, you know, it has all those title tags, meta tags, image metadata, it's loads fast. Great. Now it's time to start getting relevant industry links to your site, and basically get voted up in Google system. Cool.
So let's switch gears here a little bit. This is fun. This is like the work we're getting right now. So I love this. So the idea of using SEO as a tool for reputation management, yeah, really one. So I think that there's like the inverse of each other. So if you want to promote yourself, you want to get it out there. reputation management, you want to bring the weird stuff back in, right?
Yeah, I mean, reputation management is something that it's it's definitely become the fastest growing segment of SEO. You know, traditionally, people have always thought of SEO as Okay, I want to promote my company for this keyword or that keyword. But more and more people are just googling the company name itself to kind of get reviews, or the leadership of the company, right? I mean, if you're, if you're a CEO of an organization, and you have people who are, you know, just deciding whether or not they want to work with you. Not only are they going to look up your company name and look for reviews, but they're going to look up you You know, the CEO, the CFO, make sure who am I really working with here? Yeah. And that is just growing in popularity so fast that people want to make sure. Not only a reputation management for the company, do we have good reviews? Is the news positive is the negative stuff if there is any push down, but the executives themselves, you know, the CEO has a great interview out there on Bloomberg or something, they want to make sure that's the first thing that shows up. If the CEO, you know, had, you know, a DUI back in 1992, they want to make sure that stuff does not show up, right. And everything in between you want you want to promote the good stuff and you want to de escalate anything potentially negative.
How do you do yes, de escalate something that's ranking is there when you post more stuff to push it back further into the Exactly, yeah,
that's exactly what you do. You you because you can't, you can't really get rid of something. Once it's made. People try to spend a lot of money. Like a lot of PR firms out there, try to get stuff removed. But I mean, like Google right now could you pay through?
You'd be surprised how many like how much money people spend on like takedown requests, you know, and attorneys sending things out to remove this content. It never works ever. So what you got to do is you got to get good things written and promote that. So like, you know, if we have someone that has a negative piece of news, you know, for someone, what we do is we'll write 10 positive news pieces, published those just like kind of link building thing, right, where we get people to publish articles and link back, right, we'll get optimized articles published and then we'll link build to those articles and they'll outrank the bad content, push it, push it pages deep to where we want to ever see.
And we all know we never go past page to read exactly the data. If you get that two page, per page 10, and you pretty much done your job like there, yeah.
If you get 10 positive articles written about someone, and you put some links to them, and it pushes the negative content out of the way,
and that's going to take time to you, that's not something that you can do in the course of a week, either. I mean, no, it takes six months, right? I mean, anything. Seo related isn't overnight, but it doesn't necessarily take six months either. It depends on how competitive it is. Right? So if you're trying to rank, you know, for the word, you know, athletic footwear, or something, and you're competing with Nike, Reebok, Adidas, yeah, good luck. It's gonna take a year for even the biggest companies to do that. But most terms, you know, maybe 60 days to 90 days. Okay, interesting. You can make some progress, you know, if you really know what you're doing. The good thing about the norm after reputation management is no one's competing for that delight, as I say, Yeah, that makes total So often people, you know, you you're CEO, you think you're pretty important, but there's lots of CEOs out there. Yeah. And those mid level companies that knows Yeah, thinking of it so the idea that that's not being searched for a lot to begin with, yeah, and then I can see where Yeah, and 60 days by putting 10 stories out there you're gonna quash back anything that would come up first, because that is Yeah, out there. And it comes down to like, how much money are people spending on this stuff? If you're trying to rank for something like, you know, Pittsburgh law firms, every law firm in Pittsburgh is pouring money into this stuff trying to outrank each other so it's going to be you know, a little longer term a little tougher, but yeah, no one's out there competing for your personal name. Right? So you know, if you have a good strategy, and you're putting the content out there just a couple things here and there, you know, you'll you'll get accomplished what you will start to start putting out Wow,
that is fascinating. So I love doing these. I get to learn something new. Yeah, it you know, it's it's fun to talk about. It's all good stuff. It's all good stuff. That's why we're why we're doing our Summer of 50 PGH tech stories with Comcast is to get this information out there and it shows that you from LA to Pittsburgh to your company, which I think is fantastic. We're glad you're in Pittsburgh doing Yeah. I'm happy to be here. I love Pittsburgh, everybody here has been very welcoming of us. And you know, it's going well, what's your favorite thing about Pittsburgh so far?
Definitely not the driving, I can tell you that the streets here take a little bit of getting used to but no, I just like the community. You know, I got involved with the Pittsburgh tech Council. You know, pretty early on it was the first group that I joined here in just just going to the networking events and things like that the industry related events it was it was very refreshing, you know, to see how welcoming people were here.
So very good. I'm glad you're making I'm glad you're making Pittsburgh your home because we need women and men like you setting up shop Pittsburgh doing what you're doing to make Pittsburgh pretty kick butt. Now, our question of the day, we always ask this on all Our 50 stories podcast and video cast here is, as you all know, we are trying to raise some money for the beyond the laptops.org project through neighbors allies. So I'm asking everybody, what what are your thoughts on ways that we can bridge the digital divide? Not just in Pittsburgh, but like everywhere? What are your thoughts on that? Jesse? Yeah, yeah, I did hear about this. I know, you guys have already raised a lot of money for this. And one thing that comes to mind for me is companies who have upgraded their machinery, or they upgrade often, a lot of times the their old laptops or their old machines or tablets or whatever, you know, go to waste or, you know, they're up for grabs, at the very least. So, you know, to have have companies that when they upgrade their equipment, you know, turn to, you know, organizations that can put them in the hands of schools or people that just have the need for, you know, connectivity and modern devices. I think that's something that a lot of companies could look at. doing more of absolutely Good answer. I appreciate that a bunch and can't appreciate enough you taking the time to talk to us. I feel like I've learned something here. And what's going on that at the end of the day, I always say, Man, I'm glad there's pros like you out there. Because I really encourage everybody I know people can get savvy, they can get pretty good with getting some SEO traction. But I feel like when you're a business and you're really trying to compete and rank and do the right thing, you got to work with pros on this. I mean, this has become your business at the end. It's all dependent on this and obviously don't put that into professionals hands. I always like
I like taking your car to a mechanic. Sure you can do some of this yourself. But yeah, it's a tough thing to keep up on. That's for sure. Time job just keeping up on the algorithms.
Jesse with him from search marketing agency. Thank you for hanging out with us today. You've been a great guest here on the Comcast summer of 0 Pittsburgh tech stories, man, you're the best.
All right. Thanks for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai