Sean Garner Consulting | Marketing Agency & Certified StoryBrand Guide

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E10: What Every Small Business Owner Needs To Know About SEO

Sean Garner
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SEO agency owners will hate me for this…

But I am going to show you what you really need to know about SEO as a small business owner. 

From essential SEO tools to analyzing the right data, I’ll show you how to spot if your team is doing the work or just taking your cash. 

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P.S.  When you are ready, here are a few ways I can help…

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Subscribe and Listen to the Podcast HERE:📱 

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Sean Garner is a marketing consultant and Certified StoryBrand guide dedicated to helping small business owners grow and dominate their industries. He created the Marketing Domination podcast to teach people how to combine storytelling with strategic marketing to help businesses connect with customers and stand out online.

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Website: https://www.seangarner.co/ 

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MARKETING DOMINATION PODCAST

EPISODE 10 TRANSCRIPTION

Introduction

[00:00] Sean Garner: SEO agencies, you're probably going to hate me for this one, but I am going to tell you as a small business owner exactly what you need to know about SEO before you hire an SEO agency to do it. So you can make sure that it's set up correctly and it actually works to grow your business. Welcome to Marketing Domination.

[00:18] Sean Garner: All right. So we are continuing now on our series about filling your sales funnel. If you are just joining us, very much recommend go back and start at the first episode where we are taking you through the process of marketing domination of what it means to build a sales funnel, fill a sales funnel, and then optimize your sales funnel.

[00:36] Sean Garner: And right now we are currently on the stage. And one of the ways we can fill our sales funnel is with SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's most commonly associated with Google. People are talking about ranking number one on Google, but SEO now it is so much more than that. It's not just Google.

SEO Across Google, Bing, and Social Media

[00:57] Sean Garner: It's things like Bing, it's even social media has SEO. So you can optimize when people are searching for things. And this episode honestly took a completely different turn because I was talking to a prospect coming through our agency yesterday, and they started talking to me about what they were doing for SEO and the current SEO agency that they were working with.

[01:18] Sean Garner: And unfortunately, what is happening with them happens all the time with small business owners, just because if you don't know and fully understand SEO, unfortunately, it's really easy for SEO agencies and marketing agencies to take advantage of small business owners to make them feel like something is getting done that really isn't being done.

[01:39] Sean Garner: So this episode is not, I'm going to try not to make it super technical. I want to try to make it as simplified as possible, but I want it for business owners, go through this podcast is for small business owners to be able to actually understand what SEO is the different types of it and what they need to be looking for whenever it comes to making sure that their SEO is being done properly for their small business.

[02:04] Sean Garner: So first thing with SEO that I want you guys to know and understand is just setting expectations. For, if you are getting started with this or maybe you've been doing it, how long it should take and kind of what to expect. So first thing to know with SEO and kind of setting the expectations is there is a very dramatic difference between ranking for local and low ranking for national keywords.

[02:28] Sean Garner: So for example, if you are a Medspa. It would be very difficult if you are a brand new business to rank for Botox as a national keyword and to rank number one for Botox or even Botox services. However, on a local level, if your website is set up properly, even if it's a newer domain, you've optimized your Google business listings and some other local citation stuff that we can do.

[02:52] Sean Garner: It's a lot easier and can more quickly happen, happen for ranking for Botox services in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, because it is a local keyword and it's less competitive. So the very first thing that you need to understand when you're starting SEO is just how long it actually takes. If you are trying to rank for national keywords, it is a long term strategy.

[03:16] Sean Garner: Don't assume that just because you throw up a website and you do some SEO optimization that you're going to instantly start ranking for those keywords. There is so many factors that determine where you show up on Google. And if you are a brand new business and a brand new website, you have honestly, everything working against you.

[03:34] Sean Garner: That does not mean though, you shouldn't do it. You absolutely should do it because if you don't do it now, the longer you wait, just the further back it's going to put you, but just know if you're starting out a brand new business and you are trying to rank for a national term and you serve the whole nation, it's going to take a lot longer to rank versus if you were just focusing on a local market or a local, local keyword.

Starting Local with SEO for Faster Results

[03:56] Sean Garner: So that being said, what I typically like to do with businesses is let's say we are working with a company like an accounting firm where they could take clients from all over the state or even all over the nation, but they're in a local city. Start if it makes sense for your business, start local first and then expand out from there because it's a lot easier to win more keywords and win more things. Once you've already been established for one thing, then trying just to take the whole big pond at once. It helps if you just start taking a little section, a little city and some smaller keywords that are easier to rank for before you try to go after those big national keywords.

Understanding Domain Authority for SEO

[04:33] Sean Garner: Another thing to understand with the expectations of how long things will take and what keywords are even winnable by you is to understand something that's called your domain authority. So there's lots of factors that go into your domain authority, but just think about that as how reputable your online presence is in the eyes of Google.

[04:54] Sean Garner: It has nothing to do with how long you've been in business, how skillful you are at your trade. It has everything to do with how long your foundation has been online for that domain. So your URL, what people are typing in on the search bar, if you've changed your website multiple times or your URL multiple times, the destination people go to, that is going to affect your domain authority and your domain rank.

[05:20] Sean Garner: Because Google takes, again, several factors into things like, historical data, how long you've been on there, things that are called backlinks, which are just other websites pointing back to yours, the more of that stuff that you have, the more authority your website is going to have the more authority it has, the easier it is to rank for other keywords.

[05:40] Sean Garner: Cause you got to think about things in the eyes of the algorithm for Google. And so if it has two websites that want to both be number one for MedSpa, Tulsa, Oklahoma, how does it determine which one should be number one? There's several different factors, but one of the main factors that it uses is the domain authority.

[06:00] Sean Garner: So if one business has been in business and been online for 10 years, has multiple other businesses talking about it and linking from their website to this website has lots of relevant content on it, and then you have one that is a brand new website, maybe it's not, it's been in business the same amount of time, but a brand new website.

[06:19] Sean Garner: Website and the online presence is brand new. Well, Google is going to rank the one that has the higher domain authority and the stronger reputation higher. So whenever you are getting started with SEO, one of the determining factors that you need to help to manage those expectations is is this a brand new website or brand new URL, or do you have an existing website that's been online for a long time, but maybe you just haven't actually optimized it by doing keyword research and actually adding all of the things onto your business website that you should do.

[06:50] Sean Garner: So that is kind of just setting the overall expectations. And I realized that I'm going over this stuff. I'm throwing out a bunch of words that you might not know or be familiar with or terms, sorry about that. One of them is keywords. Keywords are the things that your customers are typing into whatever search bar or search engine they are using for to have your business be associated with it.

Mastering Keywords with SEMrush

[07:12] Sean Garner: So it's pretty easy to start out with keywords is a, you typically want to do a keyword research tool. So our business is Sean Garner consulting. We are a SEMrush agency partner. So SEMrush is the tool that we use for keyword research for all of our clients. Amazing tool. But if you are not a marketing agency or not an, an SEO.

[07:33] Sean Garner: You don't need that. As far as a small business owner, I would recommend if you're unfamiliar with that, hiring an SEO agency to whenever you're getting started with this, by doing this episode to make sure when you hire one, you know what to look for so they don't take advantage of you. But whenever we're assigning and creating SEO, we want to know what keywords that we should be adding on to the relevant places on our website.

[07:55] Sean Garner: Now it's easy for some businesses to think about there's keywords that you obviously would want to rank for based upon what you would assume that your customers or potential customers are typing into search engines like Google. But whenever you have a powerful keyword research tool, like SEMrush, you are able to find hidden keywords that might be hidden gems that are easier to rank for, to get traffic off of.

[08:18] Sean Garner: So if, for example, using the MedSpa example that we keep referencing in this, it would be obvious that people would be looking for that. You would assume your business should be ranking for the keyword MedSpa Tulsa and the city name, but maybe what customers are actually looking for that was more relevant to your business is Botox services near me or Botox injections near me.

Keyword Research for Business Impact

[08:43] Sean Garner: And that's why it's very important to do keyword research, because when we're doing that tools like SEMrush, what they're going to do is they are going to show us how, what the search volume for those keywords look like also the intent behind those keywords. So Google's really smart. It's got tons of data and everything on everybody.

[08:58] Sean Garner: Unfortunately, they know everything you're doing. But what it'll do is actually show the intent behind the, the average intent behind the keyword. So if somebody is looking for Botox and Google knows, maybe that keyword is typically done based on information. People are just looking for information on what is Botox or how does Botox help me versus what would be called a commercial or a transactional keyword, which that is where they are looking to actually do business or to find a business that offers those services.

[09:25] Sean Garner: So, looking at keyword intent as you're doing the research is very, very important because as a small business owner, typically when we're doing this for clients, the keywords that we want to focus on are either commercial or transactional because we're trying to rank for the keywords that are going to generate into revenue.

[09:41] Sean Garner: Uh, typically our clients aren't hiring us just to necessarily build out a big informational blog, which that content can help informational keywords can help for giving that a site authority. On your website, but typically for small business, local based businesses, we're looking for those keywords with the intent of transactional and commercial.

[09:58] Sean Garner: And then there's one more other type of keyword, which is pretty irrelevant. It's called navigational. And that's typically if you have a brand side, if, for example, if somebody was typing in Gmail to Google, that's a navigational keyword, they're trying to navigate to a specific website. With that keyword, that's how the navigational keyword intent would be set up.

[10:16] Sean Garner: But it's really important to know the intent behind the keyword that you're looking at, the search volume. But again, we talked earlier about your domain authority and your domain rank. Well, based upon the keyword difficulty, that's going to show you the priority of the keyword. What keywords you should be attempting or going for using the example earlier, Botox is just a national keyword gets a ton of search volume, and it's a very difficult keyword to rank for.

[10:40] Sean Garner: However, if you go down to Botox injections in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's probably going to be a much more winnable keyword and more applicable to your local market. Even though the total search volume is a lot lower than just the main seed keyword of Botox. It's going to be more relevant to the types of customers you're actually looking for to come to your website versus just Botox, where it could be another med spa looking to go order Botox products for themselves.

[11:05] Sean Garner: So it's very important to know those different factors as you're looking for the keywords to add onto your website. So talked a little bit about expectations, what to look for. Things like keywords and the different factors with those. The other thing to know about SEO as a small business owner is to know that SEO is something that you do.

Why SEO Is A Continuous Process

[11:24] Sean Garner: It's not something that was done. So this is kind of the point that leads me to where I've unfortunately seen several business owners being taken advantage of because they hired an SEO agency and they're doing SEO and they're paying these retainer packages, but they're not actually doing SEO. They did SEO and let me explain what that means with SEO search engine optimization.

[11:49] Sean Garner: There are several different types of SEO. There's, there's things that are called technical SEO, which is how the web page is structured from a technical hierarchy to make sure that Links are in a certain order and there's something called the URL structure and that it's set up in a way so Google can actually read your website.

[12:06] Sean Garner: There's things that are called off page SEO. There's things that are called on page SEO. There there's content marketing SEO. There's a lot of different aspects. For SEO. And so what happens is agencies that are doing things that I would say is in a not way I would do that is they are saying they're doing SEO for people and what they are in essence doing is the initial upfront work with SEO.

[12:31] Sean Garner: So whenever you're doing SEO, there's a lot of research that goes into getting SEO started. So you got to do things like make sure, yeah, the website is technically set up so Google can read it. We have to do keyword research where we're going to look at what keywords we should be adding to our website and, uh, what went where they need to be in specific places, like things like title tags, meta descriptions, headers and everything.

[12:53] Sean Garner: And then the site is including those keywords in it. We also have to look at things like competitor analysis. So what are other competitors that are ranking for this similar keyword? And what is their site structure look like? So we know what we're kind of going against and we want to add all of that stuff to the website.

[13:08] Sean Garner: We want to make sure the website is submitted to Google search console. We want to do all of those things. And it's a lot of upfront work for doing SEO. Then after we do that, we want to make sure that we're always monitoring and doing continually reporting to see how we're factoring in, how we're changing up in rankings based upon the work that we do.

[13:26] Sean Garner: What some agencies that are doing that I've been speaking to, to new customers and new prospects and everything lately that are doing is they're doing the upfront work and that's it, but customers are still paying them for retainer SEO services. So I'm going to tell you this right here. 

[13:44] Sean Garner: SEO agencies, come at me, bro, if you disagree, but I think that this is a shady marketing agency practice. If you are charging clients for ongoing SEO, and you are not doing new or updating content on a consistent monthly basis, I personally believe you're taking advantage of clients. And that's unfortunately what I've seen happen with so many businesses that are doing SEO.

[14:08] Sean Garner: What happened is they hired an SEO agency to help them get started with their website, do the keyword research, the comp analysis and all of those things, and then the SEO agency is just sending them monthly reports. That's it. They're not actually doing anything to implement new changes. They're just looking at what's naturally happening as their website has been online longer.

[14:28] Sean Garner: Their domain authority goes up. So naturally backlinks will start building and other people will talk about their website, but they're not actually doing things to add new relevant content, update content based upon keywords that they're seeing and the rankings that they're changing. If they're not making consistent changes each month to the website by adding new content, they're not making consistent changes to the website Updating keywords as they're seeing changes in the reporting and stuff like that.

[14:52] Sean Garner: I believe they're taking advantage of clients. And I've, I've seen several of the new clients that we brought on over the past several months that were doing SEO, that unfortunately, once I kind of showed them behind the scenes of what's actually happening on their website, there had been a couple of cases where I could look at the change log, which is just the, uh, think of that as the, uh, The login access for the website.

[15:14] Sean Garner: And I could see that they were paying an SEO agency money. Some cases like two to 3,000 a month for these SEO retainers. And the SEO agency hadn't even logged in in about three and a half months. So how are they doing SEO for a client and truly optimizing their website for not even logging in and adding new content?

[15:34] Sean Garner: Because one of the things that you need to realize about SEO is, like I said, it's something that you do. It's not something that is done. So, in my opinion, and I would probably say any good SEO's opinion, if you want to continually increase your rank, increase your domain authority on your website and grow, To be number one on Google, you have to continually be adding new relevant content to your website.

[15:58] Sean Garner: This could be things like new services pages as you get new services. This could be adding things like blog articles. It'll be taking existing content pages that you have and refreshing them and updating them as you Get these data reports in and look at the other competitors and stuff are doing, but you should always be adding new content to the website and updating the content that you have until it gets to that number one spot.

[16:22] Sean Garner: And then even once you get to that number one spot, well, you need to make sure that you stay there. So with us, we want businesses to not just grow, but to dominate. So once we get a client to a number one spot. I want to be so far ahead of number two, that number two can't even touch us. If you look at some of our clients that we've done some amazing SEO work, like number one is so far ahead of number two, we could, and as it stopped doing SEO for, and content writing for them for probably a year, and unless the other person just like went crazy.

[16:54] Sean Garner: They wouldn't be able to touch them, but that's what a really good SEO should be doing for your businesses. Yes. They've done all the upfront setup and the continual monitoring, but a big aspect is, is continually writing and creating new and updated and new content for the website and updating the content that you currently do have on the website.

[17:13] Sean Garner: So that's a ramp that I have. I will tell you this. If you have an SEO agency that you're working with now, or you're looking to hire them. These are some specific questions that I would, uh, questions I would ask them. And then also things that you should want access to, to make sure that you can actually see the truth.

Gaining Access to Your SEO Data

[17:34] Sean Garner: So I will tell you this again, we are a SEMrush certified SEO agency partner, and we have, we use that tool to generate SEO reports for our clients. I want to be very transparent and honest with you guys, those reports. If I wanted to, I could manipulate the data to skew the result in a way that looked favorable to me.

[17:57] Sean Garner: Now there's some things obviously that it's just the data is the data, but let's say example of keyword rankings. Well, I could make the report where I just wanted to show the keyword rankings we improved on. And maybe I didn't show you the, like all the keywords that we lost that month. So that to me is.

[18:12] Sean Garner: Whenever you get the reports, it's important, but what you actually want access to is the source of truth and your source of truth for SEO, or at least the big player for SEO is Google. And you want to make sure that you have access to something that is called Google search console. Google search console is the backend of Google where you submit things like your site map and site pages and everything to Google, so it can actually read your website and know what, what, what pages you want to be.

[18:42] Sean Garner: Indexing or them to look at and crawl. So they know what keywords that you're trying to rank for. It'll also show you what Google is currently ranked, what keywords you're currently ranking for, how many impressions or people are seeing your website clicks, all of the things, and it is the source of truth directly from Google.

[19:00] Sean Garner: So it can't be manipulated by skewing report data or anything like that. So you want to make sure you have admin access to your Google search console. This is another side tangent for frustrations. I have with marketing agencies. This to me is another marketing agency, red flag. You probably need to do just a whole marketing agency, red flag episode.

[19:22] Sean Garner: But another marketing agency, red flag is if they don't give you full admin access control to things like your domain, your website. Google search console, Google analytics, Google ad manager. If they're not giving you full access, admin control, they're going to probably say something like this. Well, you know, we, we, we, you know, we just keep admin access just because there's any issues.

[19:43] Sean Garner: We don't want you to accidentally go in there and mess something up. I understand that, especially being an agency owner, clients get in there and break stuff and mess it up. But. But it is your business. It is your digital asset. You wouldn't, you wouldn't own a physical business location and let somebody else control the key to the front door and tell you whenever you could go in and out.

[20:02] Sean Garner: So why are you doing the same thing with your digital presence? A hundred percent agency owners. We need admin access to everything, but you as the business owner should retain control ownership and admin access of all of your digital assets. Because unfortunately, again, I see a lot of people paying these agency owners, these big retainer fees, just because I got to pay them.

[20:22] Sean Garner: Cause I don't even know how to log into the backend of my website or, I mean, they, they, they control everything. So I don't want them to take things down. If that's the relationship with the agency owner, then you're going to Find a new agency because that that's me. That's super shady. You guys, as the business owner, you want to, like I said, you want to own all the keys, hold, hold all of that stuff because you don't want somebody to be able to hold you hostage because they own your, your digital presence.

Regular SEO Updates to Boost Ranking

[20:46] Sean Garner: So hold all of that stuff secure. So. One of the things that you want to make sure is whenever you are hiring an SEO agency, or you currently have one that you have now ask them for access to your Google search console. Cause that is how you can log in. It's connected to your Gmail account or your Google workspace account.

[21:01] Sean Garner: You'll be able to log in and look at real time. Hey, how many, I say real time. I think it's like a two day delay. But you'll be able to look in and you'll be able to see historical data as far as how impressions have improved over time. How are clicks improving over time? How's our rank improving over time?

[21:14] Sean Garner: You can see currently what rank, what keywords you're ranking for. And it's just really good insight to know, especially as you're doing other marketing assets and, uh, our projects and, and, uh, campaigns. To see how that affects things like your, your Google search console data, and hopefully it's always growing and improving.

[21:30] Sean Garner: That's also where the next part is that to ask them this question is how, how many, I wouldn't ask them how often I'd say how many. Pages, and then how often are you adding new content to our website? Because remember one of the big factors that helps SEO to continue to grow is adding new content and updating old content.

[21:53] Sean Garner: So I would want to make sure that there is some type of deliverable as far as what you can expect from it. I don't personally like it when marketing agencies bill content. For so many hours to where they'll say, yeah, we do, you know, 10 hours of SEO a month for you, I get it, but also again, we, maybe I'm just biased because our agency isn't set up that way.

[22:13] Sean Garner: We have a certain amount of deliverables. So it doesn't matter if we experienced a tech glitch issue or your website goes down or something like that. We still want to make sure that we're adding relevant content on a, uh, consistent basis and updating old articles and stuff like that for you. So we want to make sure that we present at least, Hey, you're going to get at Like for us, our base packages, you're going to get at least one article a week and updated content to your pages, to your website and everything each month.

[22:37] Sean Garner: So ask the agency owner how many new pages they're creating and how often they update old content and their process for doing that. That's the big things I would say that I'm seeing is agency owners are kind of locking up access and they're not giving the business owners access to everything and then they also aren't adding content to on a consistent basis.

[22:58] Sean Garner: There's lots of other things that unfortunately some agency owners do where it makes it sound like they're doing more than they really are. Just because again, if you're not educated on this stuff, they can send you these big, complicated reports where, Oh, this, this month we did this, this, and this. And we, we added, you know, 10 backlinks to your website and maybe they really did all that stuff.

[23:19] Sean Garner: But a lot of that stuff also just kind of can happen naturally and organically. So it looks like they've done a lot, but they're just reporting on the changes. So understand there's also a difference between reported changes and actions being taken. So I'm always very clear with my clients. Like, Hey, here's the updates that we did.

[23:35] Sean Garner: Here's what we actually did though. So a lot of times we might have had a bunch of positive updates and I'll even tell clients whenever I'm going through their, their monthly report with them. I'm like, Hey. This was awesome. There was a huge change right here. Just so you know, we didn't do any of that. We just added these articles.

[23:48] Sean Garner: That was stuff that, you know, was from months ago, or maybe some of the, the citations that we were trying to build for them finally went live with citations is just other listing directories and stuff like that. So there's lots of factors that go into it, [00:24:00] but I try to always somewhat be humble with him.

[24:02] Sean Garner: Like that wasn't us, but at the same time, when we do something really good, like, Remember I told you we wanted to write this article. Hey, look right here and it boosted your rankings here. So, but just know that there's a big difference between changes that happen, which can be reported on, which are good.

[24:14] Sean Garner: You should have those SEO reports. And then also the work that's actually being done. The main things that I would want to make sure also, if I was a small business owner is the, on the reporting, because the reporting can get very confusing and overwhelming. The things that I would. Think that are the most important is I want to make sure that impressions and clicks are going up and what keywords I've added to my top 10.

[24:40] Sean Garner: So if you think about keywords, there's going to, you might, your website might rank for hundreds or thousands of keywords. The only ones that really make a huge difference are the top three. Top 10 is great because those are ones that we can reach back up there, but the top three are, those are your big moneymaker keywords and stuff.

[24:56] Sean Garner: So I would want to know. What new keywords we've added to the top 10, because I want to make sure that the keywords that we are starting to rank for and win are relevant towards our business. I use this dumb example for clients all the time, but I tell them like, Hey, I might get you to rank number one for, you know, rainbow, fluffy snow cone.

[25:16] Sean Garner: Tulsa. But if that has, doesn't have anything to do, if you don't sell rainbow, fluffy snow cones in Tulsa, it doesn't matter. So you want to make sure that the keywords that you're ranking for are relevant towards your business. A lot of times, if a business doesn't have, hasn't been doing SEO or they've been doing it with some, I would say some shady, SEO practices, whenever we get in the Google search console, we look at the things that they're currently ranking for, it's all of these weird random terms.

[25:40] Sean Garner: And it's because there is no systemized structured approach to it. So Google is just trying to guess, and it has no idea or things like on the, some of the technical things on the backend of the website, wasn't really filled out properly from an SEO agency. And so that way it's just throwing out these random keywords that don't actually make sense.

[25:57] Sean Garner: So I would want to, I would want to know those things as things that are called impressions, which is how many times your website. Showed up on the search result page based upon the keyword. I'd want to know too, how many clicks I'm getting, because there is on your, whenever you type in a keyword, let's say MedSpot, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and you're scrolling through your search results.

[26:16] Sean Garner: What you're seeing is something that's called the site title. And below that, that little description is called your meta description. And so typically the. Work that's done on the site title and the meta description and in the website, determine the, where it ranks for the keyword. So somebody typed in the keyword, it shows where it ranks overall.

[26:33] Sean Garner: Well, then as a customer, you have to think not just about technically, as far as making sure the keywords are used, but then think from the customer experience. If I'm looking. For a med spa in Tulsa, Oklahoma, does that site title that I'm seeing and that meta description, does it entice me to want to click?

[26:51] Sean Garner: So whenever we're writing those meta descriptions, we don't just want to stuff the keywords in there where we just say med spa Tulsa a bunch of times, but we want to write in a persuasive copy way that makes a customer click. See that interest is show you the problem that you solve and makes them actually want to click on that.

[27:06] Sean Garner: So I want to make sure if we're not getting clicks, maybe if we're getting a lot of impressions, but not a lot of clicks, that would show me that there's an opportunity to go back and maybe edit some meta descriptions to update the copy to make people want to click on those. And then, like I said, the other third thing that I want to rank for, or I want to look for in my reports is just new keywords that we've added to our top 10 list, and then the fourth thing that I would, I would want to know is number of pages.

[27:30] Sean Garner: That we have added to our Google business, our, our, our, sorry, our index pages on Google. So Google, what pages did we add to the website this month that now Google is starting to add to our portfolio because the more content we have on our page, the more I said, more relevant content you have on your website, the higher it has to chance.

[27:47] Sean Garner: It has to have a higher domain authority so that you can have a chance to rank for some of those bigger, more. Beautiful keywords that you might want to rank for on your business. So I hope this wasn't super technical or overwhelming. I really just want to give small business owners a heads up things to look out for, for SEO agencies, and just kind of educate yourself a little bit more.

[28:10] Sean Garner: So one, Hey, maybe what you're doing is working really well. This kind of gives you just a little filter to run that thing through. Two, maybe you're do have an SEO agency and you're like, Man, they don't even give me monthly reports or, yeah, I'm spending, you know, thousand to 2, 000 a month, but yeah, they're not writing any or adding any new content to my website.

[28:28] Sean Garner: Um, you need to know all of those things because if they've done the SEO research and they're not continually adding content, paying them to just monitor things is not helping you grow at all in the ranks they've done to set up. If they're not adding new things to them, to your website and making changes and updating things, You should not be paying him because it's, it's not, it's not helping you at all.

[28:48] Sean Garner: They might say that it is, but telling you as an SEO agency, if they're not adding new content, updating content on your website and yeah, they're just taking your money so that, and the third one is maybe you're like, Oh, I want to get started in SEO, but I don't know how. That's a hundred percent what this is.

[29:03] Sean Garner: Now you got a little bit more information in Amos. Whenever you start talking to SEO agencies and marketing agencies, you know, a little bit more about what you should be looking for. So you can find the best fit for you. So love you guys. Hope you have an awesome day. Remember this podcast is all about helping small business owners grow their business so they can dominate their industry with their marketing.

[29:21] Sean Garner: We love simple marketing that works. If that made sense to you, and you'd love an opportunity to talk with us. I'd love the opportunity to talk with you. If you are a small business owner looking to crush it in your market, give us a call. Uh, just visit us on the website, SeanGarner. co book a call down here with me below.

Need Someone To Handle Your SEO?

[29:34] Sean Garner: And if you do what we're going to go through this exact same process. So whenever you do schedule a call with me, what we're going to do is I'm going to. Look at your domain. I'm going to run your whole website through this. If it's an existing website, if it's a new website, we're going to do all the keyword research and comp analysis and everything for you.

[29:47] Sean Garner: So we help you do, we help you do it all. And we love small business owners. So we build, fill and optimize sales funnels. SEO is a part of what we do for that. And we're here to serve you guys. I hope this episode added value to share it with another [00:30:00] small business owner so we can make sure that nobody gets taken advantage of and the real business owners thrive and dominate online.

[30:05] Sean Garner: Have an awesome day. We'll see you on the next one.