SEO Frequently Asked Questions

Transcript: SEO Questions & Answers in plain English

Hi, I’m Ben, I’m the director here at Matter Solutions. I founded the company eighteen years ago in April 2000, and I’ve been building a team ever since and training people up and getting them to the point where I’m happy for them to work on awesome stuff for clients.

We often get a lot of questions and some of these questions are already straightforward and very sensible, so I’m going to run through some of the most common ones that Frequently Asked Questions 00:27 how long does it take to see results from SEO? Well it really depends on the market but in general terms because the function of how much SEO you can have and how much we can deploy at any one time for a particular client, usually takes six to nine months for an SEO campaign to really get interesting from a starting position. If you’re getting going and you’ve already been underway or you’ve done some interesting things, where you’ve got a lot of PR going on at the time, that can be considerably less but that’s sort of a rare circumstance usually people who come to us wanting SEO haven’t really done a thing for a long time and they haven’t really done anything at all if anything of value in SEO and what we need to do is make their website more credible, text it at a time and put some blogs up there, make the thing look really good and then start building links, building content that attracts links and also go out and find people who will link to you as a website basically it does take quite a while.

There’s actually sort of green shoots and you see that a starting point of improvements in rankings at sort of three, four or five months that there is a sort of a difficult point at about the four-month mark when you’ve paid say four months of SEO and maybe you get the bill for the fifth month at the bottom of page one you might have some things on page two and beyond still and you’d look at that and say well you know is it really worth it well when you actually get to page one and towards the top of page one it is extremely worth it and that’s six-to-nine month mark, you look at it and go 02:03 why don’t I do more earlier? but that’s hard for us to kind of say to you, oh you have to do this and that’s what’s definitely going to happen because each market is quite different and there’s a question a bit later on that I’ll answer about that. 02:17 So what’s a realistic goal to set? well really if you’ve got nothing ranking and everything sort of you know starting from scratch then a realistic to start with is to get to page one, so within six months we would expect to get a good deal of good keywords to page one maybe a couple of things would get to the top five, those wouldn’t necessarily be the most competitive terms but yet that’s the kind of goal that we’d be looking to set, it’s a bit sort of backwards in that, that’s a realistic kind of time frame to achieve most of your results and that would be something we would use to set your budget. So if you wanted to do it much faster we could with a larger budget but it really does take a little bit of time to do all these things so you know the old saying of it takes one woman nine months to have a baby but nine women can’t necessarily have one baby in a month, it really does take that amount of time to go through and actually get the attention of Google in a good way and do that right.

There are some competitors of ours who will try and do it much more quickly, there are reasons why you should be careful of that, there’s a question about quality a little bit later on. 03:25 So what results can I expect? well you can expect SEO to deliver on activity and we’ll be showing you reports and things at the start to show you look this is what we’re doing, we’re heading in the right direction, we should discuss and make sure that we all are on the same page and regular basis but one of the things that you should really be cautious of is driving things by say number of Link’s because the number of links when that’s the driving KPI, you can end up with a horrible situation where the motivation is there for us to build low-quality links and that’s a very bad idea, I would rather have one good link than ten poor ones and there’s some very good reasons for that. So the kind of results you can expect well you’ll get good reports that will identify for you where those green shoots are at every month actually you’ll get those but particularly you’ll start to see the green shoots and we’ll explain to you what’s going on three four five months in and at the six seven eight mark, they’ll actually start to feel the traffic, you may feel some keywords move sooner. We had one particular client and got them ranking very quickly because they had some historic works and PR things that we were able to capitalize on and get their rankings moving very quickly but like I said before that sort of the exception.

The results you can expect is when you get to page one, get to the top of page, you will get traffic, you will get a considerable amount of traffic to your website for the right keywords and it may well be that the kind of keywords you’d be ranking for well I guess it maybe not considerable amount of traffic maybe but there would be those people that are looking for what you have to offer and you know when we try and get your ranking for a particular keyword we’re thinking about the intent, 05:10 what is in their head? 05:11 what is it that person is looking for at that time? if they just type in plumber Brisbane there’s all sorts of intent options that they could be thinking about, they could have a blocked drain, they could need a hot water system, they could need a trench dug and a pipe laid, you could have all sorts of different things but if they actually specifically say hot water system western suburbs, there are lots many less people searching for that but if that corresponds with what you’re offering we can rank that more quickly and when you get that traffic, you can service that traffic and make money and that’s primarily the idea of getting you a result sooner.

If we think about those lesser keywords as we head towards the bigger keywords and we earn sort of commercial value for you from those keywords. 06:05 So how can you get me to the top of Google, if you’re working for a competitor? well I was at a trade show just the other day and I had this exact question and the guy said you know well if I’m you know so-and-so printer in this case in North Brisbane 06:21 then how can you look after someone else? well one of the things is that when we’re going for a particular set of keywords, we are very cautious about understanding and we take the time to understand what’s the end behind what people are looking for and as I’ve just said, we want to get you ranking for stuff that you’re going to get a return on. So in that case that man there was particularly talking to me about digital printing you know business cards and that sort of thing, now we can get him ranking in North Brisbane for all sorts of different terms and even head towards keywords in Brisbane overall and in general we wouldn’t really look to take on a competitor of his, if somebody else wants to go for exactly the same keywords, if the print shop two doors down called us and said 07:09 hey, wouldn’t you take me on? well the answer’s no, because we’re into that for this guy, that is part of the reason why we have contracts, we usually have contracts for either six or twelve months long for SEO campaigns and we would look after him basically, he’s our client and we’re into that for you, 07:26 so how can you get me to the top, if you’re working for a competitor?

Well in this case, we wouldn’t work for the competitor, we would work for him and in the case where you’ve got somebody say on the Gold Coast, so outside of Brisbane, who’s competing for different keywords, a different content yes, absolutely, there’s no competition and effectively we would take on other client and we would understand the keywords like let’s say we understand particular markets quite well, we have a lot of experience in the training space, we know the property market very well, we also know lots of other particular niches you know dentists and all the service delivery that dentists offer and understanding all of these different specific things and in any market you know we’ve done everything from as far as pallet racking to catamarans you know understanding the niches and the individual terms within these things, we can understand them from your perspective by listening to you as a client but we can also understand them from numbers. So we get a lot of data and all the numbers from Google themselves, 08:34 so how much does SEO cost? well in general a small SEO plan we’ll start at about a thousand dollars a month but like I said before what you’ll be looking for is to understand the intend behind your customers. So we look at the keywords that Google tells us that those people are looking for and we also under understand the value for you, so if there’s a particular set of keywords where people are looking for particular phrase, maybe the dentist thing you know that they’re looking for teeth whitening 09:01 well where’s the value in that? well it’s quite a low-cost thing but over time those people may well want to have you know veneers or some other kind of service where they’re spending considerable amounts of money, maybe the Invisalign product where they’re spending you know three, five, seven thousand dollars in a go.

Well we’re sort of interested in looking at those keywords and we can look at who already ranks and when we see who ranks and how hard they’ve worked to get there and we know where your at maybe you’re coming from a standing start or maybe you’ve already done some SEO you know mixed quality or let’s say you’ve done some good SEO, well if you were halfway there, we can actually look at it and say well we can get you the rest of the way and we can give you an estimate of how much that would cost to get there and spread the cost over you know say six months or twelve months so that we can move the campaign a reasonable pace and not have that look kind of a bit of fake and a bit weird because you know there are some very aggressive ways of doing SEO where you can get websites ranking. That’s a very bad idea because ultimately you’ll waste their investment if google penalizes you, so I would recommend avoiding that sort of SEO, pay per click or SEO, so this is really a question of the kind of advertising but even you know other companies but my team here we also manage AdWords campaigns and Facebook advertising campaigns. So pay-per-click or SEO well it really depends, so with pay-per-click you can have a campaign up and running and you can be buying traffic from Facebook or Google very quickly you know with the matter of days, you can be up and running and earning traffic and getting people clicking through into your website and maybe buying product or creating leads.

Now search engine optimization as I’ve already said takes six to nine months to really interesting and exciting, the key question in reply to PPC or SEO it’s really how fast do you want the leads, if you need them fast obviously its pay-per-click, if you are happy to invest in your website and make it stronger so it has a footprint and competitive advantage over your competition then SEO is definitely the way to go, in many cases I’ve had clients who have both SEO and PPC underway and we found that the cost for each lead that comes in is typically three to five times more for pay-per-click than it is for SEO. Now that’s not to say that they’re not valuable leads, people who are clicking on ads are often aware that their ads and maybe even in more of a hurry, so then you know they’re more ready to buy, so let’s say the cost per lead at eighty dollars and you’ve got a pay-per-click may be the cost per lead is more like two hundred and fifty now, in that case, your product that you’re selling you know actually not going to say who the client is but in that case we had a client who ranked very well they also had a very good at advertising campaign and in their case, they were selling a product that was between sort of three and a half and four and a half thousand dollars, now that product they knew that they would sell roughly one in two to people who were doing pay per click. So two hundred and fifty dollars lead that means that they’ve got five hundred dollars per sale and so five hundred dollars cost of the sale out of the three and a half thousand dollars that they were going to yield yes, it’s pretty good now SEO maybe only one in three of those people would actually_ who one of the three people who got in touch would actually buy but at eighty dollars a lead that means that the cost per sale is only two hundred and forty.

So it’s actually quite a bit cheaper than the five hundred dollars you pay on pay-per-click and when you do those kind of numbers and you have that kind of tracking in place and it’s easily done with Google Analytics and they will know how, then you can make a decision of what do I want to invest in and in that case that client used to invest quite a considerable amount of money into SEO but as they had there was a training company and headquarters and they would have say thirty odd people come to a class now in that case, if they could fill the room completely with SEO of course they would but because it’s time dependent and has to be done by a certain date in order to get everybody RSVP and booked in and all that sort of stuff well then and there are only a certain number of people searching for the actual particular niche but you could certainly be in the situation where you’d fill half of the class or three-quarters of the class with SEO people and then you’d fill the rest of the class with pay-per-click people. So you know definitely in some cases you could run both but essentially pay-per-click has its use of getting you moving fast but you know perhaps on a high cost per lead, the SEO is more like a long-term investment which builds a competitive advantage and has a momentum, so it builds and builds upon itself and if you let it go for a little while, it will continue, it will fade away but it will continue for quite a while. 14:25 So do I need a new website for SEO? well if your website is terrible probably yes, if your website is quite good no, probably not and really the judgment between is a website good or is it terrible isn’t necessarily just how it looks, I found it a web design company matter solutions was a web design company in April 2000, but personally my design skills aren’t as good as many others, so one of the things that I did for people was make the best of maybe not the prettiest websites in the world. So the websites I would build for client’s way back then I mean I have a designer now so you know they’re awesome but back then what I would do is I would make sure that people got what they want when they were visiting and just inherently that is good for SEO because if I visit your website and it repels me because it doesn’t have what I’m looking for, then I go back to Google and effectively I’m signaling as a potential customer of yours.

I’m signaling that your website isn’t satisfying and over time Google grabs and analyzes all that data and I think you should probably watch the pogo-sticking video which we’ve got probably on this page, you should basically make sure that your website satisfies those potential customers and that’s why it’s very important to think about the intent, what is it inside that query that they’ve given to Google when they’ve typed in blocked drain Brisbane well they’re actually looking for somebody in Brisbane to fix their blocked drain, you can make that assumption and that’s a safe assumption to make and when you know they’re in Brisbane and that’s their problem, you can write pretty good text that addresses that problem and tells them you can be there to fix it pretty quickly of course, if you can do that as a plumber. 16:08 So do I need a new website? maybe probably not, even some of the most terrible websites with a bit of tweaking and removing sort of sliders and slow things, they’ve actually performed quite well, we have a few ways of building websites very efficiently for SEO clients, so if you’re concerned about that, don’t let that worry you 16:31 and do I need to replace the whole website even if like maybe the intent is wrong? No, usually you just have to change maybe some images and the text, maybe some headers to be really communicate and connect with people. So that’s worth considering, 16:48 so do I need a website for SEO? probably not but maybe it’s worth getting a professional assessment, 16:59 do I need to do SEO only once? well 17:02 do I only need to do SEO once? probably not, we have two main SEO contracts, the way we work for clients we have these one-off packs of work because of SEO packs where we’ll do a chunk of SEO work would basically document what it is that you’re looking for and what we’ll do is outline to you what we’ll definitely fix because they’re high priority.

What we’d like to fix because you know that’s going to have a meaningful impact on your rankings and what nice to have things are or what things are on the list that we can’t get to with the budget you’ve given us, so those SEO packs, they typically run between one and a half maybe two three thousand in some cases they’ve been more like sort of four or five thousand dollars but in general it’s sort of one and a half to three thousand dollars. Now what we do in those cases is we really work with you to understand you know what are the things you want to achieve and we talk to you about how we can focus on particular subsets of keywords, things that you really want to kind of improve and maybe you know if you’ve had reasonable rankings in the past, what we want to recover, what we want to get back and in that case we’ll go out and fix the things in your website that are holding it back, I mean you mentioned that you’re driving your car around and it’s making this horrible noise and you know you pull up at the traffic lights and it just happens to be somebody there, they our mechanic and they say maybe your hand brakes broken you know okay, well good that was nice to know, pull into a garage and you know twenty-minutes later your hand brake is no longer broken and it’s not trapped on you know there’s little things that can cause problems to your website and you need a professional to go in and have a bit of a look and say yeah these are the things that I would fix. There’s a couple of tools out there that if you’re interested, you can go and check yourself, probably the best one I’d recommend look at would be the page, speed, insights, so if you just Google for page, speed, insights by Google and then have a look and see you know what’s it like, usually you will see quite a list of things that need to be fixed that’s the sort of stuff that we would do in the SEO pack, so in terms of our approach, we use the thing called the SEO triangle like the fire triangle we will be fixing the content and maybe the user experience of the website to make it a bit faster, make the texts satisfy people who’ve got a certain intent for particular keywords but there’s a third side to that and that’s the links, you need to have some links that point at your website and signal to Google that yours is a good website to visit.

Now if you just build a few links as a one-off and this is the danger with buying some kind of offshore SEO companies and services from offshore SEO company, you buy a one-off block of work, what can happen is they take you from having say zero links or you know a handful to suddenly build you, you know a thousand terrible quality links and they do it over the space of a couple of months and then they stop. Now if you were Google, what do you have to do is chart that over time and you’d have a look that you went from sort of a flat line of very few and then suddenly a big spike upwards and then you’ve gone flat line again at a higher level and that looks fake, it looks like you went offshore and bought a load of links from somebody who built low-quality links, so you’re much better off putting stuff in your business that means that you acquire and earn good links over time. So create good content, create good information that’s useful, that people care about and they want to link to that, if you happen to create like an ideal link asset yeah, that actually happens to be situations where we make ourselves redundant by creating work like that and you will earn links over time, that’s kind of rare but it does happen. 20:54 So why is SEO important for my business? well I’m a business owner, I imagine either you are a business owner or you’re responsible for doing the marketing for the business you work in. Now one of the things you’ve got to think about is, how do I build a competitive advantage not only how do I build a competitive advantage but how do I sustain and expand and build upon that competitive advantage.

If I can raise a barrier between me and my competitors which generates us business, is that worth investing in and for me that’s SEO and when I work with clients, that’s what I’m working to help them achieve, even if they only have a small budget, what I’m trying to do is help them raise the barrier and keep ahead of the curve. So there you can build a competitive advantage against the competition, we have some clients who have you know invested in SEO of the last sort of year and a half thinking one particular client actually and before that they would just sort of run at the mill, everybody else was doing SEO, they were kind of keeping up and then at a certain point they said right, we’re really going to do this and they tripled their budget, they spent a lot of money on SEO and we were able to do a huge amount of work and we’ve got them into a hugely dominant position. Now that number one for all sorts of very valuable keywords and they’re you know absolutely dominating all over the country, they have stores all over the place and they get leads every day, they get sales every day and they’re in a great position, the competitors don’t know what hit them really, they’ve got competitors and all sorts of different niches and their website dominates pretty much all of them and the nice thing is that now their business is more valuable because instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on Google AdWords to get that equivalent amount of traffic, they spend less on SEO and they’ve been able to wind that back from the three times increase down to more like back to what it was back to the one time and they are able to invest in other projects, other things and still get the same traffic and they’re effectively saving what they used to spend you know tens of thousands of dollars of Google AdWords they are now that entire traffic just from SEO like I said before in the SEO versus PPC question traffic is a little bit different in behavior they have to nurture and look after those leads a little bit more carefully but they can do that because they’ve got a budget to do that.

23:36 Can I do SEO for myself? Yes, I hope so, we definitely like to work with clients who are interested in what we’re doing and if you can think about SEO in your day to day business, you will build in a competitive advantage without even necessarily needing to spend any money with us and that’s just a case of you understanding how does the world work now, everybody understands the concepts of referrals, I mean if you’re out talking to your potential customers, if you’re out say you’re a landscaper and you’re talking to people and saying oh yeah you know happy with the work that I’ve done in your garden and somebody says yes, it’s brilliant and they say oh yeah, my neighbor over here wants you to go over and say hello because they love it right, they were really excited to see what we’ve had done, brilliant, that’s the best kind of lead even better than a SEO-lead and I would happily admit that that the best leads are ones where people have referred you by word of mouth. The same is kind of true with SEO in terms of going out and securing links and people to do kind of deals with and work out who would link to you and you’ve got a relationship with, people that you already know may well want to link to you, just got to give them a reason why.

What is it, you can share, put on your website that helps them link to you and that kind of work, we can get out of you and we can do it for you but you could do it yourself, you could, we do have some training options. So you can come in and learn about SEO for yourself, if you’re a marketing coordinator or your marketing manager, we can definitely train you up and show you things and it’s pretty straightforward really but it takes time, you’ve to get your head around the idea that the only people that can really link are people with websites. 25:26 So how do we appeal to those people and how do we encourage them to write something that means that they can link to us and link to you? 25:35 should I ask someone to do my SEO? well I think you should hire an agency, unless you’re huge like if you’re really big company, you should probably build an SEO team, digital marketing team, in which case you probably need some coaching and consulting and advice in which case you should hire us to help coach and consult them 25:55 but should you mind your own SEO to work in-house, yes, maybe even the sort of mid-level and the junior staff I’ve got here you know recruiters are constantly trying to poach them and take them off to work for individual companies but the problem is with that from their perspective so it’s young employees they’re in a sort of a situation where they’ve got an extremely attractive skill which could well do your business very well.

But they are kind of going to be stuck in a one-trick, kind of you know one-trick pony really that they know a certain set of SEO skills and they’re going to need to just do those over and over again to get your ranking but unfortunately, I’ve been around a long time eighteen years doing this now. I’ve seen situations where doing the same kind of link-building, doing the same kind of SEO work for clients puts you at risk, you need to have quite a diverse effort into your link building. So you haven’t just got directory links, you haven’t just got links from what we call web 2.0 kind of you know things like medium.com and social profiles and things like that, you need to also have some real legit decent content type links, guest posts, you need a very wide diverse range of links. So if Google comes along and says ah we’re going to devalue some of these, doesn’t take out your whole portfolio of effort that’s been put into SEO, have you hire somebody depending on how much you’re looking to spend to hire, you have to be cautious because if you’re looking to hire somebody with a lot of experience, who can bring that diversity and that kind of skill in terms of all those different skills that they need to deliver, they’re going to be very expensive and that kind of money you would get a lot of work from an agency like us.

Somebody with less skill, somebody who’s more of a junior, they probably only have a subset of skills and that probably isn’t going to do you the best long term in terms of your SEO. Now if you can hire multiple people, two three four five people absolutely, you should be building an SEO team of your own and you should be thinking about having somebody train them up, coach them and show them what they should and shouldn’t be doing maybe even have somebody professionally sort of give them some oversight and help them with their milestones and their goals. We have to be very efficient for clients when we’re delivering work you know ultimately the way the economics of running an agency work you know staff are quite expensive and we have to make sure we’re always training them, that means that you know we have to produce a lot of work out of every hour that we spend on the ground for you as a client. So we’re very efficient, now we are actually a very open agency and we’ve trained other companies on how to do that before, not other agencies, we train competitors but no other businesses who we are kind of allied with you know even former clients who want us to help them build an internal team or you know businesses that come to us and say I’ve got a bit of a team, I need you to help them raise their game. So we can do that too, 29:08 can you guarantee the first position in Google? No, 29:14 why not? because Google is in charge of that and if your website isn’t a 100% the best thing on the internet for that term and it has a good deal of links and the website is really pretty fast and better than all the other ones around, there’s too many variables yep.

So if you wanted to have a guarantee of I want to have the fastest car great, okay, but the whole market means that somebody else could come out with a slightly faster car and suddenly the guarantee is broken. So it is not under our control, what we can do is deliver you the very best SEO work that we can do then we show you what we’re doing, we’re very open and transparent about what it is that we’re doing and we show it to you and we show you the results, 30:09 how will I know if SEO is working? well you will start to feel it, people will call up and they’ll be slightly more informed than they were before because the call maybe the long tail keywords, the ones that very specific that have a high amount of intent, when somebody’s looking for a landscaper to sort out a pond and a rockery and you’ve talked around a pond and a rockery in your garden you know in a client’s garden and you’ve written a case study that say and they read that and then they get in touch, that is going to be an almost sold potential customer. They have a look at the beautiful pictures of the work that you’ve done and you rank for this great stuff there in the western suburbs of Brisbane or in Brisbane, you will actually start to get business out of it and that’s when you know that SEO is working. I’ve had clients call me up and say what I’ve happened then it’s literally that they’ve transitioned from page two to page one and the phone started ringing at a huge pace, that in particular was a very big keyword, Brisbane plumber and that plumber called me up to say what’s happening.

This is crazy but they were getting calls from all over Brisbane and as a one-man shop, they were too small, they couldn’t service leads all over the city, so what we did is we actually changed the way the rankings worked and we targeted more local things to them in Khepera Ashgrove the gap, their local suburbs we helped them get what they needed and they became very busy just in their locality because they didn’t want to be driving all the way over to ten you know their Northside, so they didn’t want to be all over the place. 31:49 So how will he know? well you’ll feel it, you really will and personally I really love working with say trades because you’re either busy or you’re on the phone telling us you’re not busy yeah, and that’s good for us, it’s good for my team, I like that, 32:07 do I need to know how to code? Yes, no of course not, no, most website systems we know our way around them, WordPress in particular we’ve been working with WordPress for ten years, it’s been around for a long time but years is a very long time in the WordPress community and yeah absolutely WordPress is like the vast majority of small business websites, it’s 30% of all websites across all domains but actually in the business space, it’s probably a bit of a guess but it’s probably more like 50%.

We have experience with Joomla and Drupal and bass kind of HTML websites as well, we’ve got some experience with Umbra CO and concrete five and all sorts of weird kind of website systems, we can help you, definitely help you and you don’t need to know how to code, we can hop into your code and make the changes, we keep track of every change we make in some cases we make the changes and then you have to approve them before we go live, in other cases you know you can give us approval and we’ll make the changes live in the code and just show you what we changed in the cases where you have to approve, it’s usually in a regulated market or if you choose to so regulate the market would be a medical, insurance, finance, that kind of thing but you can choose to do that, you can choose to sort of stand in the way and check that out and I mean stand in a way because it does slow us down yep, but it’s a good idea if you’re in a regulated market because we want your sign-off and everything we do.

33:45 Is SEO safe? Yes, well the kind of SEO we’re doing, yes it is, there are definitely other SEO companies, some of the SEO companies that ranked best in Brisbane, if you search for SEO in Brisbane we used to rank very highly for that and at that time maybe some of the SEO we were doing was the sort of stuff that I’d be proudest of, so we definitely have some good knowledge about what is not good SEO hands-on knowledge about what is good and not good SEO but for clients we would never do any of that stuff and we would recommend building a sustainable competitive advantage by building good quality SEO, good quality work that will last the test of time and that’s really a you know goes right back to our ethos here at matter solutions is that we want to do stuff that matters, that makes a difference to you and your business, your employees, your customers. We want to make it matter, 34:43 can you work with my current web designers? Yes, absolutely yeah, we work with a lot of web design companies like in some cases, we’ll work for them, work with them behind the scenes, you may even be a web designer you know looking to learn some SEO or whatever or trying to find somebody who’s reliable and you know doing work at a higher standard yes, absolutely we get approached by web designers all the time, we work with them, we help them make their websites more SEO friendly, we also will take Commission’s take work from clients and all you need to do is introduce us to your web designer. They can be in full control of the web site, we can make some changes, we can work with them, we can share like code repositories if we have to share actual kind of code changes and have to be done you know if they’re going to be making some updates to the website, we just have to agree on how the budgets going to work, you’ll need to pay them for the stuff that they have to do.

You need to pay up pay us for throughout sort of agreed contract or whatever we’re going to do for you and we need to make sure that there’s a there’s a loop in there so that you know you get to see that they’re doing their best and we’re doing our best and that you know that there’s not one of these horrible situations and I have seen them and I’ve definitely raised Flags with the client, where we can’t do our work because they can’t get the changes made and then when the result don’t appear and they still take months to appear even after we’ve been waiting for six weeks for changes to be made, you’re aware that you need to have words with your web designer, let’s put it that way, okay, yeah anybody but it happens. Let’s just say we want to do things that matter, so we won’t necessarily shy away from saying, you need to go and have a word of them because things need to change quickly. 36:33 So should a CEO be my only digital marketing activity? No, generally not, we have a very successful client who started SEO with us quite a long time ago, probably six years ago, we’ve been looking after them and when they make changes to the business, when they do things, they call us up they talk to us about it and we are primarily their only marketing activity, I mean they send emails to the clients, they do a lot of sales kind of stuff but they do that themselves but they don’t really do anything on social media, they don’t do anything, they do a little bit of AdWords with us, we do loads of their marketing ads, we do all of it you know they have a printer that does signage and business cards and stuff like that but really marketing wise it’s very limited SEO is the big way that they get in front of their customers.

37:24 So should it be? probably not, Google can change the rules and pull the rug out from under us, the chance of that is very minimal because of the way we do SEO and I’m happy to talk about that face to face but I would recommend clients and anyone doing any marketing have a few threads to their bow you know think about what are the things that you need to achieve or you need to generate leads in a few different ways. So that you you’re not reliant on just one and certainly if you’re just getting underway and you need to generate leads, yet you should probably think about doing pay-per-click to get leads coming in sooner and even in that case you can analyze which keywords are actually really valuable and go into sales. So that the SEO can kind of pivot and target those particular keywords, when you know those keywords are really valuable because they turn into sales then you can really put some extra emphasis on them in the SEO campaign and when you get them ranking yeah, that’s when it gets very exciting. So I mentioned before I was going to answer this question about quality or quantity, well in terms of getting links to your website, so backlinks are links that point from other people’s websites to your website and forward links or links that you point from your website on to other people.

38:47 So backlinks should you try and get quantity or quality? well it should all be about quality like I said before, I would take one quality link over ten poor quality links, every other week in some cases you really need to think about you know 39:04 what is the topic? 39:05 what is that website about? 39:06 what’s going on? 39:07 how many people do they link to? if they link to loads of different people and you know that’s the purpose of their entire website, Google is going to treat them as like a source of spam and you don’t really want to be in the neighborhood over them put link into you, you just don’t want it, it would actually do you more harm than good. The ideal link to ever get would be a link from the very best ranking competitor, that would be the best link you could get 39:34 but is your competitor going to link to you? No, absolutely not, but what’s the next best thing, one of the most trustworthy websites out there would be government websites, 39:43 are they going to link to you? Yeah, probably not, but government’s link to charities, sports organizations, training organizations, 39:50 are they going to link to you? Maybe, if you can get within a couple of hops of some very trustworthy websites that can be very valuable and thinking about link building in sort of a you know instead of quantity you know how many links are you going to build me, no, 40:06 where are these links coming from? 40:07 what are they? 40:09 what do they say? 40:10 what are the links actually say? 40:12 what are they talking about? 40:13 what is the page that links to you talking about? 40:16 is it on topic? 40:17 is it relevant to your business? if it is then your rank can improve, if it’s a really trustworthy website and it’s relevant fantastic, that’s exactly what we want to see.

So it’s all about quality, so that’s me, if you want to talk about your digital marketing try and keep it plain English, a little bit of jargon along the way but I’d like to explain what the jargon is and obviously I’ve used SEO as a term, a lot here but you know other terms I would always explain them as we go because I want you to learn. I want you to understand, if you want some help, got some questions, give us a call. Thanks very much.