Is Being Proficient Enough?

Is Being Proficient Enough?

Sean: Are you familiar with the B-I triangle?

Sean: There you go, team, leadership, mission. All right. Team, leadership, mission. Cash flow, communications systems, legal products. Looks pretty solid to me. It looks pretty solid to me. I think this kind of framework makes a lot of sense and the entire triangle should be pointing to the vision, right? I think that’s what should happen. So the team is very important because if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go long, go together, right? That’s an old Kenyan saying about how to survive in the wilderness.

Sean: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So the team is very, very important. How you can keep the team together going in one direction, that’s leadership. And leadership is critical, if you want to grow a company long term, you want to play the long game. Leadership is extremely important. Even when you’re going to get investors, they’re going to be looking at your leadership team. The mission is important in the sense that you’re going to keep coming back to it, whenever there’s critical decisions to be made. Whenever there’s big problems that you have to solve as a leader, as a founder, then you go back to the mission. Whenever someone is acting up, not really performing well, then you go back to the mission and you tell them, Hey, here’s the mission. How much are you contributing to it? Are you being part of the problem or are you being part of the solution? So not extremely familiar with this, but looks like a pretty, pretty solid framework to me.

Sean: From Erika, is it better to rank on Google organically or through ads?

Sean: I’d say always organically, because here’s the thing that I ask people, do you click on Google ads? I mean, do you click on Google Ads? We have a lot of millennials. I’d argue the purchasers today are millennials, for most companies, procurement people are mostly millennials today for most companies, and I could bet that they don’t click on Google ad results. And if they do, it’s probably only 20 percent of the time. Eighty percent of the time, they’re probably clicking on Google organic search results. So with that kind of statistic, it’s always better to rank organically.

Sean: Now, maybe you’re wondering, well, Sean, you’re running ads on Google as well. Yes, I am. Why am I running them? Here’s the answer. On the first page of Google, you only get 10 spots. Even if SEO-Hacker is already ranking at the top, it still helps if you have another spot on the ads list and there’s usually four ads right at the top most. If I have one spot there now, I’m ranking number one organically. That’s two listings on the first page of Google, which is very, very good for a company like mine, which is we try to stand out, and we try to be consistent with their branding in SEO Hacker. That is what we do. So it’s really good to use both. But if you’re going to have to choose one, I always say it’s going to be the organic search results.

Sean: What are your tips to find the best keywords for your business?

Sean: Dig deep in your mind. That’s the best way to do it because you know, as the founder or as the entrepreneur, what keywords people are using in their heads to look for you. That’s the best way to go about it. And then you have to cross-check that with the data. You could use SEMrush for this. I use SEMrush, they’re an affiliate partner of ours. And SEMrush would tell you how much search volume a certain keyword gets every month in a certain country, and that helps a lot. So you cross-check that with keyword volume per month, per country, or per search engine. And there you go, you got your keyword data. Now it’s up to you to decide which keyword and specific you’re going to want to use to start your SEO campaign.

Sean: How can I increase my sales through organic search?

Sean: The beauty of this, when you’re running SEO and you’re ranking top, people just come to your site and the people who come to your site, they’re searching already. They want what you got. They want your product. They want your service. So you don’t really need to sell to them. They’re going to buy. And that’s just going to increase your sales by a lot. I have a client right now and they started with me 20118. This is a B2B client, a business to business client, and they were selling somewhere in the 30 million per year, which is great. Right? That’s really, really good company. No, just two years after 2020, they’re selling like 150 something million. That’s the growth that SEO has done for them because in 2018, they weren’t doing so. We started 2019 then 2020. So that’s a times five, almost times five increase in their gross revenue. That’s the kind of sales that a CEO can bring in because people will just come into your side and buy. And this client of mine, they’re very happy. They have referred us to a lot of new clients. I’m very happy to partner with them and they’re just a blessing. I’d say they’re a blessing.So, yeah, that’s the magic of SEO.

Sean: As a new business owner, should I focus on my website or my social media?

Sean: It depends on your budget. It depends on your budget and it depends on your target market. So I mentioned earlier the B2B client that I have. They’re not going to do a lot of social media. Because people who buy their stuff are big manufacturers. It’s not the average Joe, and one purchase could be millions of pesos. So social media is not going to work that great for them. Definitely go website. And they invested in their website. We built it for them. Everything. And it worked really well for them.

Sean: But if you’re, for example, a restaurant, I wouldn’t say that a website would be your go to. Maybe social media would be better for you because when people see food in their news feed sometimes makes them hungry, stirs their appetite. Maybe they’ll buy it there. So it would depend on the kind of business you have. Plus, what stage of business you’re in? Are you a startup? If you don’t have a budget for website and SEO, then definitely go social media. But if you could afford a website, definitely go for a website, because if Facebook some day would just decide to turn off your Facebook page, that’s going to hurt a lot.

Sean: And it has happened for a couple of my clients where they would post something. You know, the pandemic is very strict when you post something about the pandemic, about COVID or about people’s Facebook and just slap your wrist and take you out or ban or suspend your app, your account for a while. So that is a concern. That’s why I would always say you should always have a website.

Sean: How can I make my product page more inviting?

Sean: Make sure you have really good photos. That’s what I’d say. If you don’t have a good design, don’t have good photos on your product page, then people will be turned off and head out of your website. So the photos you take, the videos you take are very, very important. That’s content. People want to see what you have to offer and in a very good light. I mean, whenever you go to a certain store that you love, you check out the ambiance. They really focus their lighting on their products or their service.

Sean: Usually, restaurants who have certain lighting ambiances that focus on the tables and chairs that the customers would sit in. Those are really good restaurants. They really care about the ambiance, how you feel about their service, about the place, about the product. A website is kind of like that. It’s a place. It’s a place that people go to. And if the ambiance is not that great, they’re going to feel like they’re not that welcome there. And how you make the ambiance better is through web design, really intuitive web design, easy to use and really good photos and videos on the website. If you don’t invest in really good photos and videos, your ambiance is not that great. People feel like they’re not really that welcome there. You don’t take care of your website. How can you take care of them?

Sean: So that is the reason why SEO Hacker is critical about these things where we make sure that the web design of our clients is super nice and super easy to use. And it’s not just about the rankings for us, it’s the overall experience of what our clients’ potential visitors would say, and think, and feel. So we go the extra mile that way, thinking about the entire journey of the users of the client who partner with us. So yeah, definitely that’s how we do it. That’s how I think you should do it as well. Hope that helps.

Sean: How can I make more enticing copies on my social media accounts?

Sean: A lot of people forget social media is not about selling stuff. Social media is about connections, that’s it at the get go. And I was there when Facebook was starting. I was one of the people who hopped in. I was one of the people who ran ads for the very first time when Sheryl Sandberg finally released the ability to run ads on Facebook. I was there when it was full of Facebook games. I was there. So I’ve seen the growth of social media, and it didn’t grow because it was a great place to sell stuff. Social media grew because it’s a great way to connect with people, how you share your ideas, how you share memories, how you are able to consume other people’s memories and ideas and thoughts. It’s about connections, so copies on social media that are meant for you to connect with other people, those are the copies that will do really well. When you say enticing copy, it’s not copy that should sell, it’s copy that should connect to your target users. That is pretty much the only way you can do it to make it “enticing”.