Before You Invest in SEO, MUST WATCH: Understanding Search

Transcript:

Now this may sound very basic or very simple, but a lot of people misunderstand what Google pulls up with search results.
For instance, someone may message me and say:

“I want to show up at the top of Google for this specific search.”

“Can you optimize my website?”

In reality, optimizing the website's important, but what they really want to optimize is their Google My Business listing. Or if they're an e-commerce store on Squarespace, they may want to optimize something completely different, which would be getting their products online. That’s a whole different process. So when we think about SEO, let's take a look at what actually shows up on Google.

Understand Search Results

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This is really important to start with just because you want to understand what Google's goal is. They want to prioritize ads because that's revenue for them, but also at the end of the day, they want to make it as useful as possible. If Google is not useful, if you don't find information that you're looking for, you're not going to go back to Google. Your website, your information, your products should be useful to that search query. Now let's take a look at a few examples.

Google My Business Listings

I always like doing “dentists near me” because that is a great starting place. First, let's take a look. What we're seeing here at the top is an ad. So you would go to the Google ads website, create ads, pay for ads to show up. If I click on this, this company pays for that. Typically you see three to four ads at the top here but I'm in incognito mode. So maybe they're not showing up. Let me refresh and see - as you could see, if I refresh the first option does change here. You could see that we actually have two ads to know if it's an ad, look for the word ad.

All right. But then what shows up? This is what we call Google My Business listings. I'm going to show you all the websites for these in a moment, but this is a Google My Business listing. This is something to focus on.

If you're trying to optimize a local business you would use your Google My Business listing. Yes, it does link to your website, but it's not because your website is optimized. It's because your Google My Business listing is showing up. If I hit view all, I'm going to open that in a new tab. It takes me to the maps page.

Here you could see a lot more results, a lot more information. And as soon as we get in, you could also see the first two results ads. So again, these are placed by Google ads. So if you're trying to get up to a specific spot quickly, well know that you can run Google ads in Google maps to show up on a Google my business listing, like this.

Following down here is where you're going to see the organic results. Organic is SEO at its finest. This is where your website is optimized for search like this. I got a message recently, somebody wants to optimize for the search “dental.” We'll take a look at that in a moment, but that is a very broad topic.

If you're trying to optimize for something like this and you are a local business, it may be a little bit difficult. There are other ways to think about optimization that is not just basically your website and Google. Think about this, here's a few things. So number one, we talked about Google ads. Obviously you're paying for that that's different, but let's go to organic Google My Business listings. You want to optimize your Google My Business listing. For organic results you may actually want to optimize your Yelp account. You can see here, the first two results are from Yelp. The next one is actually a doctor's office in the area which is great. Here, open care again, that looks like a Yelp type of website. This is a local business. This looks like a local business. So if it is a local business result, that's showing up that you're seeing those results show up. Well, you could optimize your website. But here are the takeaways, at least for a local business.

You definitely need to optimize your website, but more importantly, optimize your Google My Business listing. And if you're trying to show up higher for specific searches, especially if they end with near me, really focus on your Google My Business listing, and possibly consider running. Now let's do the search “dental.”

What you're looking at here is very similar. We've covered some of these, but now you're getting some information here and this is Google generating information. Again, making information useful and quick to access where they're pulling up a lot of different results. So this is Google generated from different websites.

As you can see here, this is from Wikipedia. And they even give another option here for another type of search. Because if you search dental, you may be searching the definition of it, or you may be searching for a career or you may be searching for an education program. There are a lot of different searches for such a broad keyword.

Ecommerce - Google Shopping Ads

Next, we're going to look at ecommerce. So this is shopping. Let's talk about e-commerce for a moment. So I was shopping for a necklace recently, as you could see here, this is a great way to figure out how shopping works. Now, I typed in a product. What are you looking at? First thing you're looking at are at all of these are at just a side note.

Sometimes people come to me and say they never click on it. And then I ask them if they've ever clicked on products on Google and they say, yes, these are always ads. They are always, always ads. So if you've ever clicked on a product like this, you've probably clicked on that. And a lot of people do it's okay.

A lot of people click on ads. Google's main revenue source is ad spent. Okay. Anyway, so you'll see here. These are Google shopping ads. And with Squarespace websites, they're placed in a special way. I'm going to show you in a moment how they're placed, but these are Google shopping ads. So you see here, all of these are ads.

Similarly, as we talked about earlier, if you want to optimize your local business, you may optimize Yelp, but for shopping, you may have your own website and you want to optimize there. But you may want to optimize on Etsy as well. Further, let's take a look here. Now. This is Google shopping in the organic sense.

So you could see here popular products. Well, any of these are Google shopping, so I just opened up more and you could see that there are more options here. Now, if I go up here and I type in, let's say, “men's” you see, it'll start to show a lot of options. If I went back to the top of the page and I clicked on.

Let me open that in a new tab, the results we are just looking at, you're going to see here. So up here, these are ads. You'll see us as sponsored. It's a little bit hidden. These are ads, these are organic results. And again, these are set up via your Squarespace website and a third-party tool. I'm going to show you in a moment to a Google merchant account.

Okay. And then finally, these are organic results for your website. So you'll see here, this is an organic result for Jennifer Fisher's website. This is an organic result from Amazon, and then these are more options from Amazon. And then these are even now Google my business listings. So as you can see, the way this page is organized is with all these different listings that are agregated into one search result page, which is very easy for the user experience. But for optimizing SEO, you want to know what you want to optimize for. So for e-commerce you probably want to optimize some Google ads, Google shopping ads, or you just want to optimize your Google merchant. Okay. And now finally, for this last search that I want to do, just to show us again, these are ads we're doing, we're looking at WordPress, how to build a website.

The first few results are ads with ad extensions. That's its own thing. Here you'll see this. This is a rich snippet or a structured snippet or whatever they call it. I forget the exact name off the top of my head right now. But you could see here. That this is pulling information from a blog post. This blog post from HubSpot is pulling these eight or so points.

Down here this is a different result from wordpress.com. You could see here. Can I build my own WordPress website? And you'll see, it has an answer to that question here. So these are structured snippets. You'll see if I click here, it says about the results source. These are questions. Commonly search on Google and then they're pulling it from websites.

So if you go in, “is WordPress the best way to build a website?” You'll see, this is pulled from a blog post WP beginner.com. So if you're thinking about creating content, it's great to create content around answering questions, because if we go into this blog post and you'll see here that the answer it's pulling just this random tag.

From this section here, it’s not even a direct question answer. It's literally just pulling these two sentences, uh, into this answer. And anytime you click on a question, more questions, show up. “Can I build my own site”, click away. There's more questions. So it keeps going. Now this is the first organic result.

That we looked at, these are organic results, but they're structured snippets. So they're optimized in a different way. First organic website results is here, WP beginner. And then here are videos. Again, if you try to optimize, you could think about optimizing for search as well, not just for Google, but for YouTube.

And I'm just going to pause for a moment we're done with this part now. And I just want to make this. Let's talk about this. A lot of people want to optimize for search because they want it increased. But having a base understanding of what you need to do to grow your specific business is really essential because you could optimize for Google maps, YouTube, Google, Google shopping.

Google Ads

There are so many different things you can consider when you're optimizing your brand. That's not just your website. So now in this part of the video, we are going to cover all the tools we just mentioned. First one is going to be Google ads inside Google ads. Here's the website inside Google ads. You can literally do so much.

You could create ads for search. You could create ads for Google maps. You could create ads that have phone calls attached to them. So someone can click and make a call. You can make ads for YouTube. You can make ads shopping ads. There are a myriad of things that you could do within Google ads. And I'll probably say this Google ads is probably the most complex part of this whole.

It's unfortunate. It just is. I really wish setting up a YouTube ad was easier, but it's, it's not, there's just a few things that have to happen. A few processes that have to happen, but this is where you would make that happen.

Google My Business

Next is Google My Business. So here google.com forward slash business, you could create a free Google my business account.

So you could create this listing. Once you create it. I have other video content to show you how to optimize it. But in this case, you could come in here, start adding an information. If you create a Google, my business listing, you will need to verify your address. So what they'll do is they'll either call you or send you a flyer with a special code on it.

You put that code back into the site. It verifies that you are at that physical location. I would say for 80 to 90% of Google, my business listings, a physical location is required. I think there are some anomalies, but for the most part that is essential. So yeah, you could come here, create a free account. It's really easy and simple to do.

Google Search Console

I never mentioned this before, but this is the core of your optimization for your website. You want to set up Google Analytics, which we're going to touch on now, but you also want to set up Google Search Console. This is the way you communicate with Google manually on what you've done to your website. Any updates that have been done when you add new content and all of that, it is your way to optimize your SEO by making sure Google has the latest website, the latest crawl data, all of that, and make sure everything is working properly. And this tool is also free as well. Next is going to be Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

This is a free analytics tool that you can add to your website to track the user experience. Find out valuable data on what's working. What's not working all of that. Uh, it's a great tool to just add to your site, to see what's working, where people are coming from, how are they getting to your site? And a lot more information.

It's actually pretty exhausting how much information they provide, but it is good to just add it, have it in the background while you build your business while you're building organic traffic. It's great to have running in the background.

Google For Retail

Next, if we're going to e-commerce, we're going to talk about Google for retail.

What they also call “merchant account.” So your merchant center here, you could connect your website and your products to Google so that it could show up in Google shopping. And if you do want to run Google ads, Google shopping ads, you're going to need to have this account set up. And if you are e-commerce and you want to show up in Google shopping or run Google shopping ads, I highly recommend using square feet.io to set it up.

There is a monthly fee to it, but for some odd reason, Products on Squarespace, do not naturally connect to Google shopping. They need a little bit of help. So this tool will help you connect all your products to Google so they could show up in search results. This is one big, unfortunate thing about any e-commerce on Squarespace.

I highly recommend Shopify if you are exploring, but if you already have this site, you're staying on Squarespace, then this is the tool for you. Next, just something to consider.

Google Trends

Maybe you've seen this before. This is Google trends. You could search keywords, see what people are searching, create content around that.

It's a great way to start. I don't think it's the most valuable tool because inside Google ads, there's another tool called Google keyword planner. So many tools from Google. Uh, if you use Google keyword planner, you're going to get exact data and really rich information. Uh, it's not actually exact data, but it's a lot more precise than what you're going to get in Google trends.

Google Structured Data

If you're really focused on blogging, consider looking into structured data markup. So you'll see here. I just did a Google search, Google structured data, markup helper. Once you come here, there's a few ways to get to it, but I'm going to click here on the support page and it'll explain everything to you.

This helps you create those rich snippets or those structured snippets. We were looking at. Where the question would show up on the Google results page. So there are a few things to consider here. We're looking at structured snippets. There's also rich snippets or rich results. There's a lot of different ways to look at this, but if you are offering any type of product or service, there are tons of ways to optimize your results. Now this is definitely more advanced, but again, this video is to help, you know, what to focus on rather than waste your time thinking, “oh, is something gonna happen”?

So here, this is the search gallery that Google search central provides. You could see, you could optimize as an article, a book for breadcrumbs, a carousel courses, a dataset, an employer for job listings, events, fact checker FAQ, or home activities, how to image license. There are so many things, recipes, local business, all that stuff. Again, this is super advanced at this point, but if you know that your website is heavily event based, you want to make sure you start to learn this and see what you can learn about events and how to optimize them for Google.

Structured Data Markup Helper - Rich Results

So there's two tools I want to talk about here. First of all, the structured data markup helper, which we already open, I'm going to click here to open the actual tool and you could see, this is what it looks like. You're going to have to have a Google search console account to get into this. But once you have that set up you can go in here and start working your magic.

Next is going to be rich results.

And this is the last tool we're going to look at, um, from Google. So does your page support rich results? And you could type in a URL here, especially like blog posts or products and see what shows up again. This isn't a, how to video on how to fix it if you get bad results, but it'll show you what you can do.

And for all of these pages, just Google the title of it. So if you Google “Google rich results test” or whatever, you're going to find it. And we will provide the links down below for you. Finally, I found this tool very helpful. It's a simple version of a tool that Google provides. If I go back here to this post. So if you go here and type in a URL, it'll help you start to tag that URL. So this tool and this tool are the same thing basically. And anything you type in will start to pull up here so that you could provide Google with the code it needs so that it knows and understands what your pages and how to organize the information. Back to where we started in this video.

Just let's keep in mind. Our mission here is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This is. Goal. This is their promise for search. So everything you can do to optimize your site, to make it as useful as possible so that the person who searches, if they click on your product or service or page, find what they're looking for. Well, at the end of the day, that is what we're doing with any type of SEO with that.

Thank you for watching. If you got value from this video, please hit the like button down below. If you have any questions, drop a comment. And if you want more content like this, we publish new content every single week.