Links from Episode:

• Huckabuy

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello, welcome to the Close The Loop podcast. I’m here with a very special guest today, and we’re going to be discussing NAP consistency, and how it relates to SEO, your organic reach, your organic ability to acquire new visitors and maybe new future consumers to your business through your website.

[00:00:18] Kevin Dieny: So a reason that we wanted to jump into this topic. Is that it comes up so much. And I was told this is something really important that people are running into a lot, which is: is my name, address, phone. The acronym of NAP is my business listing is my business information consistent out there. And is that impacted by things like dynamic number insertion is that impacted by inconsistency?

[00:00:46] Kevin Dieny: It’s hard to keep your business consistent everywhere. A business is trying to establish itself. In the marketplace, it’s trying to establish itself online. It wants visitors online, who type in their name or type in things that are related to them to be able to find their business, their services, their products, so they can acquire those future customers.

[00:01:05] Kevin Dieny: That’s a huge part of the business. A lot of early stage businesses are spending a lot of money in advertising, but eventually that goal usually is, oh man, I hope that they start coming in organically. I hope that the referral side, I hope that our presence in the marketplace establishes ourselves well enough that the awareness of our business expands and starts bringing in people organically.

[00:01:26] Kevin Dieny: So there’s this shift toward more online, I think in every industry. And that is driving this force of, we have to take care of our SEO, but SEO is not really a quick short term, just do a few things and forget about it kind of scenario. To help us really dive into this topic with a lot of expertise, our special guest is Ryan Lawrence Hill.

[00:01:49] Kevin Dieny: He is the head of lead generation and conversion at Huckabuy. Ryan handles all online marketing channels, lead generation, and the converting of those leads. He has been in digital marketing, primarily SEO for over 15 years. So he brings a lot of experience here. Aside from hunting, fishing, and barbecuing, helping small businesses outrank the big box stores and online search is his passion.

[00:02:15] Kevin Dieny: So you definitely want to pay attention to everything he’s got to share here today. He’s the father of five, also known as a basketball team. He enjoys leatherwork, harassing his kids, and building the occasional massive Lego set, which I was really impressed by. So welcome, Ryan!

[00:02:29] Ryan Hill: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:31] Kevin Dieny: So we’re talking again about nap consistency and how it impacts SEO. So why is it difficult for business to keep themselves consistent in listings. Listings, as in Google My Business, yellow pages, things like that, or offline listings. Why is it so difficult for businesses to keep themselves consistent in regards to their name, address, phone everywhere?

[00:02:53] Ryan Hill: A lot of that has to do with, specifically those different directories and the way they kind of format their addresses or based off of user input. So if you’re talking about, you know, you’ve managed your Google, your Google My Business listing, that’s what they call it now, my business. Local business, but it’s changed so many times in the last 10, 15 years.

[00:03:14] Ryan Hill: It could be a small variation like road spelled out or the abbreviation of RD. And so it’s really tough over these hundreds of different directories that Google pulls all this information from to keep that consistent and the spelling, or, you know, a customer might say, well, this is their phone number instead.

[00:03:34] Ryan Hill: There’s some nasty business practices that go, that go into it with, uh, we won’t get into what those are. But you know, competing businesses and stuff, they can make suggestions to these different directories. So it’s really difficult to analyze and keep a really consistent NAP profile across all of these just simply because of those factors.

[00:03:56] Kevin Dieny: To touch on the SEO aspect, I think a lot of businesses, or maybe a lot of business owners, marketers are like, man, SEO is such a black box. I kind of know why, but I was curious if you could expand on why isn’t the world of SEO and how it works and stuff like that.

[00:04:10] Kevin Dieny: Why isn’t it just, why doesn’t everybody know how the algorithm or how the search engines work? Why is that something that everyone has struggles with to figure out? And everyone’s got all these little, crystal ball methods of figuring all this out.

[00:04:26] Ryan Hill: You’re not wrong. It’s kind of a crystal ball method in that Google keeps that algorithm and other search engines as well, but when we primarily talk about search engines, we’re of course talking about Google. It’s really difficult to figure out what that algorithm is. A lot of work, actually, a lot of physical labor, a lot of time, goes into proper search engine optimization and anyone that you talk.

[00:04:50] Ryan Hill: Whether it’s an agency or a freelancer, they’re all going to have, like you said, that crystal ball that they look into and they’ve they say, well, okay, this has worked for me. So I’ve cracked the Google algorithm. Yeah, I can’t tell you how many times, like I’ll be on Facebook or Instagram and be like, Hey, ex-Google employees spills the beans.

[00:05:10] Ryan Hill: Um, something like that. It’s not true. Those are just, those are hooks to get you to buy what they’re doing. And, the other thing that makes it difficult too, is here you have small to medium business owners where that time intensive work of SEO and getting, your link structure, or your content on your website or back links, or even nap consistency.

[00:05:32] Ryan Hill: Those can get really, really pricey. I think I was looking at it a couple of weeks ago and the average cost for a freelance SEO. Is somewhere between $100 and $150 an hour, I’m like, okay, are we lawyers? So, so yeah, there’s a stigma and, and, you know, honestly, there have been SEOs in the past and agencies that have really given analysts and optimizers a bad rap because they’ll charge thousands of dollars a month for all this work, not get any results from it.

[00:06:06] Ryan Hill: And still expect to be paid because they just simply did the work. And the thing that hooked that, that small to medium business owner into, to really fork out money that could go elsewhere, was that promise of, “Hey, I can generate traffic for you. I can get you out ranking Walmart or Home Depot!”

[00:06:24] Ryan Hill: It’s been tough to overcome that. There’s a lot of people out there that, that kind of give it a bad reputation.

[00:06:30] Kevin Dieny: Anytime you’re like, okay, I need this. I need to either hire this. I need to freelance this. I need to outsource this. It’s like, okay, who can I trust? SEO changes and it makes it difficult for even the people in the industry to keep up on.

[00:06:44] Kevin Dieny: I know that there are big updates that come out and Google tries to prepare everyone. And so it may change the things that have worked before. Exactly because maybe some, the weightings or maybe something in it has changed. So, some of the things you have mentioned, which I was hoping to highlight a little bit was you mentioned link building, you mentioned SEO has a really big emphasis on keywords, and there’s the name, address, phone consistency, or even how your brand logo looks your images look, your website looks, how fast it is.

[00:07:12] Kevin Dieny: There’s a lot of components there. There’s just so much to do.

[00:07:16] Kevin Dieny: How important is it that they try to stay on top of, let’s say their nap consistency, their SEO, their keywords, their logos, and their site speed, their related content. They have the structured content that the whole package of things. How important is it that they keep on top of that?

[00:07:31] Ryan Hill: It’s key because if you think of when you’re a small to medium business owner, there’s always going to be competition that’s going to be pushing their SEO. You could do SEO for six months and you could rank in the top keywords. A perfect example is my company Huckabuy.

[00:07:44] Ryan Hill: In December we were ranking for Google algorithm update. We actually had the top direct answer box and it was kind of an experiment because we knew it would happen. But we just wanted to prove it over time, we didn’t do anything with it, we didn’t update the page or anything and sure enough, it started crawling down and it’s not that it was crawling down it’s that other businesses were pushing so hard to leapfrog us.

[00:08:06] Ryan Hill: And then, obviously when they go up, then they push us the other rankings down. It’s super important that you have, if you have the ability to either do it yourself, if you’re that business owner that says, Hey, yeah, I can dive into this. There’s a lot of training courses out there for, beginner SEO stuff like that.

[00:08:23] Ryan Hill: There’s a lot of plugins for different types of WordPress. That’ll help out with that. My company Huckabuy, we actually do really specific software in regards, like you mentioned, the structured data, website speed, but really where they’re going to benefit and where you’re going to benefit is if you have someone that’s experienced in SEO for a long time. Usually that person is familiar with, foreseeing the future and how that comes out.

[00:08:51] Ryan Hill: So with the Google update that recently happened in June the core web vitals update, they announced that a year before, And there were SEO’s out there in the industry. It’s like, okay, something big is going to happen. Google’s going to, so we kind of foresee that coming simply because we’re used to it. We know the times that Google is going to roll out these new algorithms.

[00:09:13] Ryan Hill: They have their own schedule, but yeah, I mean to go back to your original question, how important is it? I’m not going to put an importance on one specific thing until we get later on into the podcast. But if you have an overall strategy for SEO, it’s hugely important to your online presence.

[00:09:27] Kevin Dieny: Right. That’s a really good answer. I wouldn’t know. It’s one of those things where I’m like, okay, well, if I have all these things to do, which one do I prioritize? And I know that they are all sort of important, and I know that some of them are easier and harder for someone to do. Let’s say who doesn’t really like maybe their website’s been handed to them from an agency or from a developer.

[00:09:46] Kevin Dieny: Maybe they can ask their developer to do some things. There’s a lot there. So the next thing I want to go into is the customer experience side. So, to me, this is my opinion. I don’t know how it sits is a lot of what’s driving SEO changes is the customer experience at the end of the day.

[00:10:06] Kevin Dieny: Google or the algorithms are trying to find a way to improve the experience from someone searching and then landing on the place that they intended or the best place for them to go.

[00:10:15] Kevin Dieny: They’re not psychic, they’re not perfect, and the algorithms are amazing. But, uh, from the business side perspective, to me, a lot of what was behind all this technical components of SEO is trying to improve that experience when someone hits your page. And by experience, I mean, You’re reducing that friction.

[00:10:35] Kevin Dieny: You’re trying to get out of the way. You’re trying to make sure they get the page or the place that they really wanted and intended to go. If they came to for this one thing and you give them something else, like a bait and switch. Bad idea.

[00:10:47] Kevin Dieny: If Google sees things like the bounce rate is high or, you know, no scrolls happening or they could, if they could see like everything about what’s happening, if they could see the expression on the person’s face, or they could hear it through the microphone on your phone first and going, oh, this isn’t what I wanted.

[00:11:01] Kevin Dieny: They would kill for that. And so I’ve looked at a lot of SEO at the end of the day, I’m usually like, there’s a lot going on here, but let me try to simplify this. Is this better for the end user in the end? And that’s a lot of what I, I get to.

[00:11:13] Kevin Dieny: Cause if I put all these, if I jam pack my article with keywords, but you know, it’s small font or I can’t read it, or if the it’s all squished together or something’s off about it on the page, all these things pop up and get in my way. The experience there is just not going to be ideal. So if you could talk a little bit about how SEO and customer experience, fold together?

[00:11:34] Ryan Hill: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m glad you brought that up too, because one of the things that I’ve been saying for years, and this is going to be, this is going to be a tough pill to swallow for the business owners is that Google actually does not, they don’t give a crap about your business. They don’t give a crap about your website.

[00:11:49] Ryan Hill: They just don’t care. Google takes the approach of, we care about our user. We care about giving the user what they want. So Kevin, like you said, it’s how fast is your website load? If Google goes in and sees that, Hey, you’re ranking for a page about, I don’t know, cigar boxes and you click on that link and it goes to wine sellers.

[00:12:11] Ryan Hill: Well, Google sees that too. So they’ve programmed their bots to act, to emulate, how a human would interact with your website and score your website based off of that. So thinking about the fact that Google doesn’t care about your website, if you care, how your users interact with your website, you’re on the right track.

[00:12:32] Ryan Hill: That’s the first, that’s really the first step. Having loads and loads of content that is keyword stuffed. Okay. Well, yeah. Google does need to come in and understand what your websites about, but that’s just one small thing. If it’s too confusing, if it’s overdone, if the font is too small, I mean, we’re going back to, we’re going back 10, 15 years ago.

[00:12:53] Ryan Hill: Um, there was a tactic, and it was called ghosting where we would keyword stuff the background of a website and then put it as the same color. So it would be white keywords against a white background. So Google’s bots would go in and be like, holy cow, look at all this content. Now they’ve gotten smart and they realized that, that’s a black hat tactic of manipulating the Google bots is where, okay, there’s all this content there, but the user can’t see it.

[00:13:22] Ryan Hill: You really, really gotta be careful with that. But I think the biggest point to take away is that yeah. Care about how your user interacts with your website. Like you brought up bounce rate. Why are they bouncing?

[00:13:33] Ryan Hill: Why are they going to your website? And then leaving soon without scrolling, without clicking. And that’s where you need that SEO guy to go in and analyze. How long are they there before they leave? Are they reading, what information do you have above the fold? There’s so many different aspects of it.

[00:13:51] Ryan Hill: And then we get into like video and the interaction of video and how well that works. Whether it’s on YouTube or whether it’s on your website. If you have a product that, you’re selling and you have a video of there, chances are you’re going to get more video views than people actually reading the description of the product, because I don’t know, people are lazy, they don’t want to read.

[00:14:14] Kevin Dieny: Yeah. So why is it important then? You hit on it really well. Why it’s important for, search engines to understand the business well, to see what’s happening on the website to see consumers hitting the website or having a good experience. But maybe from like the, specifically from the consumer side or the visitor side to a business’s page, why does it matter that that business do some of the SEO elements?

[00:14:38] Kevin Dieny: And how does it help the end user if a business does have NAP consistency, meaning their name, the address, the phone is consistent and it’s spelled right and it’s prominent or is featured as part of that?

[00:14:51] Ryan Hill: Any time you’re looking at capturing traffic from another website and bringing them to yours, that’s where it gets really, really important for that consistency. Just so there’s less confusion on the customer end and it improves the user experience when they get to your website.

[00:15:07] Ryan Hill: Okay. Yeah, this is exactly the company that I was looking for and NAP consistency actually, Kevin, you brought this up before, even a logo, if your logo is different on another website and they’re like, this is not the company that I wanted to interact with.

[00:15:22] Ryan Hill: And so they’ll just bounce right out.

[00:15:23] Kevin Dieny: One thing that you have mentioned, there’s a lot of listings. You mentioned hundreds and I know that there’s probably maybe even more, but for a business in a specific industry or a little more niche, are there listings that are important from a backlink perspective, or even just from authority or from the idea that these listings are better for certain business types?

[00:15:43] Kevin Dieny: Like maybe the medical industry or plumbers or roofers. Are there some industry listing services or are generic ones like Google My Business that are really important that some businesses may be like, I don’t know if I could do 300, but maybe if I can pick the top, I don’t know, 20 or something, I’ll just try to stay consistent in the top ones.

[00:16:03] Kevin Dieny: Is that an okay strategy?

[00:16:05] Ryan Hill: Yeah, yeah, it is. You’re not going to get as much benefit out of that strategy, but definitely your Google listing, simply because someone could do a voice search for your company. And if your Google listing isn’t properly filled out, it’s going to give them wrong information. Or navigating to that specific location. Obviously Google maps is the most widely used… platform. That’s, that’s the word I was looking for.

[00:16:28] Ryan Hill: When you’re talking about bringing customers to your physical business, even your website as well, but for local businesses, like you said, plumbers, or doctor’s offices, definitely your Google profile. There are some other top ones that different other directories will pull information from.

[00:16:45] Ryan Hill: So like yellow pages, Yelp is a big one. Angie’s list, which is now Angie. And there’s a lot of them too, that you have to pay to be on. So that’s one of the things that you’ll want to look for as well. Maybe it’s a less work to get into these free ones, like Google, like yellow pages or super pages.

[00:17:03] Ryan Hill: Whereas, as a business you have to pay to be on platforms like Angie’s list, the user it’s free, but the business you have to pay on. It might be different anyway, there’s, there’s charges to some of them. So you’ll want to take that into consideration and another thing too, there are companies out there that do NAP syndication.

[00:17:25] Ryan Hill: And when I say NAP syndication, you can hire a company that will go out and submit your business information to all these directories for just a monthly fee. So that’s, that’s another option that you have as well.

[00:17:39] Kevin Dieny: Would you place PR, I don’t know, companies that rolled their citations or roll the blasts out around and social media possibly in the same category as listings, or is that a totally different beast?

[00:17:51] Ryan Hill: it depends on kind of the platform, but when you have a business, that’s on say like Facebook, you can have a business page on Facebook that has the address and phone number. So yeah, that falls into, like you said, the citation and to those listening, a citation is that signal of the name, address, and phone number, that business information that’s coming from another directory.

[00:18:14] Ryan Hill: A lot like a back link, but we in the industry called them citations. You’ll get a citation from Facebook. It’s not going to be social. It’ll be a business because Google will pick up on that. Same with other platforms like LinkedIn. Now you’re posting on those and you get an interaction from a post and it goes to your website.

[00:18:30] Ryan Hill: Okay. Yeah, that’s kind of a social, you can even get an easy citation from YouTube and that’s like the biggest domain authority citation that you can get. If you just put your business name, address, and phone number in your company description on YouTube. So super easy to get that one.

[00:18:46] Ryan Hill: And those are free. So I’m not sure if that answered your question or not actually….

[00:18:53] Kevin Dieny: No, it does because I think the idea that, okay, I have to manage my listings could feel a little bit like this is a daunting task. And like you said, there are services that can help you. I know we use a service that, that we put in our information in one place and it goes and make sure it’s updated in all these other sources.

[00:19:14] Kevin Dieny: And it tells us like, okay, you’re updated in hundreds of these places with this. So you update it once and then it goes out to everywhere and those things are paid. And it could take maybe a couple of days to update it at the beginning. But is it something that has to be watched every week, every day, every month, every year?

[00:19:34] Kevin Dieny: How often do you think something like this would have to be updated for a business or is it just every time they’re like, you know what? We changed our logo. We got to go through and update all our things. How, how much of a burden?

[00:19:44] Ryan Hill: That’s the, that’s the daunting task. Yeah. Honestly I would suggest anywhere from a month to a quarter, just go in and review what your business shows up on, where it shows up, the accuracy of the information. And once again, like you said, Kevin, a lot of companies will hire other companies to do that.

[00:20:01] Ryan Hill: Like Localeze is the name of a company and I’m not trying to name drop here or anything. These are just companies that I know. There’s another company out there, site citation builder pro. I’ve known personally those guys for years. And the thing that you really want to be careful of too, is that when you sign up for those services, yes, they’ll get your name into those directories.

[00:20:20] Ryan Hill: However, when you stop paying for it, then your name’s going to be removed or your information is going to be removed or it’s going to be changed. I’ve seen some dirty tactics with some companies it’s pretty nasty.

[00:20:32] Kevin Dieny: Wow. Yeah, I didn’t think about that aspect of it. They can help get it started, it keeps them around, but not for the right reasons. Like, oh man, I’m afraid to cancel it now. And that’s never a really good thing.

[00:20:42] Kevin Dieny: So let’s pivot again a little bit toward the dynamic elements. Something that I remember from years ago, anytime someone ends up on your webpage and you change the page in any way, it was looked at as a bad idea, a bad thing, Google doesn’t want you to, okay, I’ll come here, and then all of a sudden, the whole page changes.

[00:21:01] Kevin Dieny: Cause they’re trying to get you to click on an ad or something or trying to get you to go somewhere deeper in the site or they cover the page and links. I know in the past dynamically altering a page in any way was seen as a bad idea.

[00:21:13] Kevin Dieny: So is there anything you’d want to tell us or share about that?

[00:21:17] Ryan Hill: Yeah. Yeah. Actually Google’s come out in the last couple of years and depending on how you dynamically change that page is good or bad. So in the aspect of what you were saying, if I’m coming to once again, eluding to the, the cigar box, but going to a wine cellar example, that’s bad. If you’re going to a page and all of a sudden you want to see these and then you see something different, Google’s going to penalize you for that.

[00:21:46] Ryan Hill: They’ll penalize you for it. Now, it might not be a manual action, but their bots will go in and be like, eh, this is kind of shady. Actually, this is a good segue into dynamic number insertion or what we’re going to refer to as DNI.

[00:21:58] Ryan Hill: There’s also something called dynamic rendering. This is something my company specializes in where it takes your website. It serves that form of your website into, in flat HTML. The Google bots come in, they see all your content. They get a deeper crawl because a lot of websites right now are JavaScript heavy.

[00:22:18] Ryan Hill: And that JavaScript actually interferes with the Google HTML bot. It takes a lot more resources. And so Google says, okay, we have to use a rendering bot, we are only able to crawl this much. That’s what we call Google’s crawl budget. So when you’re able to give them all this content, now we consider that dynamic rendering because you’re serving a version of your website to Google that the customer doesn’t see.

[00:22:42] Ryan Hill: However, that version is exactly the same version that a customer would. So there’s no changes on the website or anything like that. Now, when you get into dynamically changing content, say like phone numbers, that’s a little bit different. Because you’re talking about a customer seeing, they might be coming from a Google ad and then go to your website.

[00:23:04] Ryan Hill: And the phone number of up in the header changes from your actual phone number to one that you want to be able to track calls from Google ads. So that’s different than dynamic rendering. That’s just dynamically changing a little tiny piece and Google has a baseline of what percentage of your content changes, where it’s acceptable or not?

[00:23:27] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, that’s interesting. When we ran into this, we have a tool for dynamic number insertion, and the whole purpose of it is when people come to the website, we serve them a unique phone number. And that way we know, this is where they’ve come from, maybe an ad, a campaign, any sort of channel, anything like that.

[00:23:45] Kevin Dieny: And by giving them a unique phone number, when they make the phone call, we’re able to connect like the two spheres. The first sphere, this is all the information we have when they came on the website. And then the second sphere is everything that took place in that phone call.

[00:23:57] Kevin Dieny: It was mentioned in a previous episode, we drove a ton of traffic to our website, which ended up as a ton of phone calls. And they’re all asking for trampolines and our SDRs on our front line. We’re like, well, we don’t even sell trampolines. And it was because there was a keyword that was triggering off our ads that was a broad keyword.

[00:24:14] Kevin Dieny: So when it got ‘synonymed’ with Google, which drove a bunch of traffic or people looking to buy trampolines, and we were bidding at a point where we were crushing it and getting tons of trampoline calls, but it just wasn’t driving the right kind of call. So we use that information to change our keywords, change our ads, and ultimately drive people who were interested in what we did to our website.

[00:24:36] Kevin Dieny: The purpose of DNI, at least the way we push it is yes, it’s attribution for your phone calls, but it’s also going to improve the kinds of people you want to bring to your website. People who are interested in calling, people who are interested in having that more intimate experience with the business, by picking up the phone. Or, for tracking web forms or chats or people who are in that lower funnel, ready to convert stage and understanding them better.

[00:24:59] Kevin Dieny: And that helps us understand the middle and the top of the funnel and helps us drive better things all down the road, but there is a dynamic component to it. And the phone number is swapping out. And when we ran into people asking us, well, if you’re swapping the phone, the P and the NAP consistency, like, are we losing a third?

[00:25:17] Kevin Dieny: Or what impact is that having? We’re working so hard on our SEO and our organic presence is this completely sidelining us? And we were like, well, we don’t know the crystal ball. We don’t know how Google is looking at this. And so we made a change of, any time a crawler, a bot, just like you mentioned with your dynamic website replacement and flattening tool, anytime the crawler hits the site, we don’t touch the number.

[00:25:41] Kevin Dieny: But anytime it’s a consumer from maybe even specific sources or channels or parameter based visits, we will swap that number and we have measured this and tracked this and found we’re not having any negative…. in fact, it could be having a positive change.

[00:25:56] Kevin Dieny: But it’s one of those things where it’s like, oh man, this is really hard to measure and track because we’re not the end user. So is there anything you wanted to add about the DNI element there?

[00:26:06] Ryan Hill: Yeah, actually, I do. Cause you bring up a good point when Google comes into to scan your website. DNI is actually a process of adding a JavaScript on there and depending on where the source is coming from with that user, it switches out to that specific source number. That’s tied to it in say like your system, but when Google comes in, they do see that Javascript.

[00:26:30] Ryan Hill: But they also see the number that’s that your actual phone number that’s still coded into your website, just because that JavaScript masks, that phone number with another one for the user doesn’t mean that Google isn’t reading it doesn’t mean that that nap consistency is gone because that phone number is still embedded in the code of your website.

[00:26:48] Ryan Hill: So you’re not losing anything there. And I really like how you touched on the fact that you were able to isolate a problem with your paid channel based off of the phone number that was attached to that. And it didn’t necessarily affect your other channels too. And you didn’t, from what I understand, you didn’t lose any rankings or anything in SEO.

[00:27:08] Kevin Dieny: At least not. We did with the trampoline crowd.

[00:27:10] Ryan Hill: Oh, well, yeah.

[00:27:12] Kevin Dieny: A lot of people it’s like, do I want to sit down and research for two hours to see if a company is telling me the truth about what their tool isn’t going to impact SEO, or it’s not going to impact my load times on my site. Yes, it may be adding another request.

[00:27:24] Kevin Dieny: Yes, it may be adding JavaScript to my site. There’s a lot there. And earlier you mentioned, there’s a lot of things that business should be doing. Do you have any quick wins or suggestions or priorities for small, medium businesses on things they should pay attention to. Things they could do to get some wins or to at least get them going in the right direction with SEO?

[00:27:44] Ryan Hill: Yeah. Obviously if you’re a local business, the first thing would be to manage your Google profile. It’s like a social platform. You’ll definitely want to add pictures, images, posts, keep it active, request that people leave reviews. If you think of the Google listing as a separate entity of your website, but, it drives traffic to your website or it drives phone calls.

[00:28:05] Ryan Hill: There’s a lot behind that dashboard that Google can do. They can show you how many driving directions you’ve gotten, which to me is a conversion. That’s a person walking in your door. They can tell you how many phone calls you’ve got, how many phone calls you’ve missed, from someone calling off of that.

[00:28:21] Ryan Hill: So it’s really important to keep that up to date, keep it active. Have people leave reviews on there. Google listings, act differently in website rankings than just normal search, because it’s about user interaction. Don’t, don’t worry about bad reviews. I mean, worry about bad reviews from their user aspect of it.

[00:28:41] Ryan Hill: But even a bad review is valuable in Google’s eyes because it means that someone is interacting with your business and if there’s anything to take away from this, is if you can get anyone to interact with your business, whether it be on Google, whether it be from Google search or whether it be from like your map listing or your business listing, that’s going to bump your position more so than your customers.

[00:29:06] Kevin Dieny: Let’s say a more advanced user who may want to use a tool like Google optimize, or they have a tool, that helps them run like an AB test or something like that on their site. On-page stuff that, that that business may want to be testing. What is something that you’d say this would be, if there’s everything on a page that I would test, I would test this one first.

[00:29:27] Kevin Dieny: Or is there anything that stands out that you’d be like, if a business is wondering if it should change something on its website. Is there anything you may want to suggest a business pay a little bit more attention to than something else?

[00:29:38] Ryan Hill: Absolutely. The color. I know that. I know that sounds weird as it really does, but there’ve been multiple studies, and it being proven. I love Google Optimize because what that does is it allows you, you don’t have to make physical changes on your website. You can go into Google optimize and say, okay, 50% of this traffic that’s coming from paid.

[00:30:00] Ryan Hill: I want this call to action button to be bright orange instead of pink or green or something like that. And so it really, really allows for that, that AB test to see what is successful then when you can prove the concept or… Disprove, whatever concept. So the marketers out there and the website developers and SEO guys.

[00:30:23] Ryan Hill: Yeah. Use Google, optimize, change a button color, move the video up or move the headline down, simple little things like that. Google also alluded to, if you’re using Google optimize that they’re going to consider that a ranking factor as well, because then your testing users out and how they interact with your website to make it a better experience for them.

[00:30:48] Ryan Hill: So, absolutely, dealing with any AB testing platform like HubSpot or Google Optimize, just try a color first. You’d be surprised.

[00:30:58] Kevin Dieny: That’s, that’s exciting for me because that’s actually not too tough. I don’t have to get into a think tank discussion and ideation process to rethink my headline or are my sentences combining the right keywords in the right order. Are they high enough? Are you using the right header elements?

[00:31:13] Kevin Dieny: There is a lot… I have gone through in the past where I’m like, I don’t know if all this work is necessarily necessary, but I know that, I’m just going to keep up with what I know are best practices and try to keep it going. What is funny is Google Optimize, google’s own dynamic tracking, the things we’re talking about with some experimentation with flattening the site, a lot of these are using dynamic elements.

[00:31:38] Kevin Dieny: But they’re doing them, like you said, there’s a right way and a wrong way. And so knowing that businesses are following the right way or knowing what is the right way? If it’s a product by Google, they’re probably doing it the right way because it’s associating with their other products.

[00:31:52] Kevin Dieny: There’s just so much in this black box of SEO that people struggle with unraveling and nap consistency, and everyone’s trying to get their SEO up cause they consider it, free, earned traffic, but it does take a lot of work. So, just to tie it up at the end, is there anything else you wanted to add? Something that you thought along the way, you’re like, oh, I got to mention this, but if you still remember, is there anything else you wanted to add to this?

[00:32:16] Ryan Hill: The only other thing I think that I would add is, if you could pay attention to the Google algorithm updates and what they focus on. You’ll notice a shift in the last few years that everything’s going towards mobile. So depending on what kind of a business you are.

[00:32:30] Ryan Hill: Yeah. If you’re a plumber, I pretty much guarantee you that everybody’s going to be looking on their phones, for that plumber that’s local to them and even coming through their Google listing. So really focused on the mobile side of it. And I’m not saying the desktop site isn’t important because it definitely is.

[00:32:44] Ryan Hill: But if you can determine where the majority of your traffic is coming from and optimize towards that, that’s, that’s a quick win. It’s definitely a quick win. If you can rank higher on mobile results than you can desktop.

[00:32:57] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, the devices is a whole other element to this. And I think good mentioning it, something that definitely didn’t get brought up. So I want to tie up a little bit of this episode. The things that I think stood out to me, where yes, SEO is kind of a black box, but there are definitely some things businesses can do to make sure that they do rank higher.

[00:33:20] Kevin Dieny: You are competing a lot of the time, like Ryan mentioned against your competitors against other people vying for the same thing in the same space. So some industries may be less competitive than others, but at the end of the day, making sure that your business communicates trust for that end user, for that consumer, that you provide a better experience, making sure your name, your business logo, your address, that they are, up-to-date consistent your phone number, right?

[00:33:44] Kevin Dieny: There’s a lot of places to put a phone number. Google my business has at least three phone number of slots for you to put it in. So if you want to drop in a tracking number there and then your main number, you can do all those things, right. All of that works together to provide a better experience for your consumer.

[00:33:59] Kevin Dieny: They want to get there. The mobile aspect, paying attention to how my visitors are getting to my site. What are they interested in? Not baiting, switching. There’s a lot of services that can help you do a lot of this. Maybe take a little time to, to evaluate that. There’s so much out there, which is why this can be so confusing and so difficult for a lot of businesses.

[00:34:20] Kevin Dieny: At the end of the day, I think if you do just pay a little bit attention toward making sure your business is consistent. That you are putting yourself out there in the listings, especially the ones that maybe you’ve, you’ve heard your consumers say, I keep going to the site and finding you there. If you haven’t gone there and made sure that your listing is accurate, maybe you should do that.

[00:34:39] Kevin Dieny: And then you’re by ranking higher in SEO, you’re driving more business, more revenue for your business. SEO is a long term strategy. I, the way I look at it.

[00:34:50] Ryan Hill: Yeah, it is.

[00:34:51] Ryan Hill: It’s not an instant win either. It’s it’s definitely long term.

[00:34:55] Kevin Dieny: There’s a lot. There’s a lot going on, but I know you can do it. I would encourage you all to, like Ryan said, pay attention to some of the listings, making sure things are going in the reviews. I’ve heard it time and time again, and even responding to those reviews is so important. So thank you, Ryan, for helping us talk about this really, a really interesting topic of NAP consistency.

[00:35:16] Ryan Hill: Taboo subject?

[00:35:19] Kevin Dieny: Yeah. It’s a tough subject. It’s tough when you don’t know the actual algorithm and science that’s going on in the background, but through experimentation and by what we’re being told, we just, we kind of have to follow the trend that’s being set and it’s changing, the updates come out and it’s changing.

[00:35:33] Kevin Dieny: SEO experts are like you said top dollar nowadays, and that could be hard to find and hard to find someone who actually knows what they’re doing and is performance minded, like you had alluded to. So, thank you and appreciate –

[00:35:48] Ryan Hill: Yeah, it’s, it’s definitely been, it’s definitely been my pleasure. It’s rare that I get to talk this, this nerdy stuff with people. So thank you.

[00:35:56] Kevin Dieny: I love the nerdy topic, so I appreciate your time, and everybody thank you for listening to our episode and we’ll see you again. Next time.