Increase Your Reach and Donations: Learn About How to Get $10K in Free Adwords [caption id="attachment_1523" align="alignleft" width="150"] Pip Patton[/caption]
Pip Patton and John Zentmeyer will share secrets about how to get $10K in free Google AdWords monthly and how to drive more traffic to your website for more engagement and more publicity. Their company, Search Intelligence LLC, based in Tampa Florida, is a digital marketing agency.
'We believe that marketing in today's digital age should not be confusing to utilize and benefit from.'
We help you accomplish this by offering digital marketing services that are easy to understand and implement. Our services start with SEO and include optimized website design, social media management, video marketing and traffic analysis so you can make informed decisions about your marketing strategy.
We also work with non-profits by helping them apply for and obtain a Google Grant. A Google Grant is a grant of $10,000 in AdWords advertising each month for your non-profit. You can use the grant to promote your non-profit and gain more exposure online; increase awareness, recruit volunteers, promote special events, etc.
Notes from the Interview
Why do we care if people come to our websites?
Need for visibility brings more of people you want to see, online is where people are looking.
Not ranking on Google is like being 100 miles off the highway with no lights turned on. No one can find you!
You can’t get the word out on your work if no one can find you.
How do you figure out who to attract to your website?
Extensive interview with client, create keywords and Adwords to drive traffic, find out what people are searching for through online research, very few people aware of what prospects are searching for and tax status is not a factor.
Online is where more search for info takes place!
1. What is a Google Grant and How Do I Apply?
Google’s way to give back to the community; $10,000 month available to 501(c)3; keyword bids restricted to $2 or less; must find enough keywords to use all of the funds.
Qualifications - verify status as charity; apply online; campaign (Adwords) must be ready to go when launching
2. What is SEO and why do I need it for my charity or church?
Paid v. Organic Search priority given to paid; Ranking based on most relevant to search according to Google who cater to their own customers; can use best keywords when they are paid for; Google rates the information you provide, you have to build authority; organic search provides 5 times amount of results as paid search; you have to build credibility through your results; good information adds to your authority!
Facebook uses pixels attached to your website to build a “smart dat profile.†Google does not do this for you.
LinkedIn relation to Google - optimized profiles are critical to building authority, it helps develop authority
Organic Reach - Basics
Clarity around what you do needs to be clear to Google tech; links back to high authority sites on subject helps (on page SEO) must be relevant and valuable; Google grades authority based on links from other sites, social media, or blog posts that are shared or other shared information. This all takes time using SEO.
Only 18% to 20% of traffic comes from paid search. The rest is organic! The top 3 get the lion’s share!
Analytics tell you what people type in to find you. Free tutorials available from Google.
One-third of searches on monthly basis are different from anything they’ve ever seen before!
QUUU.com
Buffer and QUUU work together
How do people learn how to do SEO in a way that helps them?
Creating a presence on the main social media sites use tools like Buffer (link posts to other sites); Quuu - (Aggregator of articles and information for curation); make sure you include some original content that increases engagement
Basic Visibility Enhancers - get more than one account (the Big 5; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram); have accurate info on all sites; hire  someone who has expertise because everything changes frequently
Algorithms for mobile and desktop differ, mobile friendly search is more important all the time; by 2018 it will dominate rankings; far more searches on mobile than desktop!
Closing Thoughts - (John)Â Go through strategy form to provide the types of information they need to provide good service; stay in your wheelhouse and focus on what you know, let your SEO experts to help you get where you need to be; search terms most relevant to you
Closing thoughts - (Pipp) - Take time to analyze your site and other information; video is a great tool for conversion, less than 2 minutes is best when it is engaging, speak like you are having a conversation with a single person; video drives up conversion considerably.
Contact Information
Search Intelligence, LLC 1520 W Cleveland St
Tampa, FL 33606
(813) 321-3390
http://www.si-5.com
The Interview Transcript
NPC Interview with Pipp Patton & John Zentmeyer
Hugh Ballou: Welcome, everyone. We are talking nonprofit language. Our guests tonight are two distinguished-looking gentlemen, Pipp Patton and John Zentmeyer. They are in Florida on the Gulf Coast and in central Florida. They have a very defined expertise. I met Pipp on a couple trips in Orlando doing some interaction with CEOs. You must be a CEO if you are in that group. This company you have, tell me what the name of it is, what inspired you to launch this company, and a little bit about your history and expertise that you bring to this very specialized space.
Pipp Patton: Thank you for having us on. My background: Over 20 years ago, I was actually in the yellow pages business. I used to work with small businesses, helping them promote themselves and growing through the vehicle of yellow pages back when the yellow page directory was the search engine of choice. Then that changed about 10 years ago. At that time, I was transitioning out of yellow pages. I enjoyed working with business owners, and the technology and the digital arena was of great interest to me. I studied it and tried to learn it. I have been now working about seven years or so in that arena with an agency model, where I help businesses be found in Google search primarily.
Hugh: I used to buy yellow page ads when I had a camera shop. It was the go-to place to find out who to hire and who to solve your problems. That was a unique spot. You transitioned from that space? Was that a direct transition to the digital marketing that you do?
Pipp: Yeah, pretty much. At that particular time, I left yellow pages because the company I worked for got bought out by someone else, and they didn’t treat their new acquisition people real well. So it was a good opportunity for me to leave there. At that time, my mom needed some attention and care, so I decided to stay home and take care of her. Shortly thereafter, I had been studying digital marketing and had a couple of people that I met that really needed help in that arena. I helped them, and the business evolved from there.
Hugh: Awesome. To fall into that. John, you are part of this team. Talk about that. What brought you to this place?
John Zentmeyer: Directly, Pipp brought me to the place. Pipp and I have done business together off and on, many different ventures, always been good buddies, and always enjoyed bouncing business ideas off each other for over 30 years now. Last year, I was making a transition, and I have owned several businesses. At the time, I was working with a group that I thought I would be at for the rest of my career, but that doesn’t always happen. But Pipp and I had always talked a lot about what he was doing and what was happening in the SEO world. All my career, I have looked for ways to bring large ROIs to companies or to my clients. SEO is a great way to do that. I have always been in the technology world, mostly automation, but this has been a lot of fun, and we have enjoyed working closer together.
Hugh: Russell Dennis has been stalking you, so Russell, what did you find out about them online?
Russell Dennis: John said wonderful things about Pipp online. It’s a glowing testimony. There are a number of things. There is this track record of years where you have been getting premium results. Coming from the yellow page world, I saw yellow page ads in my sophomore year of college. I made a truckload of money that summer. This was back in 1995 of course.
Pipp: That was a good time to be in yellow pages.
John: It probably wouldn’t work as well this summer.
Russell: Probably not. I would probably go hungry over the summer. You see things like Yelp, but everything is a known directory. The only real power in that stuff is in the testimonials and getting credibility.
Hugh: Awesome. That is back when a truckload really meant something. A truckload of money was worth something.
Russell: That was before the exchange rates went to pot.
Hugh: Oh gosh, yeah. Guys, we sent out an email today and one just a few minutes ago to tell people they could get $10,000 of free AdWords. We are going to talk about that. These are people who are in what we call social benefit work. They are running a membership organization. It has a tax-exempt status. They are running a church or synagogue, a community foundation, a cause-based charity. There are lots of people who are in education or government organizations, like down the road from me, we have an agency on aging, my peer group. We have a lot of people doing really good work. Why should we care that people come to our website? We want to direct traffic, but let’s talk about why people come. Who do we want to attract? Let’s take it sequentially. Why do we care, and then who do we want to bring to our website?
Pipp: Whether it’s a nonprofit or a regular for-profit business, you need more customers, more exposure, more people to know who you are and what you do. Whether they have an interest in perhaps volunteering or donating or being involved in special events that you have, taking advantage of what you may teach, all of those things are there, so having a higher profile online will bring more of those eyeballs and ears to you. If people want information about anything, they are online.
John: Take it one step further. Having a website online and not being ranked in Google anywhere is like having your nonprofit or for-profit business ministry, whatever you’re doing, out in the middle of a very dark desert with no lights. So you cannot be found. If you are providing a service for somebody in a nonprofit arena, then the idea is you want people who are looking for that service to be able to find you. That is the biggest reason that you want to expose yourself on that side. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing. If you’re doing for-profit, you want people to be able to find you.
Hugh: There are lots of really good organizations doing really fine work that nobody is aware of. It would occur to me that PR is one good reason. I know people will support the cause they believe in. If they can go to somebody’s website and see the impact of the work of the charity—who are we serving, what problem are we solving—how do we figure out which people to attract to the website? That matters a lot, doesn’t it?
Pipp: It definitely does. In our world, what John and I do, generally when we work with an organization, they are telling us what people are searching for to find them, or at least the basic concept. We will build campaigns around that. If we are doing SEO, then we are going to work to make their site visible for certain keywords, as an example. In the AdWords arena, it’s the same thing. You are bidding on keywords to become visible in a search. If somebody is new to an area and is looking for a specific type of denomination, they may go online to see what’s around them. If you’re not visible, you just missed out on a new member perhaps.
Hugh: There are a lot of choices in life today, aren’t there?
Pipp: There sure are. Most businesses, or organizations if you will, today I find aren’t really aware of how many searches there actually are online for their service or product. It’s the single largest pool that exists of prospective new customers, clients. Those are interchangeable words, even in the nonprofit world. It equates to the same thing. If you have a business or an organization, and you are working in a certain arena, there is more search for that information about that online than there is anywhere else.
Hugh: Awesome.
John: Hugh, you can relate to this. What happened when you got a yellow page ad?
Hugh: People would call me up and say, “I see you have this.”
John: They found you.
Hugh: That was the go-to place. We actually went to the yellow pages last week to look for some resources for moving.
We put out a line that people get $10,000 in AdWords. Talk about that program. I have one of these grants, and I don’t know how in the world I got it. Somebody helped me get it. I am still learning how to work it, but I am spending $10,000 a month. Talk about that program. How do people acquire that grant?
Pipp: It’s a terrific program by Google. This is their way of giving back to the community at large here in the United States .it may be available overseas, too; I’m not sure of that. It’s a grant that they offer to any 501(c)3 for $10,000 a month to use any way the organization sees fit. The determination of the success of any advertising campaign is totally up to you. Google is providing that. The only restriction they put on it is that you can’t bid on a keyword that is more than $2. Now depending on the area you live in, larger areas, certain keywords that might fit your organization might be highly competitive, and they would be well in excess of $2. But just as you found, Hugh, if you work with somebody who understands how to dig out the keywords that still fit the proper niche that you are going after, you can find enough keywords to bid on to utilize those dollars.
Hugh: I think I have 24,000 keywords in all of the things that are related to us, and we have an average position of 2.5 on a search.
Pipp: That is terrific. That is very good. And you are working on a national level, correct?
Hugh: I’m working with anybody who speaks English. We got Philippines, Australia, New Zealand.
Pipp: There are many organizations who would be able to take the same approach. If it was a local church or synagogue, an organization like that, they might be more defined by a geographic area. But still, the exposure that they can gain from that is just fabulous, and it is a really terrific program that Google has put out there and made available to all the 501(c)3s.
Hugh: How do you get it? How do you qualify for it?
Pipp: It’s an application process. They just have to verify you are truly a legitimate 501(c)3. Doesn’t matter what you are promoting or what you’re about. We actually offer that service to nonprofits where we will do the application process for them. We don’t charge for that. We are pretty successful. We haven’t had anything not approved so far. Along with that application process, you have to have a campaign that is ready to go. Google sees there is a campaign in place that you are ready to turn on the minute they say yes.
John: An AdWords campaign.
Pipp: Yes, an AdWords campaign
Hugh: You can register for that for free. If you do it on your own, you pay per click. Russell, they just slipped something in there. Did you hear what I hear? He said they do it for free.
Pipp: Maybe we shouldn’t have said that, John. What do you think?
John: It’s a little too late now, Pipp. You can’t put that one back in the bag.
Pipp: I will say this. We don’t manage campaigns for free. I found a lot of people- The application process can be confusing to them. You can’t even begin until you get approved. We have at least been able to figure that out and are willing to do that for anybody. They can manage their own campaigns. When you get into the nitty-gritty of it, as you found, Hugh, you need somebody to help you because it would be difficult for you on your own to find 24,000 keywords.
Hugh: Oh my word. And to put them in the right ads in the right places to direct them to the right page to do what we call conversions.
Pipp: You have to have landing pages and ad groups and campaigns and this stuff that needs to be done to optimize it. One of the reasons you have 24,000 keywords is you want to utilize all that money and are limited to $2 a click. You have to find a keyword that might only get five searches a month, but you want to make sure you are found when those five people are searching.
Hugh: It’s the misspelling of the words, too. People who spell leader wrong just as a typo. Laeder. John, you were going to say something?
John: I just said the maximum is $2. It’s not that they are all $2.
Hugh: I adjust them down, and sometimes I get the mileage. There is also a quality score. I have some that are 7’s and 8’s, which I understand is pretty hard to do. They rate you on the quality of the word as to where you are driving it. There are some sophisticated tools out there to watch what you’re doing. It’s just amazing. Where do people contact you to let you help them do that and start that conversation?
Pipp: They can call me. Our phone number is 813-321-3390. That is our main line here in Tampa. They can go to our website. On the website you can get contact information. The phone number is there of course, and there is an email link to send us an email if you want. They can reach me via email if they like at pipp@si-5.com.
Hugh: Si-5.com is the website. That is a very generous offer. It’s not a lot of work. I want to talk about the juxtaposition of SEO and the ads. Those two need to have some synergy. John, you were talking about that if you did the SEO, it would get you more mileage for less money with the AdWords. I’m surprised they didn’t cancel me. I had the grant. It had five or six campaigns going. Now I have several thousand campaigns or ad groups going. Four campaigns. But I found that no matter what I tried, I could not spend more than $300 a month. That is the maximum you spend a day, $332 or $333. I spend that every day now. But I couldn’t figure that out. So I had to get somebody to help me. That is a for-hire thing you can do. I got frustrated because I shouldn’t have been doing this in the first place. I do leadership and culture and strategy really well. I suck at that. Suck is halfway to success. Talk about why you need this if you do SEO.
Pipp: It’s the difference between paid search and organic search. Whenever you do a Google search, you bring up a search result page. At the very top, the first three or four listings are going to be the paid ads. The next ten listings below that are what they call the organic or non-paid listings. Each of these listings, paid or unpaid, are the listings that Google believes are the most relevant to the search you have done.
John: They are catering to their own customer. I as a Google searcher am a Google customer. They want to try to provide me the most relevant and best options possible so I am happy.
Pipp: You are happy and continue to use Google.
John: That’s right.
Pipp: Why don’t you go ahead and talk about the percentages of where the clicks go, John?
John: That is important. if I launch a campaign today, I can bid on an AdWord today, and I can get that AdWord and I can be found for that word today. Organic is a little bit different. That takes a little bit more time, authority, optimization. Google is not going to make that change quickly because again they want to make sure you actually do have good information to provide their customer when they search for a given keyword. That is why it takes time to build that authority for the organic search. What is very interesting is that the difference between the paid search and the organic search is there is about five times more volume for the organic search. That is a big deal. If you are buying AdWords and you are getting traffic, that is great because I can do it today. That is a way to get to the organic search. You can start to get traffic today but realize that over time you will have a lot more to choose from if you are getting the organic search. It just takes time.
Hugh: Does Google learn, or does the effectiveness grow over time? I have listened to people talk about how they do Facebook ads. Over the weeks and months, the Facebook ads build a knowledge base and becomes more effective over time. That may or may not be the accurate description, but is there something like that with AdWords?
John: The parallel would be- I guess it would be the authority that you gain by having good information and making it available so Google can read it, understand it. Your page is optimized. The information you are providing is relevant. Google will look at all of that. If I have a new page and someone finds me but my information is not very relevant, Google’s customer, the searcher, will leave. Google doesn’t like that.
Pipp: I understand your question also relates to Facebook. Facebook has what they call a pixel. They want you to put that pixel on your website. Facebook learns. Facebook’s algorithm learns who clicks on your ads and who your ideal customer is, and they get smarter and smarter at putting your ad in front of people that fit a profile that is more likely to click.
AdWords, I don’t believe does that. To be honest with you, my business partner is more knowledgeable than I am on the running of the AdWords campaigns.
John: You should clarify that as your other business partner.
Pipp: Yes, sorry. My other business partner, who is on vacation with her children right now and her husband. But I don’t believe that the AdWords does that. It’s pretty much up to us as the buyer of AdWords to optimize the campaigns and figure out what is working best.
Hugh: My colleague Russell is very active on LinkedIn. I have heard you guys other times talk about authority. Russ does a lot of good stuff on LinkedIn. He has articles, and his description of who he is is very valuable. How does that play into the picture with the Google SEO and the AdWords and the whole package?
Pipp: Having an optimized profile on LinkedIn, as well as other social media properties, is all important. Every one of those provides a description of you and your business, a link back to your website from a site that Google sees as high authority. When you can get a link back from a high authority site, some of that authority transfers back, and it helps you build the authority of your website. Those are all part of the mix. They don’t really have much of an effect on your AdWords, but from an SEO standpoint, those are very important elements.
Hugh: Russ, did that bring up any questions or comments on your side?
Russell: Keywords are important. This program for grants is something I have seen because who couldn’t use $10,000. When I read the language, there is a certain amount of traffic you have to drive. If you don’t do that, they pass it on to people who can use it. The idea of them looking at keeping their own credibility high by giving their users what they need makes perfect sense. Unless somebody has a lot of expertise in that, and I don’t think you have that on your typical nonprofit staff, is it’s a wonderful opportunity, but you have to be able to drive the traffic to keep it going.
Pipp: That is correct. Google AdWords is much more complicated to optimize, and it takes some time to optimize a campaign. Usually when you are working with AdWords, you will figure the first three or four months is what you will put in to tweak and figure it out. We are managing a campaign for a chiropractor client. It’s not a big campaign or a huge amount of money, but we took it over because the people who were handling it for them were unhappy with the results they were getting. We have taken it over. We have had it about two months, and it will be another month or two before we get it fine-tuned. I was in my office just now building landing pages because they were sending all this paid traffic to their homepage. In their particular case, if you were looking for a chiropractic solution for back pain, the homepage mentions it, but it doesn’t really talk about it in depth. So it’s less likely to create a conversion or getting a phone call for an appointment than if they were landing on a page that spoke to that particular problem directly. I am in the process of building them landing pages that will help their conversion, and the better conversion you get helps your quality score. Hugh is obviously doing that well if he has some 7’s and 8’s in quality scores.
Hugh: I’m not getting the conversions I want, but it has gone up dramatically in the past two months. I am starting to fine-tune it. I had some AdWords that weren’t relevant, which were bringing in some people who weren’t the right people. I wanted to come back to that piece. We want to bring the people that can find words, and we can trick them into coming, but if it’s not what they want, they will leave within a second or two. So we just wasted the money.
Pipp: Then Google dings you and realizes that ad is not working. Regardless of what you are bidding, they drop you down in position. With AdWords, even if there are three or four ads at the top of the page, even if they are all bidding the same thing, if they all have the same quality score, Google rotates those around. As time goes by and one or two gain more traction because they have a higher quality score—they are getting a better click rate, even though it’s the same price or a little lower price—Google will show them ahead of the other ads. They want people to have a good experience so they keep using them. Like John said, the person doing the searching is the customer that Google is trying to please.
Hugh: That’s a really important area to understand. I’m a pretty smart guy, but it’s taken me a while to wrap my head around this. I am learning it so I can bring on somebody and have them manage it. There are lots of charities doing social media, and they don’t do themselves any favors. There are lots of charities who put up pretty websites. Propeller Head makes them something nice. They say you have all these hits. I think I shared this with you, but it’s said that hits are how idiots attract success. It really doesn’t matter who comes. Hits is every time you download an image or a page or something, so you can have a lot of hits with nothing. It’s really coming back to this what do people do, the conversions, that matters.
Let’s go into some of the things you know people need to learn. When you put up a webpage or site, Google looks at everything. How does this organic SEO work?
John: That’s where it starts. The very first thing is that Google is a computer. It needs to make sense to Google. You can’t infer things. It has to be written and optimized such that Google can read it and understand exactly what you do, what you’re promoting, what information you’re providing. We want to make sure you have optimized it so Google can understand it. Then you want to start to look for ways to continue to build that authority. We mentioned having links back from high authority sites so Google realizes, “Oh, okay. This site thinks that they are providing the right information about this given subject.” But the big thing is it does start on the page. We call it on-page SEO. It needs to have the right information in the right format and make sense for Google.
Hugh: Go back to this authority site thing. Talk a little bit more about that.
Pipp: The sites that you see in organic search on the results page—those are the sites that Google feels are the most relevant, which to them means they feel they have the highest authority on that subject. Authority is predominantly gained in a number of ways, but one of the biggest is links from other sites. It might be social media sites you have. It might be other people linking to your information. Maybe you wrote an article or a blog post, and other people pick up that blog post and repost it on their Facebook page or their own blog. Through that, there is a link back to your site from another site that has relevant information. It takes time. That is why John was talking about how SEO takes time. You can buy a paid ad and be at the top of the search for a given keyword tomorrow. But with SEO, it takes time to build that authority, and it takes time for Google to trust your site. A brand new site comes up, and no matter how good your information is, it can take months for those links to build and for Google to gain the confidence and trust that you are the right one to show for search results for that given keyword.
Hugh: How do these two work together, the organic SEO and the AdWords? Is there a negative dynamic we can create that cancels each other out?
Pipp: No, there is nothing negative about it. The numbers are interesting. Paid search gets about 18-20% of clicks on a page. Organic gets the rest.
Hugh: Whoa. 18% is paid search?
Pipp: 18-20. It can be different in different niches, but that is the average. Of all the ads out there, somebody searches for a new plumber. They say “My toilet is leaking and I need a plumber,” so they search for that. There will be ads at the top of the page. Those ads will get 18 out of 100 clicks. The organic listings will get the rest with the top three getting the lion’s share. That is what SEO is. Our job is to build that authority and get an organization’s site ranked into those top three to five positions. The reason I say three to five is in many niches, there are directory-type sites that will get into that top five, and they are not direct links. Customers will avoid those and go directly to a business because they want a solution to their problem.
Hugh: Yeah. People are looking for things. You can go to Analytics and other tools like that to figure out what people are putting in, can’t you?
Pipp: Analytics will tell you what someone typed in in order to find you. That is certainly a great tool. Anyone who has a website should sign up and get Google Analytics. It’s a free service from Google. They offer great tutorials on learning how to digest the data.
Hugh: That would be a good way to research what people are looking for, is that true?
Pipp: It would be, except you don’t really have access. Google has a Keyword tool built into AdWords where you can type in a keyword and they will give you a range of how much search there is for those. Or they might come back and show no search even if there is some. It may be low, but there is some. I have a friend who often says, “It’s great how much money I’ve made from search terms that Google shows there is no search for.” Anyway. But there are new searches all the time. Google says a third of the searches they see every month are searches done in a particular manner that they have never seen before. That is constantly changing.
Hugh: Give me that statistic again.
Pipp: A third of all the searches that Google sees every month are done a little differently than they have ever seen before.
Hugh: I thought that’s what you said. That’s remarkable.
Pipp: It is. I know.
John: We can’t use another term like that. I don’t think Hugh can stand it. We can’t bring him a new statistic that is blowing his mind.
Hugh: That’s amazing.
Russell: At this rate, his hair will start turning gray.
John: It will light on fire.
Russell: You have to ease up on him.
Hugh: At least I got hair. Ha!
Russell: This is the secret to not having any gray. You cut it all off.
Hugh: Last week, we had an interview with Les Brown, and Les talks about using the mascara on his gray. He said his gray hair doesn’t last very long. He keeps looking fresh with that look.
Guys, this is fascinating stuff. People put up websites, and they wonder why nobody comes. They really do stupid things on social media. It’s really social. How do people learn about this? I think we should create an academy and have a membership for people who are in charitable work to learn how to do these things. Like Russ said, they have a small staff and not a lot of money. If they started getting traffic and people found them and they raised the donor base- and actually if donors know what you’re doing, the impact you’re having, they will continue to be donors and spread the word. There is no negative aspect to tooting your horn and letting people know about it. Come back to some of my crazy ideas here.
Pipp: That’s right. What you and I have talked about before is how do you create more of a presence in social media? You have the main social media sites, like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, maybe Pinterest, Google+. How do you put out information on a regular basis? There are a couple of tools that make it easier for you to do that. One is Buffer. Buffer has the ability to post and link articles to the various social media accounts you have. There is another company called Quuu. They are an aggregator of online articles. You will probably find articles in almost any niche or subject you can think of. You can get an account for free for both of these. On the free account, you are limited to how many posts you can do and how many social media accounts you can link to, but you can link Buffer with Quuu and pick like four or five different subjects and link two articles a day to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Every single day. Those are what they call curated content. Somebody else wrote it, it’s in your niche, and you post it as interesting information for people who are interested in your niche and what you do. But I also recommend to people they need to be doing some original content of their own. If you have these other services, you don’t have to write something every day or two to three times a week. You can do something original a couple times a month, but there is still a flow of information coming out. That creates engagement. You will build Twitter Followers, Facebook likes, and additional connections on LinkedIn all from having information that flows.
John: You asked one other question, Hugh. Pipp and I spend a lot of time figuring this out. This is way full-time. There are some basic things that can be done to give your site more visibility, just some real basic things. The biggest thing Pipp said is make sure that you have a LinkedIn account, a Facebook business account or an account that is to your ministry or 501(c)3, a Twitter account, and an Instagram account, and have those connected to your website. That will sure help. You want to make sure that you have accurate information on all those places. You don’t want to confuse Google because that’s not good. You want to make sure information is accurate across platforms. Then when you want to get really serious on one of these areas, it’s probably a good idea to hire somebody who spends a lot of time trying to figure it out. It changes all the time. We use the phrase that Google has all the gold and they make all the rules. We just have to live with those.
Hugh: The golden rule.
John: To have an academy would be a great thing. It wouldn’t be a free academy, and it wouldn’t be part-time.
Hugh: No. I was throwing out an idea. If anybody is listening and interested, we could play with it.
John: It’s a great idea.
Hugh: We could do the same thing with a group of people and make it a more level playing field and impact more people and have greater results. Talk about how Google changes things. They are sneaky about it. A logarithm, is that what it is?
Pipp: Their algorithm, yeah. They have made a lot of changes just in the past couple of years. They have two search algorithms. One is for desktop search, and one is for mobile search. They are separate. They announced about a year and a half ago, or maybe two years ago, that they were going to put more priority on mobile search algorithm, meaning that if you were ranking on page one but your site wasn’t mobile-friendly, because it wasn’t, the mobile-friendly aspect was going to become much more important to the mobile-search algorithm, and you could lose ranking on a mobile search even if you are ranked highly on a desktop search. That was a couple years ago. Then a few months back, they announced that the mobile search algorithm in 2018 was going to be the predominant factor to ranking in the search engines period.
John: And the reason for that?
Pipp: Well more than half of all search is mobile. That is mostly Smartphones, but that also includes tablets.
Hugh: Amazing. Russ, you have been taking this in. I think we should come up with a hard question for these guys. Let’s stump our guests.
Russell: How do you stop these guys from making all of these changes?
John: No, it’s a great question. But it goes back to that you have to look at it from their standpoint. They are trying to provide the best product for you and I, the guy who is searching. They are going to work really hard to get into our brains and to put that into their brain to give us the searcher the best result. What we have to be doing as SEO experts is understanding Google and where they are going and then making sure that our clients are providing relevant information for those search terms. It has to be. Otherwise, we are going to mistakenly send somebody to a client’s site, and the Google customer is not going to be happy, which is going to drop them in ranking.
Russell: This is how they made Yahoo and other people disappear in the first place.
John: They worked really hard at it to provide the best quality product for their client.
Pipp: And they make changes all the time. They make changes to their algorithm all the time. The nice part of it is we are actually members of a very large SEO mastermind group that is worldwide in scope. Some of our peers are really smart, and they- actually before Google makes changes, they file patents. They get copies of the new patents that are filed and waiting to be approved and read it. We generally have a pretty good idea of where things are headed. Google does their best to obfuscate that, but they have to have the information in there so the guys in the patent office can say okay. We have some smart colleagues that read that stuff, figure that out, and give us a good idea of where Google is going six months or a year from now.
Hugh: Part of this change is necessary. People used to pack in the keywords. Then people used to go out and do these fictitious sites with all these backlinks. There were thousands of them, and Google got smart to that.
Pipp: No matter what the rules that Google comes up with, there will always be somebody who figures out a way around it. Once they figure that out, Google will figure out that they did that, and they will change the rules again. But there are some basic things. We ourselves in our company follow industry-best practice. We don’t do any blackhat. In the SEO world, blackhat is things you know you shouldn’t do, but you do them anyway hoping for a good result and hoping not to get caught. That was standard practice, even five years ago. But the things that a lot of people did and we were doing five years ago, if we did them today, they would get us penalized.
Still one of the biggest things I see for people who try to do SEO on their own is they over-optimize their websites in terms of keywords. Let’s say they have 600 words of content on their homepage. They will put a keyword in there like 40 times. Google needs it there once or twice and they know what you’re about. When you start putting it in 20-40 times, you get over-optimized. You may see yourself move up in the ranking. You may even get to the bottom or middle of page two, but you won’t get further.
Hugh: Wow.
Pipp: it’s almost like they give you hope. I’m movin’ up, I’m movin’ up, I’m movin’ up, and boom, you hit the ceiling. You’re on page two where nobody can find you.
Hugh: When you get penalized, do you stay there, or is there any way to get out of that?
Pipp: You can change it. I have had a client this last year who after I had done some SEO work and were moving up nicely, he went in on his own and decided to rewrite one of the pages he wanted to rank for, and he put the keyword in there like 42 times. Then we started dropping back. I was trying to figure out why, and he happened to mention to me that he went in and changed that page. I went in and copied all the information and highlighted all the places he had done that, saying, “This needs to get fixed.” I fixed it. And we shot right back up to page one. It took a little while. When I say “shot right up,” that might have taken two or three months, but that is something that still a lot of people do. I find particularly those who try to do SEO on their own, they are looking at old information and don’t really have the resources to stay abreast of what is working today and what current best practices are.
Hugh: Russ, did you have more to that question?
Russell: It gets back to that notion of working within your wheelhouse and not trying to do things that you’re not good at. I definitely don’t know a lot about SEO, but I do write. What I have started doing is looking at the principles of copywriting and studying that because that is what I can do on my own. I definitely need to hire someone- I have a guy working on my website who knows a lot more of this stuff than I do. He is reoptimizing the site, but in order to help myself, I have started looking at copywriting. I put together a series on donors that talks about the information you have to have. You have to know your audience in order to get some traction. That is important. What your content contains is where the keywords are probably going to be found.
Hugh: Absolutely. Good points. We are on the downside of our interview. We try to keep these under an hour because that’s a lot of time and people want to get some good content. Think about some stuff we haven’t talked about, guys. What is a thought or challenge or tip you want to leave with people?
Let’s go back to the electronic media. If all of this stuff, Russ and I work with organizations to build out their strategy. We are trying to hunt and peck in the dark rather than having a synergistic plan. I wouldn’t dare get in front of an orchestra or a choir and try to direct without having a piece of music because people are all over the place. We have to have some glue to hold us together, and then people can become engaged. With that, we are very clear on what it is we offer, who it is we offer it to, the value of our service, and the impact. That gives you guys something to work around and to use your magic to bring that constituency to the site and actually do something. If I have heard you correctly, part of it is identifying the trends, finding what it is people are looking for, but also attracting the right people. On the other side, you slipped right by this, you are creating a landing page, and the landing page has to convert. It has something interesting so people don’t leave in .2 seconds, so they engage with you and learn something and want to be part of your tribe, donate, or be a part of your volunteer pool. There is a whole synergy in this thing.
Let me throw it to you. Like the last time we talked, my brain is firing on many cylinders that I’m not doing right. I can’t handle much more of this, but I have a list of things to do. You will be getting a call from me about my new site. Let me throw it to John and then Pipp. As a departing thought and comment, sum up the things you wish people would do, and remind them of where they can go to find out. You have a survey or something on the site, so talk about that, too.
John: We have a form that they can go through. What is the name of that form, Pipp?
Pipp: Strategy form.
John: We have a strategy form they can go through on the site. It leads them to give us information so we can get back to them with some knowledge of what they are trying to do.
I am going to step back and go back to what Russell said. Stand in your wheelhouse. Companies that come to us, we are going to have to make the assumption that they are good at what they do. Pipp and I have a really wide range of backgrounds. Pipp has owned several businesses; I have owned several businesses. Sometimes we get more involved than we should in the whole process. But what we look to do is be the SEO expert. What we look for is our clients to bring to us “This is what I do, this is who searches for us, and this is how they search for us. Put me on page one for these three key search terms.” That is what we do. We go after those search terms. Sometimes we get deeper into the weeds than that. That is what we primarily do.
Pipp: Once they have filled out our strategy form, we then produce an eight-minute video analysis where we look at their website, we look at the competition, the strength of the competition, and then tell them the opportunity that is there. If you rank for this, this is how many searches there are, this is a conservative estimate you could expect as far as visitors, and based upon a conservative conversion rate, how much that traffic would be worth to you. We like to show them how big the opportunity they are missing out on is.
The other thing I was going to say in closing is something you and I have talked about before, Hugh. We touched a little bit on conversions, and we haven’t talked about video on this call. Video can be a good way to help conversions on your site, on your landing pages. If you can do a short video that deals with your business, that topic of the landing page, usually less than two minutes on your page can be a tremendous help. People like to know who they are potentially going to get involved with. You do a video that is engaging, you look at the person who is watching, you talk to them directly. You want to talk to that single person. You can do that. As I told you once before, I have an attorney client that we had ranked, and he was getting clicks to this website but not getting the conversion. We put a short video on his site, and overnight, that video tripled or quadrupled his phone calls in a week for his business. It was unbelievable how much of a difference it made.
Hugh: You guys aren’t a one-trick pony. You have a whole lot of different programs and knowledge base and wisdom. That is quite remarkable.
Pipp: I think that’s one of our strengths. We have gray hair, too. At least I do. I’m not sure John does. We have done a lot of things. We generally have the ability to understand what they’re doing fairly quickly and obviously work within our expertise, which is SEO and digital media. Oftentimes, we can make suggestions to other things you could be doing that could be helpful.
Hugh: Thank you for jumping in at the last minute and being so gracious to share all of this information (we had a cancellation tonight). You do a lot of upfront service to people. That is a gift. Russell, thank you for being here again and asking really good questions. Russell has made some notes of the profound statements that came out of your mouth.
Russell: There is one thing I’d like to sneak in before we leave. The service these guys provide is superior, premium. The thing I like about what I see in their website is when they go in there, they define some parameters. If your business or organization is at a certain point, we can help you. If you’re not at that place, then we don’t want to offer you something that will not benefit you. That is integrity on steroids, and I love it.
Hugh: Russ listens and observes and comes up with some profound statements. John Zentmeyer and Pipp Patten, thank you for sharing your wisdom with our audience tonight.
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Increase Your Reach and Donations | The Nonprofit Exchange: Leadership Tools & Strategies podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
