Ep. 12 — What Google Actually Sees: A Real SEO Audit of artillerymedia.com

Welcome to Slow and Steady, a podcast by Artillery. For way too many people, website is a scary word. And if that's you, don't panic. Just press play. I'm Jake, and I'm John. And we're co-owners of Artillery. All right, let's roll. Welcome back everyone to Slow and Steady, a podcast by Artillery. And today's episode is a little different. Instead of talking about websites in theory, Brittany from Downey Strategy and I are actually going to walk through a very real SEO audit of the Artillery website that Michelle from WordsOnTheRise.com gave to us, or I should say we paid for. We recently had an outside SEO specialist, her review the site. And like I said, we're rebuilding the Artillery websites almost complete, more on that in a bit. And the next evolution of our website needed a goal that was how is the site functioning in Google today, understanding that, and the doubling down on what's working and what we should be avoiding going forward. So the interesting thing about this audit is that the results were kind of a mixed bag. On one hand, we're dominating locally for web design searches here in Lincoln, Nebraska. But on the other hand, a huge portion of the traffic coming from the site is from completely unrelated searches. Like for example, one of our top articles and links on the entire website is people searching how to sign a PDF on an Apple device. We rank really well for that. But those traffic numbers look good on paper, but how much of that is actually helping our business? Does that help our domain authority and more? So Brittany and I, that would be fun to open up the audit together, talk through it, and talk about what matters. We have a site, it's been working for years. Now it's time to understand it a little bit more and dig into it for our rebuild. So how is that Brittany? - Because this is actually our definition of fun. I'm the kind of person who actually dreams about making websites in my sleep. So this is very fun for me. - I know, it's hard not to get geeked up about it, but it's like what we do, but also we need to be geeked up about what we do. So here we are, our gathering about it. So that's fun. - And probably, and we should make the caveat that there's a lot that goes into SEO, like tons of different things that go into SEO. And you guys already had a really good foundation for that. So we're not really digging into some of those basics today, right? - That's right, that's right. The basics of SEO have remained, well, we just wrote a post on this. You can go to our site and check it out. We also have an episode about this as well. And essentially, the basics of good SEO have remained the same. Google's pretty clear that if it works well for a human, then it works well for the algorithm. And they wanna keep it that way. That means a good Google My Business Profile that is accurate and up to date, leading to a beautiful, fast, safe, secure artillery built website that has bounty strategy content on it, polling from SEO reports that captures intent, keywords, helpful things that people are actually searching for. So that AI can index these pages, this content, and serve that up as well, which is the future of, of course, delivering information to people. Okay, Bernie, did I miss anything there? - No, I didn't get over. - Before we dig into the report. - Cool. To dig in a little bit further, I suppose artillerymedia.com, this is the third version of the website. Since I've been involved, I think there's a couple versions before that. I think the third WordPress version, over 12, 13, 14 years, maybe more. I'd have to get John on here to get the official timestamp. But over a decade, we have consistently blogged. We have hundreds of blog posts on our site about honestly kind of a lot of random things. We'll get into that. We also have pages on our site, maybe about 30 to 40. Some of them being helpful, some of them being completely not. And our Google My Business is pretty well up to date. We have great reviews, over 215 stars. And a lot of those reviews have our keywords in it. For example, this team, our artillery, is great at web design. That type of a thing. Then on top of all that, we also have a lot of profiles on other websites. So, better business bureau profiles, Angie's list, style of profiles, the top web design near me has like a profile you can have. All that to say, the more of these profiles you have and the more you capture reviews outside of just one source, Google or your website. AI really captures all of those data points. And so if you have more than one domain or more than one source capturing reviews, having information that's all matching, your business name, your address, your hours. All that works together and compounds really well. So I figured I should mention that too. - Yeah. And the other thing to know is that that messaging means to match across those different platforms. And so if you talk about kind of one aspect of your services in one profile and then another aspect of your services in another profile, that signals to Google and also to AI that you're kind of fragmented. So it doesn't know which one is a source of truth or what to go to necessarily. And so having that consistency in the messaging is really important. But the other thing is to note that you might have these profiles that have been created for you without your knowledge. And so it might even be worth just taking a quick look and seeing what comes up because oftentimes these directory sites will just throw on up for you even if you didn't create it yourself. - Yeah, and make sure that like we said, kind of the final point is everything's consistent. Artillery, is it all caps artillery or is it artillery media? Is it artillery media comma ink dot? Even discrepancies such as street, S-T-R-E-E-T-N-S-T dot can throw off the system. So consistency is key. But maybe we already knew that. - It's more important than you think. Like a comma, you wouldn't think it's a huge deal but those nitpicky things can make a difference. - It's a huge deal, Mrs. Copywriter. - Speaking of which, we should talk about your Google business profile and what comes up when we see that right now. - Okay, great. Should we just pull open the report or should we dig into the actual live version of searching a few things? - Your call. - Your call. - Well, let's pull open the report first and then we'll get into that 'cause this report references that all the times. Okay, so we're pulling open our report by words on the rise, thanks Michelle. And what we see first is that we wanna see our purpose, right? What's the purpose of this? I think it's important to start with why. Thanks, I'm Incinnick. We wanna understand how people are coming to our website first and then, you know, I guess, what's kind of the first thing Brittany that you would say that we're trying to understand? And I kinda have my reason for this, but I would say in general, the main reason for an SEO report is how are people coming to your site? How are they searching the machine and landing on your site in general? That's kind of the number one thing that we're seeing here? - Yeah, you wanna know how people are getting to you and what sort of problem they want solved or what sort of desire they have around what you're offering. So you might be getting exactly the kind of audience to your website that you want. And if you find that out, that's great. You also might be getting people who are coming to your site for a slightly different purpose than what you have to offer. Or maybe your services aren't matching up with the intent of what people are searching. So you kind of have an opportunity to either decide, hey, we wanna go after a slightly different audience, some different traffic, or it's working well, or we have an opportunity to serve the people who are coming to our site with some more of the things that they actually care about and that they actually want. And that impacts everything from structure to the way that you message, to the pages that you have on your site. - Cool. Well, our purpose is the SEO audit, state of the website report, how it's going with Google searches, as we build out this new version of artillery site with our team and just an overall strategy for continued website growth, what are some things that we need to focus on as we finalize our build. So some statistics, let's get into this. Over the last six months, artillery media website received about 3100 clicks, excuse me, about 517 clicks per month from Google search. And that accounts for about 42% of our website total traffic. So about 42% of our traffic comes from Google. Other traffic would come from either someone directly punching in your website, or coming from socials, or coming from something that isn't from Google. Bing, Yahoo, those types of things. So some math to figure out. First, 76% of that organic traffic is what we would consider low value. So as we know, Google traffic right now is going towards those PDFs on Apple devices posts. And so if we exclude that traffic, then we only have about 717 valuable organic clicks about 60 clicks per month in the last six. thoughts. That look right? Yeah. Okay, number two, the home page drives the most valuable traffic for us. 58% of it via Google business profile. So most people that come to our home page come to it from our Google business profile. That's interesting. So the website used to be the the foyer of your business. That's when you're inside the building, right? So I guess the Google business profile is the signage outside your building now. If we can kind of stick with that matter for. It's the most important. It's the front door. That's the it's the main entrance to our content to our site, at least for us. So the most valuable page on the site is the home page for artillery. It brought in 415 clicks in the last six months. And again, 243 of those clicks, about 58% came via the website link on the Google business profile. So people searching typically how that works is people search our name, artillery media. And then they see our profile business and they click on the profile. That's typically how it works. Of course, they could also search web design near me and find our Google business profile and click on that. But as we're seeing a lot of people are authenticating our name through real conversations and then searching our name on Google to find us. So that makes sense. Then the last thing and then I'll kick it over to you, Brittany, for some overview as far as you see these organic traffic stats. But the third thing is the home page brings in about 31 unbranded valuable clicks per month. So 231 of the 419 clicks came via the keyword artillery media as I was kind of saying previously. So most most of the people visiting our site, like I said, kind of already knew about us and searched our name. Any overview thoughts about the organic traffic stats there? Yeah. Okay. So the first thing here is that you guys are doing great on the most important thing that matters, which is that branded search. So just for clarity for people, branded search is when somebody searches the actual name of your business. And it's really important to show up for that. Sometimes it's harder to show up for that if you have other brands that have similar names or maybe even the same name as you do in other industries. So if that part of your business is not kind of short up, like branded searches, the number one thing you got to show up for. And if you're getting a lot of branded search, that means that your reputation and that your connections are really doing a great job of building awareness of your brand. So really what this says to me is that you guys artillery media has been serving customers very well. And that they are referring people to you that there's name recognition throughout the community and that they are coming specifically to see you. Those unbranded searches are where things can get a little dicey because there are so many unbranded searches that could be happening, right? But you know, a valuable unbranded search for you guys would be a website designer in Lincoln or just website designer. And so even 31 unbranded searches for website designers could be very valuable for you guys. If they turn into 15 clients, that's, I mean, that's great, right? So even those small traffic numbers, I think are still super valuable, especially for small businesses. What about the people who are coming to us from those blog posts that I wrote back in 2017 about signing a PDF on my Mac. We recently went in and we saw that, of course, that was happening. Now that we weren't aware of it, but we went in and we're updating that post. We're keeping it fresh. We're keeping, I just recently put a video on that post. People can watch and that video is getting views, which is great. But tell me what your perspective is on some of those low value quote unquote traffic. Okay, so at face value, I think that it's almost pointless to have blogs like that up on your website because they are not coming with any sort of intent to purchase a website or to purchase branding, branding services. But I have, however, I've heard some arguments which make me think that it might be a little bit more nuanced than that because what's really happening is it's really showing that and showing Google that people are coming to your site and finding it valuable. So there are some good signals that are coming from that post and like Michelle from Words on the Rise said, it might not hurt to keep that up as you as change your site so that it doesn't negatively impact anything. But generally what I'm thinking about content that's worth the time to produce for people is content that's more in your area of expertise and where you have thought leadership cloud where you can really bring something to add to the conversation because I think AI search is just going to continue to eat up those, eat up those views. At some point people aren't going to be going to any sort of website. They'll just be having an AI overview of whether on Google or chat GPT and at some point your website is not going to be relevant for that. What do you think about Jake? Yeah, no, I agree. The only thing I'd kind of add is just kind of that domain authority ranking. It's becoming more popular. Google kind of sees each.com in this very obscure ranking system that only they really know. You could kind of tell what your domain authority is with some tools that are out there. But essentially your domain has an authority score. Brand new fresh domain has authority score of one or zero. And Google.com or Facebook.com has an authority score of 99. Meaning that anything on there is not going to, well, there's a lot of things that go behind the domain authority score. But traffic to the site, how long people are staying on the site. If people are scrolling, people are clicking and people are taking action. That all plays into that. It all goes into the very good old, you know, score. So I guess what artillery kind of needs to decide is, yes, I think we keep it that specific post. But can we get that type of traffic on something that's relevant to pulling in the type of person who would buy from us? Right. Not necessarily a normie who doesn't understand how to sign a PDF on a Mac. And as it gets easier for companies to generate posts like this with chat GPT and just post it into a blog post on their site, I think the value of these things is going to go down. I think your value came from a period of time where that was not the norm. You didn't have AI to create these how-to posts. And so having that post up was super valuable. But that's changing. And so I think that anybody who's starting right now is not going to see the same results that you guys have from that kind of legacy system. Yeah. Slow and steady, baby. Right. Right. That put right that article way back then. And anyway, slow and steady. Lots of small ads to the site over time. But now it's this huge kind of overgrown tree that needs to be pruned. Okay. Next take away. The audit shows that the homepage is doing, of course, the heavy lifting in terms of real business traffic, especially from the Google business profile. Is that typical for a service business website? And is that bad? Oh, yeah. It's not bad. It's like very normal, right? That's usually what pops up first if you're searching locally. So if you do any sort of local search, what you'll see is a bunch of different businesses in a directory pop up. And that's where artillery is popping up. And that is great. My question usually is how are you showing up in that Google business profile and the first place? And can we increase clicks to the website from that profile? And you guys are doing great because of your reviews. A lot of reviews. Show us some of our Oopsy's Brittany. You were just pointing them out to me. Okay. So and Oopsy, you want to make sure that the services and the description that you have in that Google business profile matches what you have to offer. And there's a lot of different fields you can fill out in your Google business profile. But the most important one is sort of the short little description of who you are and what you offer. And if I go to your business profile right now, it says that you are a website design company offering photography, video production, and graphic design services, which it sounds like Google might just have made that up because that's what they think you do. But Jake, do you do all the services? Well, we can. Don't let that hesitate from reaching out, right? You can refer people. You can refer people, right? We're your website fiduciary. Okay. So when it comes to adding things to our Google search business profile or Google business profile search rather, do we want to select all? Yeah. Catering photography. If you have a need, just reach out to me. Turns out that that is actually in today's day and age as the algorithm is shifting less valuable, adding a ton of things, especially if you don't have a page for it to authenticate that on your website. It's actually not that great. So artillery does not have a full time photographer does not have a full time videographer. We do not offer those services. We have that built into a lot of our processes where we will then hire a third party freelancer. But since artillery is really focused now on website design and development branding design and then website hosting and management maintenance security support. Those are the three tiers that we are going to be building a long landing page for updating the services on our website for and really doubling down the blog and podcast and content to caption those keywords, which we'll talk about here in a second for that as well. And kind of removing the photography stuff, sign up PDF on stuff and that kind of a thing. Yeah, and to also be clear, there is a spot where you can add the services in addition to your description. So that description needs to be tight and needs to show the value of what you have to offer in a very short kind of section. But you can actually add the subservices lower down in the business profile, depending on what sort of business type you tell Google that your business is. So you can add all those things like, for example, you might want to add logo design in there as well, like logo design is underneath branding. But having that as just one of your services lower down on the profile is going to be a great way to show Google what you are offering. And then of course, having that match up on your website service pages is also helpful. But you don't have to have a matching page for every single service that you list on the profile, but you don't want to list every single service up in that top space. Like if you overwhelm people with a list of 10 different things, they're not going to be, they're not going to understand who you are or what you have to offer. You've got to really hone in on that main positioning that you're going to do. Heck yeah, to be clear is to be kind. And that means most of the time, especially in our AI age, removing things and not adding things. Okay, moving on. We're ranking number one for web design in Lincoln. Woohoo! Sounds great. But does that mean there's not much room to grow? So when a business is already winning locally, what should we do next? And I'll kind of tease this up by saying, most of our business does not occur in Lincoln. Most of our business is outside of Lincoln, as far as artillery is concerned. So this is where we can start to tiptoe our way into building location pages for other cities, not just Lincoln. And maybe talk about servicing other areas. But what do you think, Brittany? Because our technically artillery can service folks anywhere. Geneva, Sydney, LA, New York, anywhere in between. But of course, our offices in Lincoln, that's where our address is on our Google business profile. What should we do? We don't have an office in Omaha. Do we need to add an Omaha, servicing Omaha locations? So we need to start creeping into that market. What should we do? Oh goodness. This is actually, this is a kind of a nuance and a really tricky, tricky, I literally said "tryphical" from Bluey. Clearly too, clearly too, parents having a conversation or not. Tricky and terrific. But it said nuanced conversation. And there's not a clear cut answer for every single organization like I wish there would be. Because when you look at all the potential companies that are trying to target web design services, I mean, you got thousands of companies that are aiming for the same position. And this is something that's interesting. I'll often hear people say, well, why aren't we ranking number one for X keyword in New York City? It's like, well, in New York City, there are probably a lot of people trying to target the same exact thing as you. So is there opportunity in adjacent local places potentially? But at some point, like how much time do you waste building out tons of location pages where there might other, already be other organizations that are physically located in that place? I don't know. I don't think there's a clear answer to that. What do you think, Jake? Yeah, that's true. It's like, you know, we're working with a client right now that we're building location pages onto their site because for that reason. And we're expanding the site because, yeah, like anything, you can plateau if you don't add to it, grow to it, adjust, learn from the data. A lot of our business does not come from Omaha right now. We don't get a lot of search. That must be going to someone else. Do we need to get an artillery office up there in Omaha, a PO box and create a business profile? Yes, I could do that. That would probably be a good evolution. If I wanted to spend the time starting to creep into that market and capture that, that would probably be the next step. I go in. I figure out an employee there. I figure out a base there. I figure out a PO box or some type of address. I create a business profile there with an address in hours. I sync it up to the Omaha location on the artillery media website. And away we go. We start getting our own reviews to their so on and so forth. There's a ways to add locations. And again, we want to think about Google first because that's how people are typically searching Google. But all that to say, I don't really want to spend my effort there. There's other things I want to spend my effort on, which we'll talk about. Yeah. And I think you bring up a really good point. Is that SEO should not be driving the strategy? Your strategy should be driving SEO. And so, and so for example, if it's smart for you to start building out your network in your community in Omaha, okay, that's great. Let's build a strategy to expand to have a bigger Omaha presence. But that actually means that that's driving the SEO strategy not the other way around. And so the question might be, okay, what kind of groups do we want to get into there? How can we build our team there? How can we like have a local presence and be involved with the business community there and offer value within this community? And that's a business strategy decision. And that can trickle down to your SEO. So for example, these these websites that you're building out, if they have physical locations in these different places, that's a business strategy. That's great for them to have those pages that reflect that business strategy. But if you're trying to build out in a really crowded space, if you're trying to build out SEO strategy first before your business strategy, I think you're kind of driving it the wrong way. Totally agree. And Google can see this coming from one mile away. I start creating and popping up certain city things that aren't real, that don't it's just oh, Jake and Lincoln decided he's going to start tricking Omaha people into into picking him. So to speak, Google sniffs that out for like a better words. Yeah, the algorithm knows that hey, if you have a physical spot, if you're actually providing value locally to this specific place and like you said, you're plugged in like there's not there's not a lot of ways to trick it now. And so again, if your business strategy says that, if I'm going to franchise, then that would be the best way to do it. And that would be the best way to definitely capture traffic in those local areas. Otherwise, maybe we should focus on some other keywords. So let's show a pivot into that. Let's do that. Okay. So keywords, simply the tools or words on the website that is used to find people information products, people search for web design, people search for Jake Kramer, people search for whatever. And online search usually gives you a snapshot of what you see, right? But it's really important to think of this as as I'm kind of seeing in this report now that desire, the question, people are searching things for a reason. Simon Sinek, the why? So someone searches website design. Why did they search that? Well, they're probably really frustrated with something. They probably pissed off at their current web design provider or their website to broken, right? Like usually there's a problem. People aren't just searching things because it's fun. People are searching photographers near me because they just got engaged. So the problem doesn't always have to be bad, right? It could be celebratory. But there's always a push, a drive. Okay. So knowing that, the why is how we help decide our keywords. And then those keywords decide what our website is presented when someone includes a keyword like web design. So so Jake, can you just throw all the keywords you want people to you would come up for on the website and then people will see your website and come to you? Is that work that way? Remember the old days where John and I were just reminiscing about this where you could create a page and then you could just grab a bunch of text and add links and make them make it white text with white links on a white background and make the text like one pixel font size. And you could literally cram like hundreds and hundreds of even thousands of keywords on a page. Wow, tricky. Yeah, you thought Google took 10 minutes to figure out that that was happening and change the algorithm. A lot of people think to your point, Brittany, that we can just cram or add that keyword a bunch of times to the site and we did it, right? It's just a crank it out. Let's create an open claw count and create a bot to just cram in that keyword 1000 million trillion times. That's got to work, right, Brittany? Yeah, totally. Turns out Google thought of that, right? And at the end of the day is this page creating value for a human on that page. Give a great example. One I use all the time. The body lab. Dr. Rachel, we love you. Create an incredible brand. The body lab in Lincoln. If you search cold plunging in Lincoln, what's the number one result? It's a Brittany Downey written page, cold plunging. It's a H1 meaning it's a standalone page. The title of that page is cold cold plung. There's details on that page about cold plunging, the facility that you walk into. There's a whole facility with options. There's multiple ways that you could say cold plunging, cold water immersion, cold therapy. And that's organically baked into the content on the web page, which is broken out into story brand friendly. Hey, you landed on the site because you probably need to understand what cold plunging is and how you can access it and some details about it in Lincoln. Let me break down what it is. Let me break down how you can access it. Let me break down the values, the benefits. Let's put an FAQ section at the bottom. Let's provide as much value as we can on this web page so that if someone searches cold immersion therapy or cold therapy or cold plunging in Lincoln, Nebraska, this is the resource. And it's also a service. So come on in and pay us. Right. I think the thing that's really important to remember is generally one page, one general keyword. So you're not going to be able to cram in a million different keywords on one page. You kind of have to have one page with the purpose. It might have some sub keywords in there. So for example, your branding page might have some subsections about graphic design or logo design. But that general kind of topic, the general keyword needs to be about like what the whole page is about. So I think that that's kind of an important rule of thumb as you're looking at these things. And you can get more specific when you come to blogs. For example, a blog can answer a very specific keyword that your home page really couldn't love it. And blogs sometimes even now are shifting to be more like what are the prompts that people are putting in a chat GPT or Claude? You know, like specifics like how much should I be paying for a web design in Lincoln? If there's a blog post with information that's sort of detailed like that that matches that very probable prompt. Well, there we go. Great. Should we keep talking about kind of some recommendations on this audit as it pertains to backlinks? backlinks. Okay. Okay. So backlinks as I kind of teased before kind of helps determine the authority of a website. So the links that are from other websites to your website. So backlinks they're coming back to your site. I don't know. It's a good way to describe it and think of it. Yeah. Orcs in my brain kind of like how con concave and convex. I think of concave. It goes in like a cave. You go in. How about that, Brittany? That's perfect. My brain works. Yeah. What's up? Okay. So the best links. Three three points here. The best links. Number one, high authority websites. So like if the New York Times linked to my blog, that would be a lot of juice. A lot of juice as they say. Number two, sites in our industry, topical neighborhood, like links from websites related to web design, WordPress, graphic design, websites in tech. If that links to me, that increases our website's authority as a trusted source in that industry, right? So high authority and then topical industry. Okay. Number three, in our geographical area. So for example, Lincoln reports, Omaha reports, best businesses in Lincoln, Lincoln commerce, Lincoln Chamber of Commerce, those sites linking to us is great as well. Yep. Anything to add on backlinks? I actually like to kind of take a step back from backlinks and think of it really just as PR. Because essentially what you're doing is you are getting your brand in front of other audiences and you're getting your message out on other relevant sites. And that link back to your site gives your site authority. But I also think that you can get double benefit from that PR activity. You're getting in front of that audience. You are becoming more known in the communities that matter. And so really you can kind of think of your backlink strategy and your PR strategy is like almost one in the same kind of combined. So if you already are doing PR, you want to make sure you're getting those links back to your site in a good way. And then if you aren't doing PR and you're thinking, I got to get backlinks, I would think about it from a PR mindset rather than just like I got to get backlinks. Yeah. Yes. Back with the Y. I love that PR. And so how we've been doing this at artillery is as Brittany, Downey strategy, mentioned to us in our own brand strategy marketing strategy, exercise that we did recently, you said, Hey, Jake, what's working well for you is getting in front of an audience or even a single person face to face. And so this, this podcast is a really way to number one, have conversations that are meaningful, but number two, that leads to good PR, good conversations, good resources, good value that are then linked on another website and backlinks to us. And so that'll kind of place together as you're saying. It's not just we don't want to spam just to get backlinks because what value does that serve? Not a lot. Okay. Then we kind of already talked about local SEO reach. We're doing very well for that. We're number one organically and we're ranking number one in the map pack. That's fun. That's our Google reviews. So make sure that you're getting those. It's so important. Locals SEO. And make sure that your people are leaving reviews that have those keywords in it. For example, for us, web designer, graphic designer, logo designer, brand designer. So we're doing well for that. Kind of already mentioned it. Should we move on to recommendations? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, great. So some recommendations were extend our business hours to evenings and weekends right now the site does a lot better during business hours. And that might be because our target market works on weekends and evenings too, but we should extend those hours to say like, hey, we work on Saturdays and Sundays from these times, but we're still appointment only. So that might be an interesting way to show that hey, we're open and we can kind of take that call still. Someone wants to call or email in. So I thought that was an interesting suggestion that I didn't really realize it was a big deal. Hours. Do you think they'll give people that just show up at your office on a Saturday? Well, it'd be locked. Would it piss people off more than anything else? People can't come and say hi anyway. And if they do, we still can be a nice tour. But yeah, buy appointment only. Google has a lot of good options for buy appointment only though. But we're still available via email and there's kind of there might be some ways that we can update that on our profile. I like that. Yeah, being clear. You can't just walk into our office on a Sunday morning. Right. But if you have a big problem, we'll probably answer the email. Okay, number two, extend our topical coverage to like as we kind of already tease branding, logo and graphic design right now. Our sites do much better locally for website design. But if we're getting into that market, it makes sense to create graphic design or branding design page. But again, does that fit our business needs? John would say, don't you dare do that, Jake. Don't you dare at a graphic design page on the artillery media website? Getting that filthy traffic. They can go to Nebraska print or something else. So another idea kind of baked into that would be okay, extending our topical coverage just in general. Yeah. So one idea is that we are doing in our new website build is to kind of have services and then surprise surprise a web page for each of those main topics of services. But also our services are typically our keyword like most service businesses. For example, web design, that'll be a service page, logo designer branding, that'll be a service page hosting, web hosting, web maintenance, that'll be a service page. And then one more thing that, for example, a lot of big sites do is we can create web design for certain categories or certain niches. For example, web design for medical industries, web design for construction companies. And we are doing that because in our project section in WordPress, we're putting our portfolio of projects that we've launched and we're now categorizing them with specific categories that we want to start ranking for web design construction companies. That will now have a category page with that H1 web design construction companies. A little bit of blur about it, helpful information and then a ton of projects that people can click on to expand more and dig into that. Yeah, Jake, I think this is a really good example of how a website can and should change based on your business and your business growth. Because a couple of years ago, you weren't doing that much branding, that much low-good design. And so you didn't really need to have a bunch of service pages. You were serving a lot of these industries, but you didn't even necessarily need traffic to the site within those industries. But at this point, since you're redoing your website, it makes a lot of sense because you have so many websites within the medical and health space. Why not capitalize on that? And you're offering these services now. So building out services pages actually makes probably sense for your business. There's a lot of businesses that are starting out or kind of just beginning. They might not need all those in-depth services pages. And it might not be worth the budget to do that, especially if they're not really offering a ton of support in those quite yet. Well said, moving on, optimize for location. Michelle suggested Omaha, because our geo-grid rankings don't extend towards Omaha. But without a physical location, Omaha, it's unlikely that our site will rank well there. As we kind of discussed, Google kind of sniffs this out. So, publishing Omaha location, how can we do that organically, naturally? Does that fit, as you said, our artillery, why? Do we wanna start scraping some of the Omaha traffic? Do we, is the juice worth the squeeze? What do you think about Omaha? Oh man, I think if you were gonna get a little bit more involved there, it would make sense. And I like how her recommendations are all, like they are literally all based around community building and networking and basically relationships in Omaha. She's not saying, just build out a page about Omaha. She's saying, hey, go actually like, hang out and meet with Omaha business owners. Take pictures from there, work on sharing information about your Omaha projects, all those things. Yes. And so, probably depends on how much time and energy you have and you want to spend on that. But I know you guys have a lot of clients coming in without that optimization. So you might not really care about that right now. Right, and grain and mortar is already crushing in Omaha, shout out, grain and mortar. So, let's keep going. This goes into kind of the other recommendation that we already kind of tease, which was web design category, web design for medical, web design for disability, web design for therapists, web design for pet lovers, whatever we wanted to do, we could kind of start digging into that if we think, and by the way, you could search this, you can find what people are searching for. That's a public information that Google can allow you to see. That's because they're trying to sell ads. But you can see that information. Great. That means that you can see if people are searching for web design, link and pet for pets. And we can see that data. Then, do we want to create those pages? One page per keyword with a lot of helpful human information, including an FAQ. So, besides all those little subcategories, one category was for story brand, okay? And this kind of gets into kind of a more specific question that I wanted to talk to you about. Is it good to stick your name on another name? Is it good? Is story brand is a process of building websites? It's an idea. It's, hey, we think that there's a formula for what makes a good website work. And for the most part, story brand, it's kind of like a religion, right? I believe in Jesus Christ, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, right? That's kind of like story brand is kind of like that for the business, right? Like, we agree that those principles make sense. It should be built for humans. It should answer three questions in two seconds. We should position ourselves as the authority figure and the customer is the hero, and they have a problem that we can solve. Do I want to start ranking for story brand web design now? I thought that was an interesting point. I liked the point. Take it away, Brittany. You know what, one last thing. I talked with Kim, Kim Meyer, Kim Meyer.com, customer of artillery, but also a very great shout out, Kim, partner of both artillery and downing strategy. And I was on a plane with her one time and she said, hey, ditch the the, right? Ditch story brand, Jake, like you don't need a cling to it. You're the expert. And you don't need to authenticate yourself consistently and constantly with this book or process that you're not even paying for. And I got her point, I see her point, but I'm wondering what you think. - Oh man. So it depends on where you're doing it, right? Like, do you want to put story brand, a story brand website designer on your homepage? Probably not, because 90% of the people coming to your homepage aren't going to know what story brand is and have that like, I guess more people are knowing, knowing that process these days, but still a lot of people have not heard of story brand. So that's not going to be a value proposition that's going to connect really well for a lot of people on your homepage. However, do you have thoughts to add or examples to share or training that you can do that talks about story brand as is related to websites that you could include in educational material. That's where I think it makes sense. And that's also where Michelle was recommending you put that content is not necessarily front and center, but more as that educational content that people can get to if they are searching and if they get there, they're so aligned 'cause they already have the same mindset and philosophy. So if you've got a good call to action at the bottom of that blog, it's like, hey, work with artillery media. We do story brand website design. Awesome, like you're in the right place, great connection to have. But then that way it's not taking up the really prime real estate of your main website pages. And I think that's the important distinction there. It can also serve as like helpful information that you send people to if they're like, I want to learn more about story brand. Sure, you could send them to the story brand actual website or you could send them to the page that has your unique thoughts spin on story brand and how that works with websites and how you guys have developed upon that, which just gives you more authority in that space. So I think it's probably more worth it than creating articles of like how to sign a PDF on Mac if you're to develop something out, right? Love that idea. And I also like the idea that you said that, well, she said that we can develop series, educational series on this, right? This is a process that we do with our service business as we're building websites out as we're helping our customers. We reference this and so if people are digging or maybe they're already familiar with that, they might be able to find us through that search as a kind of an evergreen series or chunk of posts or articles or pages on our site that don't really change. Like it doesn't have to be our main thing. We don't have to blast it on our homepage above the fold, so to speak. But we can certainly have it listed as a necessary resource and have a handful of links that are built well, have good age structure, optimize well, have good alt tags for that and provide most importantly some helpful value to the reader taking them through the process of what we're about to showcase. - Right. And I think I mean, like not every single website that you build, it doesn't make sense for 100% of your websites to be story brand, right? Like most of them, it probably does, but there's some outliers there. So you also just don't want to turn on people who might not be a good fit for that model. - Yeah, and when you put like, we are a Christian web design business or we are a story brand web design business, like you kind of have to take it to the end 'cause it's like we believe in this to all the way to our blood and bones versus like, this is a helpful thing that we see is helpful for a lot of service businesses, but for X or Z or Y are kind of this alternate, like we don't have to die on that hill. - Right. - Which I think is important. - Yeah. - Cool. Okay, so one last thing that we'll talk about and then we'll kind of wrap everything up is writing and publishing what is, starting to be known as entity optimized about pages. So search engines in large language models learn about the world through these things called entities, specific people places, things, nouns in our world, factual data associated with them. So search engines and these LLMs like chat GPT, Gemini, Grock, Claude, they're learning about these entities through repetition and collaboration, bouncing their information across other entities, other sites, triangulating that this is the right thing, not just pulling everything from one source. So the more the individual show up online and the more that their own website and on third party sites is consistent information about the factual details, the more sure, quote unquote, or confident, Google and these large language models are about the facts that comes from this report. Again, shout out Michelle, thank you for all that. Collaboration on the key facts about a person in many places online has several direct benefits. So, for example, someone searches for Jake Kramer or Brittany Downey, or in a real world example, one of our artillery clients, Sam Manzito, shout out Sam. I'll come back to that. It's more likely that that person is, included in Google's knowledge graphs. If you kind of Google someone's name, usually you see a picture of them first and some details about them. Like if they're an author or if they're a CEO, if they have a Wikipedia page, you see all those bits and pieces. Versus, you know, your daycare associate who just is kind of listed in one spot, there's a lot less things to kind of pull from. Okay, lastly, people with common names, it tries to pull the primary person associate with that name online, which is of course why some people change their like public name to be more unique, right? Okay, so she's recommending and by she, SEO specialist, that we publish entity pages on the website for each of our main people associated with artillery. The goal of each of these pages is to provide a single source of truth on a domain that we control for search engines and AI engines to reference. Who is Sierra artillery? Who is Jake artillery? And he's about pages on our current site arenas optimized as they should be that they don't have our bio. They're kind of random. They just kind of have links on them. So rewriting them and following kind of these, the content brief that she referenced above is probably going to be a good idea. So she's recommending. I had a client recently go through this too, where the name of the company is his last name and turns out that the main way that people find the company is searching his name. I just said Sam Enzito, public name. So usually lenders, people searching for information about his company will search his name, find it. This works really, of course, a lot with real estate firms, law firms, partners, LLP's, anything kind of of that nature, but also of course, small businesses because most of the time people want to authenticate who they just had a conversation with. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think this is especially great for service businesses, where people actually might be searching for that person rather than the actual organization. This is like for doctors, for example, or therapists, you might be actually searching for the therapist name that somebody recommended to you or the doctor that somebody recommended to you versus the actual organization's name. So I think that that can be a great example. And I thought that was kind of interesting because I remember looking at those reports with you guys and be like, ah, people are searching Sierra, people are searching Jake. You might not think that it would make sense for a web design company to have those detailed about pages that could be entity pages, but I think that would be wrong because the search is clearly showing that people are looking for your names. There you go. Well, the last piece that we'll talk about is the nerdy technical details. We'll kind of go fast here. But we talked about the why. We talked about how the SEO isn't really about chasing traffic. It needs to be about attracting the right people. It's all about people, people, people, websites are for people. And we can have a thousands of visitors come to our website every month. But if that's not directly helping the why of our business and our business strategy, as you very wisely laid out that one needs to trickle down from the other night by vice versa. So the audit really helped us see this opportunity, not just for more traffic, but relevant traffic and to target information, put information on our website that matches our marketing strategy and matches the actual service that we offer. And the goal is not to impress Google, but to provide value and to have the right people understand what we do and convince them to fill out that form, baby. So it's not some trick. It's not some crazy tricks. We want to think about and publish very helpful content that people are probably doing every day searches that people are probably making every day frustrations that people have every day. And we like, you know, the whole story brand version of building a website and fixing that problem. But that doesn't necessarily mean we have to stick with that word, even though we like it. So anyway, let's talk about the technical details now that we kind of talked about all the other pieces. Sorry, just not before. Technical details are next steps. Technical details first and then next steps. And what do you mean by technical details? Can you describe that for the audience? Yes. So on maus.com, you can Google the Maslow's hierarchy of SEO needs and it kind of breaks down what's important for kind of the food chart. Remember how it used to be completely flipped to what is actually true. But anyway, that's a whole digression. We won't go down. There's an important needs for a website SEO that that has to be check kind of a list that we have to check off. And some things are more important than others. For example, if you Google this, you'll see the site needs to be be able to be indexed by Google. Like it has to be crawlable. It seems obvious. Most all artillery websites do that. They're crawlable. They have a site map and a robots TXT file. That's usually step one. And then on and up the pyramid we go. But a good website page has, okay, let's let's break it down. A page title that has usually title keyword. There's usually a meta description. A quick description of what that page is. Sometimes it's also called an excerpt. But this is what Google, when you Google, you usually see the title and then that little bit of text underneath the title. It's called a meta description. You can control that. Number three, the URL, the actual structure of artillerymuted.com/websitedesign, right? That URL, does it have the keyword in it? Next up is we have the actual on the page. When someone loads the page, there needs to be proper hero sections, proper H1, H2, H3. The top section of the page should be very conversation focused, not SEO focused. So second person, you know, an easy answer. What do you do? Has it make my life better? What should I do on the website? And then there's also a testimonial section that's really happy for every single section of the website. We also always recommend kind of putting a quote or a testimonial, a specific reference to name or that kind of a thing. And then an FAQ on the page is helpful as we kind of talked about making sure that you have about 500 to 700 words on the topic is usually pretty helpful. Are we linking properly to social media in our footer? Does our menu have kind of the proper things? Do we have awards, properties positioned in the footer, publications, links? And then the last thing is web schema. And plugins like Yoast usually cover a lot of this, but you can get really specific, which with what's called rich text or web schema, where you can kind of control and categorize every little piece of every type of content that you have on the website. And this is becoming more and more popular because machines are starting to become more of the people that are on the internet than humans. So lastly is website speed. Making sure it's reasonably fast, reasonably fast. What do I mean by that? Check out the other artillery episodes about that. But usually about two to five seconds as we kind of joke about if someone hears about artillery media or downing strategy and they hear about it from an reputable source, good conversation, some of a friend that they've had or a network person in their industry. And doctor so and so says to another doctor, oh man, you got to hire artillery. Jake was awesome. He took me through the process. It was completely pain free. You just got to hit him up, search artillery, find him, reach out. Do you really think that if he searches artillery and clicks on our website and it's like one Mississippi two, oh, the site hasn't loaded, I'm out of here. Like no, like as it's proven to us, people are searching our name and tapping on our Google business profile. They probably wait 10 seconds. You know, they probably wait a minute. What's crazy? I'm not saying our site should be that slow. No, no, no, no, no, we want to target that under two second load time. But it's not as important as you might think if we're not doing massive, massive, massive, massive numbers for small and local businesses, typically kind of the out of the box, WordPress, compression, built well, is good enough for good strong SEO. That's a small piece of the puzzle. And as we increase traffic, that piece gets more important. Yes. As we add more traffic every time someone visits the website, that is more resources exponentially. So that is important. But it's important to stay within context. What do you think about all that Brittany? Yeah, I agree. And I think that's a lot of that come standard in your process. So my question to you, Jake, is what steps are you going to take differently as you're building out your website because of this SEO audit? Well, great question. I think what we'll do is we will, as we've kind of recently updated our checklist of a site map, which Brittany is going to be fine tuning our web copy and our site map and outline to make sure that is cream of the crop. We're going to have web pages that are very controlled. We have kind of a central hub for each keyword, for example, web design. We will have a project portfolio that's very well controlled and categorized, such as web design health care, web design, web and brand design medical, those types of things. And then we will update those people pages to be a little bit more people friendly. Right now it's just kind of my picture and some links of podcasts I've been on. That's not good enough. And we kind of need to follow more of the metric. So all that plus trimming turns out there's more crap on our website than actual value can quickly become that, especially over years. So we have a lot of Marie condoing to do. Yeah. And then how are you thinking about your content strategy moving forward when it comes to blogs and pages on the website? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, content strategy moving forward, well, pin in that. Also Google search stuff, we also need to go in there and optimize that. That's important. Forget that Google profile, Google business profile, I mean, making sure our logo's right, our photos are right, services are right, hours are right, locations right. Because as we've just found out, that is the front sign into before our website right in the main gateway, okay. Content moving forward, this podcast has been an incredible way of us to be able to control the type of content. If I'm not really willing to have a conversation about it, it's probably not supposed to be on our website. So I like the idea of series, controlled series that are very well informative. For example, we just went through the perfect website series and going more for those types of series is great because that allowed us to do 9, 10, 11 episodes with that key word with those H ones in the title, tons of great keyword and great information, plus a podcast episode driving traffic and driving people to it. This isn't just topical whisp in a pan type of content. This is stuff that we will be able to reference forever. I've always already started referencing our wireframe episodes, our web hosting episodes, we're documenting our process, which turns out if you document a process of your business, you talk about it a lot and those keywords pop up again and again and again. So for example, web designer, perfect, the perfect website series is a great content piece. Another great content piece would be how to have a perfect story brand website that's a evergreen content piece that just kind of stays there and stays put. That's how I see our content strategy moving forward, certainly not brands artillery likes and why books we've read and why, certainly not going that direction unless it was an evergreen piece of content, top 10 books you need to read about web design and that list and link never changes. Oh, man. I love to see a top artillery books list. It's on there. You got to dig. You're different team members would be, it would have very different recommendations. That's true. When it was just me and John, it was easy to monopolize that. Oh, man. Love it. I think that's a solid plan moving forward. Any final takeaways to any of that plan? You know, I would just say that SEO feels a little overwhelming to people probably at times and there's a lot in there. It's its own specialty. But I think to do some of the basics right is not as hard as you might think. It just depends on your business and your strategy and what you're trying to do with that. And you've got to keep that first and then the plan can really flow from there. So do you need to spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars doing a ton of things differently to your website just for SEO? Probably not. Maybe it makes sense for you, but probably not. There might just be a couple key things you need to tweak to make it better. And that's what you guys are doing. You found a couple key things that you guys need to tweak to your already solid strategy to make it better. And I think that that's an approach other people can take to. Well, if you're listening and you're a business owner and you're thinking about SEO for your own site, hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully you can see that you don't need to pay for ads. You certainly can. That is a great way to get traffic and help us grow. We don't want to downplay ads, specifically Google ads and Facebook ads, but artillery doesn't partake. Maybe we need to, but we don't currently. It's all organic, which means free. So thanks for joining us on this very special episode of Slow and Steady. We hope you're enjoying this podcast. The best thing you can do is subscribe and also check out Brittany's podcast at DownyStrategy.com. And wherever you listen to podcasts, share it with someone, rate it, roast me in the comments, as I like to say. As long as you leave that five star review. And until next time, keep building, keep improving and remember Slow and Steady works. Cheers everyone. Thanks for listening to Slow and Steady, a podcast by artillery. If you like this conversation, please rate it. That's the only way we grow. Like, subscribe, and remember, just like your business and in all things, progress beats perfection. And momentum is built slow and steady.