The 7 Core Areas of SEO With David Finberg

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. And we are happy to welcome our next guest to discuss today's topic, which is The Seven Core Areas of SEO. This week's guest is a CEO and founder of Peaks Digital Marketing. Since founding Peaks Digital Marketing, he has generated 10s of millions of dollars in revenue, while serving his passion for growing small businesses and corporations through Data-Driven ROI Centered Strategies. A big welcome to David Finberg. Hi, David.

David Finberg 1:18

Hi, Andy. Hey, thanks so much for having me on today.

Andy Splichal 1:22

You know, we're excited to have you now, let's not even waste any time with small talk and get right to what the listeners want. What are the seven core areas of SEO that you think all companies should know about?

David Finberg 1:34

Definitely, yeah. So there's seven core areas, right, that we look at, when we're looking at any kind of campaign. And the first most important one is going to be strategy, right? Like having a roadmap, knowing exactly where you're headed, really helps the journey, you know, accelerate and become a lot easier to kind of manage through. And then you've got web design, your reputation, some user experience elements and split testing, PageSpeed backlinks and content. So a lot of great, you know, different areas to dive into today. But those are the core seven that you know, I think are the most important when you're really sizing up your campaign and estimating and kind of mapping out where you want to be and, you know, following these seven steps, you can actually get there in an expedited time frame. So so it's really interesting to get to share some of these and dive a little bit deeper in.

Andy Splichal 2:28

And those seven again, make sure I got them all. So strategy PageSpeed backlinks site reputation, is that what you said?

David Finberg 2:39

So, so strategy PageSpeed, backlinks, content, user experience, reputation, and then your web design as well.

Andy Splichal 2:50

And web design?

David Finberg 2:51

So, they do blend together which is, which is actually amazing that you said that because it is all going to kind of come together in concert? Yeah, it's, it's those seven buckets that are really the most important areas. And we'll share some tips and maybe rank them in priority to kind of give people an idea of where they can start.

Andy Splichal 3:12

Yeah, let's do that. Let's rank them. What might assume strategy is first?

David Finberg 3:17

Exactly as a strategy would be first. Your web design and content are kind of like a strong second, arguably, reputation could start before you get a website, most businesses, right, you get the website, you get the presence first. And then you can start driving leads through that website and get reviews and things like that. So it's strategy, web design, content, reputation, then PageSpeed comes next, right? So the speed of this new site with your new content. Making sure that before you launch that site, or if you already have a current site, making sure the user experience is great. And you can ascertain that by split testing, like what users gravitate towards using like Hotjar or CrazyEgg. And then the last one would be like more of your backlinks, right? Like what are the things that you can do off your website that will really help move the needle up for keywords and rankings and traffic?

Andy Splichal 4:12

Wow! So you're putting backlinks last?

David Finberg 4:15

Yeah, I think really the core, you know, most SEOs would say, wow, you know, backlinks are like the first thing, right? But it really comes down to having a site that reflects reflects the quality of your brand and looking to create an innovative best in class website, having amazing content, having a really clean, easy to use functional user experience. You can build backlinks all day, if your content doesn't convert, or if your page time is super slow, and it just takes forever to load, right? Like you're actually getting less and less juice out of the fruit. I like to use this this making orange juice analogy right where most people are thinking about, you know, when they're making orange juice, they're just putting an orange on they're squeezing it out in the machine, right? And they're just getting a couple little drips of juice. Right? And so our goal is, how do we not only add more leads to the top of the funnel, which is more of a backlinking and off page strategy, right, like promoting your website is really important after the bones and foundation are late, and so we want to make sure that as we're putting oranges into this machine, we're not just getting a few drips a few conversions. Because our PageSpeed was slow, or due to the fact that our user experience wasn't as great as we thought it was initially. These are things that basically cause you to have to add more leads to top of the funnel. So our mantra is, you know, it's not just about adding leads to the top of the funnel, it's about better converting the leads that are coming in, whether that's through SEO, or through Facebook, through referrals. And so if you're a small business that's just starting out, you really want to think of this order that I'm putting together as kind of like the Bible, right? I don't want to get too religious or start to say that I'm, you know, your Savior here or anything weird like that, I do want to think of it as like, if you follow these steps, you'll see changes in the life of your business. And so, you know, regardless of what you believe in, like, use it as your checklist and your, your, your overarching, you know, handbook as you're on this journey. And typically, if you're looking at it from, you know, a strategy, web design, content, user experience, PageSpeed, you know, looking at those things, first, you have a really strong foundation to lay the rest of of your home out, right, and be able to invite people into that home and have them have a great experience.

Andy Splichal 6:27

And so now, I know that last June, Google changed some of their algorithms to focus more on user experience. Did you find that that change with PageSpeed? And stuff kind of changed the order?

David Finberg 6:42

You know, we've been focused pretty heavily on PageSpeed there, was there a couple of algorithm updates. One was that June PageSpeed, or page quality.

Andy Splichal 6:49

Right!

David Finberg 6:49

So page quality is becoming more and more of a like leading factor. That said, right, Google's whole job is to promote the best website. So I do think that it makes sense. And we have reorganized this right. Like in the past, it'd be title tags and backlinks. If you're doing SEO in 2010 2012 right before panda. Now it's more about relevancy, searcher task accomplishment, and then how are you laying that content out? So the PageSpeed is really interesting, because there's some studies out there that show like a site that loads in eight seconds, versus a site that loads in four seconds, the site that loads in four seconds, can get up to, you know, 50 100% more conversions. And so, I really think that most people underestimate the impact that PageSpeed can have on your brand. And you know, user experience and page quality. PageSpeed, for those you don't know, is a big determining factor in that it isn't necessarily the end all be all, factor. So what we're seeing is that more comprehensive content is needed, right, having innovative ways to present that content and keep it engaging, especially on mobile. And then kind of having your your housekeeping in order, right, like people are going to perceive the speed of your brand. In some cases, there's gonna correlate the speed of your site to the speed of your brand. It's like a first impression, right?

So those those seven that you laid out, I'm just curious, are those is far is conversion or actual traffic?

Well, it's both, you want to have that traffic convert, right? So sending backlinks or doing these off page components is critical, don't get confused, like we need to have these components, right. A lot of this is laying the foundation and in having great searcher task accomplishment, great user experience great design, you're actually not going to start on page you know 175 of Google, you might start up a lot higher, which makes that path to ROI a lot quicker. And so a lot of people will just start pumping backlinks or doing a lot of off page and a lot of PR and great things that you need to consider and incorporate into your strategy without having, you know, really great page quality. And so when you think of it as as you know, you're only as strong as your weakest component. Yes, there are certain components like content and PageSpeed and backlinks that are more important than others, right. But when you start to look at, you know, what makes there's only 10 spots, right for for first page ranking, and the top three spots, get the most clicks, right? And then kind of goes down from there. So 90% of pages aren't going to be on the first page 90% of websites, arguably, right.

Andy Splichal 9:28

So, how important is it to be on the first page of Google for important keyword?

David Finberg 9:33

It's extremely important. You really not getting as much traffic as you would now it doesn't mean that if you're not on the first page, you're not anywhere, there's an industry joke. It's like where's the best place to hide a dead body? And people say, well, it's the second page of Google, right? Because like no one goes there. Now I'm a little bit different. We all have different browsing habits. Sometimes I'll go to the second page if I don't find what I want on the first page. Google split test your content so it's not a static like you're on page four if you make an update to that page, it might put you on page one for a very small percentage of users just to see what happens. And if users and find that page engaging, or if they hit the back button, or whether they fill out a contact form or not things that you know, can can give indicators of the quality of the page and what the experience the users having. So you can think of it as is a you know, it's almost like a form everyone's trying to compete to speak. And you can raise your hand to make a point. And if the crowd really resonates with that, you'll be boosted up a little bit more of the crowd didn't really like the content or the experience of the page right now. You're, you're, you know, you're kind of in LaLa Land, you can go up and down and up and down, hey, here's a new backlink. But like the page experience isn't great. And so, you know, going back into your question about like, well, how important is it to be on the first page like Google is always going to send a little bit of traffic when you make an update, or change that title tag or that FAQ section to a page, things like that, right? You're adding and changing the experience, so it re-evaluates.

So if you're not on the first page, how often should you be making tweaks to see if that will help your organic ranking?

So that's a great question. You know, I'm from the mantra of let's have a controlled experiment, right? So we don't want to make so many changes in a manner that is very hard to quantify. You know, the goal is that you're making educated, informed research based decisions. And so you may see that, you know, your business talks about a specific service, but the people on page one, have a lot more depth to that content. And so I usually love to start with content, like how can we, you know, have a better experience, if your content is lacking? If you feel like your content is great. The next step is, you know, what are we doing the split test? And like, where are users dropping off on the page? So Are they enjoying the hero, right? Like, if you have a high bounce rate, it might just be your hero image, right, or whether you're above the fold section on mobile, like the content the user first sees.

And so for people that don't know, sorry, to interrupt the the hero image is the main image on the page, correct?

Correct. Yeah, it's the image at the very top that users it's kind of like the first impression of your website, if you will. So, you know, it doesn't mean that your whole site is in need of, you know, it's in disarray, and you need to redo it all. It could be some small, actionable tweaks. So I like to look at the content, is it in the right format? The right order? Are we asking the right questions talking about, you know, providing the right answers, I should say. And then what are the things? What's the priority content on the page? So like, your first impression content. Does it have some keywords in it? Does it have, you know, a great call to action, for people that are ready to get started, maybe they're not ready to get started. So let's prequalify them through the remainder of the funnel. And then using tools like Google Optimize Hotjar, CrazyEgg, they can actually tell you what users are doing on your website and provide you with data to make more informed adjustments and decisions.

So how long are you testing? Because if you're, you know, on or organically, you're relying on traffic, and you're not getting any. And so you make changes. How long have you testing? I mean, you're not testing based on traffic, apparently.

Well, you do need to have some level of traffic. So if you're at the point where you're just launching your website, right, that's your honeymoon phase, Google will send some traffic to your site, especially if it's brand new site. So if you're a small business, and you've just launched this great, amazing website, and you're not sure what's what's happening on it, you know, I would test for a minimum of, you know, two weeks, if you have a lot of traffic, and then I like to go like a month out, right? So get enough of a sample size so that you really know and sometimes within the first week, you'll know, right? There can be there's a statistical probability if you use Google Optimize, which basically allows you to test two different pages, maybe one design of the same content, right? It's just two different designs or two different layouts. And so it might tell you that this one has a 90% probability of being a winner, we had a test like that. We're after seven days.

With Google Optimize, does that show you conversions as well? Are you optimizing the conversion?

So you have to you have to program that end, right. So that's, that's really where, you know, you want to make sure that from the beginning of your campaign, you have the right conversions and goals set up so that you're not, you know, missing out on any data and being able to really ascertain where the the places and funnels and messages that most resonate with users. What you do is you set up some conversion actions in Google Analytics, or Google Tag Manager, right and then you link those events with your your split tests and Google Optimize. So it's, it's actually really simple if you have if you don't have events set up you know, reach out to an agency reach out to someone on your team reach out to, you know, whoever helps you with your website and and get some events set up and then from there, you can just plug them as a conversion goal, so Google optimized and say, what's the goal? Is it a form fill? Is it a phone call? Maybe it's some purchase or something else, right? You can actually, as long as that goal is set up in Google Analytics, it will test with the primary goal being for convergence or four, you could say time spent on pay, you know, there's a lot of different ways you could set it up.

Sure. Now, SEO, it seems to be an industry that's, that's prone to con artists. And I always like to hear good stories regarding these SEO scams. I don't know it's maybe me slowing down to looking at accidents. But do you have any stories about clients that previously were burned by working with a shoddy SEO company before coming to you guys?

I do about you know, the the most common one is we've been paying these guys for a year, and we're barely getting anywhere, right? And that a lot of that time, it's, you go in and you see that there's just been a lack of innovation, right, a lack of keeping things fresh and testing. It's not that every SEO company is bad. It's just a lot of them are limited in the types of people that they have. And so you really need like a web developer or a content expert or strategists someone that builds the backlinks, someone that runs the tests, right. So it's, it's interesting that when you see clients who haven't gotten those results, and they've actually committed to that investment, and unfortunately, that investment with that agency didn't pan out or with that, you know, SEO expert, quote, unquote, didn't pan out. It's painful, right? But it's also amazing to then go in and say, Well, you know, looking at this from a 30,000 foot view, here's why we're here. And here's how we can get you to the top of the mountain. And so one of the crazier stories so that's like a very common story, right? It's just had been painted, didn't work. And like you go look at the backlinks are crappy backlinks, or you look at their page experience, and it's slow, or it's missing a lot of content, or whatever the case may be. And so a crazy one that I think you might really enjoy was I had a client come on with us a small business with like seven locations. So you, you know, been around the block for a minute and saw some success and actually got some results. And one day, his traffic just dropped off the map, right? It was crazy. Just just saw this huge drop and wasn't actually getting that, like strategy actionable. Here's where we need to go to compete with his algorithm update. It was just kind of like, well, you know, that's how, you know, that's Google for you. So long story short, he was looking at other agencies, and he came to us and he said, Look, you know, I'm just not seeing eye to eye with my guy. Like, yeah, we had some gains, it just doesn't seem like like, you know, the action steps are there to get us to this next, you know, season and next level of growth. And I said, well, so he signs on. So as a great, you know, he's like, look, I want to finish their days. It's a great, long story short, the guy goes and removes all the backlinks that he built. So know, what the guy was actually doing is using a PBN which actually, we uncovered what His strategy was, it wasn't some groundbreaking, innovative strategy. It's kind of an older strategy from 2012 2010, right, like the earlier days of SEO and somehow was still working, right. Like, he did it in a smart enough way that it worked. But he, he basically removed all those backlinks. And knew we had to have that conversation and say, Hey, listen, you know, your guys removed hundreds of backlinks. And, you know, here's the strategy that we can do to combat this, but like, you might want to pick up the phone and have a conversation. So that was a that was really just one of those nightmare stories that you never want to have for a client.

Did the other agency put them back or No?

I don't think that they did truly. There's some silver lining in the sense that, you know, we were able to reposition a lot of his his links and find other other ways in places to, you know, combat some of of what was happening. We did like a forensic approach that allowed us to a lot of those links weren't like that great of quality anyways, right? Like, they might have had a high domain rating, but they're just PBN links, right, like private blog networks, like, basically, some people used to just buy old websites and blogs and, you know, they don't really add any value. They're just basically utilized to mass produce content to get SEO juice out of it, right. And so, you know, we took a different approach. We said, Okay, well, why don't we work on your website? Why don't we rebuild a lot of the last anchor text and links using some some untraditional methods that were a bit more aggressive than what this guy was doing. And you know, ended up working out it was certainly one of those those situations where it was like, I felt like the guy was being scammed and and unfortunately. Um, you know, it sucks when there's a lack of accountability or when you pay for something, and then someone goes and because you didn't, you know, I don't want to say the word because, you know, some for some reason there was a dissatisfaction. Yeah, it's almost like, you know, trying to take some people paid good money for yours, right?

Yeah, no, it's almost like a scorned spouse or something.

Yeah. Like a divorse, like I'm taking half of this with me.

Hey, something else that I'm curious about? Are there certain web website platforms that you believe are performed better than others when it comes to SEO?

100% I love Webflow. I think Webflow is a fantastic option. It's really fast. You don't have to really optimize it for speed as heavily as you would like a Magento or Wix. The ones that I don't like, or like Wix. Magento is good.

What about Shopify? That's the hot one for E commerce.

I'm mixed feelings on Shopify, I think there's a component where like Webflow and WordPress like WooCommerce with WordPress is typically better SEO optimized, has a lot to do with the speed like most Shopify themes inherently start off a bit slower than and they're harder to optimize and harder to code in. So they're great inventory management. They're great at back end usability user experience for business owners. So that's why a lot of business owners prefer Shopify, especially Magento was kind of the older version of Shopify, it's really more of an enterprise store the 1000s of products, Shopify is like, up to 1000s. And now they have these, these higher tiers of service more aimed at like a Magento offering. I like Shopify, for ease of use and management, there's a lot of great apps and things you can add on to Shopify to make it better optimize for SEO.

Do those slow down though, do those slow down the PageSpeed?

The apps itself do. But the apps that I that we use are pretty light, they're not like the SEO apps tend to be pretty light. It's your Facebook apps, it's your cart abandonment tools. It's all of these other third party apps that load resources from other servers, right. So if you have like, you know, a warranty plan or a payment plan, and that's not native to your store, it's a an add on service like your checkouts going to next, you're not necessarily going to have a fast checkout, those apps need to communicate with your store and then back with the company that hosts the servers to provide the infrastructure for those apps. So it's all these extra hops jumps. And it's a great point that you bring up, which is one thing that we typically see in Shopify is there's just way too many apps. And we need to try to just like with WordPress, right, plugins, apps, things that are additional, slow the site down. And so especially if you're an Ecommerce Store. I like WooCommerce and WordPress a lot better just because it's a lot faster. Typically, unless you you know, bog it down with apps, we've actually had some really great results with Shopify. It can just be frustrating when you set up your business with a certain level of continuity with certain apps and features and processes. And then those apps end up slowing down the site. And it's a matter of well, do we keep this app? Or do we slightly slower speed? Right? And those are the types of friction points that you know, it's it's, it can be a challenge. And so just something to consider there.

Now, you can get all the relevant traffic in the world, whether it's coming from SEO, or it's paid traffic. But it doesn't matter if it doesn't convert. So when you work with a client, how do you address that? Do you offer advice for conversion? Do you offer services you had mentioned web, Google Optimizer, but what what are you doing for the conversion for your clients?

Yeah, so you know, a few of the the items you mentioned today's call, right? Google Optimizes is one of the tools that we use to split test, you know, optimizing certain above the fold content, like getting a higher conversion rate. But the most important thing that I consider is like, do we have the right traffic. So just a lot of places sell traffic, and that's great. But to your point, it's only really matters if it converts, right at the end of the day. It's about the brass tacks on what does it cost to acquire our customer good mentor of mine, Vinnie Fisher, is huge on that, right. It's like no one really knows what the cost is to acquire customer. We're just, you know, maybe gambling or spending money or maybe we're taking a more pragmatic approach, hopefully, right, or working with someone to help, you know, get the right data to make the right decisions, as he would say, what I look at is, you know, what are the calls, like, what's the quality of the traffic, and that can be done by keyword targeting, that can be also like you can have great targeting and perfect keywords that your page just doesn't convert. So it's really determining like what out of those two different scenarios like which one is the more probable culprit of our traffic problem. And so,

And how are you identify that for your clients?

So we look at bounce rate pages per session, obviously, we're looking at conversions, we're looking at a lot of the experience of a have the page for when it's a conversion problem on the website, off the website, yet, we're looking at what are terms that actually have been like AdWords traffic, right. So like, if you have, let's say, your rank for this keyword, but like, no ads are on it, no one's bidding on it, it may be a lower converting keyword. So that's like one market indicators, like you should probably go for the more competitive terms, not saying that every term needs to be competitive at that level, right. But if it has a zero, either, it's a brand new term, and no one knows about it yet, or it's not a valuable term. So everyone's kind of trying to target the same stuff. So you can also infer from other you know, there's a lot of competitor research tools like SpyFu, and SEM Rush and eight traps that'll tell you like, what are the common buckets of, you know, if you know, what your competitors are ranking for. And you can see, you know, Nacho analytics is another one, it can kind of tell you how much traffic a site is getting, you can correlate that to the keywords that it ranks for, I take a look at Google Search Console, and I take a look at the analytics pretty heavily. Most of the time, when you see that it's a targeting issue, the pages converted in the past, maybe the content converts in other queries or other parts of the site. But you'll typically see a sub one minute time on page, you'll see a very low pages per session, like people aren't clicking through to the rest of the page, or you see a high exit rate, a high bounce rate. So it's, you know, to kind of qualities are either the page experiencing content is poor, or you're targeting junk terms, like so many SEO, traffic, wrong traffic, right, whether that's SEO or Facebook or AdWords, right? Like, you know, we make these these Oh, well, our businesses about this. And, you know, if you're a Facebook person, right, like you might think, well, you know, we're selling, you know, headbands for tennis players. And you would think that if someone likes tennis, they're going to be interested in this product. But it might not be that simple, right?

Sure. So,that no traffic, it says it's its own animal for sure. So are there other challenges that you struggle with, with your services for your clients?

Challenges would be, we'd like to treat every client like they're our only client. And that's just the way that I've always scaled the business. We're able to grow to seven figures. And now that we're at seven figures, it's, you know, it's only 7% of businesses hit seven figures. So it's this celebratory kind of like, you know, not trying to toot horns too much. And, you know, pat ourselves on the back, but it's like, that was our first challenge. Like, how do we get to seven figures while making sure that every client, you know, has a equal, like best in class, Ritz Carlton experience. And now that we're at seven figures, we are trying to scale that. And so it's really more about culture and hiring and finding the people that check the right boxes, they might not always have the perfect, you know, skill sets, right. And so training and process, just like most businesses, processes are like the most important component next to the people.

Yeah your people, your talents always, especially in this day and age a challenge for sure. Hey, no, personally, are there any business books out there that you can attribute to your success to an entrepreneur?

Yeah, I would, I would check out False Profits by Vinnie Fisher. It's not the you know, the the amount of cash that brings in, it's like, it's not the the bottom line that pays you, right? That was a really interesting book that helps. You know, when you're to me growing a business, you're reinvesting in that business. And there's a time to position it for margin, you always want to focus on margin, I think as we're scaling up, and as we're, you know, eating our own dog food, so to speak, like, we're, you know, doing the same things that we're doing for our clients for our brands. You know, it's it's important, I think, as business owners look at where they're spending their money, right? It's like, Hey, am I gonna go spend 5k on SEO or 2k on SEO or whatever it is, or on Facebook. It's like it's really knowing where to reclaim that margin. And there's a dozen other books other mentors of mine Tony Greg Meyer does the be fulfilled journal which is more of a mindset mindset kind of exercise gratitude approach right to to keep scaling. I loved there was a an audible book that I started about nonviolent communication that I thought was really fantastic. There's so many people that have that a shepherd shepherded me and you know, Jim Rohn's stuff is all really great. I mean, you can go down the rabbit hole of different, I'm sure different stuff. But those would be my go twos.

Now let's talk about some more actionable steps. So if you are new to SEO, what is an actionable step that you could take today, right away, they wouldn't cost you more than, say, 50 bucks?

I'll do you one better, we'll do one for free. So the first thing that I would do, okay, is one, make sure you have Google Analytics set up, alright, it's gonna be your treasure trove of data. So without that, it's hard to make decisions, right? It's hard to know where you're where you're flying. Once you have Google Analytics setup, whether you launch your website, you have at least you know, a couple of weeks or months worth of traffic, if you've been around, you know, your site's been around for some time. And it's like, Hey, I've been around since the 90s, great, even better, let's take a look at the last month or a quarter of activity. And what I would suggest or recommend actually is, is take a look at your landing pages, and take a look at your highest Bounce Rate pages. Take a look at the lowest dwell time on those pages, unless the content is like a thank you page or something that's supposed to be.

Right, right.

You know, consumable. Write those down, then go to your pages that have the highest engaging your homepage is probably naturally going to be one of them. But there should be some other pages and you should be able to predict like what that flow is. So I look at the best performing content and the lowest performing content, I make more, you know, scale, what's working and trim the fat on what's not. So just get rid of any, you know, maybe don't get rid of it. You don't focus on that kind of stuff as much or figure out why people don't like is it the content? Is it something else? But looking at what's doing well, and focusing on the positive, I think is really great. And then go create five more pieces of content around that. You know, so for us, it's like, hey, we sell SEO, it's like, great, what are backlinks? What are, you know, what are tips that I can have? Right? Like, these are things that people want? And you you scale more of that and go in and ask your sales team ask if you're the frontline person for your business? Like what are the top five questions that you get asked about these products and services? What are the top five objections that people have around these? You know, it's just old school marketing and a new school method? Right? It's it's websites, it's SEO. It's, it's the same stuff for Madmen, right? It's like, what are what are the pain points and objections? And how do we paint this picture of, of, you know, does the quality of your product and or I should say, does the quality of your website reflect the quality of your product or service or experience that they would get with you one on one directly or with a member of your team? And if it doesn't, you know, let's try and digitize that. And then quantify it with what's already working, what are people already gravitating towards. And then just talk a little bit more about that.

Now, if you could look into the future 612 months out, what do you see change in the world of SEO?

You know, I see, I see links changing, I think, I think link building will be a little bit more like Digital PR, right? Where you you have more substance behind your links. There's also more penalisation behind like spammy links, which has been a recurring theme, I think that will continue into 2022 through 2025, they'll find better ways to find quality links to your site and quality, you know, trustworthy experiences, not ones that violate Google's guidelines. I also think that search for task accomplishment, Google mom is coming out to new algorithm. That's, that's, you know, basically the next iteration of search, I don't think it's going to, you know, change everything. But I do think that Google will become smarter and understand more about your pages. So it's, it's more and more important to, you know, consider your page experience, and more importantly, consider the content and the ordering and the presentation of that content. And lastly, I think they'll find better ways. I'm hopeful that they'll find better ways to I think FCC regulation of reviews and things like that has been talked about, I'm not, you know, maybe this is a little bit of foreshadowing of what, what's to come with, you know, people leaving fake reviews and a lot of review spam, and just a lot of deceptive practices that, you know, some of our clients have, have experienced from people that have, you know, done fake reviews, and there's just not a lot on Google business that allows you to there's like less validation of the review. And I think over time, that will become increasingly more important, and I'm hopeful that there's maybe like a review update. So that's one of the areas that get as many good reviews as you can and stay away from the Fiverr review gigs or whatever the hell people you know, do now.

Now what problems does Peaks Digital Marketing solve for your clients? And how does your agency stand apart from the competition?

Yes, we're a little bit different. We're a full fractionalized team. So we're we're a team of web developers, content experts, branding experts, backlink experts, data analysts, we really think that, you know, just like we talked about today, it's about these seven core areas, you're only as strong as your weakest link used to be an SEO, you get to get away with with, like, less work right now, it really does require a full fractionalized team. So we understand there's a lot of at stake a lot out here, we do things a little differently, we don't walk in our clients for months and months. So we believe the proofs in the pudding, we also believe that, you know, in order to stay on top of of the latest algorithm updates, you actually have to be innovating and looking ahead of the curve constantly, which is really been a big component of of the success of our team. You know, we can help you with anything from your web design to your backlinks to your Google business, we do some paid ads as well. But it's really designed to be a one stop shop for your Omnichannel Marketing efforts. And so you know, I'm big also believe we can't help you like if you wanted, like some social and, you know, you wanted certain ads that we couldn't do, we have a really awesome network of people that we can connect you with. So if you're looking to rank higher on Google, or if you you're looking to get an audit of your current website and find uncover some insights as to, you know, how you can rank a little bit higher get to page one start really getting a better click through rate but or leads or better quality of leads. You know, our team comes in and acts as an extension of your team. And we'd like to get you everything you need nothing you don't and get you in the room with some some experts that, you know, take a full comprehensive fractionalized approach to your to your success. And that would in turn gets you is a faster path to ROI, more consistent, stable growth. And it allows you to position yourself for that top 10% of websites, which is really what it takes to get on page one.

So what do you think that most companies get wrong, we're looking to hire an agency like yours?

I think they get they tried to typically it's two things either, they're not as invested in their website as they should be. So they're like, Well, I had this website built last year, and it's like, can't we just polish this up a little bit, we actually have strategies that we can do that. But I think you really have to rely on the experts and go go in sometimes a painful direction that is, you know, one that is going to set you up for future success. So there's times where you need to get a website built or you made a decision that ultimately maybe didn't disempowered you from an SEO perspective. That's usually one of the bigger problems is like website. So sometimes we come in and you know, do a whole website or sometimes we'll go in and, you know, spruce up their website, piece by piece, it's usually some web development is included in our monthly contracts. The other would be, they're thinking that they can do it themselves. And there is a level of, you know, we work all the way from small business all the way up to Fortune 500 enterprise. So not every business is the same. We do want to support in the ways that are most valuable, but I have clients that just want backlinks. And that's great, we can do that. But if you're not focused on those seven areas, and you don't have the team to support those other seven areas, you know, our goal is to get you the best experience possible, not just sell you into a package, right. And so I think that there is so much disinformation, there's so much changing. There's a lot of people that have great experiences, a lot of the bad experiences, and I think being open to you know, trying something new is not always on on people's like radar. They're like, Well, someone else told me try something new and it didn't work out. And so I think it's, it's still being open and not, you know, someone's Zack on my team said, you know, there's a certain recency bias, you know, and certain things can be can be tricky, right? And I think really having the faith and saying, Okay, if we go this direction we're going to succeed versus let's only do 20% or 30% of it, right is we want to handle the heavy lifting. But we also want to make sure that, that we're not cutting our nose to spite our face and saving, you know, a little bit on a package in order to, you know, have a more palatable budget when, when in reality, maybe you do need that web developer to support your current web developer to get those new pages up. Or, you know, so we find that most people don't run in, you know, it's not like a lot of people run into that second problem, but I think that's just a consideration point to make is, is it's tricky. It's kind of like I had an accountant that you know, was a CPA did a great job on some things didn't do a great job on other things, and it's difficult to hear someone come in and say we got to go through your books for the last year and make sure everything's squeaky clean and get every, you know, your Chart of Accounts, reorganized to be, you know, 100% version. And so I think that's a, you know, having that peace of mind of knowing that you can move forward in a confident manner from that and have a solid foundation really is really is the most strategic approach and one that you know, can save you three to four to five months on your rank, you know, can take some time at rank so if you have it all set up.

That makes sense for sure. Now, who makes the perfect client? Do you guys specialize in Ecommerce? Professional services? Is there a niche, who out there if they're listening should definitely get in contact with it?

So on the local business side, we work with a lot of, you know, home services companies, architects, builders, interior designers, landscape architects, lot of health companies, so, you know, treatment centers and rehabilitation centers and you know, higher ticket medical services tend to do well and higher ticket professional and home services do really well. On the higher end, you know, a lot of SaaS, SaaS is a service. So IT more of your enterprise kind of, you know, managed services or

What about Ecommerce? Do you work with Ecommerce?

We do work with a lot of Ecommerce. So Ecommerce on Shopify, ECommerce on Magento, WooCommerce. Definitely a lot of very variation all the way from one of our clients sells felt tiles for soundproofing, just to make your office look really great all the way up to you know, welders and Christmas lights and, you know, larger, larger ticket items as well. And the great thing about Ecommerce is you can make some some adjustments across an entire site and see some exponential results. Typically when you know, when there are additional opportunities that that are uncovered. You can say okay, well let's apply this sightline and then you see a nice uplift so yeah, fitness, Ecommerce. I'd say fitness Ecommerce. You know, product services. It's really two are big buckets are Ecommerce and B2B. And then we have like a very focused B2C group as well. So I don't like to say that we do at all, you know, we do a lot and multiple industries. I'm probably missing three or four industries that we work in. But we really just like to integrate into an onboarding and learn the ins and outs of your business. If if for some reason we don't already work in that industry, and make sure that it's a great fit before we take anyone on.

So how can an interested listener, learn more about working with you?

Check us out the website is peaksdigitalmarketing.com. We'd happy to you know, get you an audit with the team or get you on a phone call. And we can do a free strategy session. Or help you uncover some insights or solve some problems in your business. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook. David A. Finberg. I think we have to do a TikTok tock now according to my social social team, we're doing some tic TikToks as well. And there's new, you know, tips, tricks, strategies, not only on social media, but also on the Peaks website blog. So peaksdigitalmarketing.com, and then David A. Finberg. And I look forward to being of service or just providing some value.

Well, it's been great. Well, thanks for joining us today, David.

Andy. I really appreciate it. This is awesome. And thank you so much.

All right. Well remember if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding connecting with David Or Peaks Digital Marketing, you will find those links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business check out our all new podcasts Resource Center available at www.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all the different past guests by show topic get included each of their contact information in case you would like more information any of the services I've discussed during previous episodes. Well that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.