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SEO Unleashed: Strategies for Dominating Google Rankings

From Twin Creek Media's YouTube Channel:

In this episode of Between Two Creeks, James and Thomas, the co-founders of Twin Creek Media, dive into the world of SEO and why it’s a game-changer for business success. With Google ruling the search engine world, ranking high is key to boosting your website traffic and leads. We'll break down how to create a winning SEO strategy, covering everything from keyword tips to understanding search intent, and the ins and outs of on-page vs. off-page SEO. Plus, we’ll share some cool success stories from our clients, like Space Center Storage and Snore MD, showing how effective SEO can supercharge business growth!

Let’s go!

James: Hello Internet! Here we are today, talking about SEO! I'm James!

Thomas: I'm Thomas!

James: And Thomas, if you didn't know, this is his first time on the show here in Between Two Creeks, and we should call it Between One Fern or Across From One Fern (you know we're original like that.)

Thomas is a co-founder of Twin Creek Media. Actually, we've known each other for 20 years. We met back in art school, like digital, technical school, the center for Arts and Technology here in our town back in 2004.

Thomas: Yep, that sounds right.

James: It was pretty funny because our first class back then was Photoshop and illustrator. I think it was Adobe Illustrator in Photoshop. They were our first semester, our first classes, and Thomas was good, like remarkably techy. I was like, I've got to get to know this guy better! Fast-forward a few years. We started a company in school, actually contracting a little bit, and now we're business partners, and in Twin Creek Media, he's our Technical Director.

Good thing because we're talking about Search Engine Optimization. It's a very technical field and Thomas has been keeping up with that for a very long time.

Thomas: Yeah, SEO has been around probably as long as the internet has been around. It's always the battle of how to get found. How do I get my website found by back in the day, it was Yahoo, Do you remember Yahoo? and then Google was the new kid on the block, and now it's pretty much the only kid on the block, if you want to call it that.

That's right. Bing is still out there, Yahoo is still around, but I mean, really, Google is the benchmark.

James: I think it's 90% market share or something like that.

Thomas: And if you do well on Google, you're going to do well everywhere else as well. Yeah, Google is the big kid.


Why is Search Engine Optimization important?

James: So let's rewind the tape a little bit and say what's the point? Why should business owners and and marketing managers care about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so much?

It's probably not news (unless you've been living under a rock for the last 20 years) that if you rank better, you have way more website traffic and end up with way more business. Whether that's generating leads or e-commerce sales or even more people visiting your store if you have a physical store, it's just about being in people's faces.

Google or any other search engine they're trying to play the Matchmaker. That's all they're trying to do.

SEO boiled down to its raw one liner is that Google is trying to match people's searches.

So, if I'm searching for Christmas pyjamas because I want to buy some gifts or if I'm searching for the best Italian Wine or if I'm searching for a Kelowna accountant in our city… Whatever you want to search for, Google will be like Oh! I’ve got the top 10 right here! I’ve got the best businesses and the best websites for you… And it's trying to generate those results instantaneously and have them be of a really high quality, really accurate, so Google is trying to put in front of you what you want, right?

That's it, that's the whole thing. And if you rank below the top 10 results, it kind of falls off really, really fast.

Thomas: You're looking at an 80%—90% click drop-off based on the first page to the second page. If people can't find you on the first page (unless they're really dedicated and just can't remember your name but are looking for you), they're not going to click and continue on pages 2, 3, 4, and so on.


My Business is not ranking well on Google. What should I do?

James: What should a business do if they don't rank at all organically?

Thomas: Well, Google is in the business of making money. So the easy trick is you can buy your way to the top. That's called Google Ads. These are the results you see front and center (when you search on Google). The number of Ads and visibility for a search query changes daily; sometimes there are three ads, sometimes there are five… We’ve recently noticed that Google is expanding the number of “ads” on search results, so it's taking up more space to actually have the paid listings.

Then there are their own properties like the Google Business Profile, Google Map Listings and all that stuff. And then you have your organic listings.

So you can be visible on page one without ranking strongly (through paid ads). But getting something for free is always better than paying for it, right?

James: That's right. I mean, it's technically not free because it's a LOT of effort to rank organically, but it's more powerful. You don't want to use ads forever and ever and ever, at least not solely. I mean, we often use them in combination; we do SEO practices and build up rankings for our client's websites and businesses, but we're also using Google Ads as well, especially for words that are very, very hard to rank organically. You know, we might have organic rankings on specific long tail keywords, but then for some very powerful generic words that are still driving a lot of business, we're going to use Google Ads. So search ads specifically, also known as Pay-Per-Click, when those ads show up, they don't cost you anything. They only cost you something if someone clicks on it. 


How do I choose the right keywords for my business?

James: We talked about searching for the best wine in Italy, Christmas pyjamas or whatever keyword you’re searching for. How would a business even figure out what sort of words they should be focusing on to match someone's search? How do they know? They have a business in this industry, and then there's all this Google traffic looking for their company, their products and services. How does someone figure out what the keyword list is? That's what we call a keyword list. 

Thomas: That's also a very important definition.

In search engine marketing, Keywords are terms you try to appear for in search engines like Google. So you can attract valuable traffic to your website or physical location.

When you enter a search query, Google sees the entire search. It could be that some people search in sentence form, for example, “I want to find the best marketing agency in Kelowna,” as they will literally type that out. So Google takes what it calls “the keyword” out of that search, and that is the word you want to optimize for and be found under.

Figuring that out is a process. You can start by researching your competitors. What are they ranking for? First of all, who are my competitors? That's an amazing question to ask!

James: Yeah, like, who's in your industry and who's a direct competitor, and what are they ranking really really well for? You want to do some analysis on them to figure out what's going on.

Thomas: This is twofold; 1. Who's my competitor in my day-to-day business and 2. Who's my competitor online? Those two might actually not overlap, either.

For example, there will be businesses that rank really well for the keywords that we want to target compared to your local competitor; they might not rank that well, but you do compete with them a lot. Online, this is a very different ball game. Sometimes, your online competitor isn't actually anywhere close to your local competitor, but they're still stealing the spotlight.

How do people think about you? What words do they use to find you? Do they think in a country scope or do they think in a city scope like Kelowna? Do they want to meet with someone face to face? If so they're going to use a local keyword (and that's one of the keyword types). For example, I want to search for “Kelowna’s Best Chocolate”. It's a very different result than “Canada’s best chocolate,” or just “best chocolate,” or just “best chocolate shipped to Canada.”

What is Search Intent?

Thomas: That's where search intent comes in as well. Not only do we need to look at keywords, we also need to look at search intent. What is the intention of that search, and what are they actually looking for? Because that then determines how likely they are to click on your result, and then ultimately buy something.

James: We use a whole bunch of tools in our agency to figure out what the keyword should be, including analysis tools, research tools, the Google Keyword Tool itself, as well as some third-party ones, and they're all trying to figure out the same thing – what are the best keywords to actually focus on, that's going to drive the most people to your website? And also, how hard is it to rank for those keywords?

Thomas: That's a great point.

James: If you search for the “best chocolate bar” and then you put in your city name after that, so it’s “best chocolate Calgary” or “best chocolate Vancouver,” you're going to get a keyword volume which tells you the estimated number of people searching for that each month, and that's going to be one number. But for “best chocolate bar in Canada” or “best chocolate bar in the world”, you're going to get a whole different set.

And maybe you're not looking to buy, though, and that's where intent comes from. But if you make chocolates, if you're a chocolatier, then you're trying to get customers to order from you. But with the big national keywords or the more generic keywords like “best chocolate” or shorten it down to one word, “chocolate,” the volume is going to be absolutely 10 times, 100 times, or, you know, even more per month. There are 100 times more people searching because it's such a generic term.


What are Negative Keywords?

James: Another interesting thing is actually adding negative keywords. So that's an important thing that we've discovered to stop wasting your effort. This plays more into adding negative keywords to your Google Search Campaign, so it prevents your ad from showing up if someone types in a very specific thing.

What's an example of a good negative keyword that has helped save the budget instead of it blowing through to $500,000 in a month on something we don't want to be a result of?

Thomas: It actually came up with one of our clients, Pool Patrol. They used to sell pool fencing many many years ago, and they ranked really well for it. But they're still getting searches, they are still getting inquiries for pool fencing. They don't sell it anymore, they are like, I don't want any more inquiries for that, we don't sell it.

So on the Google Ads side, we needed to add a negative keyword, “pool fencing”, asking Google not to spend any money on that keyword.

What we did on the organic side is, because we have a ranking for Pool Fences, but the landing page for it didn't exist anymore, it bounced us back to the homepage or like a “not found” page, which isn't a great customer experience. So what we actually did is we took that keyword, and we made a page – just a little mini page around it, so if someone lands on it, it actually says, “Hey, we used to sell Pool Fences, we don't anymore, here are some options, and this is what we sell instead (Pool Covers), and it's much better than this (Pool Fences).

That's a good example of why negative keywords are still important for your content strategy and keyword strategy.


Types of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

James: Let's talk about the two types of SEO in the industry. They're known as On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. So what is On-Page SEO? What does that entail?

Thomas: On-page SEO is everything that you can directly control with your web presence. So that's usually your website. Things like, how is your content structured? How is it laid out? When a person arrives on the homepage, for example, is there a clear structure of how they get to your services? How do they get to your products? How do they buy your products? How do they contact you? That whole flow is actually a part of SEO because they're called “Internal Links.”

James: Off-page SEO is another thing. We don't have to get super into details, but what are a few Off-Page SEO optimizations you should consider?

Thomas: That's basically everything that you don't directly control on your website, but factors outside on the internet that still play a factor. For example, how old is your domain name - this actually has a sort of a trust ranking with Google. How many other websites are linking to you? How do they see you as? Do they see you as a market leader? Do they go to you for resources because you have an amazing information resource on your website, and everyone's linking to you? That then tells Google that you must be important, so they should rank you higher.

James: I always compare this to like a high school. Translating this into English for non-techie people, it's like, Does your website have any friends? If your website has no friends and you have a very unpopular website, you're not going to rank very well because no one likes your website, including Google. But if your website has lots of friends, meaning that there are hundreds of other websites talking about you, sharing information or linking to you, it's like a handshake or a high five. You're more popular. It's not just a popularity contest; it's similar to the High School environment where you have some friends or no friends.


Algorithm Updates and SEO

James: How often do people have to be concerned about the pace of change of Algorithm updates?

Thomas: What we call an algorithm update is basically Google throwing a wrench into our lives as search engine optimizers because they go, “You know, what you've been doing for 5 years, we're not going to do this anymore, we're going to do it the other”. And the best part about algorithm updates is Google does not tell anyone when they're coming or what they're going to be.

James: How often do they happen?

Thomas: We've seen them happen as quickly as every three months, once a year… It is really all over the map.

James: An example is blog posting. So writing articles on your website and posting them on a regular basis, you know the phrase that content is King, that used to be circulating around the SEO world, it's still mostly true, but there's a caveat there now, where it's easy to create an article with Chat GPT or another one of those AI programs that kind of write the article for you, but it's regurgitating information that's already out there. There's nothing original. So Google's now trying to crack down (on un-original content) because it's so easy to crank out 500 words and throw it on your website. With AI, you can blog and create content every day because you know the AI tool will generate the whole thing for you, but there's, again nothing original. It's regurgitating what it finds online.

So blogging doesn't count as much as it used to because it used to be a lot of effort to write an article, even if you were pulling in all these different sources, it still took a lot of effort and created original content. Now, Google is trying to discount all that garbage information because it's not worth it.

But if you do write stuff, or you post a video format, or you do a podcast, and it's your own ideas and your own experience, and you've added a lot of human twists to it, it does take effort, and Google is going to reward you for that because it's not regurgitated content found from the internet and spit out by AI.

Thomas: Funnily enough, Google is using AI to combat AI. So they have AI tools that can then detect if the content is AI generated.

James: And a billion-dollar company using AI is probably a little bit ahead of you using Chat GPT for free. 


SEO In Action: Case Studies from Twin Creek Media

James: To put this into a real context, we have some case studies; We have some examples of companies we worked with that, once their Google rankings increased, they got results and they're tangible (results).

A company we work with locally here in the Okanagan is Space Center Storage. They're a self-storage facility, they were already doing okay when we started working with them about eight years ago, but bit by bit, with some new technology and lots of content and really focusing on capturing the people looking for self-storage and all different facets (because there's a lot of different ways and things that people are looking) they now have well over a hundred keywords ranking in the Top 10 in Google Search Results. Their organic traffic is in the thousands per month, it's huge for a local company. 

Thomas: Another one is Snore MD. They are based in the Lower Mainland Vancouver area. They also have their Sleep Clinic deals with CPAP machines and they went from about three or four Sleep Clinics up to almost 20. They're also in Alberta now as well, so business is going well for them. 

James: And that was a really neat one. Because when you're opening a new medical clinic, and it's a franchise, they would pick a city, and we developed this formula of “Here's how we're going to rank quickly.” We got it down to a really short period of time. We're hitting some number-one positions in about 60 days, which is really, really fast - usually, it takes much longer to rank that high in Google.

Another local example is a Garden Centre called The Greenery Garden Centre. We started their SEO efforts probably earlier than any other competition, and that's why they got ahead. Then, because we were keeping up to date, they are really, really powerful.

Thomas: They're a great example of the power of the domain age because they've been around for so long, and they've been an online name for so long in the local market here.

James: And even though it's like, why do they want to rank so well being a physical store, where you have to go there in person, they're still driving business from hundreds of kilometers away. They're a destination garden centre now because when people search, they find them from all over the place, so yeah, it's just really powerful.

Just to recap, I would say SEO, for most people, is a pain, and it's boring, so that's why you need to partner with someone smarter than you. For most business owners and even marketing managers, SEO isn't their specialty, so get someone on your team who knows what they're doing and round it out. It makes such a big business impact to the tune of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars


Check out our previous episode: Digital Battlefield: How to Master Online Competitive Analysis

“Between Two Creeks” is Twin Creek Media’s weekly podcast series. You can find us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Spotify. If you enjoy listening to the latest and wonkiest in marketing every week, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button! If you want us to amp up your marketing, click here to contact us and let’s chat!