Today’s Titan
For over ten years I’ve led Web Savvy Marketing as the Founder and President. In this role, I provided full-service SEO consulting and one-on-one SEO coaching, created online SEO courses, hosted an SEO podcast, and teach onsite SEO Bootcamps.
As an agency, we’ve also performed a whole lot of website design, development, and WordPress theme sales. In total, we’ve served over 6,000 clients in 185 countries over the last ten years.
I’ve personally worked with all types of clients from entrepreneurs and small business owners to enterprise-level organizations and Fortune 500 companies. I’ve also partnered with other WordPress developers and agencies.
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Transcript
Josh: What is up everybody, Josh Tapp here again and welcome back to the lucky Titan podcast and today we’re here with Rebecca Gill, who is the founder of savvy marketing and turns out, she also runs an alpaca farm, which I thought was super awesome so I’m really excited to talk to her today, we’re going to be delving into SEO and the tactics around how she’s been helping a lot of companies literally triple their traffic for most people, that’s like, literally triple the sales, if you’re paying attention to that, for most of you who are, are running traffic to your sites and for people like me, who are not really heavily doing that I’m excited to just kind of learn your strategies and tactics, Rebecca so say, what’s up to everybody and we’ll hop in and get started with interview.
Rebecca: Hello, everybody, I’m glad to be here.
Josh: Awesome. Well, Rebecca, my very first question for you is, how did the farmer get into SEO? That’s the first question.
Rebecca: Actually, just the opposite I was a city girl and my in doing so I’ve been doing SEO for a cash 15 20 years and you know, sales before that but might we just my husband and I had reached the point of being tired of the suburbs and the, you know, the crazy lives that we’re living, he was an executive and automotive and I was running an agency and I had already scaled my agency back because I was just not happy with the size that I had grown it and we decided to we had two houses at the time but you know, the big house in the suburbs, a big house on the lake up north and we’re like, nope, we’re selling off we sold off both houses, we sold off all the boats, and we packed it up, and we moved across the state and you know, across the state and four hours up, and we started a farm and that was probably about five years ago when we bought the raw land so it was really just kind of just having enough of life as we know it and everybody that the times that we were doing midlife crisis is because we’re now approaching 50 it was like No, it’s life. 2.0 and it’s just a conscious decision to you know, live the life you want to live.
Josh: Yeah, I love that because there’s, there’s a big I think midlife crisis is thrown around so much because a midlife crisis is like a reactionary state you’re taking proactive actions and you know what, this is what our lives look like and you made the changes so I love that you, you went that direction,
Rebecca: very intentional move, I would say.
Josh: Yeah. And I love that it was kind of the other way around. So I have I come from a ranching background. My my grandfather was was a rancher. My dad did not like it at all right? So he came out of it and I’m kind of a city boy, we live we live in Idaho, there’s only so much city you can get out here, right but it’s really funny to watch that sometimes you just need a taste of both to see where you’re at and what you like because I also do like being outdoors a lot, I’m not a farmer by any means but you’ve been tricked out with alpaca so we are going to talk about that here in a minute. So let’s talk a little bit through SEO tactics, though, because you obviously had a successful company, the fact that you scaled it back is a big deal most people are like, Okay, I’m gonna grow as fast as I can but I love your story, because you’re like, I was making a lot of money just decided that was good enough I don’t need to keep growing so what have you been using as far as tactics and your framework around helping people to take their sites and triple their traffic?
Rebecca: So, I would tell you that the biggest thing is, you know why I love absolutely love data and data helps me make decisions, I always come back to the humans, and start whenever I get a new client, and whatever word like the clients evolving, we always come back to personas and really, who are you targeting? Who’s your target market? What kind of groups of people do you have? What are their frickin challenges? Like, what are they struggle with? What are their fears, you know, people talk about it, but it’s like, that’s really the heart of SEO, people go to Google to solve problems, you know, to get information to do you know, to solve something that in their life that needs resolution and if you always bring that back to the human and you think through what they’re struggling with, and you base your SEO on that your plan formulates very easily and it’s not you know, there’s not Voodoo and there’s not pixie dust, it’s it’s just solid trying to serve your human and I truly believe that is that is what wins and because you’re, you’re really focused on the human experience and really providing a positive experience for that person when they come to the website with your content Google rewards you because you’ve done exactly what they need to so that they themselves can make money.
Josh: See and that’s such a fun concept because I think, I think what most people don’t realize with SEO is that it’s not like it’s not voodoo magic it’s not like some crazy there’s they’re never doing anything that spectacular for you right It’s find the keywords right, the content have links, is that correct? Am I correct?
Rebecca: so figure out what your topics are, which involve keywords, right, really good content, make sure that you have internal links, I never chase backlinks and I haven’t for 15 20 years and then make sure that your house is sound so that your technical SEO is up to snuff it really that is the heart of it. There’s a lot of nuances that go into, you know, those components, but you can screw up a lot and still get rewarded by Google just because you’ve really done your job to, you know, feed information, good information to the humans.
Josh: See, and that is beautiful and so when basically what you’re talking about is instead of having to connect with other websites and do all this extra work, you’re saying just focus on making your hub amazing and link between the pages, is that correct?
Rebecca: Correct. Correct. I have never chased backlinks I will not take a client on to someone if a lead comes in and they start talking about backlinks to me, that’s a huge red flag they’re relying on old school tactics and Google, Google knows, backlinks have been manipulated for forever that’s why Google has so many rules that’s why they’ve been downgraded in their importance, internal links, which Google clearly tells us our signals that you give to the search engines on what content is important and what that content is about those are the superheroes I mean, they internal links should be wearing capes because it is the superheroes of SEO and it’s what everybody forgets about or screws up because they have no strategy and plan and you can do a lot by like I first that’s one of the first things I do is when I get a client as I look at their their current website, their content, but I’m also looking to see Is there any type of strategy there because what happens most of the time is you’re sending people in multiple directions for the same topics and the same keywords and it’s all it does is stroke confusion so those are quick wins to clean things up and to get your what your website healthy and make it much more clear for the search engines.
Josh: See, and that’s I love that I think for like our site, for example right? So we have I think at this point, right, get 150 ish podcast episodes so we have all the transcripts for those but that’s what people have been telling us is it’s a little bit like it kind of clogs our site, is that true? It’s like it’s producing content, but it’s not not clear.
Rebecca: Um, I don’t think that having like 150 episodes is bad at all, what you might want to do is have some type of way to connect the episode so people can find all the SEO episodes or you know, things all the SEO is about the episodes about branding and things like that, I always do that explanation for people with internal links is like you arrive it you’ve all traveled, right? You get to the airport, you’re going to look for luggage, your baggage claim, right? How do you get there, you get there through signs and placards that say baggage claim but now imagine that you arrive you come out of your gate, and you see five signs with baggage claim, I’ll point you in five different directions how do you know where to go? When you don’t? Right, they all need to be pointed the same direction and that’s what your internal links do and most websites have baggage claim going in and 20 directions, even sometimes on the same page, right? I mean, they’re giving their different, different routes and when you clean all of that up and you point Google and you’re humans towards one location for baggage claim, everybody’s happy, everybody knows what to do and you’ve, you’ve actually given Google the data points that they’ve requested and they tell us in their documentation that they need to better understand our content and how to use it and those are, those are easy wins and quick wins that people can do there’s tools like Screaming Frog that can help you audit that like probably your website and it’s a pretty inexpensive tool and it will show you where you’re linking with what works and once you do it, you’ll be like, Oh my gosh, what the heck was I thinking? Like you just you know, because you just it’s not something that most people pay attention to but it’s a really easy way to clean up a lot of confusion at your site.
Josh: So I also want to throw one little quick thing in here for our audience as well about you, Rebecca, because in our in our pre interview, Rebecca was telling me this interview is really she’s not pushing anything. She’s not trying to sell anything with this. She’s got a wait list of clients really doesn’t need any more clients, right? So she’s, she’s really coming here providing true value and help people pay attention to that because everything you’re saying, There’s no ulterior motive to it, right? It’s not selling your methodology or anything and so that’s why I’ve taken notes over here for sure so I love that you’ve given resources, you kind of directed us in the right direction, and I love that you’re talking about I feel like it’s truly resolving their problem, because a lot of my beef with SEO is it’s like gaming the system, right? That’s why I don’t do a lot of paid ads, because it’s the same thing. It’s like how do we how do we gain system to make this work and for us, it’s always been, well, you can make a lot of money by just, just truly solving the needs of your customer and so for you, you know, when you’re coming into these companies, and let’s even just use your alpaca farm as a transition point, right, as a as an example, like how did you take that and make that so successful with SEO in really just such a different niche, I mean, there’s probably really not much competition I would assume in that space.
Rebecca: So there is competition, but it’s very unexperienced very inexperienced competition because it’s a lot of older people that don’t know, digital marketing it’s just the nature of the industry but there wasn’t a lot of places to find information on because there’s just not a lot, right so it’s you got to figure out what people want to know and it’s really, you know, just do I did as much competitive research as I could not just farms, but industry websites and things like that so I could really understand kind of where searches at, then I honestly did a trial of alpaca versus llama, which was like, the biggest search term, you know, to bring in just to see if I could rank for it, because that was gonna really quickly tell me how easy it is to rank for stuff and like, I pretty quick got to page one, I don’t know if I’m still there to read it a long time ago but I pretty quick, quickly got to page one, I’m like, Alright, so this tells me things I can, you know, I can pretty much do what I want and then it was just a matter of really starting to try to figure out like, what people would be searching for that as my target market you know, one of them is I have an article about how to start an alpaca farm, right how to write a business plan, gets a lot of traffic now, the one thing I would tell your listeners is, if you were to go search for that phrase, in Google, it will tell you that, you know, 10 people search for that a month, because the data that Google puts out is geared towards, I truly believe it’s the search volumes are geared towards pay per click and guiding horse ads not so much SEO and that that URL gets like 1000s of hits a month, right an activity and if I just went off the date, I would be very skewed by that, by that information but so it was like really staying honed in on the target market? And who do I want to sell to? And, you know, what would they be searching for? What would they need to know write that and write really good content for that and that doesn’t take you know, backlinks or anything else it just took trying to do the right thing and give people what they need.
Josh: See, and I love that you’re giving me all kinds of ideas here because our big, our big problem with SEO has been to be come up with new content and really what you’re talking about is take what you have interconnected and, and provide that that true results for people but like you’re saying, instead of having five baggage claim signs, it’s like, do you need more help with marketing? Do you need help with SEO? Do you need help with branding, right? having different pages, I love that and so the reason I want to bring up the alpaca farm with us as well as because I love that you were able to take that and say, Okay, I want to start a new, new hobby business, like you said, kind of a side business and it’s become this really big thriving business as well because, because you had what, 6 70
Rebecca: 64 alpacas in one llama.
Josh: Right, right. I don’t know if people notice, right, that’s actually a lot, especially
Rebecca: It is a lot in a couple years, because we only our first our alpacas came home two years ago.
Josh: Right? So I mean, they didn’t breed that fast, I would assume. Right? So I mean, you know what you’re doing when it comes to, to business in general running that business plan and so I want to ask you this question about where the SEO and the business plan meet because that that seems to be like your other area of expertise is running that business plan but I’m kind of curious how you fit that in, like, how does that work?
Rebecca: That’s a good question. So when we were starting the alpaca business, and I wanted to grow my husband’s like, I don’t know how this is gonna work I know you did it with agency, but like, this is like, we’re This is completely new and I said, well, and he, he’s kept going, I don’t see it. I’m like, I have a vision. He’s like, I don’t see it. I’m like, Alright, let me so I took the one weekend, and I wrote out the business plan, which was what was in my head, you know, and a bit used SEO, cuz I’d already been doing competitive research and things like that. So I understood the state of the market and things and I created the business plan and but the SEO, like the research I did for SEO fit into the business plan but then the business plan also helped, you know, it, everything kind of just works together, right? I couldn’t make a business plan unless I understood the industry more by doing research and what I found in the research helped me understand where their holes were in the industry and where I could dominate it right and content marketing and, and digital marketing was a easy way to dominate it and you’re right, like it did, did we last year, we sold 25 alpacas, which is quite a bit considering that reserve really first year selling alpacas and you know, it grew very, very fast but it is like, it’s the blending of both. So if you have a business plan, and you don’t have SEO, that’s a problem, right? If you if you try to sell and do business online, and if you’ve got if you want to do SEO, but you have no business plan for your business, that’s also a problem because again, they have to blend together I mean, it’s you’re looking at your target market for both, you know, your what is your What is your mission statement, what is you know, there’s all those things that you would put into a business plan, your revenue streams there that that relates to SEO because your SEO needs to grow that you know, it’s there so inherently It’s not even funny, and I probably wouldn’t even realize that until I was doing the training last weekend for an association.
Josh: I love that and I want to kind of dumb it down to a third grade level as well it helps me understand it as well. Okay, so a lot of people. I’m just going to put it in my perspective, right as as a business owner, when I see when people say, SEO, I glaze over, because I’m like, oh, man, there’s just so much unknown but I mean, you’ve simplified that process so much I think the next question in mind is, I mean, how many articles does it take? You mean? Is it quantity versus quality? Or how does how does that work?
Rebecca: So it you don’t need a ton of articles but you know, years ago, we were told, like you need to publish every day, and people were putting out articles that were 300 words, 500 words really don’t, what you need to figure out is what you want to rank on. Like, you know, like, what topics do you really want to bring people into your site for look to see what’s on page one for Google and do better, that could be 2000 words, that could be 4000 words, and it one get 10 of those, that’s a lot of traffic, right? If you have 10 articles that are super powerful, or even five, right, that but that brings in that can bring in 10,000 visits a month and Google easily so it really just depends on you know, what your industry what your niche is, and then what your target market that you want to sell to your preferred target market, what do they need to know? And that’s what you build your content around, and you make them really good? I’d much rather see you post one article that’s written like, you know, 3000 words, every two months, then flood your website with little articles, you know, every day or whatever I mean, you just, it’s, it’s not going to resonate and I think people, people want to they want if they if they’re searching for something, they want to actually have their, their question answered, right. So they do a lot of times want longer form content, not everything, right, I might want to just go like, give me a recipe for cooking brussels sprouts, I don’t need that to be 3000 words, I just want this stinking recipe and you know how to cook them but in other things, like, if you wanted to find out how to start an alpaca farm, you’re going to need a 3000 word article to be able to kind of walk you through those steps.
Josh: Yeah, and I really liked that, because it’s all about finding that, that nation and providing providing the right value and to me, the hope that I gained from talking to you about that right? Five to 10 articles in my Okay, I gotta hire somebody five articles, right? Or if you’re just starting by yourself, or you know, I could write five to 10 articles and that’s something if you really dedicated yourself, I also think you would help you refine your message.
Rebecca: it absolutely and you’re already saying the things over and over again what I like I took away was we were starting the farmers, we were talking to people and they would come on site and same thing with SEO, you’re saying that you’re answering the same questions all the time. You’re, you know, whether it’s an email, or it’s on a prospect call, you know, whatever that case is, you’re saying the same thing and even back when I was very, I was actively blogging for the agency, I would get tired of answering the same like, Why are 301 redirects important? So I’m like, screw it I’m writing a blog post so I you know, it’d be Kermit the Frog, keeping the main thing really fast, get the blog post out and then when I had that question, I’d be like, here’s a blog post, I wrote about it. Like, you know, a good explanation of it, which also saves me time It brought in traffic, and it saved me time of explaining it for the 400th time so like you don’t because people do struggle they’re like, what do I write about? You know, and it’s really what questions are you already answering for the people that you serve?
Josh: Yeah. And I love that because again, simplifies it if you’re already answered, I mean, in our space, the first question I get every time, Josh, when should I get a sponsor, and I’m like, avidly against getting sponsors for your podcast personally and so it’s it’s kind of interesting to see you’re constantly answering that question. Like, we can write an article about that.
Rebecca: write an article about it. Yes, absolutely.
Josh: That is awesome. Well, let me ask you this. You know, we are coming up to the end of the interview here already but when it comes to SEO, we’ve covered a lot of different topics so what are kind of your final thoughts of action steps that people could take to kind of wrap up this episode about SEO?
Rebecca: So I would tell you, or tell your listeners no matter what niche you’re in, right? No matter what business you have, ask yourself the question and force yourself to answer it right? electronically write it down, whatever your process is, what are the top 5 to 10 questions that your preferred target market needs to know? Like, you know, what do they have? What are they? What questions do they have, they really need to know? Now ask yourself, do you have any content on your website that answers that and if you don’t, go write it, I mean, it does it doesn’t have to be if you’re not a fabulous writer, it doesn’t need to be wonderful to start your writing well progresses and you’ll find your you know your voice, but take that time do that, you know that process because in the majority of the cases, what you would write down as those questions that people have, and when you go to look at your website, you have no content, you have nothing there to solve those, you know, those those inquiries in those questions and I think the fear that people have is if they get the answer, they’re not gonna reach out, like, they’re not going to convert on the website and that’s it that’s a, it’s an unfounded fear because what you’ve done is you’ve proven yourself to the visitor before they’ve ever had the opportunity to reach out to you and they’ve already connected with you emotionally because you’ve helped solve a question for them, you’ve solved the problem so you know, they’re already emotionally bought in so that when you do have that first point of contact, verbally, or a purchaser, whatever, they’re already in a positive mood, it’s a positive experience, and it makes the whole thing flow better.
Josh: I love that. Wow, great advice. I hope everybody looks at that, and then go apply that in any way they can possibly, I mean, you’ve simplified it down to the point of, you can do this by yourself and you can actually hire somebody to do it. But that’s, that’s cool to me, because it takes a lot of the fear out of SEO so I am, I’m gonna hard pitch you because I know you’re not going to do it but she also has this Rebecca has this egg coaching program that they do that is amazing you can go check it out so it’s digitalkitchen.com, is that correct?
Rebecca: digital marketing, digitalmarketingkitchen.com
Josh: digitalmarketingkitchen.com make sure you check that out, guys. I mean, it’ll be a great place to go pick her brain. I mean, nobody gives you access to their brains for cheap. So make sure you go check that out. Um, and Rebecca, I just have one final question for you. If you could give one final parting piece of guidance to our audience, what would that be?
Rebecca: Go on at your site, go sign up for like SEM rush, do a trial, do their website audit, you know, look at your look at your site it’ll give you information on your backlinks inter inside internal backlinks, right this in the health of your website, and it doesn’t you may not know what everything is, but there’s a lot of guidance in there with a little question mark so it’ll tell you exactly what issue is and you know what you should do and you will be surprised at what you see if you’ve never audited your own site.
