E01: Greg Gifford

Richard Hill:
So, in today's episode of eCom@One, I've got an amazing guest, Greg Gifford. Now Greg is somebody that in the agency when we're doing local SEO projects and we are looking for that new angle, that new thing, or a bit of inspiration, Greg's somebody for the last sort of five years plus that we've been sort of all over in a sort of SEO way and looking at what Greg's been doing.
Richard Hill:
So, seeing Greg speak at various events throughout the UK. And Greg as far as our agency is concerned, is the number one local SEO expert out there now. So, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Greg. Welcome to the podcast.
Greg Gifford:
Oh, happy to be here. Love doing podcasts.
Richard Hill:
Fantastic.
Greg Gifford:
I'm on a podcast honey.
Richard Hill:
No worries. So I think it'd be great, first of all if you want to just do a quick intro, or an intro, and introduce yourself and give us a little bit of a sort of history of your career, what brings us up to today.
Greg Gifford:
Sure. So currently I'm the vice president of Search at Search Lab. We're a boutique local SEO agency based out of Chicago. But I have a varied history in digital. So, I actually way back in the day just kind of self-taught myself with computers. And then back when Flash first came out, I started playing around with making some Flash websites for a few friends, and I was a film major back in college.
Greg Gifford:
And so, the way that Flash worked at the time, all the people that were designing Flash were trying to recreate static HTML, but it was timeline based, which made up more like editing movies, which having the film background made sense to me. At the time people thought they were cool. You look back on it now and you're like, "Oh my God, that's like the textbook example of what not to do with Flash."
Greg Gifford:
But I made really cool, bizarre sites because of approaching it from a different way. So, then I started making a lot of Flash websites. Then I kind of combined forces with a guy that I had done a website for who was a commercial photographer. We started a whole agency doing Flash websites and Flash hosting and pretty quickly figured out that the Flash sites weren't showing up in Google.
Greg Gifford:
So, we just figured out how to get them to show up not knowing anything about SEO or what the rules were. It was super black hat evil stuff that we did. So, I actually started in SEO as an unknowing black hat. And so then did that for a few years and then things didn't go so well with that partnership.
Greg Gifford:
And so, I ended up leaving and went and got a job as head Flash designer at an automotive software company and kind of really quickly rose through the ranks to become in charge of the marketing and doing all that. And then we wanted to start selling SEO as a service. But through the stuff that I had learned doing all of the evils black stuff.
Richard Hill:
Roughly, when was this, when you started to sort of that transition from geeking around evil black stuff?
Greg Gifford:
I almost need to pull up my LinkedIn to see. We're talking-
Richard Hill:
10 years?
Greg Gifford:
Like 13 years ago, probably 13, 14 years ago. So yeah, I started doing SEO once I was doing all the marketing stuff, like legitimate SEO, once I was doing all the marketing stuff. Then they wanted to start selling SEO as a service. So, we started interviewing and at the time, we were like, "Gosh, I don't really find anybody in the area that knows as much about SEO as I feel like I know now."
Greg Gifford:
So, the owner of the company said, "Why don't you pivot and go do the SEO department?" So, I started the SEO department there, grew that to a several million-dollar department, and then a lot of crazy like… it would take me hours to describe, crazy stuff happened with that company. And so, I left that company and went to work for another automotive company. And so that was DealerOn which is the second or third largest website provider for car dealers in the US.
Greg Gifford:
And so, they wanted to start selling SEOs. So, they came after me real heavily. And so, I went there, worked there for four years, grew that to a multimillion-dollar revenue stream. And then left that about a year ago. And now I've ended up at Search Lab, and I wanted to get away from being stuck in one vertical. So now, we serve lots of different verticals and I can do lots more fun stuff. That's where I am now.
Richard Hill:
People say specialize and obviously you’re local SEO and a few other things I'm sure which we'll come to. But so, you spent a lot of years doing the motor and the auto industry, a lot of car dealerships, about literally hundreds, I'm guessing.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Richard Hill:
Now I know we talked briefly before we jumped on the call, but you're working with all sorts of companies now, like casinos, hotel chains, lots of other verticals.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah. And jewellers and attorneys and it's just all over the board. So, any local business, any business that needs to show up in that Map Pack in a specific local area. That's who we work with now.
Richard Hill:
Brilliant. Okay. Well, thank you for that, Greg. So obviously the eCom@One podcast is very much around and focused on eCommerce and digital marketing and the ways that eCommerce stores can sort of help themselves to implement different things. And some people say to me, "What's local SEO got to do with eCommerce when local SEO is obviously a geographical location, whereas eCommerce potentially and usually is more on a broader geographical sort of radius or area?" So, what would you say to that?
Greg Gifford:
So typically, that's true, but I talk to a lot of eCommerce people that don't really get the opportunity of paying attention to local SEO and how local SEO works. Because a lot of people whatever it is that you're selling online, when you're just 100% eCommerce base, there is a local business, there is a local brick and mortar storefront that is selling the same product that you're selling.
Greg Gifford:
So you want to compete against, especially over the last year or so, we've seen Google, call it switch, the intent of query that used to, if you would type in a query, it used to be a full eCommerce query and that's it, and now it pulls up a Map Pack and they're assigning local intent to a ton of search query that used to be full eComm and now it's local and then a little bit of eComm.
Greg Gifford:
So, all those eCommerce guys out there kind of struggling because now, something like if you were to, a year ago, type in patio furniture, it's going to pull up just a bunch of eCommerce sites. And now it's going to pull up a Map Pack, show you where to go get it locally, and then show you some eCommerce sites.
Greg Gifford:
If you're just in the eCommerce side of things, you've got to understand how that intent is switching within Google so that you start paying attention, "Okay, well now, this is being assigned local intent. I need to start doing some local SEO stuff to my site to get this to compete with those local businesses so I could still get that business."
Richard Hill:
Okay. So maybe for the guys that are listening in, go and have a look at their key search terms that they're trying to rank for, the ones that drive the order's intent, and see if the Map Pack, put my teeth back in, Map Pack is showing. And obviously if it's showing, you need to be in there.
Greg Gifford:
Yes. And even if not, sometimes when it's not, just for the keyword, let's use patio furniture again. Patio furniture, not a great example because it doesn’t show local intent. But let's say it doesn't show up local ones. I'm selling widget, you look for blue widgets, there's no local intent. But I as a user might search blue widget, Dallas, or blue widgets, London, or wherever I am, which then does assign local intent because I'm adding a city name into it.
Greg Gifford:
But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't necessarily be willing to buy it from an online option if that online option is presented to me. So, in those cases, even still if there's not necessarily local intent, just for the keyword phrase, understand that it's likely depending on what it is that you're selling.
Greg Gifford:
Your potential customers could be searching with a city name attached, in which case, again, you want to make sure you're doing some local SEO at least a little bit for those major markets that you're in so that you will show up and be able to compete when people do that.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. So, what would you say then to eCommerce stores right now that are looking to deliver additional sales quite quickly? At the moment, obviously there's quite a lot of disruption to say the least out there at the moment. Obviously COVID-19 sort of shut down a lot of localities and local stores pretty much worldwide right now. See when other people are listening to this podcast, things will be quite different no doubt. Which way, we're not quite sure.
Richard Hill:
But in terms of like eComm store, yeah, it could be, well we don't really know, do we, at this stage. But we could still be sat here having another chat in two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. We probably will be. But so, eCommerce stores, there's quite obviously different verticals. They're going to be feeling different things right now. Some are going to be flying, some are going to be the opposite end of the spectrum.
Richard Hill:
What sort of strategies and things could you recommend, or would you recommend for sort of some fairly quick wins and things that eCommerce stores could do?
Greg Gifford:
Definitely you want to do some stuff around home delivery or online ordering. So not necessarily around a particular product that you sell, but just to have that messaging on your site. Depending on what it is that you sell, if you're a smaller eCommerce site and you charge shipping, you may want to consider foregoing shipping for now.
Greg Gifford:
Because if people are looking around for where to buy something and they've got multiple options and everybody's charging shipping and you're not, you're probably going to get it right now because a lot of people are out of work. So, any sort of sales, you don't want to be crass and be like, "It's the COVID sale," because that's insensitive. But-
Richard Hill:
Yeah. I'm seeing that already. I just think, "Guys, you are going to destroy your business." It's too late. They've already done that. They think that people that are doing that and I have seen some email campaigns and-
Greg Gifford:
I've seen some really, really horrible email campaigns. A friend of mine forwarded me something the other day and I threw up in my mouth a little bit. Like it's just really-
Richard Hill:
I saw one. Yeah.
Greg Gifford:
They think that they're being witty and it's just like, "Man, you're so insensitive. Like thousands of people are dying and you're making a joke out of it."
Richard Hill:
Well, I saw free sanitizer with every order yesterday. Yeah. Okay. So, local delivery, if that's possible, I think that's a fantastic one. If you can deliver locally, obviously that's a massive concern right now. People are literally trying to get things to their house. Amazon is famous for all that. It's very, very quick delivery.
Richard Hill:
But obviously right now even that next day delivery is a two to three day delivery. I think UK is two day at the moment. I think there's a lot of items that are one day, but no doubt that will be three, four, five days in this next week potentially. So those stores who can do their delivering, especially with fresh products. Get that local delivery, get that-
Greg Gifford:
Definitely, have some sort of messaging on there about what you're doing at your warehouse as far as sanitation. How are your warehouse workers, are they using hand sanitizer between every order? Are they washing their hands every 10 minutes or whatever it is? Because there's the whole kind of just health scare of like, "Well, what if somebody at the warehouse that's doing the shipping has COVID and then it gets on that cardboard and it lives on that cardboard, and who knows how long it lives."
Greg Gifford:
There's so much unknown right now and so much fear-mongering going around, especially on social media, that anything that you can do to say, "Here's what we're doing because we care about your safety," that's going to go a really long way to help getting more sales.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant. Okay. So, I think let's go straight into some of the local SEO side of things. So, what do you believe or what are, should I say, the biggest ranking factors in SEO right now? What are you seeing in your agency?
Greg Gifford:
Well, so with local, there's the whole proximity factor, especially within that Map Pack. In local, you've got the Map Pack and then you have the standard organic results that are also localized. And within the Map Pack, proximity is a huge factor. How far away the search result is from the person doing the search. Reviews are a pretty big factor, but right now, reviews had been turned off by Google. So, that's kind of crazy.
Greg Gifford:
The reviews will still play into the algorithm right now, but there's nothing a business can do to work or to optimize that signal at this point in time. It really comes down to the same thing as SEO. It's content. So, the one thing in local is a lot of people that do local, it's a lot smaller scale. So, when you're talking about these SMBs, it's not like giant eCommerce sites or giant brands that have thousands or hundreds of thousands of inbound links.
Greg Gifford:
A lot of times you've got small businesses that may just have links from 10 to 15 unique domains. So, depending on the vertical or depending on the phrase that you're targeting, we've had massive success with clients through the years where maybe we only have to get two or three links in that area to just skyrocket somebody to the top of search results because there's just nobody else in that area getting links.
Greg Gifford:
So, links are really, really powerful in local. But I think its content too. You've got to have great content, you've got to have good links, you've got to have good reviews, and then you can't really do anything to optimize proximity. But links and content are really where it is.
Richard Hill:
So, if you've not ... Obviously proximity is what it is. You are what you are, where you are and the searcher is where they are sort of thing. So, that's a very difficult one. Well, I guess what it is. But in terms of links, you're a local business, you're in a city say anywhere in the world. Is a bit of a cheesy question, but what are the ... do you want the local links within the local area or is that like what-
Greg Gifford:
Yeah. The local algorithm weighs various factors differently than the traditional algorithm. So, the traditional algorithm is considering all the different factors and there's some sort of a weight associated with each individual thing that it's looking at, that those weights are different when it comes to local SEO.
Greg Gifford:
So traditional SEO for years, now there's the whole thing of, well, maybe no-follow is just a directive and it's not necessarily a rule, but in local SEO it's never mattered. We've been able to move the needle drastically with only no-follow links. But I think that's just because of the fact. If you think about it, it makes sense though because a local business, like I said, they may only have 10 to 15 links.
Greg Gifford:
And if Google was going to say, "We're just not going to count no-follow links for any business," then you'd have a lot of local businesses that would count as having no inbound links. So local links they have to count. But it's also important within that local algorithm that those links are from those local businesses and there's not a lot of value there.
Greg Gifford:
And one of the things that I've always talked about at conferences for years is, you have to think about link building differently because the traditional link builders won't go after those low authority metric. You might have a site that's got a domain authority or a trust flow of like 10 and traditional link builders would run away from that and say, "Oh, that's going to get you penalized," but local SEOs are like, "Hell yeah, I'll take that link." For years-
Richard Hill:
And you would say, "Take that link," yeah?
Greg Gifford:
Yes. For years, I've called them a shitty church link. You get a link from a church, it's super valuable because it's hyper-local and it's definitely… that church is going to link to stuff in that community. It's a really valuable local link. But church websites traditionally are not that great. And if you run a church through whatever link building tool you're using, it's going to have a very low authority metric.
Greg Gifford:
But it doesn't mean it's a bad link. It's just Google weighs those links differently. And the other thing too is if you're going after all these high authority links, you have to do traditional link building, we're going to build some piece of content and do outreach and do all this crazy work where with local links, a lot of times all you have to do is just ask the business what they already do in the community.
Greg Gifford:
So, if they're involved in the community in any factor, then there's going to be these relationships with other local entities that are already in place that you can get links from very easily.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I love that sort of shitty local church links. I can see the headline now. Fantastic. So local business, the links, obviously you don't have to go after hundreds, obviously, depending on what city you're in. Maybe a little bit there's literally a handful quite often can move the needle massively is what we're saying. A lot of maybe SEOs won't go after because they think they are just too low value.
Richard Hill:
So, you've got a sort of local area publications, directories, those types of places. And they still got them there. But you're saying they still got the value as well?
Greg Gifford:
Directories, not so much. That's what in local we call those citations. So that's any time your business's name, address, and phone number are mentioned on any other site. And it used to be really important that all your citations matched and everything was consistent and it was almost down to the character years ago. Nowadays those citations and directories don't really matter so much.
Greg Gifford:
There's a lot of really obscure local directories that back in the day or you had to be on these directories. Now you really only need to worry about any site that your potential customers might find your information on. So, what we typically suggest is to do a Google search for your business name and any site that shows up in the first two pages of search results, those are the only ones you really need to worry about. But beyond that citation, consistency just doesn't really matter to the algorithm anymore.
Richard Hill:
Okay, good, good. So that’s links. Content, what would be a couple of little strategies that local businesses could do content wise?
Greg Gifford:
So, blogs, a lot of people have kind of moved away from blogging. Old blogs aren't important anymore, but within local blogs can be really powerful. For our clients, half the blog posts that we write don't really have anything to do with the business and it's just useful information about the local area. It helps you toss out a wider net.
Greg Gifford:
So if you're a personal injury attorney and you're only writing content, putting content on your site that is about car crash victim, motorcycle crash, dog bites, all the typical personal injury stuff, you're still throwing out a net that's targeting a really narrow portion of the local audience. You're only putting content out that's relevant for people that need your service right now.
Greg Gifford:
Or for an eCommerce side of things, you're only putting out content that is relevant for someone that is ready to buy your product right now. So, if you just write helpful information about the local area, throws a much wider net out and it gets you exposed to more people and that's what it's all about, it's that exposure.
Greg Gifford:
You want people to know about you and know that you're there so that when they do slip and fall or get a dog bite or get into a car crash, they already know about you. They've got that familiarity with your brand. And so, it's more like it's old school brand building like it was back in the day before digital came about. So, it's that kind of thing. So, the localized blog posts.
Greg Gifford:
And then it's not just shoving your city keyword throughout your texts 15 times, there's no magical number, but it's writing truly localized content. So, the content on your site should really obviously be written. If you're based in London, it should be content that shows you really are based in London and it's not like you could grab your homepage content and throw it on a site that's based in New York.
Greg Gifford:
It wouldn't work because there's too much there. Besides just the word London, there's too many other things there that clearly, you're based in that local area and that's really important to establish that local relevancy.
Richard Hill:
Okay. So, you've created the pages, you've created these blog posts. What would you say about them taking those pages and sort of syndicating, putting them on social media? What's the benefit there in terms of ... obviously I know we've got a banner, you've got this sort of the benefit of getting them in front of your audience on social media is one thing, but then what's the impact on your SEO or is there any impact on your SEO by taking-
Greg Gifford:
There's not really any impact from social with SEO. There was speculation for a few years that that was going to become a massive signal because links are easy to buy and links are easy to cheat, but social engagement is more realistic. It doesn't really do anything for SEO though. It doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
Greg Gifford:
Social channels are great and Facebook traffic is off the charts right now with everybody being at home. So, that'd be more of an advertising play on Facebook than just sharing it organically. But yeah, share your stuff on Facebook because everybody's there right now.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. It has its place definitely. But it doesn't impact SEO is what you're saying.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah, for sure.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. So, let's say you're a store that's multi-store, you've got maybe 10 locations. So, within Google My Business, you can have a multi-store, sort of master account where you're logging into multiple locations. Are there any specific tips around managing a lot of stores? Because I know we've got a few people who will be listening to this that I know of that I know have got a lot of stores as one group, one company or a group of companies.
Richard Hill:
Is there anything in terms of like being able to manage those locations a lot quicker and within the backend of my business or any specific tips or tricks on locations?
Greg Gifford:
Not necessarily for managing them quicker. If you get to where you've got hundreds or thousands of locations, that's where you might want to look at finding some sort of a management tool that lets you push out to a lot of locations from one spot. But if you're talking 10, 15 locations, it's not that hard to just log into each one. They're all going to be in the one dashboard.
Greg Gifford:
But yeah, if there's anybody listening to this that does have GMB and I don't know how quickly you're going to be posting this, but if we're still in the midst of all of the virus craziness, it's definitely important to get that messaging onto Google My Business. There's a lot of things that aren't working. The reviews are turned off right now. The Q&A section is turned off right now.
Greg Gifford:
But get that into your description, make sure you've got great photos going, make sure your hours are current. Definitely make sure that it's clear that you are open and running business as normal during this outbreak so that everything continues to be okay.
Richard Hill:
So, if their stores are closed or let's say they've changed their opening hours. Their delivery times are changed. So, they need to go into the Google My Business, GMB, and go in and update.
Greg Gifford:
We've been suggesting using the holiday hours feature. So if you go into the dashboard and you click info on the left and then you go in and it's the standard place where you're entering business information, underneath where you enter your standard business hours, it's a section to enter holiday hours. And that would be where Christmas Eve, you're closed early or whatever. That's what that's meant for.
Greg Gifford:
But you can also put in, just you enter a date and say what your hours are. So it's better to use those holiday hours right now because that way it's easier too if that you know that, "Hey, every Monday, I'm going to go into my 10 locations and set the hours for the week." Because you go to your 10 locations and change all of the permanent hours and two, three weeks from now, everything goes back to normal.
Greg Gifford:
Who knows how long it is, 10 weeks, whatever point it is, you're going to have to remember to go and change those back. And if you forget, so it might be easier right now. And that's what we're suggesting at least is to just use the holiday hours. So, we've been going into clients that have adjusted hours and just setting what the hours are for the next two weeks and then giving us a little reminder.
Richard Hill:
Just your holiday hours and enable the holiday hours as now sort of thing.
Greg Gifford:
Well yeah, because basically when you go to set the holiday hours, you select a single date. So, you would select Thursday, 26, 27, Monday is the 29th. Is it whatever. Let's say Monday the 29th, if it's not, you would go in and select March 29th and here's what your hours, March 30th, here's your hours. April 1st, here's your hours. April 2nd, here's your hours. So, you go set those up. So, you're just setting it for a single day.
Greg Gifford:
So then once that expires, it goes away. So that way if you just go set the next two weeks up, you know, "Okay, cool. Here's my hours for the next two weeks." And then you just need to remember to come in and reset them. Whereas if you were to go the other route and just change your permanent hours, maybe you forget if it's who knows how long this is going to last, but if it happens to be five, six, seven, eight weeks from now that you're coming back to standard business hours, at that point, you may forget to go back and change those. And so-
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Hours obviously any messaging that you want to add in there, but you did say about the reviews. So, Google have disabled the ability to give reviews, is that right?
Greg Gifford:
So, if I am a customer and I go through leave the review, it will let me leave the review and it will appear to me that I have left that review. But that review is in limbo. It doesn't show up to the public or anything. As a business owner, I could go in and respond to ... I wouldn't see that review. But let's say there was a review that was left last week before they turn reviews off and I'm just not on my game and I'm coming in now to respond to that review.
Greg Gifford:
I would see that my response is there because I'm logged into that account, but the public doesn't see that response.
Richard Hill:
So, it's just literally-
Greg Gifford:
So, there's a lot of confusion there because users think they're leaving a review and businesses think that they are leaving responses, but they're just stuck and they don't show up.
Richard Hill:
Just on hold basically. You can reply. They can add a review but nobody sees it.
Greg Gifford:
We don't know if it's on hold. We don't know. Right now we haven't gotten in or we haven't heard a definitive answer that customer review that's left, that customer's view, does that show up when they turn things back on or that response that I've left as an owner that shows up to me but not to the public. Does that then show up once things are turned back on? We don't really know at this point right now.
Richard Hill:
So, have you heard any other sort of rumors or anything? Anything you've seen because that's the best, I've never heard of that before. Obviously, it's an unprecedented situation. Is there any other thing they may do that may change in this ...
Greg Gifford:
As of right now, I don't know. I think it's really unfortunate that they've turned off questions and answers. Obviously, it was probably getting overloaded with way too much stuff related to the virus. But I know there were a lot of forward-thinking businesses that were loading their own questions in of… Are you still open? What are your delivery hours? Are you doing delivery? Things like that.
Greg Gifford:
That was really helpful. And now that's gone. So, that was one way to really get some information across. You can update your business description, but the description is so much further down in the panel that it doesn't have as much visibility. But yeah, Google is going around and marking businesses as temporarily closed right now, and sometimes they're marking businesses as closed that aren't closed.
Greg Gifford:
So, it's important to pay attention to see if you get that because then you can go back into your dashboard and say, "No, no, no. I'm open. I'm not temporarily closed."
Richard Hill:
So, Google My Business while we're on that for a minute. So obviously you need an account, you need to claim it, you got to wait and you'll fill it all in. Is there anything in there within Google My Business, if we step outside this month or two that we're in, but on a normal trading day and you've got your new Google My Business, obviously you've got your photos, your descriptions, your short name ... What are some things in there that sometimes gets missed or some things in there that are the most important thing? So, what are a couple of tips within Google My Business that you think might help?
Greg Gifford:
Definitely the Q&A section is key. Lately, a lot of people think that the Q&A section is just a messaging platform where if I ask the question, that question goes to the business, but it's really a function of Google map. And so, it's a community discussion feature. So, anyone can ask a question about the business and anyone can answer that question for the business.
Greg Gifford:
So, if you are a business that does have a GMB listing, once all this gets back to normal, you definitely should be monitoring your listing to see what questions come in and answering those questions. Because each question can get multiple answers. So, when the business answers, it says it's answered by the business owner. And then if a question has multiple answers, the answer that shows as the primary answer is the one that has the most thumbs up.
Greg Gifford:
So as a business, you want to monitor, make sure you're answering the questions, and then make sure you're upvoting your questions or your answers so that your answer show as the primary answers to the question. Another big important thing that gets overlooked is loading in really awesome pictures. Make sure that your pictures are high quality, professional shot images, and that you're changing them out often.
Greg Gifford:
I did a Local U Advanced yesterday and one of the questions was, "Well, should I remove pictures of products that I don't sell anymore?" Well, heck yeah, you should. Because if you're an eCommerce site, would you have stuff on your site that you no longer sell but you just keep it on the site? No, absolutely not. So why would you do that on Google My Business? Take it off Google My Business.
Greg Gifford:
And we've even got some businesses that will do seasonal photos. So, if they're further north in the US, they'll load in pictures in the winter that show what outside of business looks like when there's snow on the ground. And then in the summertime, they get rid of those and put in pictures that show what it looks like when it's nice and sunny.
Greg Gifford:
So, the Google My Business for a lot of places, it's the first impression you're going to make with customers. So, you want to make sure you've got great photos and all the right information, all the best stuff there to make a good first impression.
Richard Hill:
So, probably the guys that are listening in that need to go and Google their products or even their business name, get that Google My Business to come up as a potential customer view and look at how it looks. Quite often you see these grainy logos that have been dragged in from the website or wherever from five years ago or whatever and then no imagery when clearly they've obviously got no doubt a lovely shop location, warehouse, people, whatever it may be.
Richard Hill:
So, making sure the images are optimized. Sort of the way you name the images and things like that. Is that relevant or is that old school now.
Greg Gifford:
I should've paid attention yesterday. There was a whole session or a session about this and Joy Hawkins mentioned it, but I was answering an email at the time. I think there's a little ... if you have a file name on an image and you upload that image, it retains that file name in Google. So, there might be a little bit there, but again, it's the kind of thing of all of the other hundreds of things that you can do with your website.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. It's a little ...
Greg Gifford:
It's a little thing. It's not really going to matter that much. So best practice. Sure. Put the name in there, but I don't think you should expect too much out of it.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Okay. So, Q&A section is one, which I think to be fair, I very rarely see, in our agencies, we very rarely see people using it. Maybe five percent of our clients when they come to us have been using that. So, I think that's a great one, Greg.
Greg Gifford:
Well, and you can preload questions. A lot of people don't realize that, you don't have to wait for those questions to get at. You can load your own questions in. So even if you look at your profile and no questions have been asked, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's not a good way to get information across the customers.
Greg Gifford:
So, we call it a pre-site FAQ page because with zero click search, a lot of people aren't going to your website anymore. So, take the frequently asked questions. If you have an FAQ page or just talk to whoever is answering the phones or whoever's doing customer service and find out what the most common questions are, load those questions into the Q&A section and then answer those questions.
Greg Gifford:
And now again, better first impression. If somebody is first encountering your GMB and they see those questions and answers, maybe they've got a similar question, they don't have to ask now because that answer's already there.
Richard Hill:
The guys that are listening in, that's a very simple but really not used tip. So, thank you for that, Greg. That's a really good idea. Literally if you've got an FAQ page on your website, take that and literally copy and paste it with some amends. Maybe make sure it's up to date and straight away you've got Q&A, Q&A, Q&A, Q&A, Q&A, but relevant to ...
Richard Hill:
I think that's the same on the website as well. Obviously making sure you've got the Q&A's on the website as well. So, you've got that sort of unique content around the services, products, locality. So, SEO wise, so you've been on this about 15 years, I think, ish. I think we're somewhere there.
Greg Gifford:
If you count all of the unofficial evil Greg black hat stuff, yeah, probably about 15 years.
Richard Hill:
15. Yeah. That's like 100 years in this game. It's like cat years.
Greg Gifford:
Long time. Yeah.
Richard Hill:
I don't know if it's equivalent to cat years or dog years or SEO years. So, a long, long time. Obviously, you've seen a lot of different things over the years. But I think like you said about 15 minutes ago, links and content still there's sort of that links and content debate, or that links and content are still hugely the two core areas.
Richard Hill:
So where do you see things going? What do you see this next maybe ... obviously this next month is going to be a challenging time for a lot of businesses, but if we step outside that for a minute and think this next year, where do you think some of the SEO strategies will be going, where do you think Google's going in terms of potential direction of-
Greg Gifford:
Next year's kind of up in the air because who knows what's going on and how long this will last. And I think in the near future, Google is definitely making moves to look at real world entity signals as ranking factors. Just last fall, they got a patent for quality user visit, which is basically a patent for a system of using repeat visit to a location as a ranking factor.
Greg Gifford:
So basically, if businesses are more popular in the real world, they become more popular online. And they've been moving in this entity direction for a long time, but local SEO has always been entity base because you can rank a local SEO without a website, which you obviously if you don't have a website, you're not showing up in traditional search results. But in local, you can show up because all you really need is a Google My Business because that shows your physical location.
Richard Hill:
That was a new one for me literally. I saw that two weeks ago. We have potential new client. We had a meeting with a potential new client, and we were looking at its competitors and yeah, straight away the number one competitor in the maps didn't have a website.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah. So that entity signal, they've been looking at it for years. If you're out there and you're interested in reading about it, Dave Davies at Beanstalk does a lot of ... He's been writing about entity stuff on search engine land for, I mean I think since like 2015, for years. And he always at conferences talks about entity stuff. So, he's got a lot of information on it.
Greg Gifford:
But yeah, the patents, especially if you're looking on the local side of things, there's been a lot of, "Let's use these entities signals as ranking factors," and now it's even moved into like this new one with the quality visit score of real world signals that will affect how you're showing up online. And it makes sense because Google is fully aware of the fact that it's pretty easy to cheat the link signal.
Greg Gifford:
You can buy links. Now, they try really hard to figure out if they're purchased links or not, but people are going to continue to be intelligent about ways to buy links or they've gotten pretty good at detecting PBN. But there's still some out there that still work and yeah, it's not sustainable. It won't last forever, but it works for now.
Greg Gifford:
There's always ways to kind of cheat the system, but it's going to be harder to do that in the real world if they're figuring out ways to use real world signals. And they're already doing it now because they're tracking your location, whether it's an android device or an Apple device that has Google maps on it, because that's how they populate. If you look at Google My Business, it has a little graph that says most popular times today.
Richard Hill:
Yes. The time of day.
Greg Gifford:
And you can see, is it busy now or not? How do they know that unless they're just tracking your location. Which to us as marketers, we're like, "Okay, cool. No big deal." General public, they're like, "Holy shit. They're tracking my location." And they freak out, and it's all about privacy. But for me, I don't care.
Greg Gifford:
I'd rather they track my location because then I get a better user experience because I know when I need to go to the business because there's no wait at that restaurant or whatever. I don't mind so much.
Richard Hill:
It's totally makes sense, doesn't it? You're talking about local search proximity being a key thing. If they can see that dozens, hundreds, thousands of people are going through that business in and around that business and sticking for us a length of time in the area, it's scary stuff, but yeah. You can see that.
Greg Gifford:
And then, I'm interested to see what happens with augmented reality because I know a lot of people are making a play there and you've got Google lens where let's say I'm on a trip and I'm in London and I want to get some fish and chips and I'm walking down the street and I see a couple of pubs next to each other and I'm like, "I wonder which one has better reviews for their fish and chips."
Greg Gifford:
And I just pick up my phone and do this and I'm not conducting a search, I am not typing anything into Google or speaking anything to Siri or to Google Assistant. I'm literally using the Google lens where it picks up and it's going to identify what those pubs are and show me their information and their reviews.
Greg Gifford:
So that's a whole different kind of approach to things where now all you're doing is holding your camera up and looking at the real world based on where you are and getting information about that stuff without technically conducting a search query, what happens there? And I don't know. I think that's still fairly far away.
Greg Gifford:
But we all know that they had the whole Google glass thing that didn't work out because it was big and ugly and chunky. But they're working on that stuff and they're working on the contacts that it's just on your eye and you can get that. So, we're getting into that kind of Star Trek biotech world that I don't think that stuff is a year away, but 10 years from now, who knows how things are going to work and what devices we'll be using.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Fantastic. So slight tangent now. What's your thoughts on email marketing for eCommerce and local businesses?
Greg Gifford:
I think email marketing is still incredibly powerful if you do it right. Now, a lot of people aren't doing email marketing, but email marketing still works if you do it right. It's really powerful. You get great open rates still. You can lead people directly to get them to click on something that takes them to your site and then you're able to retarget them and do all the other things that you want to do. I'm a big fan of email.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I've asked that question a few times and obviously, I've had a very similar answer, but the amount of stores that we see that just really aren't implementing anything. What would you-
Greg Gifford:
Especially with eCommerce. Because with eCommerce, you've got somebody checking out, they're buying stuff on the site, they're checking out. They have to give an email address because they've got to get their digital receipt. So, you've got more so than a business that doesn't do eCommerce and just with clients in the real world, customers in the real world where you just kind of have to collect those email addresses to get permission.
Greg Gifford:
You're inherently getting that on eCommerce sites and you do that on eCommerce. Then there's your customer list. This isn't just like a car dealership where you've got a list of everybody that's bought a car from you in the last 10 years and you could send out an email and hope that some of those people are ready to buy. Depending on what it is that you're selling on your eCommerce site, it might be something that people buy every couple of months or every ...
Greg Gifford:
And you've got a list of these are people that already bought from you. This is the killer way to get these people to come back and buy more.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant. So, I've got to go back to SEO again. Obviously, you've got to make the most of it. So obviously you worked on a lot of different campaigns, a lot of car dealerships, jewellery store, jewellery brands, hotel chains. Have you got one particular campaign and I know it'd be difficult to maybe go into certain details, confidentiality and what not.
Richard Hill:
But what would be maybe some of the best results on one particular campaign or a campaign that you can talk about and some of the things that you did that really sort of moved the needle on that campaign and made it work?
Greg Gifford:
Funny story. So, this was several years ago, we had a car dealership that signed up for our service and they had a page on their blog that had been done by a previous agency and it was a VW dealership. And the page was just basically an informational page on the blog that was, here's what all of the various dashboard light means, that if you have a dashboard light, here's the meaning of that dashboard light.
Greg Gifford:
And most likely what sort of service you would need to get because of that dashboard light. But it was a massive JPEG image. They had just had a designer create it and they just uploaded the JPEG. So effectively to Google it looked like a blank page. So, we said, "Hey, this is great information." So, we chopped out just the dashboard image or just the JPEG of whatever the dashboard light was, and then had text for what that was.
Greg Gifford:
And very quickly it ranked like crazy. And I think at the best point, it was getting ... well first of all, it ranked worldwide. If you search for VW warning light or VW dashboard light, it ranked number one all over the world. Now it got a whole lot of traffic. I think at one point it was getting like 20,000 visits a month just to that page. And the dealer actually asked us to take the page down.
Greg Gifford:
And we said, "Wait, wait, wait. What? You want to take this page down that we created that's giving you tons of traffic?" And he said, "Yeah, it's messing up my Google analytics." And we said, "Wait, wait, why is it messing up your Google analytics?" And he said, "Well, it's traffic that's not converting." And we're like, "Well, yeah, because it's not meant to convert. This isn't to buy a car. This is to provide information that would potentially drive service traffic to your business."
Greg Gifford:
And he's like, "Yeah, but it's getting like 20,000 visits and it's stuff from the UK and from Spain and from France, and those guys aren't coming. And so, we want to take it off." And we said, "Well, how about first of all, let's look, and like 10% of the traffic is local traffic, which means that 2000 people a month in your local area that are seeing this page that are potential service customers.
Greg Gifford:
Who cares if there's another 18,000 that are international?" He said, "No. It messes up my analytics." And we said, "Okay, cool. How about we give you a filtered view of analytics that just doesn't look at this page, it cuts this page out and then your analytics." "No, no, no, because I want the default." And so, they kept fighting with us, kept fighting with us. Finally, the guy ended up leaving, not because of that, but the whole dealer group made a choice to go with a different provider for website and for everything.
Greg Gifford:
So, they left us. And then as soon as he left, he took that page off of his blogs and we put it up on somebody else's blog and it .And then that guy ended up leaving and I don't work there anymore so I don't know what's going on and we have to go look. I don't know if that page still ranks or not, but yeah, I just thought that was crazy that we had a page that ranked that well worldwide and they wanted us to take it down.
Greg Gifford:
But yeah, we've had other situations where the standard kind of answer the question of, well, how long until I see results. You're usually saying the safe answer is six to eight months, you'll see some uptick. But what you would count to be really good results, you're probably looking at six to eight months of good SEO before you see that. And then we've had clients that the second month we've doubled their traffic.
Greg Gifford:
So, it just really depends on the vertical. We've had some verticals where we come in and if it's a jewellery store in Northern Indiana and none of the competitors are doing any SEO, you can come in and do just a little bit and just skyrockets really quickly.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. So varied on the locality, the competition. Yeah.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah, for sure.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's brilliant. So, you must have seen, I would say, a lot of horror stories or a lot of things over the circa 15 years of SEO. What would you say is one of the main things that people do wrong when it comes to their SEO strategy? What are some of the-
Greg Gifford:
They don't do it at all.
Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah.
Greg Gifford:
No, mostly I would see just really bad content. The content, just where you read it and it just doesn't sound like it was even written by a human because they're so worried about stepping in keyword or just not enough of it. A page where they've got a page on the website and it's two sentences. Hang on one second. Home school going on downstairs.
Richard Hill:
Keep them going.
Greg Gifford:
Got to answer.
Richard Hill:
Crack the whip. Yeah.
Greg Gifford:
So yeah, just bad content. I see so much bad content. A lot of people don't do link building. I think that's pretty big, especially with the local, just lots of people especially within local, most SMBs out there don't have an agency that they're working with. They don't do SEO because they don't ... maybe they know about it, maybe they don't, they just know they need to have a website.
Greg Gifford:
They know they need to have a GMB, but they're not really actively doing anything. And one of the most important things is link building. And there's so many, even businesses that know about SEO and do SEO, there's a lot of SEO agencies that don't do link building and especially like I said, especially in these smaller SMB niches, it can make such a massive difference so quickly.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. So, they're either doing nothing or they're doing crappy content or they're doing no link building. So, comes back to doing nothing or doing something badly. Pretty much. Yeah. Okay. So, in terms of sort of training out there for the guys that are listening in and sort the resources, I know that, you are literally, literally around the world every other week.
Richard Hill:
I think it seems when we jump on YouTube, we jump on the various big conferences. That's how I've got to know you over the years. And that my team got to know you and you're sort of, like I said it, been our go to resource for local SEO, a lot of different conferences, a lot of different training courses out there. What would you say some of the better sort of SEO trainings to the guys that are listening and what are some of the better conferences that people can go to or listen to online?
Greg Gifford:
Yeah. I love Brighton SEO. I've been going. This whole virus thing made them cancel the one next month. So, it breaks my streak, but I've been coming over to Brighton SEO twice a year for I think six years now. Five years for sure. Maybe six. I love that conference. It's great. The whole SMX series is great. PubCon is awesome in the US. I'm disappointed, we were supposed to do PubCon in London this year because it's the 20 year anniversary. But with the virus thing, that's not going to happen. Jeez. What else is good out there? UnGagged, I liked to do UnGagged a lot.
Richard Hill:
Was that in Vegas?
Greg Gifford:
They go all over. This year, they're doing it in New York instead of in Vegas, but they do one in London every year as well. What I like about that one is they've locked down to an absolute maximum of 500 attendees. So, there's a lot more of an opportunity for attendees to kind of mingle with the speakers and get to see the speakers on a one on one basis because it's just a smaller group.
Greg Gifford:
Where Brighton SEO I think was like 6,000 people last October. So, it's just massive. And you may not even be able to talk to a speaker because there's just so many people there. And I think the biggest value from a conference isn't necessarily the sessions that you're sitting in. It's the conversations that you have with other attendees or especially with speakers at the pub that night.
Greg Gifford:
I think that's incredibly valuable. And then there's a lot of regional conferences too, the little regional meetup. I know in the UK, Andrew Optimisey does his little optimisey meetup. Those are great. Dallas here we have DFWSCN, so it's a once a month meeting where they fly in one of those top caliber speakers that you would see at SMX or PubCon or Brighton, they'll fly them in. So, you just get that one person for an hour once a month. Those are really cool.
Greg Gifford:
Then you've got stuff like Engage in Portland is a smaller regional conference. We've got State of Search in Dallas, which is really good. So, there's a ton of opportunities out there if you really look. And then I do a weekly video series called Local Search Tuesdays, so it's quick three to five minute videos on the Search Lab website.
Greg Gifford:
And then I'm on the SEMrush Academy. So, SEMrush Academy puts out these educational videos where I was actually the first instructor they ever had. And so, the first course I did is just the fundamentals of SEO. And it's a four-hour long course. And then once you're done with the course, you can go do a test and get a little certificate that says that you did it.
Greg Gifford:
But now they've started doing shorter courses where those courses are like hour long courses. So, I did keyword research, back root management, mobile SEO and something else, and local SEO. They're just about to release my local SEO course.
Richard Hill:
So, course wise, training wise, SEMrush, great resource, lots of longer ones, but also those hour. And then you can test how well you've been listening, so you can do a little certificate at the end of them. So, SEMrush, a great resource. And I think they've got their own podcast, I think as well, haven't they? And they've got the webinar.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah. I've been on several podcasts and webinars for them. They're really big on providing free information and podcasts and webinars, and all of the academy courses are free. So, they're great. They really want to help educate the community. And there's other trainings too. Moz has a great guide to SEO or a beginner's guide to SEO. There's a lot of stuff out there that, if you look, there's plenty of information out there to learn these things.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Okay, fantastic. So last couple of questions, Greg. So, SEO and the content, the links, the research, the local, there's a lot of different tools that are out there, a lot of different tools and sort of I think each SEO has a similar tool stack. Quite a lot of tools I think are extremely popular across the sort of SEO industry. But what was your go to tool set if you're a working on a local SEO project, an eCommerce project for a local company, what's your go to tool set?
Greg Gifford:
We really love Places Scout. It's a really robust tool set for local SEO. So, we love Places Scout. I'm a big fan of STAT Analytics or rank tracking. That's really awesome. BrightLocal and Whitespark are also great local SEO tool sets that have some amazing stuff, we use both of them. Obviously, we use SEMrush, Majestic and Ahref for links are great. I think that's pretty much what our stack is.
Richard Hill:
Well, do you use, let's say we talked about content. You've got to write a content page on your local business. What tool would you use to sort of create that to analyze maybe the people that are ranking already on the content wise, although the pages are ranking already to then decide what style, length of content that you need to create?
Richard Hill:
Are there any tools specifically for sort of analyzing content and then giving you the ideal page needs to be a blog post and it needs to be this many keywords? Is there-
Greg Gifford:
I don't necessarily buy into the whole there's this certain keyword link.
Richard Hill:
Keyword length, I mean.
Greg Gifford:
It's really more about looking at the intent of the search query and writing the best answer for the intent of that query. So just because you have a competitor who has a 1500 word blog posts doesn't mean that you have to write a 2000 word blog post to outrank the guy. You could write 1000 word blog posts or a 750 word blog posts that answers the question better. So, it's more about the quality of the content than the length of the content.
Richard Hill:
You recreate behind the content to know what intent and what to write about, which is more related.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah. Because maybe it only takes the ideal, just for the sake of example, the perfect post to answer that specific phrases intent is 800 words. But somebody writes 1500 words because they think they need to write a longer post to rank for it. It's like you're in high school and you're trying to sound like you're a better writer than you are and you just add a bunch of extra crap in there.
Greg Gifford:
You don't need that. It's write the best answer. And then write the best answer and get some links to it so that it's more relevant and more powerful and that's what you do.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. All right, final question, Greg.
Greg Gifford:
All right.
Richard Hill:
You ready?
Greg Gifford:
I don't know. You're asking me that like it's going to be a curve ball and maybe I should like strap in.
Richard Hill:
No. It's not, it's not. I promise. So, I like to always finish on a book recommendation. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't have to be SEO, it doesn't have to be, it can be anything. As a individual, what would be the book choice or a book choice that you would recommend or what are your sort of favourite books right now?
Greg Gifford:
There is an author called Peter V. Brett.
Richard Hill:
Brett.
Greg Gifford:
He wrote a series of five books called the Demon Cycle. I'm awful for book recommendations. I do not read business books whatsoever or marketing books or management books. If I'm going to take the time to read, I read a lot. I read very fast. But if I'm going to read, I need to escape. So, this series of books might be the best books I've ever read. Amazing. By far the best world building of anything.
Greg Gifford:
I got turned on to him by a guy at DealerOn that I worked with. And I started reading them and I blew past where he was and so I had to wait for him to catch up so that I have somebody to talk about it. They're so good. And the guy just released the last book like a year ago. So, it's great because I hate when it's like Game of Thrones right now. I've been waiting for 10 years for the next book to come out.
Greg Gifford:
So, I burnt through all the other ones. I started reading the series before the show came out, but then now we've all been waiting for ... If you're a person that's reading the books, you've been waiting for 10 years for that next book to come out. So, whatever. This one, so great. So, so, so good. And I read through the first four and then had to wait like a couple of months for the last book to come out. But the last book came out. And then now, I actually heard a rumor that the guy's working on another series of five books that's like in the future also.
Richard Hill:
It's like your new Game of Thrones then you see it right-
Greg Gifford:
Way better than Game of Thrones. I can't ... hold on. I'll see what the first ... the first one is called ... in the US, it's called The Painted Man, but I don't remember what ... I think in the UK, it's ... Or no. In the UK, it's The Painted Man, in the US, it's The Warded Man.
Richard Hill:
Warded.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah. It's ... man. So, so good.
Richard Hill:
I was going to go straight in the Amazon I would say prime.
Greg Gifford:
That's a massive, massive books. So I used to do audio books. When I worked at the last gig, I had to drive to work every day. Now I work from home, but when I had to drive to work every day, I had a 30 minute commute there, 30 minute commute home. So I would do audio books. And so most audio books are maybe 10, 12, 15 hours. I think the last one in this Demon Cycle was like 42 hours. They're huge, they're huge.
Richard Hill:
Wow. Another level. Another level. So, you're going to have to wait probably another six years for the TV series, the Netflix, the Sky or whatever. Yeah.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah.
Richard Hill:
Okay. Well, thank you Greg. That's been amazing. So much value, so many tips, so many things there that the listeners can go away and implement. If the guys that are listening want to find out more about you, obviously we've mentioned a few of your sort of the resources, et cetera, but where's the best place to find out more about yourself or your agency?
Greg Gifford:
It's searchlabsdigital.com. Super easy. You can find out more about me on Twitter. That's kind of my social platform of choice. I live tweet a lot of conferences when we have conferences going. It's just @GregGifford. And then obviously you can email me, it's just Greg@searchlab and actually, we just rebranded the Search Lab digital.
Greg Gifford:
So it used to be Search Lab Chicago because somebody else has just searchlab.com. So, email address, it's just Greg@searchlabschicago.com because we're getting those switched over this week.
Richard Hill:
And then you've got your weekly updates as well, haven't you? Which-
Greg Gifford:
Yeah. So, that's if you go to searchlabdigital.com/blog every Tuesday, those Tuesday videos come out and those are typically short three to five minute videos. But every once in a while when I do have conferences, I'll share my entire conference presentation and I like to do it. If you go back and look at past videos at conferences, I will grab speakers and just get one quick tip from like 15 or 16 different people. So that's a pretty.
Richard Hill:
Your presentation Greg are a work of art.
Greg Gifford:
Thanks.
Richard Hill:
They are literally like ... It's like, Oh my God, it is literally like, how do you do that?
Greg Gifford:
And crazy fact, I don't have any live text in PowerPoint because every slide is a JPEG that I create in Photoshop so that I have 100% control over exactly how it looks because I'm a nerd like that.
Richard Hill:
You must spend a lot of time preparing for these coconferences. Obviously, you're doing, you said you've got 25 conferences planned.
Greg Gifford:
I had 22 scheduled this year. I'm sure that there's more later this year that I know I would be doing. It's just-
Greg Gifford:
... they're not picking speakers for October, November yet. But I had 22 that I knew for sure that I would be speaking at. And then everything March, April, May, June has been cancelled or postponed at this point. So, who knows what that number is going to end up being? I'm sure I'll still do a bunch this fall because I'm sure, I mean please hopefully we're back to normal by this fall. So, September, October conferences and I'll probably be on the road most of those two months.
Richard Hill:
Guys listening in, keep an eye on Greg's Twitter, you're going to see obviously all the presentations wherever they end up in terms of uploading them and live YouTube and Brighton SEO eventually I think they live stream quite a lot of stuff on there. A lot of the conferences as well.
Greg Gifford:
Yeah. If I end up on the stage, Brighton SEO always live streams the main stage. So, I was on the main stage last fall. It just depends. The way that they do it there is, they kind of figure out which speakers go together to kind of make the best little trio for that particular time slot. And then they put it up to vote to kind of see which ones are the most popular. So, if I make the main stage, I'll be on the live stream this fall. But ...
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Keep an eye on that. Well, thank you so much, Greg. I will see you again soon. Thank you.
Greg Gifford:
Thanks for having me.