The Zoomers to Boomers Business Show

Mastering SEO and Schema Code to Skyrocket Your Home Business Visibility

• Hank Eder / Scott Humphries

Share episode

Ever wondered how to drastically increase your online visibility and generate more leads for your home business? This episode promises to transform your understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) with expert insights from Scott Humphries of Right Path Marketing. Scott emphasizes that an effective website is more than just good looks—it's about building robust online brand assets and maintaining consistent, authoritative content across multiple platforms. Drawing a vivid analogy to a librarian meticulously organizing books, Scott illustrates how properly labeled and categorized web pages can help Google efficiently retrieve and rank your content.

We also demystify the concept of structured data schema code and its pivotal role in enhancing search engine visibility. Think of schema code as a detailed user's manual for search engines; it provides them with crucial information about your business to boost your online presence. Scott shares practical tips on generating and refining schema code using accessible tools like ChatGPT and online validators. Additionally, we discuss the significance of Google My Business in contributing to the Google Knowledge Graph and why hiring professionals for complex SEO tasks can be a game-changer. Packed with actionable advice, this episode will equip you with the knowledge needed to master SEO and elevate your home business.

Website: https://therightpathmarketing.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RightPathMA
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therightpathmarketing/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottahumphries/ 

Be sure to visit BizRadio.US to discover hundreds more engaging conversations, local events and more.

Hank:

Welcome to the Home Business Success Show. Join us as we speak to home business entrepreneurs for tips, tricks, do's and even don'ts for running a successful home business. Welcome everyone, I'm Hank Eder, also known as Hank the PR Guy, host of the Home Business Success Show, and you're listening to bizradious all entrepreneurs all the time. Today's show is part of my two-part interview with marketer Scott Humphreys. Scott owns the Right Path Marketing, a strategic digital marketing agency located in the greater Boston area. The agency assists trade and service providers in increasing sales by focusing on effective messaging and other strategies. After observing that companies who focus their marketing strategy purely on aesthetics, like logos and design, often struggle to meet their sales goals, scott founded the Right Path Marketing in 2022 and now steers brands towards sales success through a messaging-first strategy in digital marketing services.

Hank:

In the first show, we discussed brand consistency and messaging. Today, we're talking about the changing face of search engine optimization, also known as SEO. Welcome back to the show, scott. Thank you, hank. Great to be with you again. Always a pleasure. Hey, these days, everyone and their pets have websites, and I'm not even exaggerating. I see websites, I see social media pages for people's pets.

Scott :

My pets don't have one.

Hank:

Should I get them? Maybe you should if you want to get with the program. But basically some of these sites are just, you know, digital business cards sitting around looking pretty and not doing anything else, and some really bring in leads that convert into customers. What's the difference? What are some of the tools that the more effective ones use for online visibility?

Scott :

Oh, how much time do we have? No, I mean, I don't mean to make it sound daunting, but the reality is you simply can't, you know, build a website, put it out there and expect it to be a magnet for researchers, right? So what I can tell you, hank, is a lot has changed in search just over the last couple of years, really more than at any other time in the history of it, right? So I'm going to focus on some of the more prominent tools and think of it this way Search engines are out there looking for answers to what the question the searcher is looking for, but they're not just going to send people to any old place that has that answer. They want to verify that the source of the information brings expertise, authority and trustworthiness. So you need your content to have those qualities on your website. But you need more than that.

Scott :

And what Google and I talk about Google a lot, because 90% of the search traffic at this moment still goes through Google they're going to actually try to verify your company in as many ways possible. So that includes what I like to call, and what's becoming a common term, is your online brand assets, right? So your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn profile your Google business page, your listing on Yelp, your listing in. I'm mentioning a lot of location-specific sources but platforms, but there's also topical and industry specific platforms, member organizations that are relevant for your industry or on the topics that you are covering with your content. And the more of those entities that have your information and then the more they sort of match up with one another, the stronger the signal that sends to the search engines and it really gets very detailed, like if you have one logo in one place and a totally different one in another. It's not. You know, google actually has a way to, you know, determine the likeness of these things. So the descriptions, the terms, the product names, everything, the city and town, the exact address. If you change your address, you got to make sure it changes everywhere, otherwise you're going to confuse people. So Google doesn't like to be confused On your website. You want to think of it as a directory, right? So what Google is?

Scott :

I like to say that it's a document retrieval system with x-ray vision, so people tend to think of it as a website finder. Really, it is a page finder, okay, and it's going to take a quick look through the entire Internet, but if you don't have your pages labeled in a certain way. You know you think of it as like this big file folder. If you don't have like tabs over each section. If you pull out a document, the document doesn't have no clear sections on it. It's going to be very hard for someone to quickly scan it and understand what it's all about. But that's what you want to do with Google. So there's a whole bunch of different things, technical terms like title tags, headline tags, h1 tags, as they're commonly called. You want to have those on every page and you don't want to have duplicates because that's going to confuse Google, right? Good God.

Scott :

Structured data, also known as Schema Co. It's like a user manual for the search engine, right? It's further help what's your website all about? And you say where are you listed, what organizations are you a member of? And it's really putting together this amazing jigsaw puzzle on your company, and so the more signals you can send, the better, but it's one being listed in as many reputable places as possible that are either social media can be broad, but industry specific sites and location-specific directories are important. You'll get full credit for those links and I told you there's a lot to it. I'm starting to get off track trying to give you the explanation because I could take it in a lot of different directions. But the key is making it easy. Like a librarian going through a library putting away books, you want that document retriever to have an easier time finding stuff.

Hank:

I like what you said about having tabs on top of your folders. And if Google is looking for pages and each page has its own unique name, like folks who are like us, who are digital marketing agencies, we have different pages. We might have a page called design or logo design. We might have a page called website design. So then on those pages, you would want the content on those pages to match the headline of the page Right, so that when you look and if you were looking at physical file folders, that's what you would find in that file folder Exactly, and you have sub headlines and you know like there'slines and there's hierarchy on each page too.

Scott :

So if you're covering sort of a bunch of subtopics, having like an H2 for a secondary headline and then, if that further breaks down, an H3 for that and really it's organization, if you're website is organized, search engine will have an easier time crawling it. Now you bring up a good point about tabs right, which I, you know we use that as an analogy for title tags. You don't want to overcomplicate the title tags for your main pages. What we see is a lot of like keyword stuffing and putting into like a lot of stuff. That makes it very complicated for search engines to determine what that page is all about.

Scott :

Most of the time, all you need to tell you have on there, especially the main pages, the blogs. You can get a little bit more detailed on blog pages, but for main pages, home you know about services, products, have the brand name you know. Tell them who you are, tell them you know what you do, like your product or service category, maybe a call to action kind of thing there, but not too many words. And then if you're a location, specific type business, a third part of that is where you do it North.

Scott :

Carolina region and just keep that simple, because that's going to help build your brand footprint. If you're if you're over-focused on the keywords, it's going to come back to back backfire on you.

Hank:

You know there's a lot of things that go into algorithms and you know there's people that I've run into that claim to know everything there is to know about algorithms, but those people are usually run screaming into the night when they tell me that. And the people who say I can get you on search, you know on page one of the search engines in a week. I tell them that you know alarm bells go off. But one thing I hear a lot and you mentioned it earlier is the industry-driven links, authoritative links to your site from related web sources, and if we could touch on that just a little bit and why that's so important.

Scott :

So an important part of search, as I mentioned, is backlinks links to your website, because that further validates your credibility and authority in an area whether it's a geographic area or a topical area to the search engines. It's common for people in our industry to say we'll help you find high authority links, and high authority means that a lot of people subscribe to it, a lot of people visit it, and that helps your authority. When a high authority link, but if it lacks that relevance to your offer and to what your website's all about, you won't get the credit for that link and it's not going to help you as much as you can. So it's an extra layer of detail that might be getting overlooked, especially as search continues to change. It's evolved so much, but it's probably changed more in the last year, year and a half, than at any other point in search's history.

Hank:

One example I can give to that for our listening audience is that if you were a digital recording studio, you would not benefit from having a link from a hair salon, that kind of thing, so it should be related to your industry. If you were a digital recording studio and you had a link from, say, a manufacturer of high-end recording gear, that would be an authoritative link.

Scott :

It'd be authoritative and relevant. That would be an authoritative link. It'd be authoritative and relevant and that's the relevant part I think is as important as anything. Right, because you know there's something called black hat tactics. That was, you know. We've seen it used from time to time. It might help in the short term, but in the long term, google tends to catch on to it. But I'd even go further just make sure your white hat approach is 100% on point or close to it. Right, because it really is about nowadays making sure all the information checks out and it doesn't make anything like oh, that seems like an odd connection there. The search engines are just so smart now that they can see through that horse hockey.

Hank:

Right Black hat and white hat practices. Think of the old cowboy movies, where the bad guy always wore the black hat and the good guy always wore the white hat.

Scott :

Those are in black and white right. Yeah, yeah, that's where they get the oh, black and white, yeah, color, yeah, yeah, black. And white.

Hank:

But yeah, they were in black and white, but they had the black hat and the white hat. You know, in our prep for this show, you mentioned to me that SEO has become more entity-based than keyword-based. What does that mean for the mere mortals like myself even though I'm in SEO to a large degree and to our audience, what does that really mean? They're entity-based rather than keyword-based.

Scott :

So keywords are more common words, right, cake, birthday cake. Right, you know, nut-free birthday cake near me is something you might type into the search. But that was before AI became a big part of the answer, and so now the questions that are being asked are you know, where can I find a birthday cake made in a nut free facility in the XYZ town region? And people are having more conversations now with the search engine than before. Ai became a big piece of the Q&A part.

Scott :

So what has happened is the keywords part of it have become less of a factor, and when I say entities, those are proper, more proper nouns, right?

Scott :

So your product name, your company name, your founder's name and then some of the associations that you have, maybe you're tied to a certain industry organization and you have a link to it from that site, and so these entities are starting to piece together a real picture about your company. It's building what's called the Google knowledge graph. You really need now that foundation in place and it's going to help businesses tremendously, I think, because the little business that might have a hard time moving up in a search ranking, but if they offer something very unique and they have the right listings in certain places and they're on the right websites and the entities are various places. It's on the back end of their website as well. It's going to draw a really nice picture for Google to make sure that that company gets the attention it deserves when someone search for something that's exactly suited for that company to service. Does that make sense, hank? It does, it does I'm trying to explain.

Hank:

But now having these entities on the back end of your own website, that's sending traffic in another direction. But I guess, if the algorithms see two-way traffic, then that's sending traffic in another direction. But I guess, uh, if the algorithm see two-way traffic, then that's a good thing if it's on the back end of your site.

Scott :

So let me, uh, you're familiar with structured data schema code, as it's also known. I know it's like not the team, you walk into a cocktail party talking about right, but um, it's like a user's manual for search engines. Okay, and it's always been valuable because it kind of helps even make that directory even more organized. If you put in, like some of these like uh things in there that says yes, I'm a member of the local chamber of commerce, I'm a member of the digital recording artists industry of America. We offer, you know this, certain type of service in recording and it has these explanations that's going to tell the search engines more about your company, educate the knowledge graph further, and then also, you know if it sees those entities right right there, and then it sees those entities in other places where your company's of schema code. That's all housed on your site and very few websites really have advanced schema code in it. That's very detailed and helping the search engines.

Hank:

I guess that's the difference between taking care of some basic SEO on your site, you know, like the H1 tags, the H2 tags, relevant content, those kind of things and actually then hiring a really heavy duty SEO expert to write all the schema codes and make sure everything is like you know ship shape.

Scott :

I got a secret for you, hank. I mean heavy duty. Yeah, it's.

Scott :

It's a little bit more difficult than filling in the H1 tags on a website builder, but you can ask ChatGBT to write up the code. Then you could put it into your web builder in the right place and if you need help with that, chatgbt can tell you where that goes. And then you can run tests on that code and things like schemaorg and rich results, a couple of online tools that are free. And then it might say, yeah, you got a couple of errors or issues. So then you tell chat dbt, yeah, uh, that these issues were found, so it refines the code further. And then you plug it in, you test it again, the errors whittled down, they whittled down. You ask chat gbt you know how can we add more uh, relevant, advanced uh schema code to it? It'll help you and before you know it, you have a really well written script that you can copy and paste into the back end of the website. So, yeah, it's not easy, but you don't necessarily have to know coding language thoroughly to be able to get it right.

Hank:

Right. So you just tell ChatGPT the name of your website and say write a schema code for this website.

Scott :

Yeah, and it gives you a start. So it starts, you know, it gives you a bit of a template. You got to kind of correct it with the right terms and things like that. So you know, it's still something that I think most people don't want to touch. So hiring, you know, someone to do it is a good move, but I don't think it's quite at the level of complication that it once was.

Hank:

Right, right. Well, seo used to almost be a bad word to a lot of people. Whoa SEO? How do I do that? I'm not getting involved in that, but yeah, that being said, there's other aspects Like you mentioned Google, my Business, and there are other tools like Yelp and things like that. They think they play a pretty strong role in that. What did you call it? The Google Knowledge graph?

Scott :

Yeah, the Google knowledge graph, yeah, so those listings certainly help piece together a puzzle right.

Scott :

And if agencies like mine they have agency subscriptions to tools like Yext or SEMrush that can automate getting you listed in about 70 plus different places.

Scott :

The Google Business Profile is an extremely useful tool for businesses that deal in a region or a geographic area area, and when you hear people talk about I'm going to get you to page one or at the top of the list in Google they're probably referring to the local stack, which is that section of local businesses. When you you know, just below you should usually see like a couple of sponsored ads and then maybe one organic search result, and then you have the stack box, which I think a lot of people focus on more, and it is, I don't say, in week one or one month I don't give a timeframe necessarily but it is achievable to get in there in a number of months, depending on your competition, of course, and what they're doing. But it is, you know, instead of competing against everyone in the world, you're competing against people in your region, so it's a little bit more achievable. You get quicker results from being higher in the local stack and getting in the top three is really the goal that we work to help our clients with.

Hank:

Very cool, you know, I think in this short time that we've had, and, believe it or not, the time has flown by, but I think we've gone far for a lot of people in at least taking a little bit of the mystery out of SEO. Whether it's something that businesses should or would want to tackle themselves is another story and, like so many things, even for business owners, even if you feel that maybe you can, you're still better off putting it in the hands of a professional, because then that leaves you free to do the things that you do best.

Scott :

So, yeah, Could I build a shed in my backyard? Yeah, I probably could, but it'll take me much longer than someone that does it much more regularly and understands how the joints should line up and what size nails to use and which tools to use and all that stuff. So right, exactly, it's like it's like today.

Hank:

I have a guy laying drainage pipe in my driveway. Can I dig the holes and lay the pipe? I probably can't Do. I want to, no way. Anyway, that being said, how can our listeners what's the best way they can get in touch with you?

Scott :

Go to therightpathmarketingcom. That's the, and then right R-I-G-H-T pathmarketingcom. We have a contact page and our telephone number and information's there, so check us out.

Hank:

Very cool. Thanks for being here with us today, scott, and to our listeners, join us next Wednesday on the Home Business Success Show right here on bizradious. Remember, you can achieve success, freedom and independence in your own home business. I've done it, scott has done it, and you can do it too. See you again next week. This is Hank Eder, wishing all of you a fabulous day of home business success.