S01E04 - Beyond Keywords: Unveiling the Secrets of Online Ranking

Transcript

Welcome to Moose Tales. I'm Jon with Two Moose Home Inspections and I have some short home inspection topics that I've been carrying around for a while. And I want to talk about them. Let's dive right in.

We aren't specifically going to be talking about advertising in the space of being a home inspector or you know, different strategies for how to move things forward. I want to start this off just by talking about the algorithm. The black box, the thing that nobody seems to know that much about, but everybody has an opinion about, and I also have an opinion about it.

let's talk about the algorithm and what that is.

whenever I do, let's talk about it in the context of Google, meaning that my business is listed on Google business.

Whenever somebody searches for my business using Google, how do I rank in their search page rankings? Whenever I send an email, do I use Google Gmail? Whenever I host a photo? Am I using Google photos whenever I drive to a home inspection by using Google Maps? So when we talk about the algorithm in the sense of Google, let's talk about the search engine journal.

That is a really interesting place that you can go and you can learn about a whole bunch of different updates that have occurred to the algorithm. So like, are you familiar with Pandora, Florida rank brain? Any of these things are changes or separate smaller algorithms that are being run on the search results or the indexing that Google does?

So if this is a little too high level just right now, let's just say that whenever there are options for Google to present to you, they are going to take a look at those options and say, well, somebody is asking for a business. Great. These are all the business pages. Somebody is asking for a business inside of the construction realm.

Great. Here are these businesses. Somebody specifically just wants inspections. Great. Here are those inspection companies. Somebody wants it in this area. Great. These are the inspectors in this area. Okay. Well, now we have however many inspectors in your area. But then how do you rank how do you get higher in those things? And in the past, it would have been, well, this is how you please the algorithm is you put in a bunch of keywords.

And so your website would say, Hi, I'm a home inspector who inspects homes. And when I'm in your home and I'm inspecting, I inspect the home as good as an inspector inspecting the home inspection Home would have inspected the home well, in the past. That would have really helped you rank number one. Let's say you had a company called AAA home inspections.

Well, in the Yellow Pages you would rank number one. But things have changed. We don't use the Yellow Pages anymore. And the algorithm doesn't really promote pages that have just thrown in a bunch of keywords to try to rank highly. Now, do those things still matter? Yeah, sure. They still matter. Keep making your blogs, keep doing your things, you know, whatever.

Like follow all the old school traditional things. What I will caution you about is a small tangent here. Let's just talk about what happened with AT&T and all of their payphones. So at a period in time, not everybody had a cell phone. In fact, nobody had cell phones. And the only option was payphones. Now, payphones made a lot of money because a lot of people needed to make phone calls.

And so what ended up happening, well, that that was being sold off into our market, into, you know, the public market, the public domain. And so people were able to lease a phone from AT&T and say, I actually owned ten, you know, payphones. I owned the payphone on the corner of this and this, the payphone over here, whatever.

And they would lease for a fee and then people would use those phones and then they would be able to collect the quarters from those phones and make money. Well, the problem is, is that AT&T saw the writing on the wall. And so then what they did is they started to sell off all of these assets that they knew would be worthless, selling off all of this information, all these assets that they knew would be worthless because what was right around the corner, cell phones.

And now they took all that money from selling off all those payphones and they built one of the largest cellular networks in the country. They also want a really good contract with departments of emergency management on what cell phone towers are going to be used for such things to really build out that infrastructure. Verizon really dropped the ball on that, but that's a whole other topic.

So what I'm saying is that they saw the writing on the wall, so they sold all these assets, they sold them for a price because they knew that they really didn't have a value because what they could see was what the future was. And so a lot of times you'll see these people offering courses, you'll see these people offering all this insight about you need to put in all these keywords here.

This is a keyword generator. Pay us a ton of money for this keyword generator. You need to, you know, do these blog posts here, pay us all this money to be able to make these blog posts and do all this kind of stuff. And again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't. I'm just saying that the way that it looks is that the algorithm does not reward that the way that it used to.

It is the old payphone in an era that has way more information.

So let's think about a few things algorithmically.

Whenever I have my business on Google business, that's great.

People are going to review my business. Okay, So if people review my business, how does Google know that that's not just somebody that I paid for overseas at a farm to just start putting in all kinds of reviews and to do it strategically, not just to dump 500 reviews this week and then zero reviews next week, but to, you know, just trickle it in.

How does it know? Well, they say that they don't read your email and I believe them. They don't read your email except they do read the email to understand the context, to see if it's spam or phishing or other things like that. So they actually literally do have to read your email, but they say that they don't read the email for like advertising purposes and whatever.

Okay. Well, here's my question. Is their page ranking considered advertising that they don't read it for, or is that just considered understanding of, you know, the Internet or whatever it does? Do they maybe not read it word for, let's say read it word for word and then create a summation? Possibly. So let's just say hypothetically, because I don't work for Google and nobody that I've seen on the Internet really has a good answer of whether or not this is happening or not.

But let's just think critically about this. I use Gmail for our email to be sent out and Google can see which customers I'm interacting with. Now, these customers actually have Gmail accounts, so now you see that on the back end of our email. Our email service is Gmail and we have people that are using Gmail accounts and we are interacting back and forth and then those people put a review on the Internet.

Do you think that that review will rank with more power, more strength than a review from an IP address that's in a totally different country? And the answer is, yeah, it does. And so we have the email that we're using how many emails in my sending as a business? Who am I sending emails to? Who ends up writing reviews for me?

And then we say, okay, well what are some other things you can help rank the business? Okay, well, who what else do they own or they own? YouTube. Google owns YouTube. So what kind of videos am I producing? I'm producing videos about home inspections and home inspection content and topics. So now whenever we talk about page ranking or even just Google business ranking, if I going to rank higher, well, I don't know.

Do I have a whole bunch of different places in Google software, like all of my home inspection photos, you know, that we have our 360 degree photos and then we back up every single one of our photos. Now, I understand that our photos are being stored, you know, on a different server with our actual inspection reports. But, you know, if we're going to talk about backup strategies, we want that to be in at least two different locations.

The 3 to 1 idea of how we're going to back up all of our information. And so we have all of our home inspection photos, we have home inspection reports, we have all of our 360 photos, all of that on Google photos. Great. So then we are extremely active on email, extremely active on Google photos. We are active in our Google by business profile.

We are active on YouTube. And then all the comments that we get people talking about stuff and then us responding to that. All of that is saying to Google, I am not an AI bot, I am a real person, I am a real business and my business is active and so do the blog posts matter? Well, just judging from my understanding and I'm only saying from my understanding of taking a look at Google's resources that they give people to be able to track what is important on their website, My blogs have done nothing for me, literally nothing.

And so if we look at the amount of web traffic that I'm getting for A, B, C, or D thing, it's kind of odd because a lot of the traditional ways of ranking high on Google aren't really what it seems like Google is paying attention to, because I'm just looking at how much information is on the web as far as like how many people are visiting my website, how long they're staying on certain pages, yada, yada yada.

But here's the thing. Whenever I do something, I don't do it necessarily to please the customer or to please, you know, the realtor. I'm doing it to please the algorithm. Because if I make a really, really good 30 minute long video about Decks, if I make a really, really good 20 minute video about mold, if I make a really, really good video, well, surprisingly, the frozen pipes video seems to be doing really well organically because people have frozen pipes this time of year.

But what I'm saying is, whenever I make those things, the majority of people don't watch them. If you take a look at the videos on our main channel, there aren't that many views on them. You know, I mean, yes, we're like the hundreds of thousands of views. But what I'm trying to say is those longer format ones, not a lot of people watch those.

But you know, who transcribes every single one. So that way they can make they can make all the subtitles YouTube does. And do you know who owns YouTube? Google does. And so if you're telling me that Google has a transcript of everything I said, all the comments that people are leaving, that I'm leaving and they know that we're also associated with this email address and we're getting these emails back and forth and these people are putting reviews up.

Well, then our page is going to rank a lot higher than a lot of other pages that don't have that amount of traffic, that amount of movement. And that's what I'm talking about whenever I talk about the algorithm is that you can't just put crap into it. You can't just say, Here's 100 keywords. What you have to say is here is actual useful content that people would enjoy ingesting.

And then whenever people do again, like frozen pipes or some other videos that have been really, really popular, whenever people do, that's going to make Google View your site, your whole profile of what are you as a business, It's going to make that entire profile, then rank a lot higher than it otherwise would, because keep in mind, there's well over 1000 metrics that Google's algorithm is tracking.

It's not as simple as the stuff that that the influencers are trying to link to you of here. Search often here is search engine optimization for you. If you pay for my $30 a day course, I know that they are being AT&T. When AT&T was trying to sell off assets, do you think that the number one premier best search engine optimization companies out there that are optimizing websites for companies like Nike or companies for large auto manufacturers or whomever, do you think that they're really employing the exact same things that we are employing?

To an extent, yes, because those are the basics. Those are the fundamentals. But what other strategies do they have and what are the tools that they have at their disposal? So all I'm saying is that as an everyday regular person, what you can be doing is just making the best content that you can, educating the masses the best you can.

And whenever Google creates a profile of you, this is based off of this domain, which would be too much home inspections dot com. They branch out in these ways and every time they branch they're talking about the same topic. They're talking about home inspections, home inspection businesses, and that's about it.

So the last thing that I'll leave you with is do we pay for advertisements?

And the answer right now is no, because I don't think that we can convert in the way that we want to convert whenever we pay for advertisements. And then you might say, well, Jon, why is that? Why don't you think that you can convert the way that you want to convert? You can get so specific. You could say, I want a person between this age and this age who's buying a house in this area, yada, yada, yada.

Great. Well, where do we get that data? How do we know that somebody's going to buy a house? Because Google isn't going to go to a bank and say, who has applied for a loan? Sell me their personal information. Now, is it possible that banks may want to sell personal information? Yes, but I don't really think banks do that.

So how do I actually know that I have a person who is about to purchase a home? Do I have realtors that are selling their information, possibly inadvertently, just like some home inspectors are inadvertently selling information? Like if you want to sign up, you know, your customers for A, B or C ancillary service that you don't have. What you're actually doing is selling your customers information.

You are saying, here's a telephone number, here's an email address. Here is a name you're probably without you knowing, sending what the addresses for the house, which is then giving them all the information on how much these people pay for taxes, how much these people paid for the House closing costs, everything. I mean, literally everything. If you give the name and telephone number and the email address and the address, that is all that they need to be able to make and a huge understanding of that individual.

And so you've just sold your customers information. I don't think banks are doing that. I don't think realtors are intentionally doing that. And so if I were to put out, you know, something in Google AdSense, let's say, and I said, hey, I'm targeting people who are buying homes in my area, how many times have you had a Zillow in one night with your significant other where you say, let's just take a look at houses, you know, in this beautiful place that we want to be?

And how many people think that Breckenridge, Silverthorne, Frisco, Dillon All these places up in the Rocky Mountains are just wonderful places that they would want to live. And how many of them are looking at these multimillion dollar houses, how many people are looking at all this stuff? And just like daydreaming and having a good time? Do I have to pay each one of those people for seeing my ad?

They're never going to use my business because they're never going to buy a house in this area. So would it be a good use of my money at this point? I can't really say there's going to be a good return on investment, But, you know, maybe I'm just a little bit of a negative, Nancy. I don't know. I'll leave it up to you.

That's a pod.