Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband. I've got some SEO advice for you. But I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use Hello, how are

Meredith: 1:01

you doing?

Meredith's Husband: 1:02

Good. How are you doing? Hi,

Meredith: 1:03

I'm great. Thank you. How are you?

Meredith's Husband: 1:07

Good. I'm really good.

Meredith: 1:08

Oh, yes.

Meredith's Husband: 1:09

It's been a good week.

Meredith: 1:11

It's been a great week. I have to say,

Meredith's Husband: 1:13

let's let everybody know. Yeah, we did this week, I visited one of your s not technically a photo group. But one of your one of your groups.

Meredith: 1:20

What am I groups? Yeah, you made a star appearance. And it was awesome. I was first of all, I so proud of you. And you have so many people. And everybody had a really great reaction. And everyone was awesome. It was a Tuesday together, the New York edition. And it was

Meredith's Husband: 1:43

a great group. It's great. I really enjoyed it. I thought everybody there was absolutely lovely. I was like, I want to actually be a part of this.

Meredith: 1:50

Yeah, you should be part of it. It's great. It's great. Kate is the our fearless leader. She's awesome. Everybody in it. Every buddy in it is love. Just lovely.

Meredith's Husband: 2:04

So it was basically I talked a little bit about SEO as a as a sort of guest speaker about SEO and then you were the guest speaker. Yeah, we did some some q&a. I thought it was great. I think everybody got value out of it.

Meredith: 2:16

I think people got a lot Their minds were blown. And what a lot of people said was how you simplified this murky, foreign alien tying?

Meredith's Husband: 2:28

Well, that's what I'm trying to do. But at the end, somebody said, It was a lovely question. I think it was Kate, but I'm not sure. She said. How can we give you money? Oh, man, I don't get that question.

Meredith: 2:42

I don't think it was. It was this other woman who was great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 2:47

Which I was. I was that's flattered to receive that question, but made me think. Yeah, if there are people like there's no, there's literally no way right now. If somebody wants to give us money,

Meredith: 2:59

patrons.

Meredith's Husband: 3:01

There's nothing. We've said leave a review. And we've kind of been it's kind of been like a soft launch as we've been a little bit under the radio, radar,

Meredith: 3:09

radio and on the radio.

Meredith's Husband: 3:13

So I figured, yes. You can stop singing

Meredith: 3:18

for everyone's sanity.

Meredith's Husband: 3:20

Yeah. So I set up a subscription. So you can go and subscribe. You can go to merits husband and subscribe. It's five bucks a month. That's not a ton of money. It's in place of something like Patreon, if you want to support and be part of our team, and say thank you. If this. Yeah, yeah, do that.

Meredith: 3:38

Nice little token of appreciation of appreciation.

Meredith's Husband: 3:42

Yes. And I don't know, you know, the other podcasts that do this. I know, there's, there's often like benefits. You know, if you subscribe, you get this that I haven't decided on the benefits? Well, because a lot of them, a lot of them, they always seem to Oh, you get bonus content. Which to me seems really weird. Because I put the best content I can in the podcast. Yeah. So any bonus content is going to be extra. It's not the best, right? I put the best. So you'd be you'd be paying for something that's normally free in order to get worse content. That just doesn't make

Meredith: 4:13

sense. What did they say? Yeah, that? Well,

Meredith's Husband: 4:17

I mean, they're, you know, some of them are like, I suppose a different type of content, perhaps we may we may do that. We may do you know, an additional level of some sort at some point, which is like we can do, we do weekly one on one set, we do something else. I don't know what it right. Right. Right. When it'll be it'll be

Meredith: 4:35

good. Oh, if you're thinking about it, it'll be good.

Meredith's Husband: 4:39

Yeah, it's not gonna be cheesy, like outtakes.

Meredith: 4:42

Do you know, I really think I think people have are filmed. No films are filled to the brim with marketing bullshit. You know, like, hey, agree. Here's my free webinar. And then they're like,

Meredith's Husband: 5:00

webinars are 45 minute commercial.

Meredith: 5:03

It's a 45 minute commercial. And I guess I would be the person to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's great.

Meredith's Husband: 5:10

I suppose in some ways, I am podcast, this podcast is a 30 Minute, weekly commercial.

Meredith: 5:17

Yep. Well, but no, because it's giving away information that's necessary and important. And it's not giving like a tidbit. And then if you really want this stuff, well, yeah, or maybe. I don't know.

Meredith's Husband: 5:32

I cut all the tips out

Meredith: 5:33

Have you ever listened to

Meredith's Husband: 5:37

webinars or suppose that's the that's what a webinar is supposed to be. It's supposed to be some useful information. And then at the end, if you know if you want more than you can do this, but it has, it's really grown into an art form of like, this is the structure. You spend five minutes on this and five minutes on that. And then you asked this question, and then you ask that question. And then you show the price again, and then you show all the add ons. Yeah, it's very,

Meredith: 5:59

you always say, wait to the end, and we'll have a really special offer for you. Yeah, can you tell? I've seen a few.

Meredith's Husband: 6:06

Yeah. Anyway, so what we're doing,

Meredith: 6:10

living and people love to sell their wares. You know, it's not a criticism, criticism of it. It is merely an observation. We're

Meredith's Husband: 6:21

saturated. Yeah, it's been overused. Anyway, you can go now to Mary's husband and subscribe. dollars a month.

Meredith: 6:29

That's a nice way to have a little support for that price of a coffee.

Meredith's Husband: 6:33

Yeah, it's, what is that? Like? Just over $1 per episode. So if you're not if, if these things are not worth $1 apiece, I'm doing something wrong. You know, when people are sort of pitching their listeners for support, and things like that, I think of a podcast called the Dark Net diaries. Jack reciter is the host. Great. It's very cool. It's about hacking and stuff. So nice, buddy. Yeah. It's super popular, though. It's super, super popular. That's one of the like, top 1/10 of 1% of downloads. Yeah, it's really good. If you're interested in hacking or computer stuff at all, which geographers are Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so he said, you know, he has his Patreon page, and he said it really well once. And he said, something like, you know, most things in life that you buy, you go to the store, you pay for them, and then you take them home, and then you find out if you like them, right. You know, I guess sometimes maybe there are exceptions, like when you eat a meal, but he's like, a podcast is the exact opposite. You get to consume it all, as much of it as you want, and then decide if you want to pay for it. Oh, interesting, which I thought was a really, you know, kind of eloquent way of framing that

Meredith: 7:46

yeah, my first question is, what if people want to pay more than $5? But that's me just looking. I'll set up No, it's okay. If I think it's perfect.

Meredith's Husband: 7:55

It's honestly not the money so much that matters. But it's it's more of the kind of the thought that counts. Support from for me anyway. Yes. I love like the Group on Tuesday. Yeah. I love seeing people's light bulb, their light bulbs. Go on. Get excited about things. That's great. Yeah.

Meredith: 8:12

So wonderful. I'd love for you. Okay, so let's move on. Yes. What is on the ticket? Today?

Meredith's Husband: 8:19

There was I did get a follow up question from our last episode, I think, our last episode, which was a week before Thanksgiving, so we had it we had a week off.

Meredith: 8:28

Yeah, but no one's gonna, who people are listening now knows when they're gonna cook. Right?

Meredith's Husband: 8:32

Yeah, true. In any way. In that episode, I had mentioned something about exact match domains, and how they're not needed. They're not because you had received an email saying, Hey, I have this domain. best photographers in brooklyn.com. Do you want to buy it for $500? And I was saying that's a waste of money. Oh, right. Right. Right. That doesn't help SEO anymore. And somebody said, Well, what about? It does seem to work sometimes for like my company name and things like that. And it's, it's a good question. And I probably should have tried to clarify a little more. I'll try to explain what Google was was trying to do here. They wanted to eliminate this market of people buying all these extra domain names best, this best that best is in geo city, whatever, and then sell them and this this was becoming a, you know, a noticeable market. And so they wanted to stop that. So what they did, and they needed to be careful doing Google is omniscient. Yeah, there. Yeah. Yeah. But they, they really do try to not be evil. Like they tried to do good things. Yeah. So they needed to eliminate that. But they also they needed to be careful, because if you're, they don't want to make it so that so let's take your domain name Meredith Zinner photography, if they took away all sorts of matching of keywords and domains, then when somebody searches for Mayor designer photographer, your site's not going to come up if it doesn't match with the domain. So they needed to be careful. They needed to find a way to eliminate some but not all. So I think the best way to think about this is if it's like a dictionary word, if it's a word that's in the dictionary, or if or slang or common used in culture today. It's not going to help you rank for that term. If it's not a dictionary term, like Meredith Zinner is not in the dictionary, believe it or not. Yeah. Then it will help you like call. Yeah. But think of it that way. That's how you that's how you should think of it so you don't need to buy those extra domain names. However, what I do recommend you do To buy variations of your business name, such as soy Meritus, dinner photography with and without the hyphens Meritus, inner photography.org dot info, Zinner photography.com, like things like that, because what happens is once you grow and you start to establish some brand awareness, and people are searching for you by name, other people are going to go buy up those domain names, and then put up a website and try to get some some try to sort of steal some of the traffic that's looking for you. Wow, that will that will happen. If you if your brand grows to gain visibility that's happened with my own brand. Really? Yeah, I had. So I have my company name.com, I had a bunch of variations. I had the within without hyphens, and I had the.com or net, biz, all those, I let the dot info go because it was it was like, or maybe it was the dud or one of them where it's more expensive. A sick doesn't matter. Within a week somebody had purchased it and put up a site. It didn't look like mine. But it certainly was an SEO agency. Yeah, within a week, within a week, it was online. So people are out there and they have weights. They have bots that are scanning and watching what people are searching for. And then they're going to also have bots to monitor those domains. When they become available. They'll just buy them automatically. And they'll probably get a notification say, hey, put up a website that looks like this one. And that's what they do. That'll happen. Wow, that happens all the time. Okay, anyway, so wanted to clarify that that's a good, that's a good move. And don't go crazy. Don't buy like hundreds of domain names, right?

Meredith: 12:13

And where do you go to get these domain names?

Meredith's Husband: 12:16

I buy? I buy them at Google domains, Google domain, you can get them at GoDaddy go I'm not a big fan of GoDaddy hosting, I would say don't host your website at GoDaddy. But oh, we used to host mine a long time ago. Yeah. But they're they're very cheap. Okay. And you get what you pay for. In that situation? I get them at Google domains, or they're just 12 bucks flat.

Meredith: 12:38

And so you just Google Google domains? Yeah, I

Meredith's Husband: 12:41

think Google Yes. Domains? I think you can probably, I think it's domains.google.com. Probably something like that. But it's an I figure, I mean, what, you know, Google is a tech giant, there's they've got to be at least as secure as any other place where you're gonna get your website, their feature set is fine. They're not trying to make money off of off of you for your domains. Yeah, GoDaddy is GoDaddy is going to try to sell you a whole bunch of crap. If you get a domain there. Google is not making their money off your domains. So there's no they're not going to try to sell you a bunch of extra crap. Right? So which I like it's yeah, like, you know, just plus, plus, if their support is great. And plus, if you're if you're if you have your business email backed by Gmail, then it just seems to make even more sense.

Meredith: 13:28

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Thank you.

Meredith's Husband: 13:31

Okay, so CTAs this week, CTA call to actions calls to action calls to action call? Yeah, that's, it's kind of weird. It's calls to action but CTA is. So the plural is,

Meredith: 13:45

oh, CTA is because it

Meredith's Husband: 14:26

should be it should? Technically, I guess it would be yes. No, cease to a i. Okay, so this is this is something I see all the time. I've seen it a couple of times this week, both talking with a with a photographer, and also with one of my normal clients. Okay, it's and it's something that you're gonna see all over the place until you get up to it until your company if you're, if your business is at a size where you have a dedicated marketing professional, yeah. Just doing marketing. That's, that's kind of where I see where I stopped seeing this issue. Okay. And the issue is, your CTAs are either generic, or there's multiple, there's too many. A generic CTA is like if you go to a website and says contact us, yeah. Or sign up. Yeah. So that's generic, that there's no incentive. I mean, do you personally go online thinking, You know what, I want it I'm gonna go online, and I'm gonna contact somebody.

Meredith: 15:23

No, you only want to contact somebody if you either want something or there's trouble.

Meredith's Husband: 15:28

Yeah, right. So don't make it generic. This is what happened with a client of mine earlier this week. A new client. And I'll explain that, but what first I want to say your CTA, typically, the the CTA is going to be the biggest button on any web page. That's gonna that's typically a CTA. Right. And then for your business, the CTA should be what do you want the user to do next? Right. Okay.

Meredith: 15:52

Is that's the ultimate that's when they come to the page after they've seen the stuff. This is where you where you want to go?

Meredith's Husband: 16:01

Yes. Direct them, I guess so. I don't know. Yeah, this is the purpose. This is literally the purpose of having a website. It's to get people to to Take the next step. This is this is the end of the marketing journey, and hopefully the beginning of the sales journey. So it's typically the biggest button on the page. It's what you want the user to do next. But it needs to be presented from the users perspective. So not contact us. How many? How often have you seen get a free quote? Yeah. Are our quotes not free? Usually, I mean, most often, they're usually free, unless you're having a plumber come out to look at something. And he's gonna say it's 150 bucks to come out and give you an estimate. Okay. All right. Well, it's true quotes are typically free. Yeah. Why would you say get a free quote? It's like, get the price for free. Right. Okay. But that is that's an example of, you know, that replaces contact us. Right. So it's from the user's perspective, the user wants to get a quote, right. They don't want to pay anything for it. So get a free quote. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not the greatest. I think it's obviously cheesy. But it is, at least from the user perspective, right? And that's what you want to do.

Meredith: 17:18

You think, Hey, I might as well, yes. What can I lose? So

Meredith's Husband: 17:23

that that is making it non generic, make it as enticing as possible, obviously, like, put, literally make the text on the button, as exciting and as as enticing as you can? Right. Like, like, literally,

Meredith: 17:37

free kittens?

Meredith's Husband: 17:38

Yeah. It could be problematic, I think. Especially for a photographer. Yeah. Anyway, so Details, details, see, and then and then don't offer multiple CTAs. So well, meaning, okay, so you want the part you want the user to contact you? That's next cool. I saw this this week. And I see this all the time. Do you know contact me by email? Use this form? Yeah, yeah, schedule a calendar. Yeah. Yeah. And what and what you think is you're making it easy, you're providing all these options for people. You do not want to make people think you give them a yes or no decision, is what you want to do.

Meredith: 18:20

So so. So schedule a 15. Minute, Zoom chat on Calendly is not a good idea, or is a good idea.

Meredith's Husband: 18:29

That is it's very specific, right? It's very specific, but don't do that. And also say, contact us schedule a zoom, schedule a phone call, let's set up an email chat. Let's chat on Facebook, let's okay, you just want one, right? And this will be apparent. I mean, I'm sure you've seen contact or not contact pages, landing pages. So you wherever you are, whether it's on Google or Facebook, or wherever you say, you know, you see an ad and you click on an ad and you go to a page, that's it's not the website, it's just a landing page. And there's just one button on it. Right? It's the it's like buy now or sign up for a trial, or whatever it is, there's just one button, there's no navigation, there's nothing, there's just that one button, right? These pages. Always, always, always, always convert better than websites.

Meredith: 19:19

So just no other distractions, no

Meredith's Husband: 19:21

distractions, there's nothing else it's a yes or no decision, do I do this? Or do I not do it and back out and do something else? It's what the user is thinking right? Now, they also convert really well, because you know, you know, exactly, you control the advertisement. So you're controlling exactly the reason why people are coming to that page. That's an advantage, too. But the reason you have a website is because you have no idea where people are coming from or what they're looking for you so you do have to give them options, right? You can't just have a landing page as a website. Right. So I tend to think of this I often think of the cereal aisle. Yeah. When I think of calls to

Meredith: 19:57

action, I often just think of the cereal. Do Yeah, I dread

Meredith's Husband: 20:01

the Cereal. Cereal. So I went to, you know, when I was young, I did the backpacking through Europe thing, and I remember the kind of very small groceries over in small towns. You go in, and you look they don't have a cereal aisle. No, it's like Weetabix. Yes. And they have they have the kids cereal and the adult cereal. Yeah, you know which one you're getting. In my case, I'm getting the adults

Meredith: 20:30

in my case yes.

Meredith's Husband: 20:32

But there's no decision there's you know, you want cereal you go in there it is. Yeah, so go to Whole Foods in the United States of America any go to yeah, go to the cereal aisle. I feel like an absolute dummy loser standing there for 35 minutes. Yeah, like a deer in headlights morphed by staring collection. Yes, like 500 million types of cereal. And you know, ideally, you have a type that you like, he's like, you have a type that you like, Yeah, I used to but they don't carry it anymore. So I have lost my ability to just have that snap decision

Meredith: 21:08

carry anything. It's just 365 But let's say it's a different one. grocery store.

Meredith's Husband: 21:14

It's a non Jeff Bezos owned entity. Yes. Yeah.

Meredith: 21:18

Then you end up just Yeah. Well, that's America.

Meredith's Husband: 21:23

You have to go to Spain. That's our podcast for the day. Anyway, that, what were we talking about?

Meredith: 21:29

We were talking about CDOs CTOs and too many choices. CTAs Yes. Oh, CTA is the CTO,

Meredith's Husband: 21:38

Chief Technology Officer, right. A CDO is like a it's one of those things that got us into the housing crisis

Meredith: 21:45

and a CMO or things you don't want to be eating?

Meredith's Husband: 21:50

Yes. Are Chief Marketing Officers Oh, anyway. So the point is, don't make your users think there was a very well known book, years ago, was one of the early ones in the web design industry called link, blink. No, blink was not specific to websites, I don't think yeah, it was the book was called Don't make me think. And it was just, I mean, you can you can guess what it was about. And it was good. It was really well known. I don't know if it's really popular anymore. I mean, it's very old at this point, but the concepts are like, are evergreen, they're, they're never gonna go away. Don't make people think that if people have to think for a teensy, tiny fraction of a second, there's a lesser chance they're going to do anything. It's

Meredith: 22:39

true. I should buy products to an order session recently. And they're like, oh, there's too many. And I thought that, you know, like, I've been narrowing it down.

Meredith's Husband: 22:47

Yeah. It's the analysis, paralysis, analysis paralysis. So it's a cliche for a reason.

Meredith: 22:53

So now this is put relativism fallacy isn't calluses?

Meredith's Husband: 22:59

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. So, so CTAs, thank you. This was the client. I had my agency client this week. Yeah, I'm trying I'm training some I'm training their their staff. And I was looking at their website and right on their website, they have their contact is contact button is contact us. And then at the bottom of the page, they have a big, not a big but a banner that's always president's always on the bottom of the page saying subscribe to our newsletter. Double whammy like Oh, I see. You know, number one, the Contact Us is generic. Number two, subscribe to our newsletter. What for? Right? Do you ever again, do you ever go online and say, You know what I really want to do today? I want to subscribe to

Meredith: 23:49

some newsletters. Yeah, I want to get more email and more time, like

Meredith's Husband: 23:53

literally, you're saying, Hey, give us your email. No reason. Just give us your email. Right. And so I was talking to this client, and saying, Does anybody ever do this, like knowing that the answer was going to be no? No. Do you do any email marketing? No, not really. Why on earth? Yeah, is on your homepage. It is the biggest call to action. Yeah, on mobile devices, it takes up probably 25% of the screen. Oh, you can't even get rid of it. It's always there. I'm like, why? You know, if you guys have a newsletter, great, right. But it's incredibly Why would people sign up? What are they getting in exchange for giving you their personal information? Yeah, they need to get something not just, you know? Yeah. If you're just asking for people's email, you're essentially just standing on the street asking strangers for money, like, you know,

Meredith: 24:41

which is not easy.

Meredith's Husband: 24:43

I know. Yeah. Have you ever seen I've seen a couple people like, like, like, well to do like kind of Wall Street guys in the subway, all of a sudden, they forgot their wallet. They don't have a metro card. And they're asking for money. And they are literally flabbergasted that nobody will give them $1 They cannot they believe it. It's they are furious. Nobody will give them $1. And I want to say like, do you do you give dollars to people when they asked in the subway? Is that what you do? What do you expect, buddy? Anyway, so this is a super common issue that like, yeah, it's you'll see it with, like a get, like I said, I start to notice that when companies get bigger, and they get to the point where they have like a dedicated marketing team or a marketing professional, then those people will know not to do this. Outside of that this is rampant. Yeah, most people wouldn't think of this. But this is important. Because think about this, you can make a change to this, I've seen changes to CTA buttons lead to a 20 to 30% increase in their conversion rate, really. So that happens literally instantly, you make the change. It's like a five minute change. Right? And from that point forward, your your business has just increased 20 to 30%. Is there anything else that can do that? No. I mean, I've heard stories of of increases like 50%, but I've never seen that happen. But yeah, this is one of like we talked about CTAs and one of the very first or we talked about conversion rates on one of the Very first episodes and this is the reason this is like, there's nothing that can have such a dramatic impact is improving your CTAs. Because it's instant. And it's, it can be significant.

Meredith: 26:23

Right? Right. And we're so like, ooh, shiny flower didn't mean mean Ooh, shiny this. And if there's no distraction, just like the page that you said, yes.

Meredith's Husband: 26:33

So, so think so think about it. What is the objective? The objective? The objective? Is

Meredith: 26:38

it objective?

Meredith's Husband: 26:40

What is the objective of your website?

Meredith: 26:42

Yeah, what is the objective of website?

Meredith's Husband: 26:44

What is your website? Do? What is what is there for? That's, that's your call to action? Now you got to frame it as something that the that your visitors want? Yeah. And then give them that option. And try to eliminate other options. Yes, yeah. Go go do that. And subscribe. If this is worth $1. Go to my husband.com and subscribe. Please do. And if$5 a month is you can't do it. For whatever reason. Trust me. I've been there that just leave us review. That's totally fine. Yes.

Meredith: 27:13

Yeah. If and only if you find this helpful and useful. Yes. If you don't,

Meredith's Husband: 27:18

then why are you listening?

Meredith: 27:20

For the jokes?

Meredith's Husband: 27:23

True? Yes. The entertain not

Meredith: 27:24

too many. Not too many. Okay, the Muppet in the background.

Meredith's Husband: 27:29

All right. Thank you, everybody. Have a good weekend. I hope that helped. I hope that helped your website. I hope that helped your business. I hope that helped give you a little bit of confidence that SEO is not this convoluted, cryptic, crazy thing that nobody can understand. If you did like it and you found it helpful. Please share it with a couple of your colleagues. Tell them what you like or more importantly, tell me what you liked. Let me know interview. leave a review on Apple. Tell me what parts you like. And I'll try to do more of those parts. And again, thanks for listening.