Michael: Hello and welcome to the HaBO Village podcast. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: And this is the podcast that dedicated to you business owners, entrepreneurs who want to build companies with more profit, more purpose and more legacy. And we talk about holistic functions and holistic ideas about your business, all these different areas. Today, we're going to talk about marketing because everybody wants to know about marketing and how do we get more customers? Specifically about the Googles and SEO, but we have this great guest today, Kathryn?
Kathryn: We just want to introduce John Vuong. John, welcome to the show. We're super excited to have you. John is up in Canada. He's a neighbor to the north and has had his own SEO company for six years. I'm really excited to hear your entrepreneur journey, John. It's going to be fun to hear because you worked in corporate for a bunch of years. I think you sold Yellow Pages stuff for a while and then you managed without knowing anything about digital marketing to transfer into creating an online SEO company that helps small businesses with their own SEO and local search, especially. We're super excited to have you. Welcome to the show.
John: Thanks a lot, Kathryn, thanks a lot, Michael for the intro.
Michael: It's good to see you.
John: Yeah. Now I'm actually in my eighth year in business and it's been a journey. It's been a heck of a ride. I've had a lot of fun learning, making a lot of mistakes, failures, but picking myself up, growing and learning from all the great clients and staff that I have. Excited to share some insights with you and your audience members today.
Michael: Sweet. All right. Well, let's start with a little bit of background. Why did you become an entrepreneur? I'm always curious how people end up going into business for themselves.
John: Yeah, like you mentioned, I did dabble at Yellow Pages. I was actually dabbling there for five years.
Michael: That's a long dabble.
Kathryn: That might be more than a dabble. That might be like a full step into the water, not just a toe, I don't know.
John: But prior to working at Yellow Pages, I did do advertising sales for traditional advertising, print media, magazines, newspaper, as well as performance online based affiliate advertising as well before I resided at Yellow Pages where I met thousands of small, medium sized business owners, like most of your audience members. And that's where I got to really know how dedicated, hardworking and passionate these small business owners were. They love their clients. They love their community and they really served a purpose. They brought value to the table. They understood how to take care of customers, listen to customers and provided a great product and service for every single individual shopping at their storefront or online. And that's why I pivoted to what I do today because I was always doing advertising sales. But during the last, I would say two, three years at Yellow Pages, business owners were getting less ROI, return on investment, they were frustrated because they were spending more than ever in traditional advertising. And they knew there was a shift in behavior.
John: And this was probably back in 2010 timeframe and people were just frustrated. And that I knew myself, I was transitioning to fast, reliable, real time data through search and there's of course, social media, video, audio, images, but with search engines, it was pretty much the infancy. Before what Yellow Pages did a really good job, last 100, 200 years. We were ready, us customers, users were ready, they would pick that up knowing it was the most comprehensive up to date business owner directory. And when they're ready, they pick up the categories, Yellow Pages section and seek out whoever they wanted to use.
John: Fast forward to today, it's Google. It's pretty much paid ads, map and below. And I knew myself and if I'm average, 70, 80% of the population was doing that. And therefore I knew there was a transition and most of those business owners didn't want to know what was going on. They wanted to pay someone that they can trust to do it for them. Because it's new terminology. They didn't get digital. They didn't understand how people are now consuming stuff online and how it worked behind the scenes. And they just wanted someone they can trust to do it for them. And that's how I transitioned. I didn't really know anything about SEO. I knew there was a need in the marketplace and I had to figure out how to then build a team and learn as much as I can about SEO to then deliver on all the promises as a sales rep, I was doing to all these business owners. And that's how I developed this agency.
Kathryn: That's amazing. It's funny, one of our oldest clients, we've probably been with them 12 plus years. The very first thing they hired us to do was redesign their Yellow Pages. That's how we got our foot in the door. And we literally walked through that period of time with them where we kept saying, "You need to not invest so much in Yellow Pages. You really need to start pulling back." Because I think at one point they were spending a $100,000 a year because they had multiple departments and stuff. It was fun to transition them from that purely paper based whatever, to being a lot more online and digital.
Michael: And in those days when we were pulling off and trying to convince them to go with SEO and go online, it was terrifying for them. Let's just put it that way. They were scared because this is what they had done. This is basically 95 to 8% of their entire marketing budget in a community of about, when they started it, the community, our city was probably 25,000 people, maybe 30 and now it's a 120,000. It's not exactly, it's a small town in some sense. And they were like, well, this is the way people do it. They open up the Yellow Pages they go. The town of six miles long so you drive across town after you've looked in the Yellow Pages or you give them a call. But we realized the more we pulled back, it was not creating the revenue for them. And SEO was a great fit. But that was back in 2006, 2007, when that was really starting to transition and smaller towns, like the one we're in, we're three hours from San Francisco, we're kind of removed enough.
Kathryn: Yeah, a little behind the curve.
Michael: It was everything was a couple of three years delayed and watching that happen. Now I remember for us, because we did a lot of SEO work for a long time and still do some SEO work because we still develop websites and things like that and we want them to be healthy and it's a baseline for us. But it used to be a lot more profitable. It's become a lot more competitive in these days, not just for those of us in the SEO business, but for companies to start ranking. How have you seen that happen?
John: Yeah. When I started back in 2013, it's already been transitioned to really understand, you got to do a full on campaign. It's not just on page SEO or off page reputation or links. It's a full marketing branding, marketing strategy that builds on the biggest asset piece in terms of your digital presence. That website should be positioning you and bringing you a lot of leads and revenue and profit ultimately.
Michael: We like the profit part.
John: People that see you visibly, they retain and use keywords via Google because everyone's on Google and you just want to be visible, top of mind. And when they're ready, they're throughout that entire buyer journey, they're going to type in various different terms of keywords and you want to be at least present for that. And then of course optimizing your website so that they have that behavior flow to optimize so that you have a high conversion rate when they land on your website.
John: What is your ultimate goal? To either have a phone call that phone inquiry or if you have a product that can actually purchase. There's a lot of things you can do today and even a couple years ago, but a lot of business owners just don't understand the magnitude that is involved to get the ball rolling. And that's why I always tell business owners, you have to be in it, vested, and you got to do it properly. And if you're only going to do on page and you're in a hyper-competitive either market or an industry, hard to compete with someone that like myself working with these professional dentists, lawyers, physio, chiro, any trades, when you're trying to do it freelance, independent contractor or one or two person versus a team that has experts in every single field from content, SEO strategy, competitive analysis, keyword research, development, graphics, video, reputation, social media, link builders, all that plays and collaborate to have a successful campaign. That's what we've developed here to ensure that if we're going to do it, we've got to do it properly to ensure that we have optimal results for our clients.
Michael: Okay, do me a favor and let's define real quick, so we've got some people listening right now that have no idea what you just said. And we have some that are fairly experienced and they could say, "Yes, I recognize some of those terms," but this isn't their thing. How do you break this down into an idea? First of all, I want you to define on page versus off page. It's great to listen to you because I'm the one that usually says all the gobbledygook and nobody's there to ask me what the heck I'm talking about. On page versus off page and then kind of break down some of those pieces of a campaign so people really kind of at a base level go, "Oh, I get it. That's what he's talking about."
John: Maybe I'll take a step back. And for people that don't know what SEO is, search engine optimization. And when you type in a keyword like dentists in San Francisco, usually there's paid ads at the top where business owners are paying to have their website at the top and you're paying per click. Limited on budget and basically how frequent you want to be shown up and et cetera. Then there's the map, which is usually natural or earned, I would say, as well as below that, which is natural and earned. And that's where the organic sections appear, which is the map and below and that's what we offer.
Michael: And the map is, and the map we're talking about is your map of your local area, wherever somebody is searching.
John: Yeah. Yeah, local Google My Business. And that's the local three pack typically.
Michael: Perfect.
John: And what you want as a business owner is to appear naturally so that you're there all day long, 365, seven days a year with as many keywords that is your ideal type of service or product in the ideal marketplace that you want to serve up. As high up as possible because you have a higher conversion rate, click through rate higher up in terms of Google ranking. With what we do on page is whatever you see on your website. And off pages, anything that's off your website. It's pretty straightforward but there's a lot of things on your website that's important that can be optimized. And the first thing is, of course, there's the URL, www name. That's the domain name, there's title tags, which is right above the URL. And that's the first line that appears on the search engine results page. And then there's the metadata, which is meta-description. And it's a little bit longer, maybe two or three lines. And you can put a little bit more information about to support the title.
John: And the more you understand the reason you want to optimize for click through and conversion rate is customers, users, prospects, only have a limited time and you either hit them with your best slogan or your offer or something to attract them to click onto your website. And then from there you want your website to also start converting them as well, to earn their trust, to ensure that they stay long on your website to actually absorb the content, understand and read about the about us, the services, the testimonials, the blogs, because the longer they stay, the more likelihood they're going to convert to an actual lead or a prospect or a sale. That's on page. And of course there's the content that's involved, the graphics, the videos, the testimonials. There's a lot more to it.
John: And then off page is anything like press release, other articles, speaking, books, podcasts, YouTube, anything that's not on your website, linking back to you would be a great way to earn some juice from Google because it's either branded, a link or even a reference. People can refer your brand, refer a keyword and mention you. The more links that you have from other sites referring back to you, the better it is. And usually the more that it's earned, the more natural it is and it's harder to do that, but it also generates a lot more juice and gives you more credibility ultimately in the eyes of Google.
Kathryn: Yeah. How have you guys, as a company, managed kind of the balance between what I would say writing content or keywording for Google versus writing for humans? Kind of that challenge between the old sort of Black Hat thing was you'd do the black screen and you stuff all the keywords behind it that nobody sees, but Google is seeing them. And obviously we've evolved since those times, but how do you manage that? Talking to human beings versus for the Googles?
John: Yeah. Great question. This comes in, when we do an analysis. We do a competitive analysis in terms of where are the gaps that we see that you can actually play in on your website and your competitors, which may be the ranking above you. There's a lot of tools. There's a lot information that you can purchase and utilize because once you have opportunities in terms of semantic keywords, keyword variations, gaps in terms of search volume, broad or narrow or long tail, there's opportunity that you can use on your own website.
John: Once you uncover those opportunities, then you can start working on content to speak directly to your client, your prospect, users. But that data is really to give you guidelines on how to write and use and plug those keywords because there's search volume. There's people actually seeking out those kind of products and services for keywords that you aren't really utilizing and gaining traction for because there's a huge gap there. Of your business and what your competitors are ranking for that you can actually kind of outrank or at least play in the same ballpark, becoming more visible in the same grouping with your competitors.
Michael: Do you think that from your perspective now, because you're on the front lines on a regular basis, how much regular new content now needs to be produced? Has it snowballed? Has it come back a little bit? Because sometimes that's really overwhelming to people. I remember the period of time where it was just the more content you put out on a daily basis on your website, that's where blogging really became successful for a period of time. What does that look like now?
John: I've been talking, and really confident about it for the last eight years. It's not the volume, it's the depth. And it's the, I guess, positioning you as a leader, a thought leader, an authoritative figure. The more you actually own it, understand the topic, write on it like an expert would, that knows what they're talking about as opposed to trying to publish it five a day. I would say work on a really well long written blog content piece with supporting references and maybe do one a month even if it's three to 5,000 words versus six 500 word, very thin level pieces of content to just get it out there. The same thing as like any social posts or video content. Do people want depth, substance? Or do they just want to go after a keyword? Think as a user, your customers want someone they can trust that knows what they're doing in order for you them to pay for your product and service.
John: They don't want someone that just has an overview with a one or two minute video or something. Go deep. The more depth you provide in any piece of content that you write or a publication, a video or audio or what? Images, put some time in infographs. Do some research, graphs, pictures that's more personalized, customized to your ideal avatar, ideal customer because people forget that they're trying to serve Google, but ultimately what you should be serving is your customers and let the AI RankBrain decide which ones to serve up. And the more you realize that you use focus on your customers, Google will figure it out. Because that's their job because the more they satisfy the user's intent with the right keywords, with the right websites, that customer will constantly come back to Google, knowing that they're getting the best kind of websites served up from Google.
Michael: Okay. There's two things there that came up and myths that I want to talk about. One is really stressing that point, that while we're trying to make sure SEO is doing what Google wants, Google's smart enough now. This is the point, I guess I'm trying to make that I think you made well. Google is smart enough now that we don't have to just try and impress Google. If we actually just do a good job serving people and educating people and engaging that way, Google can see that and knows that's valuable and we'll be rewarded for that.
John: Totally. That's the way small businesses have been running for the last generations. Not even decades and years. And that's why I love working with small business owners. While working at Yellow Pages, it really came to a realization to me was these people that have been in it for 20, 30, 40, 50 years and it could be passed on generationally, these small business owners. And they just loved and they were so passionate, waking up every single day, serving their tribe, their customers and which is supporting their community ultimately. And they just were so happy, free. And just loved the interactions. And that's what I was trying to bring to the table here with my agency, to serve the small business owners. Just like most agencies, they want to go after the bigger brands and serve larger companies because of bigger dollar proposals and other balloo.
John: But there's not a lot of people that actually care as much to the small business owners. And if you bring what those big agencies do for the big brands to the small little guys, the small business owners, they're going to dominate the local businesses, the community. And that's what I've been trying to harvest throughout this whole eight years. I'm very passionate to help the small guys because I know how hard it is. And they don't have the in house team. They don't have huge deep pockets that these big brands can afford to drop hundreds of thousand of dollars to form an in house team.
Michael: No, you're absolutely right. Okay. There's one other thing that you said a few minutes ago that I want to make sure that we talk about a little bit, because when you said you don't have to post five times a day, if you just post once a month with a three to 5,000 word article, to me there's two or three emotional things that go up for people. One, most clients, they don't want to spend time on their marketing. They just want to serve their client. And the biggest challenge, one of the biggest challenges for small business owners to get is they've got to move to that place where they're working on their business and not just in their business. They're doing marketing, they're doing leadership, they're doing their financials properly. When we talk about that, there is this time element. But then there's also this idea that we've all been taught that short is better. The world has a seven second attention span. They're not going to read three to 5,000 words. What are you crazy?
Kathryn: And if you pull up a video and it says it's 42 minutes, they're not going to watch it because it's too big, too big of a commitment.
Michael: And you're suggesting something really different than that. Go ahead, speak to that.
John: Totally. What I'm trying to suggest is on your website, main asset, go depth. But on social and understand the platforms that you're playing in. On Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, shorter clips to attract people, to get to your home, your website, blog or whatever with that long form content. Everything should reside on your website, main asset, which is the depth content, because you want to own it. Everything else on those other platforms, you can have repurposed content, different images, call to action, clips, whatever it may be, slice it up, let someone do it. But that's the different platforms. TikTok and Instagram, they have that kind of audience.
John: And remember also, who is your ideal customer avatar? And where are they absorbing and consuming content? Focus on where your customers are seeking out information and services, like what you offer versus trying to do everything to serve everyone. The more you understand how they shop, where do they shop? Where do they spend their time? The more value and input and stuff that you're going to do to resonate with them. Put those time effort into the platforms that your customers are actually using.
Michael: How well, do you think your research is? If there's a listener right now is thinking, well, this sounds interesting and I'm open to writing those longer content articles and things like that but I have a hard time knowing what they're thinking or what the customers are asking for at this point. How good is keyword research or just any kind of research at all that you're doing these days to help business owners understand what people are asking Google and to kind of have a better idea of what do we speak to and what do we not speak to?
John: Great question. And before I take on a client actually, I want to make sure that they've run a good, solid business. Understand fundamentally how to run a business. Have about five to 10 ideal customers. Someone that is lifetime value. You have a persona in place. Someone that they can profile and actually go call, have a lunch, coffee with them and have a questionnaire of 60 questions. Go deep with all these questionnaire. That is what I mean by these are the questions you should answer for all your ideal customers and your website should answer every single one of them. And that's the content you should be producing on your website. It's not rocket science. It's more just doing the work. A lot of people forget that step when they run into adding content, producing information, they're trying to predict what your customers are anticipating to want to know. Well, your customers have already done that for you. Done the research. Go ask them.
Michael: I like it. I love it. What I think I hear you saying in the midst of that is the customers are going to help you a lot. Can keyword research or Google research help you with that and augment those personal interviews?
John: I totally agree. Software allows you to pull out and extract gaps within your own website campaign. Your main website always has opportunities based on keyword gap, journey gap, depending on where they're at.
Michael: Right absolutely.
John: Competitive analysis services that you may not even think of, your competitors are going after. That's where the research tools can guide you to really compel and add value to your existing site.
Michael: Yes. Okay. I think it's important to underscore for our listeners right now because so many people want to just go, I don't want to have to go talk to people. Isn't that the promise of the internet? Isn't that the promise of Google? Is I don't have to talk to people anymore. It gives me all the research and it gives me all the numbers and it just brings me stuff. And it tells me exactly to the penny where I'm spending my dollars. You still need to talk to human beings, the software, the algorithms, they're there to help augment and inform but this is still a human to human interaction is business.
John: Totally. Software, search engines, every medium out there is not the social interaction that people really miss during this pandemic and strive for in terms of life.
Michael: That's a great point.
John: Live it, because I have a young son, I go to the park every day and I see him playing with others. And that's joy. Play, fun, happiness. That's what life is about. If you're missing that huge component of social interaction, getting to know your customers, prospects, clients, what's the point of doing business if you can't even see them, touch them, feel them learn their emotions, feel what the pain points are, understand how you can help improve their lives, add value? If you don't know that, what's the point? Then it's just a product moving back and forth.
Michael: All right. You heard it here, folks. This is a man who understands his nerd computer stuff and he still believes in people and human interaction.
Kathryn: Yes. Very important, people. We love people. They have to be. Okay, so John, I want to pull back out of the technical stuff for a minute. Tell me a little bit about the ups and downs that you've walked through even just in having this business and running this business. I'm just curious as an entrepreneur.
Michael: Yeah, that's good.
Kathryn: What have some of the peaks and valleys been like for you?
John: A roller coaster, a lot of learning, a lot of AB testing, a lot of learning from others, as well as my team. I hired, fired a lot of people. Learning how to hire, learning, how to fire, how to train properly, how to uncover weaknesses, gaps. Every business has their challenges. You have your strength, either operations, accounting, sales, marketing, supply chain, whatever it may be. You want to continue doing what you love doing. And there's huge components that you'd probably hate doing. Clerical work or accounting, bookkeeping, outsource that. If you're a business owner, you should really understand what you wake up every day wanting to do and serve. Is it your staff, clients or projects or whatever things that excite you, keep you going? Everything else you can hire for when you're ready. Obviously based on how much revenue you have and I can pay with.
John: But that's what I found. As I started removing myself from the day to day interactions of activities and started working on the business and working on elevating all my leaders, all the managers to becoming more accountable and having their own tasks and teams, I found I'm less stressed. I enjoy the job way more. I love the brand and I love interacting, supporting my team. I want to see them succeed. I want to see them grow and make mistakes as well and have fun. Ultimately that's what life is about. The whole process of running a business is definitely the most challenging, but also the most rewarding because you're serving your clients, you're serving your community and you're serving your staff. You have people's family that you're relying on to serve. You got to make sure that this whole system is continually running. And it's a lot of fun. I find it a lot of fun.
Kathryn: That's awesome.
Michael: Have you had a dark period in your business? And if so, what was that like? And how did you navigate through it?
John: At the beginning, within the first year I made a couple really bad hires. I was hiring on skillset because I didn't know what I know today or even a couple years ago in terms of what I needed to know. I was hiring all these people and they weren't really my type of core value, moral type of people. And they weren't aligned with my personality. And the way I did business was how I wanted to approach life. I want to treat people the same way I want to treat my clients, my employees, people, my friends, my family, everything. And a couple bad hires, a couple wrong mistakes made me really wonder, why am I doing this? Am I cut out for this? Or should I continue doing it? Because I was so passionate to really help these business owners.
John: I plugged along, I ate the, whatever, the challenges, I was bleeding at the beginning and that was okay. I was up for the challenge. The first couple years, I bled a lot in terms of red and what I mean by that is just losing money. It was more about, I was investing tons of time. 16, 18 hour days. I came from a career that was always earning six figures, multiple years, stable income, everything to leave everything to start from scratch. Though I had already that mindset of, I need to at least make X amount or else, why am I doing this? But after the first year, red. Second year, red. You're doubting yourself. It's like, I am good at sales, but why am I losing money? It just took some time to really reflect and really be passionate and own what I was doing. And things turned around once I started hiring more people because I was burning myself out. I was stressing myself out with all these tasks I really didn't enjoy doing. And started focusing on what I was passionate doing.
Kathryn: Well and it sounds like you learned to sort of hire, train and fire to your core values, which is what we say is really critical if you're going to be successful. You really need to know what your values are and then hire, train and fire to those. And it sounds like you learned that along the way too. Yeah, that's really good.
Michael: Which helps with a lot. Obviously it sounds like in your story, you went to, I'm going to hire more people, but which takes a lot of courage after you've screwed up a couple of times and you've had bad hires. It takes for all of us, we've all done it. None of us like to fire people, those people who like to fire people, I don't hang out with them because it's not easy.
Kathryn: Well, and we learned that lesson. It's funny because there's the when in your business you learn this lesson. You learned it at the beginning when you were struggling financially and making mistakes and bleeding red. We learned that same lesson about hiring people who were truly aligned to who we are and how we want to approach the world and our clients and stuff. We learned that in the midst of a 400% growth over 18 months, that was so painful.
Michael: And was very profitable.
Kathryn: And really profitable but so painful that we literally considered shutting the business down because we didn't like the company that we'd become. We didn't like the culture that had been created because we were not hiring, training and firing to core values. We hadn't codified what it was we really were looking for. And so that was part of our learning process running a business too. And how do we deepen our leadership skills? And how do we hire well? And how do we find the people who really are our tribe so that the culture that we're creating is the culture we want to be a part of so that we can have fun? Which is one of my core values. I really want to have fun. And if it's not fun, I don't want to be doing it.
Michael: All right, my friend, I think we are coming close to the end of our time. If somebody was going to be thinking about looking again or tuning up or paying more attention to their website and this whole issue of SEO, I love the fact that you said earlier, it's not just a single thing anymore. It's a holistic thing that has on page, off page. It's a campaign that has a lot of different aspects to it. Which is a great way of talking about it. I like that. What do you say to them? Where should they start? And how can they connect with you?
John: Yeah. Thanks a lot. First off, I would say, understand what SEO can do for business. Understand what it actually is. Educate yourself a little bit on terminology and your expectations and timeline because there's a lot of ways to market and advertise yourself digitally. Social media is different than SEO. Paid ads are different than SEO. SEO is about long team building your authority and expertise so that you are bringing in inbound, ready to buy customers of your ideal type client. If that's what you're looking for to generate the best, most profitable ad campaign, remember it's the relationship piece too. With an SEO campaign, you need to trust the vendor or independent contractor or in house supply or whatever it may be. There's a lot of different options. Do you need support with content? Do you need development contractors or development help? Do you need graphic design or video production? Do you need outreach people for links? Do you need reputation for cleaning up and gaining more attraction in terms of reputation?
John: There's so many different aspects within an SEO campaign, and you need to understand what your weaknesses is. Is it all? Or is it just one aspect of it? And are you good at any of that? Or do you have any interest? Just like when you hire a plumber or a dentist or a lawyer, they've been in school for 20 years, they finally work and gain some experience 10, 20,000 hours, 10, 20 years before they start a business. And that's why they can charge $500 an hour. We expect someone to know what they're doing and get in and out within 30 minutes or an hour and you pay for that service without asking. Now, what's your experience like because they've already certified with a massive plumbing and being a dentist.
John: It boils down to the same thing with SEO. You go with someone on the low level or you go with someone with reputation, experience and someone that knows and understands how to rank. You pay for what you get in life, ultimately. And understand that. A lot of people have gotten burned in the SEO world because there's a lot of people undervaluing their services because they don't even know what they're doing. That's the biggest problem in this industry. I'm trying to educate people, let them know there's people out there actually know what is doing and you can educate yourself. Ask the right questions. People that actually want to help you and really screw your business over. There's so many people out there to just make a quick buck and they'll say anything, do anything and that's not the right way to run a business.
John: Just like when you have a client, you want those best clients coming to you that come with all their family, friends and they come every week because you built that tribe. You build that trust. Well, that's the same thing with SEO. I've trying to harvest all these clients to have this longterm family type relationship with them so that they continue understanding the value you bring to the table because it's an ever growing changing environment in terms of SEO. There's always movement, competitors, other SEO agencies, Google changing their algorithm all the time.
Kathryn: Never.
John: Screwing things up. For us, we just have to see on our toes and have fun. This is what we're passionate doing. I'm just very grateful to be on your show. I hopefully was able to impact and educate some of your listeners on how important it is to have a proper SEO campaign that's in alignment with your values and in alignment with what your goals and KPIs are. If anybody has any questions, you can reach out to my website, it's localseosearch.ca. We're based in Toronto, Canada, but we serve everyone in North America, UK and Australia. And we really love helping small business owners, so reach out.
Kathryn: Nice. And then if you want to just be educated, it looks like you also have a podcast, right?
John: Yeah, the podcast is a lot of fun. I started doing it two, three years ago. First 100 episodes was me educating people. And then I didn't know what else to say so I started interviewing people. It's called Local SEO Today and it's just having fun, the conversation. We're all in it to enjoy what you're doing. And this is a part of branding, marketing and it's really keep doing what you enjoy doing. Everything else you can outsource, hire or find someone that loves what they're very passionate doing it on your team. Get someone on that loves what they're doing and fill your gaps.
Kathryn: Cool.
Michael: Awesome.
Kathryn: Awesome.
Michael: Thank you, sir. I so appreciate you being here. This has been a great conversation. I'm looking forward to another one down the road. That would be fun. And we wish you the best. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today. This is fun. I hope you got something out of this. This is, we don't talk about SEO a lot these days, but it really is a critical subject. I just want to underscore that.
Kathryn: Yeah. And all of John's information, connection stuff will be in the show notes so if you want to reach out to him, you can do that.
Michael: And the things he brought to the table were really important. It's if nothing else, I want you to just say, okay, ask. I want you to answer this question, think about this. What is one thing I can do to help my website bring in more people who are looking for what I do? Let me say that again. How do I set up my website? What one thing could you do? And SEO is one of those things that could be part of your priorities for the next couple of quarters, the next year, as you're thinking about it and hopefully longterm that could actually bring in more customers for you that you're not reaching now. SEO can do that.
Michael: Are you willing to look into that and move into that realm? And even I love the suggestion of doing a long form article three to 5,000 words once a month. It sounds like a lot if you're not a writer, but it's really not that. And just spend some time going, pick a subject, what would be great? And then post that on your website and so that people can access it. And you start to become that expert because you want people to see that you are as good as you are at what you do.
Michael: Thanks for joining us today. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: This has been the HaBO Village podcast. We'll talk to you later. Bye bye.
Kathryn: Bye.
