Search Engine Optimization Tools: Which of course could be used as a Event Marketing Tools: Your event, conference or website at the top of Google search is the topic of todays interview with Brett Bumeter. Brett talks about a new resource to move your website, blog or podcast up in the rankings of Google search. Very cool event marketing tool for you to use. The tool is called SEOScribe.
Transcripts:
Mike McAllen: Welcome back to the Meetings Podcast. This is Mike McAllen with Grass Shack Events and Media and today, we have Brett Bumeter, a Bu to a kill meter.
[Laughter]
Mike McAllen: I always screw up Brett’s name because I just read it for the last – what? How long have we known each other now? A long time and it has always been – I always called you Bum-meter. So – but it is Bumeter. So, anyway, hi Brett.
Brett Bumeter: Hi, Mike. How are you doing?
Mike McAllen: Great. Thank you for talking with me again. And you have some pretty fantastic stuff to talk about today. It has really helped me selfishly and my business. I’m already seeing – already seeing it. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about Scribe or is it – it’s SEO Scribe, I guess, is the name.
Brett Bumeter: Yes, it’s the – it’s a WordPress or a Web tool and it’s called the Scribe SEO WordPress plugin or you can also use a Web version of it. But, basically, it’s this tool that helps you perform SEO analysis and copywriting on your individual pages or articles in a very guided, slightly automated type of fashion and it’s just cool. It’s built by two fairly well-known gentlemen, Sean Jackson who’s from Texas and is a bit of a programming SEO specialist and Brian Clark who is well-known on the Web as a copyblogger.
And essentially, on your site, we have installed the WordPress plugin version of this tool, Scribe SEO and it allows you to go through and take a look at your articles and fine-tune them from a copy perspective and from an SEO perspective and as you kind of go through the process, it guides you through. You can literally start to increase the rankings on your individual pages and also kind of – oh, here comes the bike.
Mike McAllen: Oh, nice. I like that. A little Harley interlude.
Brett Bumeter: Yes, he’s just getting ready to take off. So …
[Laughter]
Mike McAllen: Nice. That’s great.
Brett Bumeter: Yes, some sort of custom bike. [Inaudible] [0:02:31].
Mike McAllen: [laughs] That’s great. Never really had that happen on the podcast before where the Harley comes racing through. That’s awesome because I was saying how nice it sounds there because I get the birds in the background and chimes. It’s very relaxing and then this motorcycle guy came. So, it’s just – you’re just yanking me around with my feelings here – not my feelings, my – what do you call that? Anyway …
Brett Bumeter: There it goes in the distance too.
[Laughter]
Brett Bumeter: Just to fade away in the sunset.
Mike McAllen: That’s great. Okay. So, keep going. So, actually, I had a quick question then. So you said – I know, we used – since our site is a WordPress site.
Brett Bumeter: Yes.
Mike McAllen: You said it’s also Web-based too. Can it be used for any type of site?
Brett Bumeter: It can be used for – it can. They’ve got a – they just came out with the Web version about a week or so ago. And essentially, what you can do is you can copy and paste content from let’s say, a Web page that you have and paste it on to their site and they’ll perform the analysis through their Web tool. And then once you’ve kind of fine-tune the copy or the text or what have you, you can copy that back to whatever setting you want to publish that in.
Mike McAllen: Very cool. Very cool. Okay. Sorry, I just – it just struck me. I was wondering. So that anyone could really use this tool now, not just WordPress people. That’s …
Brett Bumeter: Anyone can use it and they’re starting to – they’re adding different ways to connect to it and use it. They’re – it has got the WordPress and the generic Web connection which kind of cover the big two and they’ll probably – expanded out to cover some other systems in the future as well. But, for people that are familiar with WordPress, there’s kind of a front-end way to do some of the SEO work on the WordPress. WordPress in general is excellent for SEO results. Typically, most of that is on the front-end when you can figure the site and program the theme and then sell some plugins to help boost – or Googlebot’s ability to find your pages.
Well, this is kind of like the back-end portion that allows you to not only optimize the general, generic site but also each of those pages on that site and their unique content.
So, you basically – as you have a post or an article or what have you, you hit the analyze button and it performs a check on a number of different key SEO points, which comes down to boring and mundane but the end result is it tells you where you’ve done well or done poorly and it kind of guides you in what you can do to improve the structure of the content on that site.
And as you follow those steps, you can see some dramatic results as your pages start to work their way up in Google search listings, sometimes known as SERPs, an acronym for search engine ranking placement and the goal is typically to be on the number one page of a search. So that when you type in a keyword, somebody finds you that first time, preferably without having to scroll down even.
Mike McAllen: It’s pretty amazing to me just in the time that we’ve been doing this, how far or how the blog post pages have moved up just by tweaking a few little things which is in your post. And obviously, everybody – not obviously but these days, people are getting away from regular static websites and doing more blogs. So this is really a blogging kind of software plus being able to post all the time. It’s a really great tool because that’s what we’re all trying, to get our organic search to be found instead of paying Google to put, you know, at the top. We’re trying to get our sites higher and this is just a really cool tool, just – I just – I’m trying to …
Brett Bumeter: It is …
[Crosstalk] [0:06:25]
Mike McAllen: Yes, it’s just – it’s really cool. Anyway, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.
Brett Bumeter: No, no. No, it’s – and it caught me that way too. I had heard about it. They’ve got like a free trial where you get to kind of run an analysis 10 different times and that could be 10 times on one page or you could do 10 different pages with one analysis each. And as I was working through that trial, I was really impressed at the results I was getting. In fact, I tried it on my own personal site and I saw about a 25 percent increase in traffic after I had just touched four different articles. And that was, you know, a really big boost from moving those articles up higher in the search engine rankings. More people were seeing the articles listed there.
The plugin not only helps you get listed higher but it helps you write the copy to help convince people to click that link knowing that they’re going to find what they’re looking for on the other side. And that’s kind of where the copywriting balance or aspect of this comes into play as well. So I was getting a lot more traffic, a lot more good results. And, you know, that was just off of the free trial and I quickly upgraded to the paid version. It is a service. The plugin is free to install but there is a service package related to this, kind of like – it’s kind of like a cell phone plan, I guess, is the best way I could describe it.
The plugin, kind of like the phone, is free and if you want to use the service, then you can purchase X number of what they call evaluations. I kind of think of them as like a cell phone minute and you can perform each evaluation or analysis on a page however many times you like to perfect or improve that article just enough to get the results that you’re looking for.
So, it’s a pretty cool little tool and I’m super happy with it so far. I’ve been using it like crazy the last couple of weeks.
Mike McAllen: Yes, it’s pretty amazing and it isn’t basically changing what you’re writing. I mean, it is kind of changing what you write in your post but it really has to do with your SEO to pull your posts up higher on Google and it – god, if you spend any time doing this kind of stuff, this is totally worth it, you know.
Brett Bumeter: Yes, it helps you when – it’s oftentimes easy for people to write a blog article. It’s kind of like writing an email or answering a question and you can do it kind of free form and you don’t have to think about it a whole lot because you’re just kind of talking to people through your blog. But it’s not always easy to take a step back and then, you know, learn SEO and learn copywriting and perform all these different mundane tasks of how to format the text in just the right way.
But this kind of guides you through it in an easy to understand kind of way. And helps you kind of see the before and after effect of what you do. So you know that if you change, you know, the ordering of the words and your title of your article and you make that change and you reanalyze it, you can see if that actually helped or made things worse.
And that’s something that definitely helps you improve that particular article but eventually, it starts to help you improve in general as you draft the articles the first time. So, it kind of teaches you SEO on the side as well just through experience.
And it’s – it’s good for – I see it – this is something where your average business can essentially do their own SEO work without having to go out and hire a specialist and pay them, you know. I’ve seen specialists get $10, $20, $50 a page to improve a – you know, just a single page or post and most businesses don’t have that kind of money to pay for a given page or post to have it optimized by an SEO specialist. Tends to be more often businesses that have shopping carts and they’re trying to up product pages but your average person doesn’t have, you know, that kind of budget. This kind of brings that to – way down to your – to – you know, to a blog or to a small business person because the cost works out to be around 40 to – 40 cents to a dollar per post that you might evaluate depending on how many times you hit the button.
Mike McAllen: It’s so amazing. So, also – so how would someone who’s brand new at this and plugs it, how would they find, you know, how it’s changing? Would they – they’re just looking at their Google Analytics then that they plugged in? Is that how you’re gauging the actual posts after you’ve worked with the Scribe plugin or the Web tool?
Brett Bumeter: Well, there’s a couple of different ways. One, I definitely noticed – I was watching Google Analytics and I did notice an increase in traffic following some work on four articles and these are blog articles, not business pages on my own site. And that– so there was definitely a traffic increase and that was coming from a search. I also – I tend to monitor where my links – when somebody performs that Google Search, I monitor where my own links are positioned. So, I keep track of – you know, if my link is number one in a Google search, the top of the first page or if it’s number two or three or if it’s number 42 or 83 or wherever it may be which could be many pages deep in a Google search. And if it’s important to me, I’ll work to try and increase it so that it’s on the front page or a lot closer.
So, I was watching these articles and I did see them move up in the rankings. I was working with some keywords that were kind of competitive. Meaning there’s other companies out there that have been covering those topics for a lot longer than I have and in some cases, not doing it as well as I was. But they’ve been covering it – you know, they just had more in quantity and – but it was a little disorganized and – but they’ve been there longer.
And I was able to catch up with quite a few of them even though my article was relatively new, just a – you know, few days old to a couple of weeks old. So that was something that I was tracking. So, I – anybody can do it themselves, track where the results are. If there’s a keyword and you think your article should be able to rank in Google for that keyword, just type it in and see if you can find your self through that search engine result.
If you can’t, then you can work on trying to improve it. So, that’s kind of what I mean by it. It – there’s a tool that I use from a different company. The tool is called SEO Book and it’s a Firefox plugin and it has got quite a few different SEO tools with it but one of them is a search engine ranking checker and it essentially allows me to put in a bunch of different keywords and then it goes out and it checks to see what my position is in Google for each of those keywords for the domain name that I’m looking at.
Mike McAllen: Very cool. So, basically, you’re looking at the traffic and then where you stack up in Google and that’s the things you kind of watched to move your post or your pages up. Is there a way, do you know, that if someone is new at this to find their keywords? Like, you know, what are some like – you know, are there a couple of ways that if I have a flower shop business, is there something that I should be – is there a way – what’s the best way to find keywords? I guess I should – that’s the question.
Brett Bumeter: Sure. Well, there’s a few different ways that you can do it. One is – and this is – there’s ways to do it actually with this tool but outside of the tool, a couple of things that I use, one, I use Google Analytics and I take a look at the search terms that people have used to find my site and that’s a pretty good way. Sometimes, if you’ve got a blog however, it’s not always easy to see keywords for each individual article, especially if it’s an article that might, you know – not get a lot of traffic. It’s a long tail type of thing where maybe you get three or four or five, maybe 20 visitors a year on that one particular article that has been out there for two years.
So, that’s – but that’s one area. I also tend to install a real basic, no frills, little plugin on most WordPress sites I work with and it’s called ShortStat and it essentially allows me to take a look at keywords that have been used on my site in the last 24 hours. And this isn’t always the most accurate indicator of where someone came from Google but it does allow me to see the weird and strange keyword combinations that people put together and kind of get a build-up, a bit of a reality check, aside from the cold analytics on how people are doing their own search because, you know, not everybody is a search expert or thinks of the best keywords the first time around. And I like to see, you know, how that evolves or what they’re thinking or, you know, if they’re phrasing it as a question or if they’re being very scientific and breaking the keywords down or if they have misspellings and all that good stuff.
And that helps me then to say, okay, well, there’s a keyword I – you know, there’s a variation that I just never expected to see and then I go out and I just do a quick Google search with that keyword and see if I show up. And sometimes, I’ll see that activity in my site but, you know, I’ll be very, very deep in Google and, you know, not terribly visible. They might have come in from a different search engine or something but I’ll start paying attention to that keyword and see if I can do a – you know, a few simple little things to boost it up because if one person searches that way, there might be more and …
Mike McAllen: Right.
Brett Bumeter: … there are some other tools, more on the advertising side that relate to using the AdWords and other programs that will also help show you where the majority of people are doing some of their search on which keywords are more popular and that’s a whole extra segment of internet marketing to kind of delve into and a good place to start too but the basics that I kind of look at are just the things that are – you know, what’s happening on my side on any given day, how are people searching it and we kind of grow it from there.
Mike McAllen: Very interesting. So, you also gave me a couple of links to put on with the podcast page. So if someone is listening to this, they can come back to the site. If they’re just – you know, they just downloaded this podcast from iTunes, they can go to the Meetings Podcast site and we have a couple of YouTube posts on how this all works too. Right?
Brett Bumeter: Yes. No, I did a quick screen cast …
[Crosstalk]
Mike McAllen: Oh, you did them. You did them. Well, that’s great.
Brett Bumeter: Yes, this is amazing and actually, it was – I think it was late March or something like that. It was still pretty cold here. I was – it’s one of the early days, I was trying to get out on the dock. I work on a fishing dock on the lake outside of Charlotte and it wasn’t quite warm enough that day so I went out when the sun was there and I got all set up and I had a jacket on and by the time I actually started working, it was getting colder and colder and colder. So, you can almost see me shivering through the screen cast a bit. [Indiscernible] [0:17:49] there was – the tool really had me jazzed at the time and still does. But …
Mike McAllen: That’s great.
Brett Bumeter: But I’m kind of going through the screen cast and trying to keep the mouse from jiggling all over the place because my hands are cold.
Mike McAllen: [laughs]
Brett Bumeter: But [Indiscernible] kind of goes through this set-up or how it’s configured but part two is really – the second video is really the – I don’t know, called the Money Shot [Phonetic] [0:18:12]. It’s the video that really shows you where the important, useful stuff are – stuff is in this particular little tool and really why it’s valuable. You can see it pretty clearly if you’re watching the video, just how it can help a site and …
Mike McAllen: Very cool.
Brett Bumeter: Finding new stuff with it all the time, different ways to prioritize what articles that you might want to work on and you kind of grow out from there.
Mike McAllen: Well, that was my thought as I – you know, as I – you know, I just – I kind of just started using this obviously because we just loaded it up. But the – but to come with a little kind of – I don’t know, like a list of things to go through, you know, because it is so – there’s so much you could do with it kind of – you know, so to kind of make a – prioritize as you said, you know, things to look at each time for your – ones you’ve posted and also, you know, learning to copywrite and some of the little steps that you’ve already showed me on – you know, how we’re posting the podcast, you know, to put them to the show at the end, the number of the show at the end which instead of the beginning and just little tricks are – I just want to get a good list going for my self.
Brett Bumeter: Yes. Well, I kind of – one of the things that I’ve done, I kind of initially came up with a prioritization for my self and I’ve kind of been – we’re finding overtime but the first area that I’m focusing on myself and for a couple of clients as well, I’m looking at the top 10 or 20 blog articles that a company might have on their site or a person might have on their blog site that are actually doing well. So, what are your heavy hitters that are already pulling people to your site? And that’s something that I go into Google Analytics and I look at the top content for the site and then I go through and optimize those. I kind of look at it like a – you know, you use a baseball analogy, it’s like, you know, find out which of your articles are Barry Bonds and go give them an extra steroid shot. So that’s …
Mike McAllen: [laughs] Yes. No, you’re right. That’s great. That’s a good analogy. It’s the way to go.
Brett Bumeter: So – and that’s mostly just a – you know, just to give your self – give your site that extra boost on the stuff that’s working well. If those articles are already working for some of your visitors, you know, do some things to increase the audience so that works for even more visitors because those are the things that you’ve done some things right with already but, you know, do some things to get some more out of it.
And then, after that, I take a look at – and I’m a former accountant so I always like to kind of follow the money. I take a look at my top pages that are going to earn me money. Now, if it’s a business site, this could be a services page, the thing that you want to emphasize that’s going to be help convert your clients. If you’re selling products, it could be a products page. It could be an individual product or it could be a category. If you’re a blogger or a journalist or something like that, it could be pages that happen to be, you know, running some advertising campaigns that are converting well.
Whatever it is, go optimize the pages that make you some money so that you can do better and continue to grow and improve your site, you know. We’re on a recession. You got to keep paying the bills and so, focus on the money a little bit especially because this is a – it’s a premium service that comes with this plugin so you at least want to – this plugin to pay for itself.
Mike McAllen: Right.
Brett Bumeter: And I have found – for me, it has definitely already paid for itself several times over. It’s definitely doing that for me but focus on the ones that bring you – you know, more traffic marketing. Focus on the ones that bring you more money, kind of your revenue or sales and then after that, I’ve been going through and focusing on the next level of articles. The ones that I think are articles that are really good but they’re underperforming. So, too often as a writer, as a Web designer, I’ll create a page and I’ll think, oh, this is – you know, this is going to be the next Barry Bonds and then, you know, before I know it, it’s – you know, it strikes out every single time.
And so, I jump into those and I start to take a look at, you know, reviewing those. What did I do wrong? Or what could be, you know, altered a little bit? A lot of times, you know, when you write an article or you make something creative, it’s difficult to realize that your baby is ugly and this kind of helps explain not only why your baby is ugly but where your baby is ugly and gives you a chance to do a little, I don’t know, plastic surgery on your blog article that …
Mike McAllen: Right, right. No, another great analogy, ugly babies and baseball. I think that – for me, it’s fantastic because I can’t write at all. That’s why I do an audio podcast and I’m ugly, speaking of the babies, so I can’t do a video podcast. But this really helps me so far because …
Brett Bumeter: Yes. No, we …
Mike McAllen: I can do the – it helps me just move the articles up the ladder is what – my whole plan is just to get, you know, organic search for my business.
Brett Bumeter: Yes. No, we saw some very cool results on – we looked at one of your articles earlier. It was an interview with a person and the – when we – you know, when it – the first analysis was done on that article. It scored like a 32 percent or 39 percent, I think it was. And we changed, I think, 8 or 10 words in a couple key strategic places and that bumped it up to a score of 82 percent but it moved you a page closer to the top in the Google search engine rankings from 45 to – what was that? 36, I think.
Mike McAllen: Yes.
Brett Bumeter: Something like that.
Mike McAllen: Yes.
Brett Bumeter: And that’s just – and that was a move that happened within about 25 minutes so we made that change. Your site got indexed again and you got moved up, you know, a half hour later.
Mike McAllen: Yes. And that’s what it’s involved about, being found on the Google. So …
Brett Bumeter: Yes.
Mike McAllen: So, alright. Well, awesome. I think this is a cool, little podcast for people to listen to and of course – well, the last thing I was going to ask you too about it, do you think now if it gets to be easier and easier to kind of game the system here. I mean, I know there’s people that do this but now, you know, some schmoe like me can start doing it. Will Google now then change their whole thing and will this thing kind of – you know, they change their algorithm all the time and …
Brett Bumeter: I don’t see this as so much a game in as – well, search engine optimization has a heavy emphasis on optimization. So, it’s not optimizing it to gain Google. It’s optimizing it so that Google can understand better what it is your site, your page, your category, whatever it is, is about. Index it and get it into the right position. And so it’s not so much – this isn’t a gamey thing. It doesn’t do anything that Google perceives as bad. It’s actually following all the Google Webmaster rules. And, you know, coming from some people that have a very good history of helping others do just that.
Mike McAllen: Right.
Brett Bumeter: It’s from a – to pull in another analogy, it’s kind of – it’s probably very similar to the time period probably back in the 30s, 40s when people were moving away from their Model Ts and moving into a faster car. And, you know, you get out on the road and if you’re still in the Model T, you might only be doing 10, 15 miles an hour and another car might come by and blow your doors off, you know, 35 or 45 miles an hour.
Mike McAllen: Right.
Brett Bumeter: So …
Mike McAllen: Or a Harley.
Brett Bumeter: Or a Harley, yes.
[Laughter]
Brett Bumeter: So this is more about getting a – more people kind of benchmark up to the same speed on the Web and I see that quite a bit more these days as people are – you know, it’s real easy to put a website up. It’s not always – it’s a whole – it’s a next step to optimize that site so that Google can find you and then, you know, you had another step for them to be able to find you and place you in the right position.
Mike McAllen: Right.
Brett Bumeter: And if each of your competitors are already doing that, then you’re kind of on a level playing field. If you’re the only one and your competitors aren’t doing it yet, then you have a competitive advantage. If they’ve been doing it for two years and you haven’t, you know, you’re probably hurting a little bit and finally getting up to speed. So, this is – everybody kind of get in up to that same maximum speed that Google allows.
Mike McAllen: Very cool. Alright. Well, let’s – I think we should cut this off right now. And I wanted to say if anybody has any questions about any of this, the Scribe or doing any kind of WordPress, you could email us at MeetingsPodcast@Gmail.com or you can find – Brett, what’s your – I can’t remember what your Twitter handle is. What is your Twitter handle?
Brett Bumeter: It’s @BrettBum.
Mike McAllen: Brett Bum. Yes. And – of course, and I’m Mike McAllen on the Twitter and MMcAllen. I have two of them. I should probably condense them back again. But, that’s another story for another podcast. So, until next time, Brett, thank you again. And I’ll talk to you soon.
Brett Bumeter: Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.
Mike McAllen: Okay. Bye-bye.
Brett Bumeter:
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