Hello everyone and welcome. Today I have a very special guest with me his name is Jeong, Nick Jeong.

He is a marketing strategist for business thought leaders and e-commerce businesses challenging the status quo with their message. Nick is the founder of Upstart Marketer, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses integrate SEO into their marketing strategy. He is also the host of the Learn Like You Mean it business podcast. So you gotta learn like you mean it. A lab for dissecting and field testing business lessons from everyday experiences. Welcome, welcome Nick.

Hi, Marisa so good to see you again.

It’s good to see this as well. Yes, we met through a conference. And he was sitting next to me we got into a conversation, and it was just so fascinating to me because a lot of us hear about SEO but we’re not always sure how to implement SEO really well. So I wanted to continue the conversation I thought it would be great to have all of you listen in as I asked Nick some questions about that. So Nick I’m so glad that you’re here with us today can you just tell us first of all how you got interested in SEO?

Yeah, so I went to school for English literature because I wanted to write a novel, and then I had one of my professors say oh yeah, you don’t need to be, uh you don’t need a college degree to be a novelist, so money well spent. So I had to find a way to like, you know, pay for the tuition, and then my friend, and that’s actually how I got my first job and my first crack at SEO for e-commerce. Hey, we need a copywriter, you write, you kind of do it, do you want to learn and I had a personal blog and we all start with WordPress. And we all know about Yoast and you know that’s how I first learned about SEO but gosh it actually turned out to be a lot more than that. So I did selling sunglasses for a number of years and that’s how I learned SEO and I’ve been doing it now for five years.

Wow, that’s amazing. Now for the sake of those people that maybe aren’t sure exactly what SEO is can you kind of land the plane and give us kind of a simple explanation of what is SEO and why it’s important?

So SEO stands for search engine optimization and really what it comes down to it’s communicating but not with people instead with machines algorithms specifically. So what we’re doing when we’re optimizing for a search engine is
to use certain communication techniques that the algorithms understand so it understands, oh you are relevant for copywriting for example, or you are relevant for whatever your business is and really that’s what it comes down to. So anything an SEO practitioner does for you is to help you gain visibility because they’re helping connect what you know with how people are using those search engines to find that information.

Got you. So when we’re communicating to the algorithms does it make us sound less human or is there a natural way of doing this so that we can communicate with the algorithms but still sound like us when we’re talking human to human to
our audiences?

That’s a great question. So maybe 1 years ago you had to use some really janky kind of language to make sure the algorithms knew what you were talking about. We’re talking about like you had to use exact match keywords. So if people
were looking for how do I take care of my Corgi you would have to type out how do I take care of my Corgi like a couple of times in the line but know you can use a variety of language and this is all because the point of those algorithms was to become more human-like and to be able to understand human language as we speak it. So yow you have the benefit of you know NLP you have all these different techniques and algorithmic lines of code to help it understand the way we talk. So you can use synonyms now where maybe five ten years ago you couldn’t use a synonym it didn’t understand that a mitt and a glove were the exact same thing, but now it does.

Wow, it’s amazing right the advances, how much better it is now so even somebody that maybe used it some years ago maybe even five years ago, they can learn something new today and really Implement and be able to use SEO more effectively as well. Do you see a common mistake across the board when people are using SEO or maybe think they are but not but do you see common mistakes?

Yeah, there are I would say there are two. One is they do not link their web pages together so that doesn’t help Google understand how your content is related to each other. So if you wanted to demonstrate you’re an expert in copywriting and you had all these copywriting articles but they weren’t connected it wouldn’t understand how they were topically related to each other.

I see okay so is it enough to have something like Yoast on your website or there’s probably more I would guess but it’s a good start, right?

If you remember that Yoast is a tool and so treat it like a ruler rather than like an inspector that will be really important and on top of that Yoast is a tool that has free features, but ultimately wants you to use its paid version. So anytime you’re using one of those freemium tools I like to think about what is the business what’s your business angle how do they make money and then that tells me I have to take what they’re offering me with the grain of salt because they’re trying to get me into their paid product. So this is where I don’t even use Yoast anymore. I think it’s a crutch for a lot of people actually. And so aside from the internal links, the other thing is you need to put your keywords that you’re trying to target in specific parts of your web page.

Gotcha!

That’ll be the title, the URL. You’ll want it like in your first paragraph, and then you can put it in your H1 that’s a little bit of coding language but that all helps signal to Google that this is about how to do copywriting for missionaries.

Right!

And when you put it all there it sends a very strong signal that this page is in fact about doing copywriting for missionaries.

Yeah it’s interesting how you say H1 is coding and I think of H1, H2 as fonts, of font size so much that I know. But in any event, you said that SEO helps us become more visible so we’re talking specifically organic traffic. Okay so can you explain organic traffic for everyone so I want them to really understand how it helps us be visible so when we align everything correctly what’s so important there so if we’re getting organic traffic you know we don’t want to miss that right? We want to leverage as much as much as possible. Can you explain what that is it’s not paid traffic it’s not it’s organic traffic explain it.

Absolutely so when Google talks about organic traffic or people talk about organic traffic they’re talking about when you type something into Yahoo, Google, Bing those results that come up are from somebody organically seeking out information. And so any organic search traffic is from those searches. Now of course on those results pages, there can be ads on the top, on the side, all over the place but that is a separate type of marketing where those engines will have we’ll say a product for marketers like me or businesses like us to bid on those same keywords to try to get your business there as well. So organic is totally free if you’re doing it on your own and back in the day blogging you can make a lot of money being a blogger Because the Internet was a lot there was a lot less content so it’s a lot easier for people to get their content to rank and then you would be able to make money off of basically just the time that you put into any content that you created. The number that we give right now for the return on your investment on content marketing for organic versus paid search it’s like I think it’s like six to one, six to one in comparison. Okay. so if you’re doing ads your how effective it is is only as good as the money that you put in. Whereas content marketing and organic search it’s only as good as the efforts you put into the content.

So now that you’re talking about content if someone is because blogging is not dead people are still they may call it articles or call it something else but they’re writing content especially writers love to write content and people like to consume content differently so when it comes to writing is there a certain length that writers should consider to get the most out of that piece of content they’ve created?

Yes, I got two answers for you. The longer explanation why, and then we have the short answer like okay just give me just give me a number. So the first answer is it depends and it depends because every single keyword Google believes that there’s a search intent behind and because of that it’s going to serve certain information and the information that’s presented on page you can look at all the results and there’s going to be an average number of words that comes out so that means that potentially the answer can be found in 500 words or even less. And so you might find that one of your competitors only has like 250 words and that is ranking on the first page. The reality is the number that we’re
going to use is 2000 words and this is for just a general rule of thumb. And the reason for that is Google is looking for qualitative answers to these search queries because if it could be answered now in like 25 words it’s probably
going to show up in like the people also ask, or it’ll have like that feature of snippet where it’ll just answer the question for you with that line. That’s kind of the way the Google’s evolving so those keywords that you’re focusing on, aim for 2 words, and that’ll help you not only articulate and demonstrate your expertise but also be a good amount that your competitors are probably also going to aim for it as well.

Gotcha that’s great that’s awesome. Now speaking of the way people consume content there’s some other ways, so I wanted to see how we leverage SEO. One of them is video content. So how what would we do to be able to marry SEO with
our video content? What’s a good practice?

So if you’re doing video content highly recommend you’re using YouTube for your both your longer form content and your shorter form content so you have YouTube and then you have your YouTube shorts. The reason you’re going to put your
longer-form content on YouTube is because YouTube is it operates actually like a search engine for video. And now what you’re going to do is, on a web page on your own website, you’re going to take an embedded link for your YouTube video and put it on that web page and then you’re going to flush out the content. Something that we did when I was at SporterX my first job is we would record videos on like the best sunglasses for fishing. We would do a YouTube video and then we would link that video sorry embed that video into our a blog post and then we would elaborate on the answer and the reason for that is because the it’s a lot to ask an algorithm to understand the content of a video it has to understand so many images and then has to contextualize that with the dialogue and then it has to understand how that is useful to the people watching it. So it actually doesn’t, we’ll say crawl the video, it actually uses like social signals like likes shares watch time those things to help it understand its relevance. So writing is still very important because it helps Google understand what the video is about.

Absolutely so it’s not enough to just put it on your website and then maybe have a few little lines you know in this video you’re going to discover this, this, and this and that’s it, it’s best to go ahead and put content in there
like you would like a blog post so that you can leverage that and it can actually help you because like you said it can’t tell what you’re saying in the video. So are the images is it important if you put images in there to also you know on the back end how you can put alternate text and is it important to take care of all of that it seems like there’s so many places that we have to go so I’m just curious.

Yes it’s uh so there’s gonna be so many things that you’re going to tactically do to do SEO the way to think about it is it’s one of my mentors said to me doing SEO is like collecting pennies to become a millionaire. You do all the right things and then as you do them every single time you become richer. So the best practice for your images is to add alt text to it. Now one caveat is if you’re using um like stock imagery and it’s not really related to the content
that you’re writing don’t worry about the alt text it’s not I mean those images are so broad it’s not really about what you’re talking about. But let’s say you have an infographic or something that’s more dialed into the content by all means have the alt text there so Google knows what the image is so you can show up in Google search Google images search and then also that helps really solidify your content page. So going back to like videos and how you’re going to write around that, you wouldn’t just leave an info you wouldn’t just leave an image on a web page and assume that it’s like answered for you would do the same

thing for the video you would write content around that video around those images to have that full experience that you’re trying to create.

Gotcha and I would assume for those that consume audio like podcasts we’d want to do a similar thing as well, writing text because we have a player right they’ll play the the audio but we want to, especially if we have it on our website we want to expand on that and add text as well for the same reasons is that correct.

Absolutely so we’re doing a podcast right now and we’ll say the killer piece of content for your audience because we’re all busy and we don’t exactly have like a large teams of marketers to do is to have this as a video published on YouTube, have this on you know your whatever podcast channel that you choose, and on your web page you’re going to have embedded YouTube video you’re going to have your embedded podcast player you’re going to have your content, so not your show notes, but like content that really fleshes out like the conversation that we’re having and you’re going to provide a transcript and that’ll be your killer content page. Okay so transcript is important too? The transcript helps because there is it helps Google understand that this is the conversations that are being had in the YouTube video the podcast the audio file and then all the original content is to make that page stand out because if
you just have your web page hosting a video and a podcast the question Google will ask is why would we show this page when I could show the YouTube video instead. Or just take them to the podcast page so you have to provide something unique and worthy of Google showing it in a search engine results pages.

And I would imagine because some people might be thinking well that sounds like a lot of work but this continues to work for you it’s ongoing right?

The great thing about SEO is if you do the work now it pays dividends in the future. We talked about paid search how it’s only as good as the money that you continue to put in. Right. You can do for example at SporterX one of my peers he we had a brand ambassadors and he created a piece of content it was called the guide to Oakley prism now that blog actually paid for like a third to half of his salary every year because he did the content and he did it once and
all he did after that was he just continued to update the content as it brought in more relevant information.

Oh, I see.

So once you’re the King of the Hill and search engine results pages the only thing you can do is lose your position by neglecting it but if you continue to treat it as an asset really your website is an asset and you continue to refresh it, continue to share it with people, then you’re going to get more length and it’s going to continue to appreciate in value and continue to maintain its position so that means that every time you put out a piece of content not only is it a road into your website and a way for people to discover you it continues to build out your body of work and appreciates its value entirely.

Yeah, that’s a good thing so whatever we do up front and I suppose when you’re even at the very beginning when you’re thinking about a podcast episode or you’re thinking about an article it’s probably a good idea to do a
little research first wouldn’t you think to see what are people looking for I would think right?

Absolutely so there are going to be two ways that you’re going to go about that if you’re already an expert you’re going to have ideas of what it is that your audience is interested in what you then do is you can use keyword C research to validate how much traffic you’re going to get so that helps you prioritize which articles you’re going to do, which podcast you’re going to do. And then on top of that you can see what the competitors are doing on the first page it’s like oh when people ask this it seems that Google believes that this is an important subtopic to tackle. So that way even though you can create you know a dozen episodes out of like one topic it may make sense to actually consolidate it and put it all on one page and this is especially important when you’re just starting out you may be, there may be, this like desire to create as much content impossible but the issue that we talked about is if it’s too thin if it’s not like 2000 words it’s not targeting the intent then you’re going to have all these pages that even if you link them all together Google doesn’t think are qualitative and it will actually not think you are an expert it’ll think that you have a lot of fluff and then when you end up talking to me it’s like Oh hey, Nick what can we do like oh we need to consolidate all these pieces together you could have just done that at the beginning.

That makes sense so let’s talk a little bit about uh say we’ve been doing this and we’ve been doing it a while we want to see how things are performing let’s talk a little bit about maybe reviewing the historical data can you tell us like how do we do that how does that help us what if we don’t like the numbers or what can we expect.

Oh absolutely so there are two free tools that Google offers you for your website that you absolutely need to have connected and going right now. The first is going to be Google Analytics uh that’s going to give you basically nformation on how people are interacting with your website the other tool that’s really important is Google search console. And Google search console tells you how Google as a search engine is going to your website and interacting with your website. This is really important because of privacy laws so Google analytics will tell you oh yeah people came to your web pages but it won’t tell you what keywords people came in on your web pages for. Oh. So, yeah, we may know that you have a really a good page that’s getting a lot of organic traffic but we don’t know why people are necessarily coming there. Now if you have Google search console it’ll tell you, oh yeah, this page is doing well these are the
search queries that people are coming in from and it’s like okay people are coming to me and they’re actually not coming to me for copywriting they’re actually coming to me because they want to know how to grow my business as a Cristian. It’s completely, those are very different things. Yes. And that suddenly gives you insights like oh if I wanted to do more content marketing if Google thinks I’m related to the or relevant for this I can build out that content and then I can work in my angle as a copywriter as like you know a business developer consultant marketing consultant in that way rather than trying to bang at the front door if you will where it doesn’t seem Google thinks I’m the most
relevant for that particular term. Gotcha that’s really helpful.

Wow you’ve given us so much to think about and I love how you explain things you simplify it in such a way that I can understand it if I can understand anybody I can understand it but sometimes I get cross-eyed when I’m thinking about SEO so in this journey I’m so excited about your business I always love to leave the audience with some encouragement and help them to get to know you a little bit. Was it always a kind of an easy path an easy journey for you to get to this point were there any challenges that you had to overcome I would love if you would share something to just encourage our audience.

Oh that’s a great question so for me I know we’ve talked about like you know how I got here before the answer I would give is if you’re uh entrepreneur you have a small team or maybe you’re just doing it yourself the mindset shift that you need to make from thinking that what you have to offer the world somebody else could do and it doesn’t have to be you you have to set that aside and really go for it. It may be true there’s a lot of SEOs a lot of great SEOs that can do what I do. The reality is there are what’s like eight billion people in the world they can’t reach everybody what you have to offer um and you know we’re Christians so there’s like this idea of like a Divine appointment in overeignty that God’s going to put you somewhere in somebody’s life in a particular season for a reason. If you’re entrepreneurial that’s not by accident. If you have an idea to change the world that’s not by accident and you have to you know pray about it and see where God’s going to take you on that journey and to go for it.

Yeah.

Otherwise you’re going to be in a corporate setting where I’ll be honest I came from corporate where making a difference is hard because there’s so many decision-makers who you know they have different perspectives and you might not be able to get what needs to be done done.

Right. Well said; great advice. There’s a lot of people in the world and nobody can share the the information the content the coaching the way you do right because it’s unique to you and like I said you have a very unique great way you’re I think you’re a teacher at heart because you have a great way of explaining things and simplifying what may feel very complex for others and that’s what I liked when we were talking at the conference I thought oh gosh I uderstand what he’s saying. So, in any event, I’d love to know what you do when you’re not doing SEO what’s what do you do on the times that you’re off you know maybe after work or on the weekend what’s life looks like. I’m curious.

Oh yeah, so I’m the oldest of six and my family I’m actually the oldest too so my family’s younger and we love playing board games like Dungeons and Dragons we used to play Monopoly but then you know there’s so many board games that we just like outgrown Monopoly so gosh actually this past holiday season my entire family got together and we’re just playing board games and getting fat off of food like my family loves to cook I used to be a sushi chef. That’s how I paid for college so you know Sushi and board games that’s all we love to do as a family.

Oh that sounds perfect I love spending time playing games and lately we’ve been using Just Dance you know it’s a video thing that you dance, and we’ve been doing that, and I figured, well heck it gives me good exercise right after two
or three of those I’m done you know. So that’s a lot of fun and yeah so that sounds great. I love it I couldn’t ask for more right hang out with family and friends play games laugh relax. That’s awesome well I’ll tell you Nick this has been so informative and I just thank you so much for your generosity and just sharing all of your knowledge for all of us. How can if somebody wants to reach out to you and they’re just stuck with this. They need help. What’s the best way for them to get in contact with you?

Yeah, I’ll provide a link but they can basically do 3-minute chat with me. Let’s get to the bottom of what’s going on with your marketing and where’d you’d like to be in the next year. The reality is SEO is very attractive it’s like one of those things that’s becoming sexier as like time passes because everybody knows that they are going to need to do it. But here’s what happens if you just do SEO. So the company that I used to work for they banked on SEO and they didn’t develop their other marketing, And they were expecting a 1x return on my old team and that didn’t happen. So what happened was they actually needed to grow their email list and they needed to like nurture their team so you you’ll come to me and we’ll talk and my solution for you may not actually be something that is going to be related to SEO it’s like hey we can bring all this traffic to your website but you don’t have something it’s going to be a leaky bucket. You don’t have the next step. So we’re talking about like that killer page of content that we could create for them but they also need a next step. So let’s talk because we need to not just think of SEO as like something you can tack on to your business we need to integrate it to your products and services and making sure that any investment you put in marketing the ultimate returns is like you know revenue and it may not be that SEO is going to be the thing that like generates dollars but it may be the thing that helps you grow your email list. So let’s talk. Let’s find out what you actually need and make sure that your marketing really gets you where you need to be next year

Awesome and you help companies but you also help small businesses solopreneurs as well is that correct?

Absolutely in fact, I would rather I’m always love a David and Goliath story I’d rather help a small business owner like have the life that they want and to be really able to impact the people that God’s put in their life than that corporate giant that doesn’t really need my services and there’s somebody who’s who will probably be more than happy to take their business. I’ll take it if it like I can see like how I can actually make the people I’m interacting with like their lives better so they can like spend more time with their family for example. Yeah but really really have a passion for helping like-minded entrepreneurs like there’s something special about us.

Yeah for sure.

Yeah, and we need…

I love it…

We need more of us and I need I can help you make your marketing work so that’s not the thing that’s holding you back from the life that you’re meant to have and to be in that place where you can you know be the light to the world.

Absolutely. Well said, I love your perspective on that because it’s the same with copywriting is not a fix-all for everything you have to have the other pieces in place so that you can leverage copy, and sometimes people will not even sure about their messaging, or who their target audience is, and so I totally get it when you say that, I love that approach that it’s you’re going to actually help them assess to see if it’s SEO that they need awesome but if it’s something else then you’re gonna point them in the right direction and I think that’s wonderful. So I will make sure I will put the link in the show notes and my show notes are going to be more robust moving forward because as a student of Nick’s, I’m going to have to you know up my game a little bit and do some changes here as you’re talking I’m going, Oh boy, I gotta fix that, Oh boy, I wasn’t doing that so anyway. Nick, thank you so much you’ve been just such a wonderful guest loved all the information I know it was really helpful for the audience. Thank you so much. Any last words as we say goodbye?

Keep moving forward with your business. The world needs you, absolutely the world needs what you have to offer. Well said, absolutely. Thank you so much, Nick. Take care, everyone bye-bye.