Category: Business

What are the seven steps to successful SEO?

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic
  • “What are the seven steps to successful SEO?”
    • Successful SEO has seven key steps, per MOZ’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO“. These are valuable ways to help your website be discoverable by new users by ranking high in Search Engine Results Pages.
      • Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
        • Enabling search engines to find and index my site
      • Compelling content that answers the searchers query
        • The site needs to answer questions in an interesting and engaging way.
      • Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
        • Be thoughtful with the composition of the website so that relevant keywords are featured in the articles
      • Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
        • The site needs to be streamlined so that it loads quickly, yet also has an interesting and engaging design
      • Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
        • Content that engages your audience enough that they feel compelled to share it.
      • Title, URL, and description to draw high Click-Through Rates in the rankings
        • Thoughtfully considering article titles, the site’s URL, and description to make it compelling to someone, seeing it in a search, is very interested in clicking on the link and coming to the page.
      • Snippet/scheme markup to stand out in SERPs
        • Make the additional comments that show up on the Search Results Page engaging and encouraging the viewer to click over to the site.

What is SEO?

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic

This quarter I studied SEO techniques, mainly working off of Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO”. Let’s take a look at some of my main takeaways. Today, let’s start with the basics: What Is SEO?

  • SEO is otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, this is a technique to strategize your website’s content to place better in the search results of Google and Bing. This requires deeply understanding your target demographics, what they are interested in, what sorts of things they search for, how they search, and the way they structure their searches. Also, you need to understand how search engines work. They crawl the internet, creating indexes of the content they find. Ultimately, SEO is about creating better organic search results, as opposed to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. SEO has 20 times more traffic opportunities than PPC (via both mobile and desktop). SEO also pays off over a longer time.

Edit: corrected the link to Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO”. 

Seth Godin: I Hate This Restaurant

Carl Setzer
Photo by Burst from Pexels

I always appreciate Mr. Godin’s insights. Today’s blog post reminds me of something I’ve long thought about: understanding what you, and your business, offer the world. If you try to please all people, well, you aim for the middle and become a commodity. That only seems profitable by the large, mega-brands that can operate on huge scale. Most of us need to focus on the niche, on being unique. This requires creativity and insight. Those that master this space impress and inspire me.

Seth Godin: I Hate This Restaurant 

Featured image by Burst from Pexels

Some reflections on “What CEOs Really Think About Remote Work” in the Wall Street Journal

Carl Setzer
Photo by Marc Mueller from Pexels

Here are some reflections on “What CEOs Really Think About Remote Work” in the Wall Street Journal.

When I saw the headline, my first response was cynicism. It’s easy to label many “leaders” as simple tyrannical micromanagers, unable to release even a little control, no matter how helpful it would be for productivity.  And that’s, as this is the Wall Street Journal, mostly what I expected to see. However, I was pleasantly surprised. What I actually read was a nice blend of viewpoints. This article is a collection of quotes. Just one or two sentences each looking at what these execs have observed, and where they think office culture will be shifting to. Quite a spectrum of thought, really. I came away pondering a couple of notions.

First, direct human interaction holds great value. We gain by working collaboratively. The “rugged individual” is a destructive myth. Yet, as I’ve seen myself the past few months, there’s value in working in isolation, in minimal distraction. We exist in continuums, each of us unique in our blend of traits.

When looking at the wide array of thoughts, it’s helpful to remember we’re all different. “Working From Home” is wonderful for me: I’m an introvert. The quiet of my home office is invigorating. Extroverts are living in hell.

A healthy working life and corporate culture accounts for the full spectrum of human experience. Finding ways to individualize working environments should be part of an effective future work life.

The Monday Peeve: Help Lines

Carl Setzer1 Comment
Angry on the Phone

Paula Light’s “Monday Peeve” for today resonates with me. I hate automated help systems, too. Unanswered emails, the chat messages that go nowhere, or the dreaded calls navigating multiple menus. Nothing says we aren’t valued by your business than hearing “your call is very important to us” every 10 seconds while on hold for an hour.

I hope your Monday was free of such misery.

The featured image is by Moose Photos from Pexels.

Gravity Payments Boldness Pays Off

Carl Setzer

I remember back in 2015 when Mr. Price made this bold decision. It gives me great delight to see such solid results. Seattle is a greater place with innovators like Dan Price, especially those willing to disrupt more than just markets.

Short Term Marketing Doesn’t F***ing Work

Carl Setzer

I just stumbled on Chris Chalmers (via this video, of all things). Chris was a DJ on a couple of local (Seattle) radio stations. Having helped many folks with their digital presence, I fully get what he’s talking about in this video. Short-term marketing, much less short-term thinking, doesn’t work. Not in the long run at least.

Marketing should be a well thought out and well planned element of your business. Strategic thought, analytics, and deliberate execution all play a part in building the long-term business.

I’ve seen too many folks expect a website, Twitter/Facebook/Instagram account to come in and rain money. 9 times out to 10 (99 times out of 100?) it’s not going to work. Regular focused posts, thoughtful interaction and the well timed/placed promotion are what gets you there. You should consider this to be a multi-year long initiative.

 

A Job Search Update

Carl Setzer

Last week I wrote about my transition from my current job to my next thing (see Transitions and Next Steps). The process of exploring what’s out there, what I’ve done, what I’m good at and a number of other things has refined my focus. Instead of “communications”, my focus will be on business administration (things like Executive Assistant, Business Administrator, Office Manager, Administrative Assistant roles). I do love this kind of work. And one of the things I did a few days ago was pull out a career assessment that Keller Williams runs on all their staff. And those administrative roles are ones I got 100% alignment with. Most of my career was focused on this kind of work. Mainly because I’m good at it, and like being good at it.

My focus right now is finding a role that I love. I want more than just to like my work, definitely more than tolerate it. No, I want to love it. As I know what work I’m good at and want to do, this next step is to figure out where. There are solid elements of the where. I want to work in a positive environment. No passive-aggressive dysfunction, thanks. Nor rage. Nor convoluted and confused leadership. I’m terrible at confrontation, and have no interest in putting up with unpleasantries for the sake of a paycheck.

I also want to work in a aesthetically pleasing space. Sunlight! It may seem shallow, but it’s important to me. It shows a deep commitment to staff, for starters. Anyway, I don’t need to be right next to a window, but lots of natural light. I’ve worked in many spaces like that over the years. Starbucks, Microsoft to start with. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen from my meetings at the Snohomish County Admin Building.

My focus currently includes many local powerhouses:

  • Boeing
  • Starbucks
  • Microsoft
  • Premera

I’m also considering local government, Snohomish County, Cities of Lynnwood, Edmonds, Everett, Mountlake Terrace.

Anyway, that’s where things stand. If you have any advice or counsel, please leave a comment below.

Thanks!

Some Thoughts On Followers: “Fake followers are hard to shake”

Carl Setzer

I just read “Fake followers are hard to shake” over at AdAge. Yeah, buying followers is tempting. Sure, it might look good on the surface, to have hundreds or thousands of followers. I’ve had many, many people ask me about buying followers. I think is a waste of money.

  • First, why? If your social media efforts are for a business, fake followers aren’t going to come to your store. They don’t engage. They don’t add any value.
  • Then there are all the recent efforts to purge fake accounts. If your follower count drops massively after one of the follower purges, you’re outed
  • Lastly, as this article points out, there are fairly straightforward ways to determine how many fake followers you have. If your goal is to become an influencer, or gain business leads, tools are coming that will out the buy followers tactic.

I expect that, in the not too far distant future, the various algorithms will easily detect copious numbers of fake followers. And I expect that will hurt you, whether via SEO hits from Google or Bing, or social media feeds devaluing your content. I firmly believe this is coming soon.

So, don’t opt for the lazy and fast. Build your brand slowly, carefully and organically. Engage other folks, post good content, and be your unique self.

F***ing Annoying Robocalls

Carl Setzer

Gads! Yet another robocall on my office line. This one was about our “vehicle warranty expiring”. Massively annoying.

I, interested as I am in things marketing, I had to wonder what kind of ROI these provide. How many people bite on these schemes? How much money is made?

I expect that the investment for most of these comes in the acquisition of the spoofing software and the list of phone numbers to use for the fake caller-id. Either time, or a few bucks on some dark-web server. So, like spam email, a very low follow through rate is fine. The software probably sends out hundreds of calls a day (thousands?), so one or two folks responding and closing does, in the end, pay off. This calculus doesn’t include jail time, fines, etc for law violations. If these folks are offshore, they might be lacking.

My main thought: if you’re a legitimate business, I urge you to use caution with these bots. Confirming doctors appointments, is, I think, fine use of these technologies. For cold calling clients: no…dear god, don’t do it! Invest the time and resources to do this right. Research your contacts, know who you’re calling, and how you will make their life better.

What do you think? Let me know.