iGUIDE Video: Website SEO Optimization for Real Estate Photographers | Video courtesy of iGUIDE YouTube Channel | 31 March 2022

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Transcript (video above)

[00:00:03]
Chris White: Thank you for coming, everybody. My name is Chris, I'm the Marketing Manager for Planitar and iGUIDE. Today I am doing this webinar with Ali. Ali why don't you introduce yourself while I mess around with these.

[00:00:16]
Ali Javed: Hey guys. My name is Ali. I'm sure some of you remember me from the last masterclass on social media. I pop around here and there once in a while, but you're probably more used to Chris. I'm more like a once in a while guy that pops up. I take care of most of the marketing and fun part and I bring any kind of knowledge or things I've learned to you guys over the course of months.

[00:00:46]
Chris White: What we're talking about today is the SEO, and before we get into that topic, I just want to address a few things. The first thing is that if you have not yet to joined our Facebook group, please do so. It's iGUIDE 3D Tour and Floor Plan Creator Group, it's really popular. There's lots of people in there, there's lots of really good conversation, so give that a world.

Also please subscribe to us on YouTube. If you do that, you will automatically be notified when we upload new content so you don't have to pay attention to the masterclass schedule as much. If we create any new ad videos or anything, you'll just be notified when they're made available, which is very cool. Two really important things that are coming up that I just want to really quickly address.

The first thing is our new viewer updates. We sent out an email for beta testers and it's going live very soon, so you'll get another email. But I just want to show you guys real quick, I can't figure out where my browser is. There we go. Can you see my screen, Ali? Is this working? Does technology work? You're nodding.

I'm going to take that as a yes. iGUIDE is going to get a visual refresh. Basically, it's going to go live April 4th and it's going to change the look and feel a little bit, which is awesome. It's meant to be a little bit of a smoother experience, a little bit cooler looking. The functionality is nearly identical. I already did a masterclass on it a while ago to give it a preview.

But if you want to try it out, you can go to the forum before the 4th of April. You can go to the forum and there's a link there in the iGUIDE operators discussion group or whatever, so it tells you about the beta and it gives you a link you can test out if you want, then you can try it out. Pretty cool. The way this is going to work today is that we're going to talk about the basics of SEO.

We're probably going to talk for about 30 minutes and give you a general overview and then after that 30 minutes, you can just ask questions if you want. If there's no questions, we'll just call it there and everyone can have a nap. If there are questions, we'll answer them. Or we may talk past 30 minutes, I don't know, it depends.

Either way, questions can be whatever you want. If they're not strictly speaking SEO related, that's okay. We're cool. You can ask us whatever you want, even weird personal questions, I'm fine with that. The topic for today, SEO, I'm just going to narrow the scope of this a little bit. There's a lot of things that go into making a website successful, and SEO is just one of them.

We're going to talk about really optimizing a website so that a search engine will display it when people search for stuff. We're just going to connect the search engine to the website and propose some suggestions or some things you can do for your website to make it perform better in that way. We're not going to talk about what happens when people get there.

That's a whole separate webinar and that's really more about conversion and getting people to move through sales funnel. That's not what we're going to talk about, just SEO and some things you can do on your website. Good news though, it's all really very achievable stuff. It's not hard things that you need to do, these aren't really that challenging.

There's a few tools that we're going to show you as well. I'm just going to load up iGUIDE and then you guys can see our cool camera promotion graphic and then what we'll do is we will go through things. Before we go through all of the tips, we have 10 because everybody likes top 10 lists, so we made 10. Let's talk about why you should care about SEO.

If you're here, you must care because otherwise, you wouldn't be watching this right now. But I'm going to tell you why anyway just to justify the effort that you're going to put in. When you make a website, people have to get to it for it to do whatever its job is. That job could be a whole bunch of different things. Maybe it's a scheduling system for you so people can book appointments.

Maybe it's a payment portal so people can buy things from you, maybe it's just a brochure so that people can see who you are so that when you show up to work for them or whatever, they know what you look like. I don't know, there's lots of different things that a website can do. But if no one ever gets there, all that work is useless.

We've noticed over the years that a lot of people spend just an enormous amount of time building and crafting and thinking about their website, especially when they start their business, but then periodically through business growth, as your business gets bigger, your website doesn't really fit anymore, so it grows too.

But they don't pay a whole lot of attention to how people are getting there and what the website is supposed to provide for people who are looking for essentially a solution to their problems. There's lots of ways to get people to a website. You can physically tell someone to go there, that would be unique if people do that anymore.

You can post content on social, and so people might be incentivized to go to your website to see something, maybe if they're on Facebook, they see you post something. You can run ads. Ads are a great way to try to get people to go to your website for reasons. The link provided for this webinar was invalid for me.

I don't know, I'll look into that. I'm not sure where the link was sent to per se. I will check that, sorry. Just a little tangent there. Either way, so what we're going to talk about today is SEO, so that's people's specifically searching Google. Although this works for any search engine, the other ones just don't really matter as much, and finding your website in the search results.

Search engine optimization can be distilled down, if you just want to describe it in a certain way, as modifying your website so that in the Google search results it is placed higher. The ideal being the very first thing right on the front page, but that's probably achievable for some things and maybe not for others, we'll get into that.

Google is a business and they make money off their searches by running ads so you can do your best to rank your site, just optimize it so well and you may still not appear on the front page because people are running ads on whatever keywords or wherever that you're trying to rank for. I'm just going to say it because maybe people take it for granted, maybe I take it for granted, people know this.

But the ideal is that you want to be on the first page of results because anything beyond that is pointless. People don't typically go through multiple pages, maybe they do occasionally, but not as often as they just pick the first thing that they see on the front page. The goal here is to try to get your pages to rank on that page, and that has a lot to do with a few things that we'll get into later.

That's keywords and search intent and a few other things. We'll talk about that. But basically the benefit here to you is that if you properly optimize your website, when people are searching for the thing that you are providing, they will find you organically in the search results, but you don't have to pay for. If your site is set up correctly, people will just find you, which is cool.

If people are finding you in that way, there's a very high likelihood that you are providing what they are looking for. Although we're not going to talk about it, that means that they're more likely to convert in some, but not all cases. That's it. It's a good traffic. Those are the people that you want. That's the benefit, get people to your website. That's ideally like paying clients. I don't know if that's obvious or not.

[00:09:04]
Chris White: Let's talk about some things that you can do to your website. Again, we could talk for days about this stuff. It's just going to be a really quick overview and we're just going to ping pong, knock it back and forth Ali and I will talk about this stuff. The first thing we're going to talk about is site speed.

This is something that is outrageously achievable by anybody because it has nothing to do with messaging your keywords or anything else. This is changing things on your website to make it load faster. Ali why don't you talk about some things that can be loaded on the website so faster and I'll load up a cool demo.

[00:09:40]
Ali Javed: Yeah, one thing we do or I do sometimes is that we reduce, for example, if you're uploading images, we condense the size of the image completely or the video itself. Less than a couple of MBs, or hopefully one less than MB. That can help slow the side and the whole idea is that you don't want anyone waiting for the site to load because they get bored and they jump out.

This is a very common thing we've noticed. A lot you can find articles and articles about these online. You want to make sure anyone who's coming to your site has a seamless experience as possible so that everything loads quickly. They're not bored and if for example, anything is taking too long to load then it bounce and that affects your bounce rate.

That also tells Google that you shouldn't be ranked higher as other sites, so it really impacts your search engine optimization as well.

[00:10:41]
Chris White: There are tools you can use. I have one on screen right now. Hopefully you guys can see it. You can use to measure site speed. The good news about this is that you don't really need to overthink it. I get sounds complicated, go in there and you optimize your images and you remove JavaScript, it can be complicated.

But just figuring out the things that you need to do is totally not complicated. I've just used a tool called GT metrics. I don't know if you guys can see the URL, but if you google GTD metrics will come out. You can run your site, you can put your site into a little URL thing there. Then click key or wherever it says test or something.

It'll tell you how long it takes for your site too low, it'll give you a score. I chose Pepsi.com because I'm thirsty right now. Just a big fan of Pepsi lately. It's not a product placement. They don't give me any money for this. Now I'm like sponsorship idea, load up products in our demos anyway. I load up the site and what it's done is it's told me how long it takes to give me a score.

But if you scroll down, it tells you the things that you can change. The most common thing on every website is resizing fairly large assets. Again, if you're not technical, that's okay because this is something you could easily hand off to someone else. A lot of websites too especially the what you see is what you get builders sites like Wix and Squarespace, they going to do a lot of this stuff reverse.

They'll optimize most of this stuff anyway. It's actually pretty cool. You don't really have to try that hard. But if you look here for Pepsi.com, they're loading Pepsi wild cherry 15.mp4. That's 1.88 megabytes. That's some very large files that they've got loading up on the website. Pepsi doesn't care because people are going to go to their website anyway.

So they can get away with the fact that load times you're going to be quite high. I think Ali made this point already, but I was doing this thing, so I wasn't really paying attention. But when people go to your website, the actual load time will be analyzed by Google and the faster your page is, the higher up you go. But that's also affected by bounce rate. Did you mention that already?

[00:12:51]
Ali Javed: Yeah

[00:12:52]
Chris White: I won't mention again, but you want that to be low because you don't want people to go to your page and then immediately like, that's terrible and then leave. If the load times are really long and that's exactly what they do. I myself, I am very impatient. I will wait 1.5 of a second for a page to load if it doesn't turn out.

I was looking up a drone page the other day and it was 17 seconds till I [inaudible 00:13:12].

[00:13:17]
Ali Javed: Exactly where we should definitely have like a masterclass on phones and how to keep people on your side. But site speed at one big one, obviously in messaging and how you face your position in the sky.

[00:13:30]
Chris White: Above the full bowl. If I had considered doing LAN just on CRO because we have that book or whatever and I could reference it right way. Well, we can do that. That'd be cool.

[00:13:40]
Ali Javed: I'm going to talk about it.

[00:13:41]
Chris White: Yeah, absolutely. Here are some other things for site speed. Pepsi didn't really have a whole lot, but there's images can be compressed. We already talked about that. Video can either be replaced with static images or compressed. Complex plugins and cool animations like look awesome, but they tend to increase load times.

An enormous amount of content also increases low tides, which is funny because people tend to either do really short landers are really long, ever scrolling endlessly ages. They're not getting a good idea. Sorry go on.

[00:14:18]
Ali Javed: Yes, sorry to cut you off, but you mentioned video. One hack I found was I just based on the gifs, there's so much more simpler and easier and they do almost the same thing. You can tell me if you don't need large videos unless you're solving some really high-quality products if you are doing basic services like pictures and gifs are fine.

[00:14:35]
Chris White: To get that kinetic, interesting motion on your site to make it look like dynamic gifts are really fun because you can lower them to three frames a second and often get the same thing you'd get from a video, but from something that's significantly smaller. Also really easy to work with because it's just an image so you can put it wherever you want.

[00:14:52]
Ali Javed: Or another hack is just send them to a YouTube page. Where are your videos [inaudible 00:14:56] . There's no need to actually embed your video on your site.

[00:15:00]
Chris White: That's true. There's also quite a few tricks with regards to lazy loading. Lazy loading means that as soon as you load the page, the thing that you've put on the page, like a video or something else, it doesn't immediately load. Funny fact with iGUIDE, iGUIDE will lazy load, which means if you embed and I got in your page.

It won't immediately load all the assets unless you tell it to. In the embedding tool, you can go in and does a checkbox, you can turn that off. It's cool. Anyway, site speed will kept to keep moving we are out of time. If you want to dig into your website, go to this tool, put your website in it scan or whenever the button is, they just read through all the suggestions that they give you.

There's, lots of other tools like this. Google has one as well. They're mostly going to pick on your media, like your images, but there's other stuff in here too. Sometimes it's like JavaScript related or wherever. That, I would say by far is probably one of the easiest things you can do for your site, because although it's a little technical like.

I suspect most of you who are listening are like photographers. You can edit your own images. That means that it's not really as big a problem for you to take your images, download them, recompress, and put them back up again to fiddle with it. The barrier to entry there should be quite low for most of you because you have Photoshop.

[00:16:14]
Chris White: - Cool. Next on the list.

[00:16:18]
Ali Javed: - Long-tail short, my favorite.

[00:16:20]
Chris White: - [inaudible 00:16:20] .

[00:16:20]
Ali Javed: - They are weird honestly. You need them but you don't really need them but you're just sure do need them. It's weird. But we use Semrush, Chris and I. It's a tool we can use to analyze keywords, monitor competition, see where they rank and you can use the same keywords for your ads as well and paper ad for work.

If you want to do it more organically, I would 100 percent request you guys to go ahead and get yourself some analyzing tool like Semrush, whatever it is. It gives you access to what's working, what's trending, and what's not. There it is. This is the one we use. Let's put in something like pepsi.com.

That's a very generic keyword and you can tell right away that it could be the traffic that authority score 65. You can't really beat that.

[00:17:13]
Chris White: -There's four million backlinks.

[00:17:15]
Ali Javed: -Yeah, that's insane.

[00:17:16]
Chris White: -That makes me sad. That's crazy.

[00:17:19]
Ali Javed: -That is crazy. In regard to the backlinks as well later in a few minutes but the idea is that you can type in any keyword in their URL. Chris, can you go down to keyword overview, left side? Go up a bit more. You see right under keyword research. Let's give them an example. Because this is definitely my favorite [inaudible 00:17:45]. Type in real estate photography on the search.

That's a very generic word. You want to be as specific as possible. Volume in Canada you get 6k searches per month. I believe that's per month. Global volume throughout the entire world, pretty much as 26.4k, and difficulty 64 percent. That's pretty hard to score so you got to be really on top of your game if you wanted to do something like real estate photography.

Not saying it's impossible, but you can still definitely go ahead and do that. It gives you more information. Let's say if you want to run ads on the right side view, cost-per-click. You'll be paying $3.54 for every person clicking on your site based on that keyword. It can't add up. You want to aim for something that's in the sense like 40 or $0.50 budget yourself.

At the bottom, it also tells you pretty cool similar words you can use as well. Let's say real estate photography Toronto, Vancouver real estate photography so there are so many things you can find from tools like these. Get yourself a go tool like this. It's pretty inexpensive, I would say and it gives you a good idea of what to use, and then once you find your keyword that you want to stand out.

I recommend less generic as possible. Something more niched in to what you guys do. If you are let's say [inaudible 00:19:13], base it on that. If you guys offer a certain service, base it on that, and then just write content, write static information on your site so it shows up on every page and make sure that you use it as much as possible because 1 or 2 blogs are not going to rank you.

But it's going to be the consistent effort over time from using certain keywords that Google will recognize your site as the authority. That's one way you can do that organically as well.

[00:19:44]
Chris White: -Yeah, let's bring it back to the reason for the keywords for a second and we'll get technical again. When you are selecting keywords, what you're trying to do is you're trying to modify your pages so that when people are searching, you're capitalizing on what is called search intent. If someone's searching for real estate photography, that's pretty generic obviously.

But if they're searching for that, you want them to find your site. That means that your site literally needs to have the words real estate photography on the pages otherwise it won't rank. Keywords is more than just a word or a couple of words. It's really terms that people are searching for. You don't need the full thing like who is the best real estate photographe.

In the world or whatever to the point that [inaudible 00:20:38], there's long and they're sort of short versions. But for the most part, what you're trying to do is capitalize on search intent. If you find all this very intimidating and it's not your jam, you don't need to really use a tool like this right away. Eventually you should engage with it, but you might be doing that through someone else.

I'll get to that in a second. But the goal is to have a think. What are people searching for on Google that would help them find me? What solution do I provide to their problem? I think you did mention it, Ali. Usually it's a local thing for businesses. It's like real estate photography, Dallas.

[00:21:16]
Ali Javed: -Yeah.

[00:21:16]
Chris White: -Real estate photography Windsor, something like that.

[00:21:18]
Ali Javed: It's better to stand out and make yourself as unique as possible so if you can rank for real estate photography, try something else that's more unique about you. Maybe you do real estate photography, I guide towards kitchen order, and that's a long tail keyword, but that sets you apart from just real estate photography.

[00:21:40]
Chris White: -Fun fact, Semrush. If you find this little intimidating and you're like, I don't know if I can handle that, they have free trials. You can use it for a week or 2. So if you want to just get it and analyze your website and just mess around, you don't even need to pay. It's pretty cool. There's lots of other tools too, there's [inaudible 00:21:55] and Ubersuggests and a few other ones I don't remember the names.

[00:21:59]
Ali Javed: -Or you can just use Google Keyword Planner and that's the basic tool.

[00:22:03]
Chris White: -This is true. Absolutely.

[00:22:04]
Ali Javed: Free.

[00:22:05]
Chris White: I'm just going to add a little bit of extra information so that everyone's on the right path here. The way keywords work is that you're not trying to insert keywords into content to game the system. That's a common misconception. Maybe in the 90s you did that. Have real estate photography like 1,000 tons of page. Google is smart. Google knows what they're doing and they're trying to serve up the most valuable information for people based on their searches.

They know based on the page structure, whether you're really doing that or you're just keyword stuffing, which is just a fancy way of saying just stuff a bunch of keywords in there. When you're deciding on what language to use, because that's all keywords is, it's just different language on your pages so that people find you. Think about it in terms of the way the page is.

This is going to affect the points for now and the way the page is laid out and the kind of content that you're producing. The way that you get your keywords to work is that you put your keywords in your page consistently and they're part of valuable content in your page. That's my wife, should I take it in the middle of the webinar? I can't tell if anyone is saying yes. Anyway, I won't. I'll call her back in a minute.

[00:23:27]
Chris White: The content that you're creating needs to be valuable. You just can't slap real estate photography on your page 55 times. That was my point. But people often misinterpret keywords as being things that need to be on the page, but it's more than that. They need to be on the page, but they need to be part of some content. For example, real estate photography Dallas isn't enough.

You need to write a paragraph about your business, like I've been working in this industry for 17 years and I have been working in real estate photography in Dallas for the last six. I'm really active in the Dallas real estate photography area. Something like that. It's in the context of some good content or copy, not just randomly slapped on the page.

[00:24:15]
Ali Javed: You can't just repeat that word 20 times in a page.

[00:24:19]
Chris White: But that being said, you do need to include it. One thing that we've learned at iGUIDE Planitar is that it's not good enough to have your keyword on a page like once or twice. It really needs to be drowning in that keyword or key phrase that you have, and that'll affect again, another points that we're going to get to before we run out of time here.

It needs to be in the paragraphs, it needs to be in the headings, it needs to be in the slug, it needs to be three or four times in the page. Those keywords need to be there a lot. Another common misconception is that you slap all of the keywords in. You know what I mean? You come up with 25 key phrases, you put them all on there. That doesn't work either. Google is too smart.

That works more than just stuffing the keywords, but what you would typically want to do is focus a page and the content around one thing that people are searching for. If they think people are going to be looking for a real estate photographer in Dallas, that is a worthy thing to include in a lot of your copy. If you've got maybe a secondary key phrase, that makes sense.

You think also people might be looking for drone services Dallas or something like that. Cool. But you can't just keep going. You can't have a page that just targets everything so the whole Internet shows up, but again, bounce rate is important here. When people show up, you want them to see what they're searching for, otherwise, they'll just leave and your keyword work will all be for not if people don't stay on your page. Cool.

[00:25:53]
Ali Javed: Chris, somebody's asking you a question. I think you pretty much answered it. Is it better to have more pages on a site or more data on a few pages? Jonathan asked us. It's a very good question. More data or more pages? I don't think it's either or doesn't really matter I think.

[00:26:11]
Chris White: Well, the conversation gets more complicated once you start thinking about what happens after people show up. If you can create a page that targets a specific search intent and people show up, why would you need more? Just optimize it, make it better, but pages start to work together. If you can provide content like a blog that targets a key phrase that's similar to but slightly adjacent to what your main page is targeting.

People show up to your blog and then they're in your funnel and then they can move over to your main page. You have to sculpt your pages so that you have multiple key phrases in different pages and they're all hitting different things. In terms of product to pages, if you think people are searching for iGUIDE in your area, then I think you could probably double that up.

It will depend on what products your offering to be honest. It depends on how complicated it is. But as pages get bigger, load times go up, so SEO ranking goes down. If it's just text, you're fine, but once you start to include images, maybe a targeted page might be better. Then it depends on if you're selling directly from your website because again, this isn't a conversation for today.

But you want to put a few steps between people and buying something as possible. Don't make them work for it. If you can send them via SEO directly to the page where they can click "Book" and they can book an iGUIDE, then do it, you know what I mean? But again, that's a separate thing. Sorry. Let's move on to the next thing because it's about keywords.

I mentioned this earlier or maybe Ali did, I forget, you have headings on webpages, and those headings are typically called H1, H2, and H3, and they are in order of importance, as in one is more important than two and two is more important than three. All the website builders have these, but if you look in the backend HTML, they're just called those.

That's a carryover from a long time ago when people had to write this stuff out. People often confuse these with formatting. With some website builders, H1 will have a different look than H2, but that's not exactly what they're for, although that is true. That is what they do. In terms of hierarchy, yes, there's a different look and feel for headings.

Whether they're H1, H2, or H3, but those are prioritized by Google differently. If you have a key phrase or keyword that you're using, it needs to be in the H1. Your main heading on your page, the very first thing people read needs to say whatever you think is important and what you think they're searching for. If that's real estate photography Dallas, then that needs to be straight up in the header.

People often get very clever. They think, I'll put a question in there. I'll do something that's interesting or funny, and you totally go ahead and do that, but you need to get that key phrase into that header and potentially into multiple headers if you can because Google likes that because it says to Google.

This thing is important because it's on the page and it's in this H1. If you compare different sizes of texts on the page and the hierarchy is really obvious, an H1 is big text. Big, bold, fancy. Well, it's big, it's important. Then H2s are slightly smaller. Then H3s are slightly smaller than that, and then body text is even smaller than that.

The size of the text, although that's not strictly speaking what Google is looking at, really reflects the importance of that text in terms of how Google sees it. Your H1s are big and you want to have your key phrases in there. You want key phrases in all that stuff, but you need to make sure they're in the H1. If you go and you have an SEO audit done by a company, that's the most irritating thing.

They're going to go through all your headings and going to be like, you didn't put the key phrase in the H1 and you're going to kick yourself. Make sure to do that because it's super embarrassing. Does that makes sense, Ali? Did I get that?

[00:29:59]
Ali Javed: Yeah. Let's get into my favorite part, slugs, but not the small kind you see on the wall.

[00:30:07]
Chris White: Good segue. Holy moly. That was pro. I'm impressed.

[00:30:11]
Ali Javed: I was thinking about this for a bit. I'm joking. Slugs. I'm wondering if you can somehow show them what it looks like. I'm not sure you guys can see that.

[00:30:28]
Chris White: I don't know if we can see it, but the slug is www.goiguide.com/planixspecs, whatever.

[00:30:35]
Ali Javed: Slugs, ideally, the best practice is you should include at least a part or a partial keyword in your slug, but that doesn't mean you include the entire folktale or massive keyword in your slug. You cut it down and focus it down. For example, if your keyword is real estate photography in Dallas, you're not going to put the entire long sentence in your slug.

What you're going to do is you're going to optimize it and focus on a few words from that keyword. For example, Dallas photography, that could be part of a slug itself. That's one big one. Another thing is that you want to make sure you optimize your websites and your slugs because that's what people search, and if that's something that pops up, not only do they click on it.

Google also optimizes it on search intent. You want to make sure all your pages that are going to have slugs should be optimized and have at least one keyword per page and make sure it's focused and it's permanent. That's one thing I see a lot of people make mistakes on is that they put the entire keyword in the slug and it looks really bad.

Personally from research, it shows that cut it down and make it more focused and that's really going to help you out.

[00:31:58]
Chris White: You're going to hear the same thing over and over with regards to everything we say for now because it's basically, you need to make sure your keywords, key phrases are in your headings. You need to make sure that they're in your slug, the URL that you use and carrying that forward. Every page has a title and meta description, and the key phrase or keywords.

Whatever you're using, need to be in that title and that meta description. Here, actually, I'll show you what those look like. Here, we'll go to Google and we'll search for Pepsi. I don't know why I'm using Pepsi. It's fun.

[00:32:28]
Ali Javed: You're getting so much free light beer.

[00:32:30]
Chris White: I know. They better send me a free case. Google wants to know my location. Sure. Of course. Here's really easy to see. You can see the slug on Google, I hope you guys can see this, pepsi.ca. Then we have the page title, Welcome to Pepsi, and then we have the meta description. They've got some more stuff here, but that's a bit complicated.

Really, every page, regardless of what website builder you're using, is going to give you the ability to have a page title and a meta description, and most of them will let you monkey with the slug a bit, but it depends. But each one of those needs to not only communicate to someone why they would want to click on this link, but it also needs to include that target keyword or key phrase. If it's not there, it'll come up.

[00:33:18]
Ali Javed: Chris, could you keep going down to see if there's another slug we can find here at Pepsi.

[00:33:23]
Chris White: Probably. Twitter for Pepsi. That is a bad example?

[00:33:29]
Ali Javed: That does work in a way. For example here, so pepsi.com.

[00:33:33]
Chris White: Well, there you go. That's one.

[00:33:34]
Ali Javed: Branch product information, there's Pepsi. No, same thing. You see the code says contact.pepsico.com?

[00:33:44]
MALE_1: It doesn't say contact us or give us a call about pepsi.com, it's just simple contact.pepsi.com. So make sure you hyper-focus it, use that keyword and make it as simple as possible. Google loves that, they're going to rank your number one most likely.

[00:34:01]
MALE_2: - Yeah. Just to clarify on the matter description. That's like a little paragraph that you can add in. There are character limits, I can't remember often how many they are, but typically you try.

[00:34:09]
MALE_1: - They're less than a 100. It's pretty small.

[00:34:11]
MALE_2: - They're pretty small. I would say that this is the number one thing people forget to add. Like they'll remember the page title because it names the page in most website builders, but then people don't remember to put this in. I mean, we've done that lot stuff. Either way, if someone can read the title and then read a quick description, that's huge.

That really shows them like, hey, this is what we offer, this is what we're providing. This is why you want to click here and then they do it. We're cruising, we're moving on now. What's the next thing? Images.

[00:34:37]
MALE_1: - I hate these, I'm sorry.

[00:34:42]
MALE_2: - Images are important and you're probably all photographers, you know this. Because you probably drowning in images. You need images on a page. Google rewards you for having images on a page just in general, but images, it's not as simple as just make an image and toss it up there. You need to name them. Let's go back to GTmetrix open, let's look at Pepsi and see what are there.

[00:35:01]
MALE_1: - Yeah, I think that has some of texts over here. You can check.

[00:35:06]
MALE_2: - Here's some. Pepsi has done a terrible job naming their images. Here's the interesting about images. When people search on Google, there's an image thing at the top. So if I go up here and I click on images, images will come up. This is a viable way for people to search for stuff. If we want to get fancy, we can go to YouTube and talk about that, but that's outside of the Google search.

But sometimes what happens is that your images will get picked up, and will be found instead of the actual website. So it behooves you to name your images correctly so that they can come up in a search. Rather than just name it some kind of code like 3CP5-2556PX or whatever, name your images like, I don't know, real estate photography, I guide Dallashousefront.jpeg.

Then when people search, sometimes people are just looking for a picture and it'll come up and they'll click, and then they'll go to the website from the image. There can be done from the filename itself or in some cases, what's called an alt tag, which is a way of adding extra text that identifies the image for search engines. That's a lot of extra work to do that on the backend.

But if you're building your website right now, if you just get in the habit of adding those alt tags and naming your images properly, it's very worthwhile. But think about it in the sense that those images can pull people in as well. They're also something that's searchable, if that makes any sense. Naming alt tags. Is there anything else for images I've left or anything?

[00:36:49]
MALE_1: - We mentioned this before as well. Make sure your images are sizable, small, and about effects your load time as well. Make sure you use high-quality images like nothing beats. Nothing's sets a bad taste in the mouth than having a really low resolution and it's a lot about user experience as well, as well as working with Google closely.

Look at your competitors sites, either ones that are doing good in the market, and see how they're using their images. That's how I would do it.

[00:37:19]
MALE_2: - The next thing we're going to talk about is links. There's lots of different types of links. The most important type of links we're just going to address it right after that is backlinks. That's a fancy way of saying other people who have linked to your website. When you first start, you'll have no backlinks, zero backlinks. You can use tools like Semrush and H-REF to measure that. Backlinks are a long strategy and I'll explain what I'm talking about and why they're important.

Google prioritizes sites that are linked to by other sites and also they're going to prioritize sites that are linked to by important sites. If your friend down the street has a personal page like MySpace, if that still exist, and links to your webpage, it's a backlink, but it's not any good. If Forbes or The New York Times or a.org or something else links to your site.

That's huge because those are really big, powerful websites. Google says, that's cool, I see what you've done there. You've got an a.edu, you've got a university linking to your site. That's going to boost you up in the rankings because that says to Google, this website's legit, this is important. Building backlinks takes time.

You don't get them right away and people don't link to you unless they have a reason to do it. A good reason to do it is when you create quality content that other people link to. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. But the other reason is that you've worked with people who just agree to link to you for some reason. Let's suppose you have a university.

You're going to go shoot one of their campuses or something. You could just provide them with the eye guide tour or whatever content you're making. But if you can get them to give you a backlink in some way, that's absolutely massive. That's going to boost your website up considerably and it's just a link someone else made on their website that just goes to yours. You'll get a little traffic.

[00:39:14]
MALE_1: - That's not the point in.

[00:39:16]
MALE_2: - The traffic doesn't even matter. It's funny. You're trying to get that backlink just to get the SEO juice.

[00:39:21]
MALE_1: - One more thing. You can pay a lot of these sites like Forbes, for example, to future an article about you. A lot of these businesses do that as well, getting paid so you are recommended because you want to be organic as possible. But if you're starting out, you need that extra boost, get featured, pay for it. It works 100 percent.

[00:39:42]
MALE_2: - Yeah, I'll give you a fun hack we learned a while ago. If you create a press release about your business and then put it out on PR.com and add a couple of links. People will just pick it up. News agencies, they don't really review very much. They just pick them up and they're not like the best backlinks, but they're better than nothing. So that's fun.

[00:39:58]
MALE_1: - One more cool hack I would recommend would be definitely get on YouTube and started making content there and start linking back and forth to that, because surprisingly not many people know YouTube is actually the biggest search engine in the world. Not Google because there are more people on YouTube searching content every day.

[00:40:15]
MALE_2: - Yeah, that's what I was getting at earlier with the images. I was like videos, that's all in one thing.

[00:40:19]
MALE_1: - Yes. If you're going to someone like get a page or be featured on, let's say someone's article or YouTube video and they'll link you back. That's a big boost as well, depending on how much traffic is coming through that.

[00:40:31]
MALE_2: - Backlinks are their own whole thing. It's a long-term strategy. It usually involves connecting with people and getting them to link to you because you have some arrangement or quality content. We could have a whole webinar just on backlinks. It's just something to bear in mind, when you're working with clients, try to get backlinks if you can.

Hey, can you link to my site on your site type of thing? Often that's all that's required.

[00:40:56]
Ali Javed: Internal and external links.

[00:40:59]
Chris White: Google likes it, and you should do it anyway, because it's good, when you have lots of links on a page that go to places, because then it's like rich content. It's not a brochure, it's an interactive experience. Google likes, for some reason, a couple of outside links in addition to some internal links. It's a good idea when you make a page to link to other pages on your site. That's it.

Sometimes they call it link sculpting, where you take your pages and you connect them together. If your page isn't super complicated, you're not going to have a whole lot of things to link to, but when you have a copy that references something, it's nice to include a link there because it does make the experience better.

Yes, technically on your menu bar, you have an about page, 100 percent. But if you reference yourself and something that is local and as mentioned on the about page, you could link to it from inside some copy, for example, on your page, and then you've got an internal link that goes from one page to another, even though they're already was one elsewhere.

But it helps their experience because people are in that content and we're looking at it and they see the link and then you can click on. The Google oscillates external links. Sometimes it's a good idea to link out to things. I mean, not like your competition, but relevant information. You don't want them to leave the page, so have it open a separate window when they click on it rather than take them off your site. You don't want that.

[00:42:20]
Ali Javed: Here's a quick little hack I've learned over the years is that if you have multiple things going on, let's say you absolutely media, you're on YouTube, we have blogs, link them in a circle, in a way. Let's say your blog goes to your YouTube page and your YouTube page goes to your website. Then there's the link on your website that goes through social media..

Then your social media goes back to your YouTube, something around like a web. They're always interconnected and they're never really leaving basically your content.

[00:42:49]
Chris White: Yeah, people in the funnel.

[00:42:51]
Ali Javed: That's the idea and that also really helps us see you in the sense that you're getting links as well as you're sending people back and forth so that courses traffic as well.

[00:42:59]
Chris White: Stand on your site longer too. My favorite thing that, well, we do it sometimes, but that I see when you're engaging with some content, that's good, and then at the bottom or somewhere in there links to more content you might also like, I'm lazy, I don't want to search for stuff, so I much prefer the Netflix version where I watch a show and they're like, here's eight more you might like. Oh thanks.

I mean, those are just internal links and other things you can click on. It's quite common for us anyway, to link on our pages to take features when we reference them. Anytime we say floor plans, we're linked to the floor plan page or anytime we reference pricing, we're linked to the pricing page or whatever. Moving on, running out of time. What do we got next? Quality content.

I've already said this multiple times. Google, their algorithms are weird, voodoo magic. They know if your content is good. I don't know how. That means that they're really going to prioritize content that is providing valuable information. It's a mix. It's like copy keywords, you're going to have maybe videos and images and extra things that make it look more and more robust.

But there's no gaming here. If you really want people to go to your site, give them the information that they're looking for and make it good, and it's just like everything will work if you do that. If you create, for example, a blog post about an event that you shot where they were going to bulldoze a building and you went in and you did an iGUIDE before the building was destroyed.

Then you use that for historical rift, I don't know, I'm just making stuff up, but if you create a whole blog article about that and then optimize it for a couple of key phrases, usually location-based, that's quality content. That's stuff people want to read. That's something that would probably get picked up by someone else and shared.

There's your backlinks, that's content that Google is going to see has lots of meat on it, you maybe include some images or some video, and that's something that would keep people on your site reading for awhile. That means your bounce rate will be lower, and that gives you lots of opportunities for keywords like if the building had a name or there was a builder involved.

But often, that type of content needs you to think on the front end about making it before you get to the point where you're optimizing it for SEO. That's way too late at that point. Usually, you think about it in terms of, I've got this thing coming up, this would make really great content, I should make this content to pull people in and off the Internet and bring them into my sales funnel.

You can think of it in real-world terms like, if someone's going to go, they're going to see that I did this thing in this area, and they're going to see the credibility, oh, I've been working in this area, I'm a real estate photographer or a person documenting spaces, I participated in this project, lots of named drops in there, they're going to think.

I should hire this person for my next shoot and then make it easy for him. Then book now buttons right available there somewhere. That content pulled them in and then sent them over to buy.

[00:45:57]
Ali Javed: Google is so smart bandage. There's a weird algorithm. Chris, you mentioned this, it knows what kind of content you're making in a way, and one of the ways is that it analyzes what people are searching verses what your site's offering. If 100 people are searching a few keywords or something about a certain.

Let's say, area or whatever, it would crawl your website, pick out exactly what you're offering and what you're saying, and it would match that. It's a lot more than it's putting content, but it has to match exactly what's in demand. If the trends right now, are let's say, selling my house or Real Estate photography works virtually because of COVID, whatever it is, and your site talks about that.

It would pick it up. It has a weird the algorithm, but it is super smart.

[00:46:48]
Chris White: It's true. Every time we say that Google pays this a little bit of money, Google's great. Praise Google. Here's the last point. We're going to bring it home though. We already did this, but there's a lot of details here in SEO, and it's complicated and weird and you don't know where to start and it's overwhelming.

There are lots of tools that you can use to do a whole site audit to make your life easy. The GT metrics one was just for site speed. But if you use something like SEMrush that we talked about, I don't know where it is in here, but there's a whole site audit and you can just do a scan, and it will basically just go through and give you a zillion suggestions. That's my suggestion.

Don't worry about all the little details that we just told you. Obviously, I'm sure you all took notes or whatever. Oh, there's a recording available to watch it again if you want. But basically do a site audit and let it do the work for you. It'll go through your whole site and it will give you a big list of to-dos. Then think about some of the things that you can do yourself and then just do those.

The images is the one I always think of because you're all imaging people. Then if you want to tackle the other ones, go for it, and if not, that's something you could easily hand off to an SEO specialists. It's very common to have people who work in SEO, this is all they do. They go into sites, they fix broken links, they suggests changes your link structure, they'll do keyword research for you.

But working with those people can be complicated and overwhelming. If you use the tool and you familiarize yourself ahead of time, that means if you do engage with an SEO expert, who's going to help you, you're way better off and more knowledgeable. You don't have to rely on what they tell you necessarily.

[00:48:35]
Chris White: But there are certain things that are easier to do on your own versus having someone else do it. I'll give you an example. Keyword research can be very challenging. What I mean by that is that using a tool like Semrush that you can see on screen right now, you can go find what people are searching for. Sounds awesome, cool. You can go find where people are searching for it and then you could just give them that. But that's not how it works.

You don't just give people what they want, you have to give them the information that they're looking for to solve their problems and proposing that you are the solution. For example, I could make a website that really targets people looking for floor plan software, and I can get them on my site. But as soon as they start reading the content, they're going to realize, "I don't provide floor plan software.

I'm a photographer, and I'm shooting, and I'm making floor plans, so they don't want what I have and they're gone. Although I get more traffic, the bounce rate is really high, so that hurts me." Keywords, it's not about gaming, necessarily. It's about understanding what people are looking for and making really subtle tweaks.

If people are searching for, for example, specifically floor plans, that's quite a broad general term. I don't know if I could really get a lot of traffic there. But maybe using a tool like this, I determine that people are really looking for ANSI floor plans. That's a different set of search keywords. Maybe I'm optimizing my page for ANSI floor plans, which is what iGUIDE provides, ANSI-compatible floor plans. Cool.

There you go. These tools are not meant to give you insight into the minds of people so that you can specifically exploit them. They're meant so that you can tailor your message to be accurate so that when people are searching for things, they're finding you as a solution. I hope that makes sense. That was a lot. That was the final. Do you have, Ali, anything to add to that? No. We're good.

[00:50:42]
Ali Javed: No, I think we pretty much covered everything. Let's just start to questions.

[00:50:46]
Chris White: Yea, if you guys have any questions.

[00:50:47]
Ali Javed: If you have any questions, just jump right in. The floor is open.

[00:50:51]
Chris White: We'll just awkwardly sit here and stare at each other. You guys don't have to ask any questions if you don't want. Well, there's lots of stuff coming up. There's the new viewers coming up, there's ANSI thing. Did you guys hear about that? Did I bring that up off the top, Ali, or did I forget?

[00:51:09]
Ali Javed: No. Let's go into it.

[00:51:11]
Chris White: I'm going to talk about ANSI. Let me load up my page real quick. Hold on. There is one question. Is there a simple way to see an overview of your website, for instance, look at the headings? Yes, there is. Lot of the tools that we talked about will give you a sitemap, which is essentially a big old list of all your pages, all the URLs, all of the titles, and all of the metadata.

There's a zillion tools to do that. We used to use one called the Spider SEO, I want to say, Screaming Frog Spider, it's got a good name. But it's awesome. This is really good software. This is a desktop thing. It's not an online thing, but you can use this software to basically crawl your whole website, and it will basically generate for you a big old list in a CSV that you could export and so you can edit things.

But it basically will identify pages without meta-description, so just super handy, and then it'll show you when you've got duplicate titles, I think. I can't recall. Either way, it's free up to, I think, 500 URLs or something so it's a great option. Any advice on robot.exe or it's out of scope? It's little out of scope.
Most of the time what happens is that it depends on the service that you're using for generating.

Separate files that are used, and you're going to have plug-ins and stuff. I'm not an expert on anyway. We'll probably have the branding for that.

[00:52:32]
Ali Javed: One more thing I would say is that you want to be careful with that because it could overload your site if you don't Google this, crawl your site too much, so that's one thing to keep in mind as well.

[00:52:42]
Chris White: We use a thing where we know index a lot of pages and Google doesn't like that. It makes it upset. That comes up on all our site audits and we're like, no.

[00:52:52]
Ali Javed: It's hard to use Google. They're very demanding and everything.

[00:52:58]
Chris White: I didn't sound like a positive statement, and we're not going to get a kickback for that. Let's say nice things about Google. I'm going to show you guys this. Just real quick in the last couple of minutes we have. If you're in Canada, it doesn't mean much, but if you're in the United States, and this came up on the Facebook group, I think, Casey posted a thing.

Either way, the Fannie Mae is going to require ANSI measurements as of April 1st for their mortgage appraisals. If you want a mortgage through Fannie Mae, your appraisal has to have the house measured and floor plans done to antsy standards. Good news, iGUIDE totally provides ANSI-compatible floor plans. How awesome is that?

We're investigating here or there with people and we're talking about it. There's not a lot of hype surrounding this, but it is a fun question to ask because people, they don't really appreciate a problem until they actually have a problem, so it's not a problem yet. I could foresee this being a bigger problem as of, say, maybe the 1st, 2nd, 3rd week of April, we'll say.

What this literally means to you, if it's not clear, is that during the closing process, when an appraisal needs to be done at the property for a mortgage approval, when measurements are done, they need to be ANSI compatible. That means that if you've shot an iGUIDE, you have ANSI-compatible measurements, that means that that mortgage appraisal can just use those measurements.

You don't need to have another one done. Well, it can, in theory, speed up the closing process so the house can just sell faster because you can get financing faster and it just makes things go quicker. That's an enormous benefit. We're pretty excited about it. There's a page that I put on screen and then forgot to share. Give me a second. Can you guys see my ANSI page here?

[00:54:57]
Ali Javed: Yeah.

[00:54:59]
Chris White: We have a page that talks about this stuff. I think I put a link already on the Facebook if you guys are on there, good incentive to go. But there's a link to Fannie Mae's, their whole thing about it. You can read it if you want. Long story short, specifically ANSI said Z765-2021 measurements, which iGUIDE provides. How cool is that?

[00:55:28]
Ali Javed: Awesome. No questions, so you guys can find those recording on our YouTube channel, iGUIDE, and go ahead and do subscribe because we are releasing a lot more content coming up this next couple of months. A lot more, especially more guests are coming on, lot more topics, so it'll be really fun.

[00:55:46]
Chris White: Thank you all very much. Thank you, Ali. Have a great rest of the day, everybody. Thanks so much.

[00:55:52]
Ali Javed: Take care. Bye.