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Specializing in strategic planning for multi-location and franchise SEO campaigns, Steve Wiideman, of Wiideman Consulting Group, considers himself a scientist and practitioner of local and eCommerce search engine optimization and paid search advertising.

Wiideman has played a role in the inbound successes of brands that have included Disney, Linksys, Belkin, Public Storage, Honda,Technicolor, Skechers, Meineke Car Care Centers, Applebee’s, IHOP, Dole, and others, with emphasis on strategy, planning and campaign oversight.

Check out Wiideman Consulting Group here: https://www.wiideman.com/ 

Follow and listen to the Search Marketing Podcast here: https://www.wiideman.com/podcast

Steve has FANTASTIC LEARNING RESOURCES YOU NEED HERE: https://www.wiideman.com/learn 

Thank you so much for a great conversation, Steve!

Transcript powered by Happy Scribe

Welcome to another episode of the DiscoPosse podcast. You’re listening to a conversation with Steve Wiideman. Steve is the founder of the Wedding Consulting Group.

He’s got super crazy good knowledge about SEO content marketing, how to get found. He gets so much great education on this and lots to cover.

But I want to give a huge thanks, of course, to you for listening. We just flew past a whole bunch of new milestones here at the podcast. You can, of course, follow us on YouTube.

If you go to youtube.com/DiscoPossePodcast, you can see the episodes now the same day they launch, if you want to watch. It’s kind of cool. I’m a real fan.

And obviously we’re getting viewership tells you, that a few people like both the video and the audio side. So thank you very much for listening and watching now. And of course, a huge thank you as well to all the fine folks that make this podcast possible. When it comes to protecting you and your data, you got nowhere to go but the folks at Veeam who have everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s on premises, whether it’s in the cloud, whether it’s Cloud-Native with their cast and platform, whether it’s things like Teams and Office 365, everything you need needs to be protected.

And they’ve got everything around orchestrator and recovery. So it’s not just about protecting, but recovering backups are only good if you can recover the bloody backups anyways, go check it out. They are over at vee.am/DiscoPosee. Easiest way to find them.

They’ve got a really cool campaign going right now. So go head over there now go to vee.am/DiscoPosee.

And as well as backing up your data and protecting it that way, make sure you protect it in flight, in transit wherever you are. The best thing you can do for your privacy and protection is to use a VPN. Look, there’s weird stuff that goes on out there. There’s lots of data that’s being captured and also just stuff that you don’t want. Those little ad pop ups that are flying all over the place. A good way to prevent that and save you from getting your data stolen is go to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse.

I’m a user of ExpressVPN. Also really good for user testing. If you’re testing from remote locations, you can actually choose your location. Great way to do stuff for web testing.

And of course, one last thing better than anything. Start your day with diabolical coffee. Go to diabolicalcoffee.com.

All right. This is Steve Wheatmann. Enjoy the show.

Hi, this is Steve Wiideman. I am the founder of Wiideman Consulting Group, an adjunct professor at two different universities here in California and the author of SEO Strategy and Skills. And you’re on the DiscoPosse podcast.

Now, this is the fun part because I also made the critical error up front, Steve, that I mispronounced your name right out of the gate, which is probably like, the worst thing you could do. So thank you, Steve, for joining. Yeah, it’s always the trick, too. When there’s two Is next to each other in a text. You’re never sure. Like when you type something into Google, it’s always like, I think you meant wide, man. I’m like, no, it’s Wiideman. It is Wiideman.

You know in high school, I was Wildman, and in the army, my peers just called me Weed because it was shorter and easier and lazier. But, yeah, it’s all the things. But the W-I-I is like the game system, right? You call it the Wii. So if you associate it with Nintendo, you have Wiideman.

So the chat today, we’re going to cover a lot of really interesting ground because we’re in a digital cornucopia. And as such, you want to make sure that you’re eating from the right side of the funnel. When you’re trying to make sure that your content, your voice, your persona, your company gets to people in a meaningful way. This is one of the things that everybody struggles with and whether it’s just somebody they’ve got a little side hustle and they’re looking to up their game. They’ve got a Shopify store, perhaps a coffee company as one would have as well.

It’s a really seemingly black box world to a lot of folks who are just trying to figure out how to get an idea to the market, and they probably aren’t able to really fund a strong SEO person. So just, like many things, we kind of go it alone, and as a result, they learn bad habits. It’s like I’m going to learn how to swing a golf club, and I’m going to learn how to swing it badly. And then when I go to try and learn how to do it properly, it’s going to be really hard to unlearn the bad things I’ve learned.

Anyway, I’m excited about the chance to chat and learn from you. You’ve got a lot going on. So, Steve, if you want to give a intro to you, we’ll talk about Wiidman Consulting. We’ll talk about the work you’ve done, your courses, everything and get into the fun stuff.

Absolutely. I’m just a digital marketing nerd, like the rest of us. Been in the game 22 years. Started as a freelancer, I got to work from some exciting companies like Disney. I ran the paid and organic for Disneyland.com and Adventures by Disney back in the 2000s. I left the corporate and agency world in 2010, decided to be a family man, be closer to home and see if I could develop my own business and went through that scary entrepreneurial transition. And fortunately because I was already freelancing, I had some existing work that could carry over into that so I had a bit of a handicap.

And having worked for Disney also made it a little bit easier to get new clients. But yeah, so since 2010, I’ve been helping multi location brands like Public Storage and myNike and Skechers and E-commerce brands also Sketchers and Bob’s Watches and some other really fun companies. Belkin and Linksys to develop a strategy to make sure that they’re appearing more often in search results, not just in Google, but in Bing, in some cases YouTube and Amazon as well, and to develop a strategy and cadence to make sure that we’re continuously growing and improving our visibility and search.

A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to look back at what my dream was ten years ago, and it was to teach, and I’m like, Wow, I’m getting close to that ten year Mark. I better get out there and start doing it. So I started doing some adjunct teaching for certificate programs at UC San Diego and Cal State Fullerton and even at the community College here in Fullerton. So I’ve enjoyed that process. I’ve kind of curated my own content to create our little Academy of search that we created to help business owners that are struggling with figuring out what’s in that black box.

So we’ve sort of uncovered everything that a business needs to do to create a plan, whether they do it themselves or whether they hire someone to do it. At least they know the what of what needs to happen, and they let the resources manage. The how. So that’s been an exciting journey. About a year ago, I got tagged to help write a textbook for Stukent and support the courseware building for certificate programs. So not only will you get to read some really organized SEO content with the textbook, but you’ll also get some cool courseware and lecture slides.

So if you’re a teacher and you want to teach SEO, talk to the folks at Stukent, ask them about the SEO textbook if it’s something you’re interested in teaching. And then you have the vision for us for the next year or two is really just to continue developing courses and programs that allow us to scale outside of just being on the phone, consulting with clients and we’ll see how it goes. But the journey has been great. I get to hang out with cool people like you and talk search and geek out on nerdy technical web design topics and have some fun.

Well, this is the fun thing now that it’s becoming part of curriculum. It’s such a great thing, because quite often I remember taking, like I was already in tech, and I said, Well, I better have a high school education. I sort of snuck into tech at the timing. You and I actually came into tech around the same time frame. So I was finding myself suddenly working at Sun Life Financial doing desktop support and then working up the server support and then really launched up into it.

You were playing Oregon Trail and Odell Lake on your Apple II, just like me.

So I had this, like, sort of getting through there. And I said, I better go back and actually back up. The luck of getting into the hotness of tech in the late 90s because nobody had accreditation. There was no course for doing what we were doing. There was no Windows support, no Vale support in universities. So I said, while you went to Ryerson University in Toronto, and I started taking a certificate program, but they were teaching stuff like old networking that was long since dead. And I work day to day at Sun Life.

We have some of the oldest systems on Earth, and they’re newer than the stuff that we’re learning in this textbook.

Wow.

It really taught me that, like, the fundamentals that make it through as part of curricula do not get updated very often because it’s hard to keep up. You can’t just keep swinging with the latest moves and fads. So there’s always this gap. So now it’s great to see that, like, true digital marketing and SEO, and it’s making it there where people can learn this instead of just getting out to the world and having to find a peer that can say, all right, come, let’s sit down. I’m going to give you a fire hose of information over the next couple of hours.

Yeah, that’s unfortunate. And it happens more often than not even in the contract that we have right now with Stukent. We’re required to update that book every year now. So I’m like, maybe we should update it every six now, let’s just do every year. But it’s tempting because Google just made a round of four updates just over the last couple of months. So it’s so dynamic and changing the results look different every year. They’re moving things around, adding new features and elements. You’re seeing videos now with the different time sections in the search results in a web search, not a video search.

So, yeah, it’s a very dynamic field to be in, and any information from three years ago should be scrutinized for sure.

It is interesting to see that shift is like I go to look for something I had the other day. How do I drain my dishwasher when it hasn’t drained properly and you just type in. How do I drain this model of dishwasher? And it comes up in the first result. it is like four minutes and 17 seconds into a 22 minute video from some rando who just posted this thing. It has literally like, 117 views, like this isn’t even, like viral videos that are getting indexed, but it somehow said, like, at this mark, you got what you want, and I clicked it and they’re like, by golly, I just learned how to do this.

And what an incredible opportunity for emerging brands that are trying to build trust and credibility and drive remarketing. We did this in public storage. We actually created twelve different videos similar to what you’re mentioning, like how tos such as how to store impact glassware, how to move your refrigerator, how to store a piano. All these tough questions that people were asking. So we got with a local college and got a fun little team of sort of not necessarily amateur, but in training. Folks help us with this really creative, funny videos.

We created pages for them, and we were able to see $0.01 cost per views on YouTube and other video networks because nobody was really using that kind of upper funnel content to build brand awareness. Like you said, it’s your common Joe’s video that’s showing up, not these branded videos that could have a little bit better production quality and benefit from a paid element to that. Instead of just being organic, they could augment that with paid and organic and have double visibility. So for cheap, because there’s not a lot of competition for that type of content.

So I’m with you. I think there’s a huge opportunity for every business to take a look at and look beyond that lower funnel myopic view that we have around just get customers to, let’s build a brand. Let’s get people to know about us and how we work and what to do. Let’s provide as much helpful content as we can possibly come up with and optimize it so it shows up in universal web search results, in Google Video Search, in YouTube, and Image Search. Just make sure that all those elements of this content we plan to create are optimized so that they can be found.

And I see a lot of business owners that are just like, I just want customers. I don’t want to waste any money on anything that’s not going to drive immediate customers. And it’s like, well, this content is going to drive a ton of customers for you in two to three years from now. If you can have the patience to build that foundation, it’s going to drive a lot of brand visibility and trust. It’s going to help with your remarketing and your marketing automation process. And you’re going to generate a lot of business.

But you’ve got to get over it. You’ve got to decide, I’m going to create really good helpful content. I’m going to use tools like AnswerThePublic or SEMrush’s question filter or Conductor Searchlights buyer journey phase tool to find some of those opportunities, map them out in a big list and then just start chipping away at it. But I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s amazing that some guy with 117 views was able to displace brands that have millions of dollars of budget and they’re not even paying attention.

Yeah, when this is the company that makes the bloody dishwasher didn’t even show up in any of the searches like that.

The bigger the brand, the less of the branded type marketing they do. We’re doing that right now, and I don’t want to put them on Blast, but both Applebee’s and IHOP, neither of them have a blog. Neither of them have content marketing. You could use a site operator in Google, site:applebees.com, site:ihop.com. And all you’re going to find are menus, news releases about new items and specials and promos. But no how to, where to, why to recipes. None of that. In fact, some of the branded questions that people ask about those brands, if you just search for them, that show up in the questions people ask, they don’t even have content for.

So other websites are getting their branded traffic. So we’re working through a plan right now to address the branded first so that somebody does do a search for anything that includes our name, that we’ve got a page of content that answers it or a section of content on a page that answers it. And then we’re going to go into some of those non branded opportunities. So you’re right. You hit it on the nail. The larger the brands, the less resources they put into digital because they don’t think they need them.

My boss at Disney said that he said we don’t need SEO, we’re Disney. None of our pages are showing up in Google search results because you have one page with a big Flash feature on it. And Flash can’t be crawled by search engines. And there’s no pages for all these different, travel to Ireland, family travel to China type pages. So it’s convincing stakeholders that the brand itself isn’t powerful enough to be number one for search terms that we need to augment our digital marketing strategy to include really well, keyword rich, optimized content.

The funny thing. Yeah. There you go. So somebody searches out for an Apple-tini, and they’re going to get some mommy blogger with, like, how to make an Apple-tini at home because they are 100% aiming at, like, question and answer content, recipe stuff, menu stuff, especially every industry has its own struggle in the end. Like you said, Disney, in effect, is fighting property management and travel sites who are saying, like, get to Disney, stay at Disney. They’re going to own that, like the behavior of the person is not to go to Disney.com and work backwards, they’re going to Google or go to their search engine of choice and say, “When’s the cheapest time to go to Disney?”

Like finding Disney blogs and so forth. And none of the actual Disney owned content. It’s incredible.

Well, and this really, there’s two key areas that I want to drill in on. Number one, you mentioned it in the early part. There is patience. So the patience of SEO, what’s the formula to understanding the path to success in SEO? And obviously, what we’re saying is not the ultimate like, do this thing and it works every time. But what has worked because it is a moving target. It’s not just keyword stuffing. And then showing up in Google the next day, there is a path. that’s a lengthy one, but it has a long and beautiful thick tail on it.

Right. I think it’s a two part question. Part one is setting expectations of what’s involved and how long it takes. The second part of it is building that strategy you mentioned so that you’re not just doing SEO, but you’re following a prioritized roadmap of areas to focus on. So the first part, and having so many years of experience in it, I’ve had to get better and better and better at it, is setting expectations. As we do start to work on a single page to get that single page to show up in search results.

The first thing we want to make sure that we’re doing is addressing the needs of what the visitors looking for. So we look at those top ten results that already appear for the keywords that you’re thinking about optimizing for, and we look for themes. What are they showing? What are they displaying? What are the questions that we see in the People Also Ask section. What are the related keywords that are used in the search results? What other search terms of those pages receiving traffic from to help us to create an outline of how that page could be written, that’s the first part, is getting those top keywords where they need to be.

So that initial crawl when Googlebot and Bingbot are crawling your website, they find those search terms and they go, okay, I’m going to test this page for those words because I saw them emphasized in the title, in the heading or in subheadings. Once they’ve done that, that keyword part, that keyword component is almost a mute point. It’s not about that keyword anymore. Once they’ve already identified those words and they’ve cued you up to see how your page performs and their results for those words. Now it gets into that second phase.

So let’s just say that content itself. Once it gets on the website and Google can crawl from your home page through your navigation links to get to that page. It’s not just orphaned in a place where they can’t get to it. They get to that page, it gets indexed, and now you’re on page. I don’t know, three, maybe within three months, you find yourself at the end of page two of the search results. Now they’re going to look at off page factors. They’re going to look at what they find across the Internet about your brand and how it correlates to those keywords or other people across the Internet using those words when they’re searching for you.

Are they searching for your brand and those words and those words in your brand? Are they just searching for your brand? So getting people to search for you in correlation to those search terms and getting crawlers to find the search terms that you want to rank for adjacent to your brand name. And of course, the obvious links to your page. PageRank that Larry Page created back in the late 90s was what drove Google in the first place. They said we don’t want to just use what’s on your website.

We want to use what other websites are saying about your website and your content. So if you go out there and do a little bit of research and you find who’s linking to those top pages, you look for creative ways to get other industry websites to share your content and link back to that page. And there’s this nice pattern of links coming in over time. Think of a line chart and you’ve got this. Over time, more and more links coming to this page. Google is going to recognize that.

And we’re going to say now, we’re on the tipping edge of page two, page three. Those links help us move up to page one. Now we’re at the number ten spot on page one. Within about six, seven months or so, we see ourselves on page one at the bottom. How do we get to the top? How do we get to that number one spot? That number one spot is the issue that a lot of SEO agencies get fired during that period because the clients just don’t have the patience.

You said I was going to be number one for this keyword. Spend six months. Forget it. I’m done. There’s this trust factor. Those pages that already rank, a lot of them have ranked for that keyword for years and proven to Google through their history that they’ve been good results. You can’t just make one of them go away. There’s only ten, right. You have to earn your way there. So the links help you, the content helps you. But what’s going to help you move up to that number one spot is how users respond to your page.

Let’s say in a search result, Google has 100,000 searches a month happening for a certain search term, and your page has been on page two and page three is now on page one. They’re going to show you higher and more often, we’ll just say 10,000 times out of that 100,000 times and they trust it like, hey, it’s actually performing really well when I display it. Now I’m going to display it 50,000 times out of 100,000 searches. Now I’m going to display it 75,000 times. So you start to show up more often and more higher as they begin to trust that people are clicking on and staying on your website.

So the action item here is to pay attention to the user behavior signals of getting people to want to click your listing because it stands out because it’s got rich results or thumbnail next to it or star results or questions and answers that are attributed to that particular page, maybe even in some industries, getting creative and using emojis and call-to-actions and titles and descriptions. And then once they do, click on your listing because that’s the goal, right? With user behaviors, get them to click you more often.

Don’t just call your friends and say, click on my listing because it’s not sustainable and it doesn’t follow that lying pattern of behavior over time. It’s going to raise a flag if you have it all of a sudden and then drops. It’s making sure that it’s a natural, organic thing, not trying to get in the search results. Then they get to your page. If they go back to the search results and choose a competing listing, then Google starts to infer in being that maybe that listing wasn’t very helpful and they start to demote you over time.

So how do we get them to stay? We get them to stay by using common web design best practices, mobile web design best practices, and maybe following some hints from Google’s guidelines. So we’re going to pay attention to things like security and using a valid SSL. Privacy, is there a link to Privacy Policy? Is it updated? Is there an updated date? We’re going to pay attention to accessibility because some of our users have impairments, we’re going to really focus in on our mobile user experience. Do we have a floating call to action so that we know the users know what they should be clicking on without having to flick the page up and down to find a button somewhere?

Did we make it usable for them? Can they search our website? Can they call us? Can they verify that we’re a real business and trust our site without having to go back and do a search for your brand name? Plus the word reviews. So all of those things play a component and it could take up to a year or more. And it’s really funny how often we look at our results for a single page that we created and what happens at that one year point? If the keyword is, we’ll just say medium in terms of competitiveness, right?

It’s somewhere in the middle range. Right at that one year, our little line chart that’s been growing slowly suddenly turns into a hockey stick, right around one year. It’s really interesting, and that hockey stick just kind of continues for the next part of the following year. It’s really exciting for a competitive search term that could be two to three years as long as every month you’re chipping away and having better, more helpful content, earning more links and mentions off your website and continuing to test different ways to get more people to click on your listing when they see it in the search results.

If you’re focusing on those three things every month, even for a competitive keyword, like credit card or online casino or whatever, you could see yourself on the first page or higher within three years. But that’s the expectation, right? That’s the thing that business owners typically don’t have the patience for. But then you look back. You’re like, man, if I would have done this ten years ago.

That’s right.

If I would have done this last year. I’d be in hockey stick right now. I’d have my best December ever if I would have done this a year ago.

And that’s the mentality I’d love to have business owners be thinking about next year when they remember this podcast and go, damn, I should have just, it went by so fast, I should have just done it.

As the proverb goes. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now planning to do things. And look, I’ve been a victim of this myself of like, yeah, I should build a content plan, and then you get behind. And then you spend more time doing the planning than just carving out content. But you look at, especially when you get into the areas of capturing inbound content and affiliate marketing processes, it’s exciting to watch that world, because the whole thing is just, like, just keep consistently putting content out that’s going to eventually get in there.

And I’ve seen the conversions where all of a sudden I’m like, oh, wow. You go from showing up in no searches to showing up in searches, but no click throughs, then showing up in searches with click throughs. And then, like you said, all of a sudden there’s this thing and you’re like, this random page that looks like it should have just sat there and gone away is suddenly getting some heat. And then, conversely, I actually bought an existing domain that had a lot of traffic and sort of let me try the other side. Game the system.

So I actually started taking the original inbound URLs, which are now four-folding because the site had been gone and I was moving them to other pages, and I was getting click through, and I was actually seeing results. But then I let that site wane in the activity and the content for, like, six months. And I go back and the hockey stick turned down because it’s a consistency game. It’s doing all of these things together. But it’s hard to explain to people, especially in an organization they say like, I work at flood dergulon.

No one could possibly know more about Flug dergullian than I do, or we do. So of course, they’re going to end up on our website. And I would tell them, like, when you search plug dergullian, the first thing that comes up is your competitor, and it’s a paid ad. So, Congratulations, you’ve got a competitor who wants to own you, but guess what. You’re a target for them, and they’re winning, right?

Yeah. That happens more often than not. And the second part of that story, that expectations is important because it gives you a better picture of how long it takes. But the second part is, what you mentioned is, actually having a plan. And one of the things I tried to do when I started teaching at Cal State Fullerton and started kind of borrowing some of my own content to create our own little simple training program was to try to fold in the specific audits and the specific strategies that you need to follow to be successful in search for all the things we just mentioned, the keyword research element and building out what that content map should look like and how the pages should be optimized the off page visibility features you just mentioned broken links.

We recovered somewhere close to 5000 broken links for one of our restaurant chains that had 15 different URLs for this promo they ran every year. And they four-folded every year. There was Veteran and .gov and these other big websites that were linking to these pages that are no longer there. We finally helped them create a permanent URL, redirected all 15 of those and recovered thousands of really helpful links that Google is going to use when they’re scoring our site, holistically. But, yeah, having that plan.

So we put all our templates in there, the same templates we use for those brands I mentioned. So if you wanted to do a technical audit and follow the 72 different things we recommend looking at from page speed and accessibility and all those things we mentioned, they’re all in there with a little video on how to do it and the Google developer link that you’ll need when your webmaster comes back and says your SEO person doesn’t know what they’re talking about and you can say, Well, it’s not them, it’s Google. Here’s the link.

And they’re like, Fine, I’ll just do it. Developers and SEO don’t always play well together. That’s the component. I wouldn’t jump into SEO cold. I would definitely start with a strategy, map out all those URLs you already have on your website, put them in a Google sheet, and then go column by column on different SEO focal points, such as titles and headings and image names and page names. How many internal links from other pages on my website do I have pointing to that page?

And what words do I use in those links to help the search engines as they’re crawling? Sort of define what those pages are about before they even get to them. So I would start there. Build that strategy, get that tech audit squared away, get your content and keyword research ready to rock in a Google sheet somewhere or in a project management system. Figure out where you need to be getting links, where competitors have them. Get some creative ideas going on ways that you can build links by getting other influencers and subject matter experts involved in that content process so that they feel somewhat obligated to participate in the visibility of that content.

And then lastly, get a baseline report going. So that in a year from now, when you’re like, hey, check out how great my organic traffic is going and how well we’re doing with our SEO. Well, great. Where do we start? I don’t know. We didn’t create a baseline report. I don’t know, but we’re doing really good. So it’s good to have that and pay attention to it for sure.

Let’s get into the fun. What are the myths and truths of Core Web Vitals? I’ve struggled with this one because I sort of have a poke at the folks at Google. God bless the folks at Google. But they drive me a little nutty sometimes because they’ll have something like they introduce this idea of Core Web Vitals and the idea that you’re going to get effectively deranged based on the performance of your page. And then the bitter irony of it is that the blog that Google wrote on their developer site about Core Web Vitals doesn’t pass Core Web Vitals.

I know we were laughing about that, too. Some of my students were doing that, and I’m like, you guys are brilliant. That’s so funny that you use the actual site. And we did the same thing on the accessibility for the ADA Accessibility Guidelines doesn’t pass ADA Accessibility Guidelines. So much for, practice what we preach, right?

Yeah. So the thing I really want to separate for people is a guide. It’s a factor, but it’s not literally like you fail CWV and you’re off Google. That’s my hypothesis. So correct my people that are not smart and they listen to me.

I always try to focus on being principle based, and the principles we’ve already talked about, right? Is be relevant to the search term that someone’s searching for be visible off the website and be helpful when they do find you in the search results. And when they do get to your page. Like we said before, if you’re nurturing those three areas, you’re probably going to be affecting your Core Web Vitals in the process because you’re trying to make your page faster and better over time. So I would say if you’re still focusing on those three things, you’re going to worry less about little things like a Core Web Vital or one of the many tools that you could use to sort of test or audit your website.

But I know John Mueller made a point about this recently at Google. He said that it’s more than a tie breaker. My first thought about it was just one of those tie breaker things where if our content is just as good and our links and visibility off the website are just as good and our click-through rates are equal, then they’re going to choose the one that loads faster for mobile users and looks better for mobile users as a tie breaker. But he came back and said, no, it’s more than that.

And then the conspiracy started coming in from my peers, right. And they’re not always wrong. One conspiracy theory is that Google is trying to save some money. And if websites are faster to crawl and to navigate to and to collect data about that, it’s going to save their servers a bit of money and having to wait for things to load and to render assets that take a long time, like images. So they want to make the Internet a faster place. And with 60% to 80% of your users being on mobile devices. For our restaurant chains, 84% of them are mobile devices.

It makes sense that they’re continuously pushing us to provide faster and better user experiences for mobile users. They’ve been telling us about that since the early 2010s. They started putting information out about it in 2014, and we saw the Pivot in 2014 from more people going on mobile than on desktop. So it just makes sense. It’s a natural evolution of how we want to improve experiences overall for users, not just for Google, but for our visitors. And if you haven’t, since 2014, been working to provide a better mobile experience, that’s not Google, giving you a penalty that’s you being somewhat ignorant to the fact that your users care about their mobile experience.

You want to tell people, like, ‘When’s the last time you waited until you got home to search for something?’ No, you’re standing outside of the store and you’re looking at a chair and you Google, how much is this chair at Target or wherever? And of course, that’s the pattern of usage. It’s funny. Like you said, we’ve got this dichotomy that there’s better bandwidth, faster networks. And we obviously are putting more rich content in there, but it’s counter to what you would imagine. You would think that with the level of streaming capability we’ve got with all of the work we can do that now is when Adobe Flash should be taking off, because the ability to do really high res, rich media experiences should be there.

But because it is client side versus service side processing. There’s a lot of other reasons where we’re moving towards. And also searchability. Right? Like if I put that up there, it’s an effective black box even putting myself like I’ve use Vimeo.

Yeah.

So I use Vimeo for hosting a lot of content that I have on a couple of different websites. I’ve got because I can sort of control the end user experience better. But then realizing, Dang it, I’m getting just ravaged on searchability because I’m not doing the right things versus if I put it on YouTube, it’s like auto chaptering for me. It’s doing a lot of really neat things that now, I’m like, okay.

Yeah. Exactly. They’re huge boosts for potential. So I’ve got to merge with the way the systems are moving versus the way I would like to run my operation.

Right. Yeah. But just big picture wise. Like we talked about, if you have a strategy and you’re paying attention to those principles that we know are going to help our visibility. And I have to tell you, these marketing students that I’ve been working with, I think I’ve taught probably close to 400. Now they are dying to get practice for free. A lot of them. So if you feel constrained, like you mentioned earlier, Eric, like all these things I want to do. I want to do my content map, but if you let go and you delegate to somebody who’s really interested in learning digital marketing, like one of these students, thousands of students across the country that you could talk to that are in digital marketing certificate programs.

Reach out to the teachers and say, hey, you have any students that want to volunteer and do some SEO work for us? You have the teacher is going to be a guide. I never recommend a student go to a client and not stay to some degree to make sure that they’re doing a good job and that they have what they need because I want to see them successful. So not only do you get the student, most time, you also get the professor. So something to think about if you are kind of feeling overwhelmed, like, hey, there’s a lot of stuff here.

I just want to run my business. I don’t want to have to do all this digital marketing stuff. I suggest talking to a digital marketing student and seeing if they can get involved. Have them take a course that’s holistic across everything that we do in search, whether it’s our Academy of Search site or a LinkedIn Search Academy or a Yoast Academy or Distilled SEO Academy, there’s all these different certificate programs that are available that go through the gamut. Ours, by the way, if your listeners want to stick our $600 course for free, just use my handle SEO Steve, and I’m happy to give them that opportunity to kick the tires.

And all I ask is that you give me some feedback and let me know what you think and what you’d like to see changed or improved. But just go to Academy of Search. Use SEO Steve or send your marketing intern or marketing student to that course and then have them contact me if they want a second set of eyes or anyone on the team here.

Nice. Well, thank you for that. I’ll definitely do what I can to load people into there because I think this is like you said, it’s a rich opportunity there. It often feels like joke. You’d go to the community mailbox, and on one side of the mailbox that says, ‘Lost Dog’ with missing part of right ear, answers to Lucky, whatever it’s going to be. Then you go on the other side and just says, ‘Found Dog’ with no collar or missing part of ear. And you’re like, literally there’s on opposite sides of the same box.

But if we just connected you two folks together, we could do some pretty incredible things. And there are students who, they want to get real world implementation and stuff. And you may find your next employee as a result. Right?

That’s our team. They started as interns here, some of them five years ago, and now they’re creative directors. Now they’re web analytics experts. It’s just giving them a chance. One of the reasons I like this idea versus hiring a veteran. I don’t want to beat myself up since I’ve got 23 odd years of experience is that the students aren’t ingrained with practices that are outdated. They’re not going to do something that isn’t really beneficial to SEO. They’re using fresh content, and they’re thinking in today’s world, they’re not going back to 2002. 2003 and reading ebooks.

So there’s an advantage, not to show this my peers. But I can tell you that.

You mean my Sam’s Publishing guide for SEO from 2004 is no longer valid.

My ebooks, too, are floating around out there. And when I see one, I’m like, hey, why don’t I give you the updated version of that or whatever? So yeah, I think that’s an advantage that you’ll have over some of the competitors who are working with some older SEO folks that aren’t staying up to date with trends and tests that could be ran to improve search-in today’s search results. Right. So lots of opportunity there and lots of students that would die to have a chance to work for free for you just to get their hands dirty.

Because in effect, these folks are most likely the next economy. Right?

Like this. As we look at today, we’ve gone through, like, just such a, I don’t even know how to describe what the world has experienced in the past 18 to 24 months now. Bizarre is an understatement of just how unexpected so many things are. And as we see people looking at this kind of, the great resignation as they’re calling it, because they really want to control their outcomes. And there’s potential to do this. And these are the ideal folks that they can start a true digital-only organization company, product, blog, whatever it is.

When I started in blogging, it was never done with the intent of running it as a business. I did it because I was just some goofball assistant man who kept bumping into weird problems. And so I’m like, I’m just going to write this down because it forces me to document it. And then the first time I saw this little boost of like, this is a tiny little post on how to fix one specific thing with VMware virtualization. And so I’m like, okay, so I just kept writing these things.

I kept writing these effectively, like, how to articles and how to fix this thing. And next thing you know, you’ve got 40,000 views a month just because I wrote down what I was doing once in a while.

It wasn’t even purposeful or intentional.

You’re documenting your own resolutions to problems you’re finding. I love it.

Yeah. And then I was like, okay, now what if I was actually purposeful with this? Then I met a lot of folks who went that really to the next level. And they’re like, I’m going to begin looking for the questions that need to be answered, and they effectively, were able to go completely independent because they just said, I’m going to do this. I’m going to go with the advertising route. At that point, it was potential. So it’s really interesting. And we’re now at that new point where you can make this foray into a self starting world.

It’s got to be done with purpose. It’s got to be done with a plan. And hopefully, as the side hustle economy, it’s not just about GaryVee yelling at you that you’re not working hard enough. It is truly about the opportunity of, if I just took a couple of hours a week and I always tell people, like, I posted this the other day as a joke on Twitter. Everybody keeps telling me they don’t have time for a side hustle. I said I found it, and I sent a screenshot of the screen time part of your iPhone.

Like, if you took an hour off of social media or off of something and just wrote something down, answered a question, found a way to engage a world that you don’t even realize it’s out there. Next thing you know, with purpose and with intent and schooling. Right. So there it is. You go and you get involved in the Academy and just take that and put it into action. It’s such a beautiful opportunity for so many people right now, for sure.

I know a lot of my students, even people who have been to my meet up groups over the years, have developed businesses, in some cases, just selling technical SEO audits. Like, hey, do you want to know what’s wrong with your website and why it’s not showing up in search results? For $500 or whatever, I can run an audit and tell you. And then they outsource the outreach to local businesses like the Philippines. Then they outsource the actual audit work to the Philippines, and all they have to do is the quality assurance.

And it’s like, how much money you’re making a month right now. One guy is like, I’m making $8,000 a month selling $500 audits. I’m like, oh, my God, what am I doing wrong? I can retire. There’s so much to be made in this industry because it is like you mention, like, a black box. And starting with an audit gives clients a plan. Here’s what you need to work on and whether you hire a developer to do it or bring someone at house or work with an agency, at least you know what needs to be done and let them worry about the how.

The path to here. It’s interesting. Like you said, I’m going to counterpoint your point earlier. You said it’s good to grab somebody who’s kind of fresh eyes, right? That they’ve got no, how it’s already been done, baked in. How do you make the path from OpenVMS to SEO specialist? You’ve got a lot of history, a lot of stuff that you’ve had to be very good at and then shake as you move into the next thing. So you progressively became new in a lot of things. So, Steve, how do you make that jump?

A lot of late nights in the beginning, not long term. I get home at a normal time now, but there’s a time where I worked a lot of late nights. I volunteered. That was the biggest thing. Like, hey, can I do your website for you? Hey, can I be your SEO person and do some SEO stuff for you? Because I’m playing around with all this knowledge that I’m learning. I’m really interested in it, but I don’t want to get paid to do something when I don’t have a lot of experience.

So can I just do it for you for free? Help your DJ business, your local locksmith business, or your florist business? Can I do some work for you for free to get some experience? I did that as a freelance while I was working full time at IBM and just got more and more passionate about it. I went back to school. Like you’d mentioned, I got a degree in ebusiness management, where I got to touch all the different areas of digital marketing, from setting up the server on Windows and Apache to learning about how databases work to graphic design and web design and user experience, and then project management, pulling all those things together into a project plan.

So the freelance hours up till two in the morning, sometimes no sleep, just digging in and getting my hands dirty with it, to building processes on how to get better at it. Each time I did it, I was like, all right, I’m not going to do that mistake again. I’m going to put that into a process and then eventually going back to school and deciding this is what I want to do as a career. That was the transition for me. Was one, acknowledging that I had a passion for something that wasn’t running bash jobs on an open BMS system to something that was really fascinating to me, which is the Web.

And you don’t have to go through all of that again, because those of us who’ve already been through it for you have created lists and guides and helpful training programs so that you don’t have to go through that journey. So I would start there. One of the things that we do here at Wiideman, is every morning, when we’re getting our morning coffee, we spend 10,20 minutes reading through our Feedly account, Feedly, F-E-E-D-L-Y. And after the call today Eric, I’ll actually share a link to the file that I use, and it’ll give you basically a newspaper of what’s going on in digital marketing today.

I like to look at the news feeds first from Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal Marketing Land, all of those. What’s happening right now in the industry first. And then below that, it’ll be blog feeds from some of my favorites authors on topics such as local SEO and multi location search, e commerce, usability and conversion rate optimization. All of those are bucketed into their own little groups. So whatever you’re interested in, you can view it that way. And every morning, we sort of sharpen the saw and we find what’s being talked about in those industries.

And as you start doing that, you start finding rabbit holes and you dig into them and you learn. So every day you’re learning for 10 to 20 minutes while you’re getting into the office. And it’s a great way to start the day, because now you’re thinking about what you learned throughout the day and getting smarter and better at digital marketing.

And just as a practice of life, it’s such a great way to do it right. Enrich your mind first and your body with a little tasty coffee. Nothing wrong with that. I like that. This is definitely putting it into passion. And I’m always seeing the interesting, again, sort of split of people that say, follow your passion is the best thing or the worst thing you can do, but it’s follow your passion towards a viable future. And I really think that’s the thing that you’ve done. It wasn’t just like, oh, I’m really excited about reading websites or learning about the thing.

You probably had a plan of, like, I want to be able to do this and have this be the thing that I do. And it gives you that sort of very purposeful outcome. And it gives you a bit of a goal setting process to head towards something.

Yeah. You become kind of like a futurist. You start to think about where things are going to go. And if I were to start today and I was brand new and really curious about this SEO thing, I think where I might start is becoming a voice search expert. I think I would start by sort of coining myself as a Google assistant or an Alexa voice search expert, and I would start mastering the different areas that you want to focus on, from voice to text APIs with Google to playing with the Google Action console and Alexa Skills consoles, getting into those and really kicking the tires around how people are using voice search.

With 180 voice search devices going out every minute now to different homes and offices, it’s going to be the next evolution of how we search as we start to untether ourselves from our mobile devices. So I think if I was going to start today, I would learn the basics of SEO, but I think I would focus my energy around things that are to come, such as voice search. When I got into it and I decided I want to be in digital marketing. It was because I had this idea that all businesses would be online someday and all businesses would have a website.

And I’m glad that came to fruition. Because of it, I’ve created a career.

The old famous Gretzky line of, you skate where the puck is going, not where it is now, right? And there’s a certain element you have to be able to make sure that you could do a thing that’s viable financially for today. And I think this is where people often get sort of stuck. They’re thinking about SEO. They’re thinking about their website. They’re thinking about a few different things, and they either think, it’s too early to think about SEO. I just launched this company. We just came out of stealth.

It’s too early to think about SEO. Alternatively, they say, Well, there really is no SEO because Google keeps changing the rules and changing the game unpack those two myths.

Sure. Well, the latter is leveraging your paid search data. Right? So if you’re unconvinced about SEO, look at your paid search insights at what search terms are actually converting and what placements in your display targeting are generating business for you. And have that be where you start. Start with your own data from what you learn and using the paid search side of search to augment what you’re doing on the organic side. That way you’re optimizing around what’s actually converting not necessarily what’s driving the most traffic. So I think a data driven SEO strategy can not only make sure that you’re driving the right visitors to the website based on how you’re optimizing, but it can reduce your costs on the page search side, because now because you’ve edited your web pages that you’re sending traffic to from paid ads, they’re going to give you better ad relevancy scores.

They’re going to give you better landing page scores, because now your keywords and your ads match the copy and the words that are used on the page itself. So I think that’s one myth of, organic doesn’t work anymore, it’s just paid. And if you believe that, then start using paid and leverage the data to create a better organic strategy. And either way, you’re going to see better results in paid. And I think the other part is you mentioned there’s a lot of myths, I think with search. Just getting started with it, it can be like you said, overwhelming like a black box a little bit.

I think what I’ve noticed successful business owners do is they reach out to somebody who’s a seasoned consultant and get a score. Ask, how am I doing in this area? I do email marketing as part of our business. How’s my email marketing doing on a one to ten scale? Hey, SEO person, can you take a look at my overall SEO and give me a score from one to ten? How am I doing?

How much can I improve? I’m doing some paid search. Hey, paid search expert who used to work for Google. Could you take a look at my Google ads and my Bing ads and my Facebook ads and give me a score? How optimized? How much more could I be doing? How much better could I be doing, go to the experts, spend the 250 for an hour of their time and get them to put you on the right path of where you could be improving. And maybe depending on your budget, you only do that once every six months.

Hey, help me recalibrate. How am I doing compared to six months ago when we talked, I did those things you mentioned. It looks like I’m getting better traction. What can I do next? Just do a little bit at a time if it helps you. But don’t try to figure it out yourself. If you’re overwhelmed by it, go to somebody who’s a seasoned expert on it, have them build a roadmap for you, at least get you started. So that way you don’t feel like you’re just winging it.

This really is the thing, too. And also I tell people all the time. Don’t ask the people that work at your company how your company is doing on visibility. Like it’s the way that people who don’t know about you are refining you that I did an email campaign for an organization that I’m an advisor to. And it’s hilarious. The only people that don’t open the bloody emails are the ones that have the domain name of the company. I’m trying to sort of say, we’re doing this really neat thing.

And in the end, I realized, well, all that matters is that the people that are prospective customers are making it all the way through this customer journey and their conversion ratios are lining up. The fact that I can’t get the sales people to read the bloody emails because they’re already sort of bought in and it’s captive audience. They’re not my target audience, really. But it’s hard for us because we look and we’ll say you’re going to come into our organization. They’re going to say, hey, this is Steve.

Steve is going to tell us how we can do our SEO, and then that person is going to go and the head of sales is like, no, the way we do this is we grind it out on the street. I remember having this funny, not an argument, but sort of an interesting back and forth conversation with somebody one time. And he said, in the end, marketing sales greater than marketing when it comes to business drivers and business growth.

Interesting. Okay.

And I said, Well, it’s funny, I said. It’s actually got to be a plus, not a greater than. And in fact, without marketing, there’s nothing to sell.

Right.

And I said, I’m just curious, how do you think that that salesperson gets the prospective customer list? And he says, by hitting the streets. And I said, how do you think he got the addresses to go to? It’s email list. It’s Pixel tracking. It’s customer journeys. It’s all of these things. But depending on your, I’ll say your sort of anecdotal experience, it’s very easy for people to lose sight of. It’s a group of things that come together beautifully. Certainly, you can’t just shed your sales team and be 100% successful with just a bunch of landing pages.

But put these things together and think about it as a machine. And I think that’s kind of where you need to be.

I think we might have actually found a benefit of this whole great resignation, too. Some of those folks that were furloughed and aren’t coming back, we hope, are those that are sort of tied into their old ways. And some of the new people that are going to be coming in are going to look at things and go, why were you doing things like this? Hopefully, some of those smart new people are going to come in and help reinvent the way that we approach everything in sales and marketing.

And I’m already seeing that. And many of the enterprise brands that we’ve been working with over the last couple of months have brought in new people that are interested in being involved in MarTech that have questions. And that’s amazing, because now we have buy in. Now we have a partner and we’re not trying to consistently convince our clients of why we need to do something. They’ve got these new people that aren’t set in their ways that want to know, why are we doing this? Ask me why eight times in a conversation.

And I know you’re somebody who I want to work with. Anyway.

The way we do things, what I do think that we’ve gained as a benefit was that every organization that said there’s no, sorry, you can’t work from home. It’s going to break up the team dynamic, and we will be ineffective as an organization because of that. Well, you all learned some hard lessons and we adapted. It was bought by choice for sure. And I would gladly trade everything away to go back to the angry office worker lifestyle, just to know that we could avoid what we’ve all gone through as a society.

However, the fact that you immediately went back to first principles like, okay, everybody’s working from home, how do we keep them connected? How do we make sure that we rapidly responded? And then we kept waiting new things would happen. And we’d have to go back again to sort of very Socratic first principles approaches to things over and over again. And when you start with a company, the first thing they do is they say, What’s your 30-60-90? What’s your 180? At 90? It just is like, no, we should always have a 30-60-90.

We should always be questioning and rethinking and looking at what’s out there, going to your feed late in the morning and seeing what’s happening in the world. Adjust your day, your week as a result. Like, life is a series of sprints, not a well planned marathon that goes with it.

Yeah. I think a lot of us that are in dynamic industries like SEO, really feed off of new things, new apps. We nerd out over different ways to try things. Hey, let’s try this Agile process. Let’s try this new project management system. Let’s switch from the spreadsheet program thing that we’re using, and let’s experiment with some templates in Google sites since we’re already on Google workspace, and we’re constantly open to the idea of testing new things for the appointment betterment. And that mindset of let’s see how we can do better this week than we did last week.

Let’s see how we can do better. Like you said, 20-60-90. I think it’s something that creates an amazing culture. I think people who don’t fit into those cultures, working from home especially, will find their way out quickly on their own because they’ll see everybody else engaging in conversations on Slack and in projects that we’re working on. They’ll see them interact and be part of our weekly meetings and discussions and those that are quiet, those that don’t participate, those that kind of do their own thing, those that, like habits and routines and not interested in trying new things.

They are going to be part of that great resignation or find an older type business to work in. That isn’t as exciting and vibrant as what we do in digital marketing.

Yeah, the opportunity is incredible for folks that want to grab onto it. And by no means, there’s obviously a lot of people that this type of thing is tough to wrap your head around. It’s the idea of going it alone or whatever. It’s certainly not for everybody, but in the same way that, there’s people that have a thirst or they need a little nudge. Oh, wait a second. You mean I can go and I can say, SEO Steve, and I got a free course. All right. Let me give this a whirl, right?

Like, just give them that little nudge and make sure that we can do this. And that’s what I have a huge respect for your approach to it, Steve, because that is right. We’re blessed that we are able to do these things. And then when we do a little bit of a give back, like you say, next thing you know, that person that took that free course is like, hey, I’ve actually started my own little mini agency, and I see that you’ve got a job posting. That’s where it all comes together.

Or even just making a connection. And you don’t have to be the one that gets the direct benefit. But you connect to people that need each other, a business and a platform, for example. And they remember that the platforms will come back and say, you’ve send a lot of business at our direction. We want to do something, give back to you. And next thing, you get some free marketing and get invited to some fun events. So it’s great. It all kind of plays together when you give and you don’t expect anything back I think the universe recognizes that and reward you down the road.

Yeah. The most rewarding, monetarily rewarding things, have been things that I gave away for a long time with never thinking about what’s the outcome to this. It was purely just it. I wrote a little ebook. I’m like, all right, let me try this. I was that guy. I saw a neat thing on Instagram. I’m like, okay, let me give this a whirl. And it was actually a company called SamCart. My shout out to those folks, they’re really slick. They had a really great, I want to be a student of how they did it, like, how they pulled people through, because I’m like, I know that this works.

So I want to see how this machine works. And it was worth the $300 for me just to see it in action. I was like, okay, so this is it. I got to do something with this now. I sort of joke. I said I rage road a book in a weekend. I was like, I’ve spent $300. I need to do something about this. So I wrote a book in a weekend and then used another company that they recommended called Beacon, and I had it done up in a PDF in, like, a day and a half.

Amazing.

And I put it out there, and it got just gentle. Every once in a while, people would pick it up. But it was just for me to test the process. And what it did was I went with that immediate thought. I went to my meeting from the marketing team at work, and we’re like, hey, we’ve got some new campaign we’re running. And I was like, you know what you need? Let’s try and do a landing page with basically a seven step flow. And I took this, like, SamCart methodology.

And by golly, it worked. Right? And like I said, I work with you and we do things. And next you know, I’m like, okay. So Steve says we should try this. I’m like, let’s just pick this page, do this, do these things, run this checklist and the fact that you’re excited to give it a whirl. And then what happens now? Many, many months later. I’m like, over a year in it’s like, I’ve sold a couple of 100 copies of this book without ever having to go back and revisit it.

And it’s great because then people now will come back and they’re like, wait a second. I think you wrote a book that I read, and it’s fun, because then those are people that you can do other things with. And that’s really the connection that I wanted. I’d rather give the book away. And so I literally just dropped it to $5. I’m like, I don’t care about making money out of this. I just wanted to pay for my annual membership. I’m done.

I actually had somebody go to one of my meetup groups in the 2000s when I was still SEO Steve, as kind of a brand who actually had me sign my first ebook, the Four Layers of the SEO model. And I’m like, I think you don’t get the idea of why it’s called an ebook, but okay, I signed it. I drove 50 miles from North LA to come hang out with you. And I’m like, awesome, good to have you. Can you sign my ebook? And it’s just an ebook.

It’s so weird. Yeah, that was strange. But the fact that you write something that people find value in, whether it’s a blog post, an ebook, or even a textbook gives you that sense of posterity. I’ve left something behind the people that will help them on their journey to get either where I am today or hopefully even above that.

Yeah, that’s what it is. So there you go. So you’re doing, number one, congratulations. Just in what you do on a daily basis as a company, you’re doing well, you’ve taken the right approach. And like I said, we could probably spend 4 hours nerding out about everything from OpenVMS and all the craziness we went through. It’s hilarious. That, like when I started, and this is just my last little closer. When I started at SunLife, all of the people that I worked with were like, AVP of system unit or whatever it was.

There were VPs and AVPs. And I would say, like, how did you get here? Well, they all worked there for 23 years, and they started in, like, the print shop. And it was like they literally were mailroom people that were now VPs. I’m like, this is like that Secret To My Success movie with Michael Keaton.

He took some shortcuts. Let’s be fair.

That’s right, he did. But here we are. And then 15 years later, I said I had a good friend of mine who worked in the mailroom, at the company that I worked at. And it was like, all I could think of is, you know where this guy is going to be in 23 years, he’s going to be the senior mailroom guy. He won’t be the AVP of a business unit. It’s a fundamentally different organizational style. And we don’t do that sort of progression through. But what you can do is you can take a skill and then apply it to maybe inside a business unit, and then maybe you go to a competitor, and then maybe you end up coming back.

And this sort of leapfrog effect now is possible. And nowadays, maybe you just do this a couple of hours a night and three nights a week. And you don’t have to worry about leaving your job. You just keep your job. And then next thing you know, this thing’s generating 30% of your income. And you’re like, okay, if I did it more, than you can.

And now you have a choice. And that’s the best feeling in the world is knowing that you know what? I don’t have to be here. I’m making enough money with the other things that I’ve been doing with my free time, that I can leave here and get a couple more of those other clients and do this full time if I want to. So sometimes it’s not just about the job. It’s about having control over your choices. And so many people feel imprisoned. If I leave this, I don’t know if I can get another job somewhere.

I don’t know if I can get my job back or if I’m going to be paid the same, or if I’m going to retain my seniorities and so forth. So they’re so worried after working that many years for a company that they feel entrapped. And I think it’s reasonable to feel that way. But there’s enough people who’ve survived. That if you believe in yourself, enough like you said, start doing it on your free time, prove to yourself that you can do it. And if you still like your day job and you want to keep it great.

But at least now you know that you don’t need that job. You can be more confident with your boss and your manager and make bigger decisions. And if they fire you, you’ve got something on the side that you can fall back on.

It is a great potential for many people. All right. And I hope that we can see more and more folks to reach out. If you want to find out about this kind of stuff, people are always, I do appreciate it. I would get a lot of good emails from folks who are like, hey, listen to this episode. I’m curious, and we get to dig in on stuff, and we’ve actually helped a few people take on new careers. And on that note, Steve, what’s the best way for people to reach you if they wanted to get in touch?

Sure. I’m SEO Steve everywhere. We also have the guys on my team, folks on my team that if you just want to ask a day to day question just Wiideman everywhere. W-I-I-D-E-M-A-N. We love to help small businesses. We do a lot of free work to try to give back. So if there’s a question we can answer, why isn’t my page ranking? Why is this competitor beating me?

Ask us. We’d love to help you, so hopefully we’ll see you on social media. SEO Steve or Wiidemen. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to hang out with you, Eric.

This was a lot of fun. I could go all day. Sadly, I’ve got another meeting. Still got that day job, so I got to. Thank you very much, Steve.

Thank you.