Interviewing SEO Ryan Ricketts - Moving Verticals and Agency to In-house

On today’s show I have Ryan Ricketts. I’ve actually known Ryan for six years now, and we’ve worked at several companies together.
I wanted  him on the show because he's moved between several verticals as well as from different types of agencies and to in-house.

He also gives away his best link building tactic he used for real estate!
Contact Ryan
Website: https://slickettsdigital.com/ or on
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Slicketts

Full Show notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2022/06/interviewing-seo-ryan-ricketts-moving-verticals-and-agency-to-in-house/

Transcript

Phil: 0:00

Welcome to the opinionated SEO, where we talk about recent news and updates in the digital marketing world of SEO paid advertising and social media that impact you as a marketer. Also throw some of my opinion into the mix. On today's show, I've got Ryan Ricketts. I've actually known Ryan for about six years. We've worked at several companies together.

Ryan: 0:27

I've been wanting to do podcasts and thank you so much for having me. I love this. So like I'm super excited. I bought a mic. I'm ready to go.

Phil: 0:34

I'm going to start out with some fun questions before we dive into some of the SEO side. So Ryan check this out.

Ryan: 0:40

Interview deck No, I'm excited.

Phil: 0:43

We're just going to go through a couple of these and,, it's a fun way to get started

Ryan: 0:46

Got it.

Phil: 0:47

I think you guys are going to be really interested because Ryan and I worked at a, agency where it was lot of clients, low budget, and then he's moved to more client side and also move from real estate and then back to medical. I think it'll be really interesting to understand what changed, what are the pros, cons and all of that. So, all right, Ryan, you ready for question number one?

Ryan: 1:08

Bringing it,

Phil: 1:09

All right, here we go. If you are designing your own fragrance to represent you, what would you call it?

Ryan: 1:16

oh my God. That's such a good question. My own fragrance, what would I call it?, my favorite word of all time is slick. So I would probably just call it? that. But then now that I said out loud, I feel like it's just like some greasy oils and I don't really want to know if I want that associated with my cologne. Maybe I'll just call it Ricks for short. Yeah.

Phil: 1:40

I can't ask this one. It says, who is the best boss you ever had and what made them the best? So all, all transparency here. I've been Ryan's boss a couple of times , so what's, let's see what he has to say.

Ryan: 1:52

I would, I mean, I got, I hate sounding like a kiss ass right now, but you would definitely be one of my top bosses, , for the mere fact that, like, I probably learned more about SEO, what to do and what not to do from you., and just kinda like, I think I've, I've been very open about this in regards to like, almost everyone I ever talked to that like, some of the best times I ever had in my professional career was when we were starting out in real estate. And we were like building out the team and we have like all the processes and interviewing people and talking to people and kind of making the department what we wanted it to be like. That was that like year and a half was probably like the most fun I ever had in a career. So

Phil: 2:29

I think I interviewed you on my second day there. And I think we offered the next day, and I think within 72 hours you had a seat at a desk there. It was literally just waiting for the standard background stuff to go through. So probably one of the fastest moving processes ever. That was good. We got you in and got you up and running.

Ryan: 2:53

Yeah. It was great because I was coming from a other agency that was super small and just So poorly run., and like I ended up getting like laid off there and, literally, you had reached out like, gosh, maybe. Either the day before or the day of I got laid off and I'm just like, yes, I will gladly interview as soon as you need me to.

Phil: 3:14

I'm like, how are things going? You're like, I got laid off. I'm like, that's great news. I've got a job.

Ryan: 3:19

I've never been happier to hear that. Tell me more.

Phil: 3:21

Yeah. I'm like, oh, darn. That's a bummer. How about you? Come work for me. So,

Ryan: 3:26

Okay.

Phil: 3:27

For those of you guys listening. This is all about networking. Keep in

Ryan: 3:32

Oh, totally.

Phil: 3:33

especially if you're in an area like San Diego,, you're constantly meeting people who are moving to different agencies, different companies, you know, if you're ever in a circumstance where your job's not there anymore, , it's all about just reaching out to your network. And a lot of times you'd be surprised how easy it is to get a job when someone inside refers you.

Ryan: 3:54

I am probably one of the most extroverted people you. will ever meet, but you do not have to be that way. As long as you keep simple tabs on people and just reach out occasionally even like, just, if you're like Facebook friends, just say, Hey, happy birthday, hope you're doing well at so-and-so place. You know? Um, two simple tabs like that. It's, I'm not, you don't have to text someone every day. You don't have to send them memes. You don't have to do stuff like just, remember them in the back of your head, keeping casual contact. I always said, After working with certain people, if I open up my own agency and I had like my dream team, I always have like exactly in my mind, who I'd want to hire and who I wanted to take from other places, if, if it was like possible, you know? That's just pure networking and, having a great work environment and great working relationships with individuals.

Phil: 4:36

Exactly. All right, Ryan, what do you consider yourself an expert at.

Ryan: 4:45

gosh, I would say non-professionally related,, anything baseball trivia,, presidential history. Cause that's what it was like being focused in college as a history major., I would also say, , I am an expert in networking and socializing, which has led me to do quite well in SEO.

Phil: 5:05

I've got to admit, I don't care where we've gone or what we've done anytime you and I have gone somewhere like out with clients, anything like that, you've either one run into someone you knew, or to have a mutual acquaintance or actually three somehow figured out that you guys have this obscure. Same like obsession.

Ryan: 5:29

Yeah. I felt like the business development team would like roll me out just to like regale the clients with like random stories., and just try to find like some kind of like connection between like, Hey, we have a bunch of properties in Baltimore. Oh, okay. That's great. Cause you know, yada, yada, yada, um, let me tell you more

Phil: 5:44

All right. I got one more question for you so what actor or actress would play you in a documentary?

Ryan: 5:54

I would love young Jack Nicholson, but I think if it was actually filmed today, I'm pretty sure Justin Long would probably play me in a movie.

Phil: 6:01

No, I love it. I love

Ryan: 6:02

So I ran into him a couple of times when I was working at the Playboy mansion and I w I was just like, oh yeah, we're like the same high we have, like the same, like cadence. I just feel like, yeah, you would play me in a movie. Like if I did something of relevance, like.

Phil: 6:16

He's always been able to pull off that like tech kid kind of role, so, I like this one. So I'm just going for it. What's one sure-fire way to grab your attention.

Ryan: 6:26

A really good anecdote, like a good story, a good joke. Like you a good storyteller will always have my attention.

Phil: 6:33

I think that's a huge point. And for me, that's the cornerstone of SEO is your website should tell a story and I think we all get so hung up on. the technical side of it, the, how's your H tags, what's your schema look like your crawl, budget, all this kind of stuff in the end. If you don't have good content, it doesn't matter. And a good anecdote I think is, is basically that what's your hook on the site? What are you going to teach? So if we can all make these sites actually interesting, maybe while we on the first page

Ryan: 7:06

I always say like, especially when I'm like ever training. And they are like, worried about bad data, to a client. Look , just tell the story, say like, Hey, you know, this was down, this was down. This was down. Here's what we think happened and why. And here's what we want to do to fix it implemented. And here's like a plan B just in case , and clients love that they eat it up because it's honest and it's truthful and you're telling a good story, but mostly you're telling a true story, you know? No one who's ever done SEO, PPC, social media, you name, it has ever had 12 months of perfect growth with nothing ever going wrong. Something has always happened, you know?

Phil: 7:45

And your clients understand that , they get that. You're not going to be able to increase traffic every single day. There's seasonality. There's just demand that's out there. I'm seeing it right now in a lot of our sites where we're looking at, we're like, why is traffic down? And we were looking at our share of voice is actually up. And then we look at trends and we go, you know, it's less people are just searching and there's nothing you can do about that. I mentioned this earlier that we both work together. It kind of the, the high client volume, lower budget agencies. I'm actually kind of curious to hear some of your advice for people out there that might be working in those environments., Ryan: lots of clients with low probably give is to get as organized as possible with all your clients, literally spend a day or a week and just do the due diligence of seeing where they are right now, and what they're spending and how much time you should factor in to that and be as diligent as you can, to those hours I think it was, our friend, Patricia, who had the beautiful spreadsheet of every client. And Patricia, if you're hearing this, please sell that template to everyone. Cause you would make a nice small fortune on that spreadsheet., she just had like every possible thing you would want, for your clients, laid out color, coded, dated, that being was an absolute masterpiece. And if there's ever a digital marketing museum, it would hang there. That goes, even if you only have one client or five clients, or you have a hundred clients that kind of organization

Ryan: 9:20

Also, if you're like brand new to an agency and you're taking over clients, I would talk to whoever is handing them over to you and find out as much as you can about the client. Because when I've worked at agencies with lots of clients and low spend, there were certain clients who they did not want to be bothered by me. They wanted their monthly report. And just for me to do the job because they were too busy being a plastic surgeon or a dentist, and that's cool. Like I get that, , they're not making money talking to me, they're making money, performing their procedures. And then sometimes you get that client who is barely spend anything, but they want to have that hour long conversation with you every week or every month, because this is like their business and their baby, which, you know, I can respect to an extent, but also I think something that I feel like people are getting better at this. At least I feel this, , in the last couple of years, as opposed to when I first started, I feel like a lot of, , digital marketers are better at putting boundaries, , towards clients., in respect of saying like, Hey. You know, we can do one call this week or, Hey, this is the deliverable that , you signed up for

Phil: 10:21

I think, , companies have also gotten a lot better at being able to push back and say, if you need this kind of service, you need to pay more.

Ryan: 10:29

I feel like majority of clients are willing to pay more if it gives them, what they're trying to achieve. Like, you know, you have those clients that are in really competitive markets and that's where I think that's where it gets fun. And that's where it gets tricky because you got to figure out how am I going to make them rank against everyone else.

Phil: 10:46

I felt like that was the most fun that we were doing when we were working together as we had with these clients and maybe they were a building owner, or maybe they were a small apartment in a big city and they were up against the big guys. I mean, we're talking people with 15 people on their SEO team, budgets of millions of dollars they're spending on paid and SEO. And we're here for $500, a thousand dollars a month trying to get them to rank. And in a lot of cases, we were because we were able to pay a hundred percent attention to just their one site and not have to worry about the 60 or 80 other listings on that page that the big guys were going after. So it was a lot of fun. It's doable. You can beat out the big guys, but you got to have a tactic and a strategy and that's where it gets fun.

Ryan: 11:38

I remember one client I had, they were very Dallas heavy and they're main property they want to do well with, we started doing blogs for, and I will never forget, we ended up ranking one point it was top 10 and then it became top five. For best. Margarita is in Dallas.

Phil: 11:56

Yep.

Ryan: 11:57

Like a fucking apartment building is ranking top five for best margarita is in Dallas or like right below, like Yelp and, Zagat survey or, and I'm like, okay, great. Like, that's fabulous. I mean, it was a wealth crafted like blog, but in no way, shape or form should, an apartment building have a top five blog for best margarita is in Dallas,

Phil: 12:19

no, I think the closest we got where it felt really relevant was some of the ones that were near like a park and it was some of the best parks in this area. And, it's an apartment building that was next to that park. So it had some really good relevance our best trails are best hiking. And if the apartment was nearby or a walk away, it was a great way to kind of work it in. And any kind of ranking is good and if you can get a blog to rank and you could show your client, look, we've got a lot of traffic. If I remember right though, we were converting some of that traffic people were well, they were, they were going on the blog they were reading through and then they were onto the apartment site and it, it aligned because it was the right demographic As much as I hate talking about link, building the outreach to those places and saying, Hey, we just put you on a top list. Do you want to link to us? We're linking to you. And there you go. You just got these very relevant back links and it required very little effort.

Ryan: 13:17

One of the things I found most interesting, especially with real estate, more so than any of the local medical,, SEO I've done was with real estate, getting those long tail keywords, targeting those. And then just the hyper-local keywords., cause you just talked about like any ranking is Good and something I told clients cause some of them would be like, oh, I want to rank for, apartments in Chicago. I'm like, well, why don't you rank for apartments near Wrigley field? Cause that has nice search volume and your apartment is two blocks away from the stadium. And I would bet that if someone wants to live there, they're probably a baseball fan or a super into bars and sports cars. Wrigleyville is a nice little sports community. obviously apartments in Chicago is gonna have massive search volume, but apartments in Wrigleyville or Wrigleyville or apartments near, Wrigley field, not as much search volume, but you're getting the users who are going to convert and who you're really going to want.

Phil: 14:11

You wanted to talk about link building.

Ryan: 14:12

Yes. So again, sticking with the real estate, I actually use this example because it's probably the most. Satisfying backlinking outreach I've ever had. And I don't think many SEO was, can save that. So many of the, , apartments and townhomes and buildings that we, , worked on, they were very pet-friendly and they advertise all over the websites. That's what people are very interested in, especially in cities like San Diego or in Denver, , which are just super pet dog friendly places. And obviously people like cats too., and I don't know how, I don't even recall how I got the idea, but I thought like, well, wouldn't it be great if we could link to like animal shelters because the.gov or the.org would weigh pretty nicely with our back links. I reached out to an animal shelter down here in San Diego. And I was like, I have a bunch of buildings down here that are pet friendly. Could I put this on your website and link it? So that way, like, people know if they're looking for a dog that, these buildings are pet friendly and that's great. And they , loved that idea. I was like, oh, okay. I thought I was gonna have to convince you more like, this is awesome. And you're like, Hey, like, let's get a, let's get together with our developer and, you know, see what you want to do. Okay. Great. Yeah, So I had a meeting with their developer, a few days later and I was , look, I just want a simple page that says, here's a listing of apartments in San Diego county that are pet friendly that we, you know, swear by. And I said, look, and you can go on all our websites and they'll, you know, all the animal regulations for that building. They're all right there, everyone's welcome. And person from the shelter loved that the developer that this would be super easy, like, cause it's like, it's a one page with links. That's not going to take a long time to build. I've told the team like everyone give me all of your buildings in San Diego county right now. We were able to get like a few dozen properties on there and they all linked out from like the.gov animal shelter. And then from there, I just started reaching out cities where I had, a lot of properties. So I could do the same thing, with Dallas, Denver, Chicago, , Houston, Austin. And, I was able to get through like some of these animal shelters and put our buildings on there. It was kind of great because, you know, I'd like to think in some way, maybe helping the animals find a good home to live in or helping these people who have these animals. It wasn't, one of those, backlinking outreaches where you send a hundred emails, you get back two responses and another two responses, only one of them goes through. A good majority of them were willing to do this. And they really liked this idea. And , when I showed them like the simplicity of it, a simple landing page, but the company logo there, here's like what you do. And here's like a quick piece of content, you know, five sentences, if that's, and that's all you need to do, like, I'll write the content if you want, just cut and paste almost. And so it was such a great, you know, backlinking strategy and it, and it worked really well. And that definitely helped out. I think a lot of our properties because , these are high quality backlinks from a reputable source.

Phil: 17:00

When you're looking for an apartment, you're either looking for a pet friendly one or you're not, and that was a big deal. And adding that on there, I know that gave us a big competitive advantage because we were able to talk really specifically. And we were working one-on-one with these guys and we were writing, you know, articles on it and paragraphs, not just a listing of like, here's our restrictions we were really taking the time to do it. Right.

Ryan: 17:24

I remember one high rise I had in Chicago had a pretty decent, dog park on like the 30th floor and like, yeah. And then they also had, , like a dog groomer, on-site. And I'm like, we need to highlight the hell out of that., that's huge, this like massive building, which had like hundreds and hundreds of units guarantee people are going to have a dog or a cat or whatever, you know, like, Yeah. Like let's build up the groomer, like let's do a blog post on that. Let's do, you know, you know, have images that, talk about it and show like , the station that they're doing the work on, not just like a little Asterik with a blurb on it.

Phil: 18:01

That's not enough. Let's let's actually like dive into this and actually give people some usable content. I wanted to talk a little bit about your transition from the agency model to client side, as well as from real estate to medical. So thought maybe we could talk on the agency to client side. What have you seen as the most difficult part of that transition?

Ryan: 18:26

I think the most difficult part of the transition? is just working on one client that is a little trickier than I thought it would be. And I think it's actually, I can't necessarily prove this now, but like, I feel like it's easier to go from in-house to agency than to go from agency to in-house in regards to, different things that you look at and work on, , with in-house it's a very fine, , well-oiled machine, everyone knows their job. They're not necessarily people wearing a lot of different hats or doing different things. you're the social media person. That's all you do. You're the content writer. That's all you do. You do PVC. That's all you do. Whereas I feel like if you work in an agency, especially like a startup, like Yeah. I'll be the account manager. Sure. I've learned SEO. Sure. I'll do the PPC ads. Why not? Like I'll learn that, you know, oh, you want me to write a piece piece of content on trucks? Okay, great. Let me figure that out. You know, let me do. Well, you know, and that can be a lot of fun and I would definitely recommend people do that because it's a great learning experience and you can truly learn what you're great at and what you like to do. And the most probably what you don't like to do. so I feel like that has been a little tricky,, where I'm at right now, I'm an SEO team of one. I've always loved the collaborative teamwork, bouncing ideas off each other. So that's been a little bit of adjustment for me. It's like, oh Yeah. It's me. Okay. So this is why I want to do, and this is what I think. And, you know, that's kinda cool. Like I like the power and the control, but , it's also just took a little readjusting because , I've always worked with teams and I think I've had teams as small as four to as large as 11 so when you go from 11 to one it's like, oh, okay, cool. So it's on me now. Great. Okay. That's cool. I'll, I'll figure it out.

Phil: 20:07

So at what point did you get bored? And then you got reinspired?

Ryan: 20:12

Oh, totally. I would say, , there were a couple of moments where I was like, what am I going to work on next? Like what, wait, what?, luckily I had a couple of things come my way, which proved out to be pretty nicely. One was, figuring out YouTube SEO and how to optimize that better, which was fun., another one was build out a content strategy for more than just a month or two, but for the entire company and organization, which is great. another one was, , Here are about a dozen, , PPC campaigns that you can run that are kind of like the smaller campaigns that aren't crazy convoluted, because you know how crazy convoluted Google ads can be with all their different things that you can do in it. And then the last one was to work on the,, company, , website relaunch.

Phil: 21:01

To work.

Ryan: 21:02

That's a lot of work. It seemed like every one of those came, all those like little transitions came out, like at the right moment where it's like, I don't know what to do for the rest of the week because I got to do this and this, and then once that's done, I'm sure I can figure something out. Oh, great. You want me to do that? Fantastic. Yes. That's a great idea. Let's let's focus on YouTube. Yes. Let's focus on content. Yes. I would love to help out on PPC cause I know how to do it. And I would love to brush up my skills and learn what's what the new tactics are or, what's, you know, any new updates. I feel like with agency, there's always a client. Where we worked in real estate and I I've said this to many people, I was absolutely blessed with the clients that I had. I adored my clients. They were super cool. I'm still like , Instagram friends with a lot of them, you know, we still message each other. They've sent my kind words to me. They've encouraged me like, , post working for them. Those clients I had were just an absolute blessing and I will never forget them.

Phil: 21:52

Is so different between working in-house and working with clients with those clients., you build a different type of relationship and it's like a mutual, like lifting up of each other because you both, your goals is to make each other do better. So you guys have like always a nice relationship there in house. It's a little bit different, I think, because. It's just expected and, you're kind of on your own.

Ryan: 22:16

I feel like one of the things hurdles I ran into was when I wanted to do bigger changes, I kinda needed about like five or six people to sign off.

Phil: 22:24

Yeah.

Ryan: 22:25

Whereas working at agency, I'm like, Hey, I want to do these five or six big things. Let me send it to the director of marketing over there. And then I'll get an email back from them, like a day or two later saying, okay, do these three,

Phil: 22:37

They end up doing the legwork that you now are doing and you're having to, get checked off by five people. You sent one email and he, got it checked off by five people. And so there there's something there that's, that is kind of nice.

Ryan: 22:52

So I was like, okay, great. Now they want me to do that. Super,

Phil: 22:54

We talked about some of the transition there. What do you think some of the biggest benefits are for an SEO being in-house.

Ryan: 23:00

I think shift a focus is pretty nice., I know, , who my client is and I know who my competitors are and I know them pretty well when I was doing real estate or I was doing,, local medical professions. It was, I know who my client are. I'm sure they have a ton of competition. I don't have time to learn every one of them, but I could tell you who our biggest competitors are. I could tell you, , which ones have done recent changes or which ones are, improving in the rankings and which ones have dropped or how we're doing against them. And which ones have good page speed, which ones are terrible. Page speed., so I feel. From a competitor analysis standpoint in house. It's pretty cool because you have a really good eye on what you can do with and against your competitors.

Phil: 23:48

You also have some great resources. You have an entire usually marketing team or your sales team. And you can say, who is the client? And, tell me about the personas so that you can better position things and go, whoa, those keywords don't even make sense. Then if that's who we're going after, where, a lot of times when you're working in the agency side, you're not privy to that information. You can't see some of that backend data that you can really gleam information from.

Ryan: 24:17

Yeah, there is something to be said about, , when you work at a place and you're in house and you have a marketing team of 20 to 40 individuals and we're all on the same team and we're all going for the same goal. Like it's pretty cool., I mean, I worked at places where, , and this is actually before I ever knew you were, I had a chiropractor in a medical building in Boca Raton. And my teammate's sitting across from me, had a chiropractor in this same exact building on a different floor in Boca Raton. So it's like we're competing against each other, , over who can rank better in this like 12 story building in Boca Raton, it's like fun, but also kind of like awkward,, Phil: but nobody wins. Yeah, nobody wins.

Phil: 24:56

That goes back to , that high volume agency, , they're tough., you get into a lot of almost ethical situations and you have to really navigate and tread lightly and that's never fun.

Ryan: 25:07

you know, they have, they always say , everyone should work in retail or a restaurant at least once in their life. I feel like if you want to do marketing, you want to do agencies., you should work at, , at one of those agencies with a lot of clients. And just to see what it's like, do it for a year, learn what you can. And again, just figure out what you like and more importantly what you don't like, because that's just going to set you up for success for the rest of your.

Phil: 25:29

Now jumping back a little bit into some of the in-house things I like talking to people about how you work with your internal dev or engineering teams, what kind of advice can you give people that helps that conversation and getting work done? Go most smoothly.

Ryan: 25:46

I would say, talk to them as much as possible and try to explain any task you assign them as specifically as you can., they probably have way more on their plates than you could ever possibly imagine. So give them realistic timelines. If something's a legit code red, you know, on fire, let them know that if something's like, Hey, this one link seems to be, or this one image seems to be broken and it's on a page that gets about two sessions a month. Can you fix that? That can wait. if you can assign them stuff in a timely manner with good specifics and be realistic about like a turnaround time with them, I think you're going to have a ton of success, , working with them., but if you act like everything's a fire because the client acts like everything's a fire, that's going to be tricky and you're not going to have a really good working relationship. They work incredibly hard and, , I can't personally, I can't look at code all day without going nuts. So how they do it, my hat is off to them., Phil: Yeah. I think the only thing I would probably add that I've found , is just lacking in the interaction between the teams is the why. oh, that's a great point. That is absolutely a great point.

Phil: 27:01

When I talked to our developers, I asked, , what do you know about SEO? And most of them were like, nothing, nothing. I Googled it because I'm on the SEO dev team. I'm part of that group. So I Googled it to see what it's about. And yeah, it's about writing content and backlinks go well, okay. That's not what you do. And there's a whole nother aspect to it. That for me is fun. And for them, they like it because it's a puzzle they get to put together and then they get to see why, and they see impacts and , sharing wins and traffic data and share a voice data and saying, look, you guys helped make this happen. Really I think makes a difference because most of the time a developer doesn't get to see how it actually affects anything. Okay. We added this extra feature. They don't ever get to hear from the product team. How much of that. Changed, , usage, things like that. And so I think giving them that feedback loop and that little bit of education and the why behind things can go a long way.

Ryan: 28:05

I mean, I remember when we started at the real estate agency and looking at these websites and on you're looking at the coding and go, wait, why is the H three on top? And the H one is not there at all. And it's like, well, that's what the client wanted. They liked the way that the, the size of that one was better than the size of the H one. It's like, no, no, no, it doesn't work that way. And we had to give them like a basic, like SEO 101 training, like H one first H two H three. I don't care about client size. We pushed back on that., this is how it's going to be. This is how it's written., this is what Google wants. once we, , we started implementing like a stronger SEO strategy in our web. It was great because for them, they were getting less tickets and be like, Hey, can you fix this? Can you fix this? Can you fix this? It was like, Hey, this is the template. More or less. Okay. Is there ready to go? Alive? SEO gives a thumb of approval. Client gives it them approval. Everyone else gives it them approval. Great goes live. Nothing's wrong with it. It's running. It's firing, you know, conversions, people are filling out the form. People are clicking on the phone number and calling, oh, and guess what? Like the coding is right? Because there's field tag manager, there's the analytics and there's, you know, the H one word belongs on top., and just creates less work because everything's done up front and they have a basic, template to go off of that. They know how to, build out these websites the way that they need to be built out to a certain extent.

Phil: 29:24

Now you went from medical to real estate to medical.

Ryan: 29:28

Yes.

Phil: 29:29

What kinds of things have carried over from the real estate side into medical from an SEO standpoint?

Ryan: 29:36

I would say from real estate, especially with my clients, because they had so many properties all over the us. I mean, they might have been focused in certain cities, but then. That's the thing I've always told everyone. I was like, it was a very local SEO campaigns, but it was very local and a national level because they were all over the U S I mean, one of my clients, I think had properties in 18 or 20 states. If I'm optimizing for their website and all their properties, that's a national campaign. That's not necessarily local SEO. This isn't a mom and pop restaurant down the road. They're all over the U S so I think being able to, , optimize your website so that way you're hitting every part of this country is, has definitely carried over. But also one of the best scenes that carried over was having that local SEO, history and workload, because. In healthcare, especially where I'm at, which is like a travel recruitment agency. So we're trying to place clinicians all over the U S we're building out, landing pages where, Hey, you can be a medical professional in this state, and here's like a bunch of stuff that you can do. And if you look up search volume, it's like, yes, a lot of people really want to be a medical professionals in Hawaii. I mean, go figure. Right. but if you start optimizing for that, you can be the number one, on the page for people who really just want to be in Hawaii, come January and February when it's, two degrees in New Hampshire, because that's where they live. So I think , being able to create high quality local landing pages, , is definitely starting to pay off, , in regards to a national, , company, like the one I'm at right now.

Phil: 31:10

I think that's a great example., and I always challenge people to look at what you're doing in one vertical and you move to another and look at what can carry over and don't just go, well, that just works in travel, or that just works in real estate. It won't work in medical. And that's a great example.

Ryan: 31:28

Every vertical I've worked in, I feel like I've learned certain things that like work and don't work and you have to carry that over until the next vertical you're in. And once you're in this new vertical, you're going to learn , okay, this is working and that's not working. Did you read up on the new Google algorithm update that dropped like last Thursday?

Phil: 31:46

The may core update.

Ryan: 31:47

I think the one thing that I read was how of all the verticals they're focusing on,, the data trackers, , apparently like real estate has been hurt, hit the most with it.

Phil: 31:56

I've been keeping a really sharp eye on that because about half the sites I do work on is real estate. And interestingly enough, we saw, I'm very big with Google logs and we've gotten to the point where we can almost predict a core update based on our Google logs, because it hits a certain threshold and we go, it hit X number of visits over three days, something's going to happen. And usually that next day,, there's some high fluctuations. And it's just something that we've noticed that Google tends to really run through our site. And a lot of, some of our other sites before, , a major update in the guests is that they're looking for something updated, you know, whether it's changes to how they're handling schema or they're just, um, re crawling because they're pulling data in a different way. One thing I noticed. In, not this last update, but the one before it is that they started polling data that wasn't in formatted formats, like schema or tables. And, you just had it in there. Google has gotten a lot better at being able to understand how data is laid out on the page. So if you had, let's say phone numbers or office hours, and it wasn't in really a very well formatted way, it may have just ignored it where now I feel like Google's understanding it better. And so I think they changed their crawler and how it interprets the data and it recalls it and kind of does it in real time.

Ryan: 33:21

Hmm.

Phil: 33:21

One thing that we did see is when this was rolling out, our share of voice definitely dropped and we saw, and we saw Google sheriff voice jump big time. So Google has taken over a lot more, , real estate. And then it's supposed to be rolling out over two weeks. And I think we're about a week and change into it. And we are now above our previous share of voice from the day before this started., so it dropped heavily, came back, , and Google is actually kind of in the middle of where they were and we're seeing certain types of sites that are in our vertical, but aren't, transactional They're more informational and informational once we're getting a hit. And it seems like Google was favoring more of the transactional sites. So kind of interesting.

Ryan: 34:10

What's funny is that the November core algorithm update like that, boosted us, like crazy, which was awesome. And the may one has actually affected us and a couple of our competitors who we are, , 99% of the time ahead of they're ahead of us right now. Um, and one of them, we have a couple of dozen like core keywords that we're targeting and, comparing to with our competitors, , they are never on page one, they are rarely going up. If they're going up, it's usually from like 17 to 15, then it's back to like 19 for them., and they hit is like shot up and like, all our keywords, like shot went down. So it's kind of like, wait, what? I'm like, what in the hell is going on? This is crazy. This never happens. So, , I'm really hoping, , that the rollout when it finishes that like obviously a return to norm, but , if it does it, we have like something that we have a game plan that we're going to start implementing. it was just kind of a shock for us to like earliest for me, cause obviously in the SEO manager, , to see like that happened to us and it was a couple of weeks of those competitors. Cause there are like competitors, but they're not like a factor almost

Phil: 35:16

good lesson here for anyone listening is that you are going to get beat and you are going to beat people. And there's no guarantees in this business. That's the hardest thing is that you're up against a company who you don't know all the rules and they change the rules on a regular basis. And most of the time they don't tell you.

Ryan: 35:38

I tell every client, like the first call I ever have with them , was SEO is a lot like a weight loss. like if I wanted to trim this dad bought, I have right now and like just shed like 15 pounds. Yeah. I gotta eat healthy, no soda, no alcohol, no fast food, lots of veggies, you know, exercise, go to the gym run. And like, let's say, you know, I do all that stuff. And like month, a few months later, boom, 15 pounds are gone. I got my weight goal. They know that's you doing the SEO work? You know, putting in the, you know, cleaning up everything, fixing everything. I'm bam. Like you went from like seven to like one. You're not gonna stay there. The second I start eating fast food again. And I start, drinking beer every night and I stopped exercising. That's when the pounds come back and that's when the rankings drop. When you stopped doing the SEO work, it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle change. It's not a quick fix. It's a marketing change. That's just pretty much SEO. The minute you're number one. That's when you have to do more of the work.

Phil: 36:33

The moment you hit that, number one, mark, you have officially put a target on you as well and whatever, and whatever tactic you used, give it a couple of weeks and everyone else will be doing it too. You have to stay a step ahead. And that's tough when you're a team of one, because you don't have someone to bounce those ideas off of, but that's where you get to use. That experience of being in other verticals, other, agencies and say, you know, we tried this, we did that. Why don't we also do this? Let's go back and look at what we did three years ago and improve upon it. You have to constantly be improving.

Ryan: 37:08

And this is also bringing it back to having your network of fellow SEOs or digital marketers, you know, being like, Hey, , this isn't working for me. What have you, have you experienced something like this or were you affected by the may algorithm update or what's, you know, how's your website doing? And they'll tell you, oh, you know, like we went down, but we're back up or Hey, like, Yeah. Like we've completely bottomed out. Like we have no idea what's going on or, you know, so there's always, if you have that network And this is the time where you're like, you reach out to them and say, yeah, I know, like we worked in real estate, but now you're doing e-commerce did you have this effect at all? And you'll be surprised, you know, what you can learn and what they're saying and what they're doing. So, having that social network is going to be extremely beneficial for you.

Phil: 37:50

So for those newer SEOs that are listening, what kind of advice can you give?

Ryan: 37:55

Research, research, research, read everything you can search engine, land, search engine, journal, , watch everything you can, , YouTube can actually be a very valuable resource, , depending on how you feel about them, Neil Patel, it can be very informative. I know a lot of people have mixed feelings about him, but there's a lot of great channels. AHREFS has a pretty solid YouTube channel that you can watch. I liked their work a lot. Um, Matt diggity, he's kind of interesting. So I like his stuff. If you want to follow another YouTube channel, MOZ obviously they're still doing their whiteboard Friday, so they always provide a great information. I feel like with a lot of SEO, if you want to be successful, when you're starting out, it's going to, you're going to have to be autodidactic, you're going to have to learn and teach yourself and figure out, you know, what you like or how something is done., I don't know how you feel personally for me, I think Twitter is a phenomenal digital marketing resource.

Phil: 38:45

I love Twitter.

Ryan: 38:47

Yeah.

Phil: 38:47

Twitter's one of those things and it took me a little while to really understand it, but it's that you can truly follow someone who is an industry leader and like they're talking about, Hey, here's a case study or here's something that we see going on , and you're getting that information from them and I'm shocked at how often I can interact with them and actually get something back.

Ryan: 39:13

shout out to Darren Shaw, white spar, who has responded to everything I've ever asked of him., Darren, if you're listening and you're ever back in San Diego, I would love to buy you a drink and thank you, maybe even dinner because you have been so incredibly informative over the last couple of years. Twitter is phenomenal like that. I know it's funny because you read the news and you know, everyone's hating on Twitter or, how the toxicity or the politics on it. But if you go on Twitter for Jess, like digital marketing, it's a phenomenal platform. It is so peaceful and non-toxic, and there's tons of information., people will respond, we'll share stuff. There's always articles being, you know, uploaded. It's an incredibly good resource for anyone in digital marketing. Just follow everyone, do research, find the hashtags and just, your skillset will grow and you'll be really be the benefactor of that.

Phil: 40:02

This might take a minute. I'm going to tell you all the people on Twitter that I have bookmarked that I look at almost on a daily basis. All right. So let's see if we can get through this search engine, land, Google search liaison, Google search central Google developer groups, Google ads, Barry Schwartz, white spark, Darren Shaw, a Jay Garrick, Dan Shue, Cyrus. Dr. Pete Myers, Rhea Drysdale. Willie Ray is a Smith and smarty John Lincoln work in SEO, screaming, frog, Rand, Fishkin ads, liaison Alita solace up by the way, make sure you sign up with her a SEO FOMO newsletter. It comes out every Sunday. Ridiculously amazing. Um, hope I said that. Right? Claire Carlyle. soon. Nick, uh, John Mueller, of course, Amanda and a TAVI Dodd, , marketing week. Jason Barnard. If you ever do anything with Google, my business, this guy is like beyond. Amazing., Allie, Martin. And follow Gary Isles. Um, both on Reddit and on Twitter. So he's like the John Mueller, more like the Matt cuts of Google and he'll post something like once a year. So when he does you pay damn attention.

Ryan: 41:15

okay.

Phil: 41:16

That's my list. And I try to look at that almost every week, almost every day. And I'm shocked at how much just feedback I get and I could spend 20 minutes and just take a minute or two, look at their latest posts or replies and try not to get too deep into a rabbit hole on those. it's amazing the emperor. So, uh, Dr. Pete Meyers is at MAs, um, , he'll also curate anything that comes from MOZ. So sometimes that's my favorite way of doing it. Like Darren Shaw, for example, you know, I'm going to get everything from white spark, but also some of his personal takes on things and his replies and all of that., definitely follow the Google search central Twitter. They do an office hours like every other Thursday or Friday, depending on time zones. And I try to get involved in those, but you could ask questions directly to Google, and we've done that when , we're trying to make some decisions. And our executives said, well, what does Google think? I mean, literally

Ryan: 42:16

This is literally what they said.

Phil: 42:18

this is a Google. During an official Google meeting, and I've got a recorded copy of what they've said. So this is the best option for us.

Ryan: 42:29

What's funny is that some of those names you mentioned, we actually saw and met at search level and we went to it down here in San Diego. so it was kind of like, that was a great conference. I've been at two really great conferences and that was one of them,

Phil: 42:40

that was one of those where I realized, you and I talked to both Rand Fishkin and a will Reynolds. And I remember we posited a couple of questions to them and they had probably the most, I don't want to say out of the box answers, but the best answers that weren't obvious.

Ryan: 43:00

right?

Phil: 43:01

We both walked away from that going, there are a hundred things now that we can do that. I hadn't even thought of a whole different path. And that's why those guys are leaders

Ryan: 43:12

I remember vividly how we were telling them that a lot of our clients are super happy with page two results because of all the internet listing services. And they were like, I remember ran being like, wait, what? And then like you explained it to them, like, yeah, this is why here's my phone. Here's a search. And he's like, oh my God, that makes sense. Wow. You know? Yeah. Like being B plus is actually a huge victory,

Phil: 43:37

We ran a couple of case studies. If you remember where we checked, where we were positioned 11, and we looked at our click-through rate compared to like position four or five, and we had something like a 40% click through rate on position 11, and it was like 12 or 15% click through rate in like position four through 10. And it's because people just, once they saw those results, they were kind of like, I want to, I want to find the company. So it's like when you search for a product and I don't want the Amazon link, I want to buy it directly from the company. Or I want to go to the company's page and see what the actual information is. And I think that's a lot, like those smaller sites where , page two might be good. Or the bottom of page one, because people are, they don't want to see the Yelp page for the restaurant. They want to see the restaurants website.

Ryan: 44:27

And one of the things I've learned in real estate was how long people will spend on that website, because it's such an investment in their lives, you know, it's not like, okay, where do you want to get Mexican food Saturday night? Okay. Well, here's the two restaurants down the street from us. Do they have any specials? It's where do I want to live for a year? If not longer? And so those gallery pages were huge because , let's make sure the photos are amazing. Let's make sure that, everything is optimized because of how long people spend on the average session. Duration time for those gallery pages are always so high. higher than the other pages within the website, because people are looking at this, like, is this isn't a place I can live?, could I do the two bedroom or should I just do the one bedroom? Ooh. Is my furniture going to fit here? And I don't like the demension that let me look at the other floor plan, you know?, and that was one of the takeaways I got from real estate that I've actually, would implement other places where you may not be like number one, but you're top 10. And these are things where, people, medical procedures, like people are going to do their research. Yes. They might click on the first link, but it doesn't mean that they're going to do business with that one.

Phil: 45:36

Yeah, especially with the, your money, your life, think, anything that falls under that, if it's not a name brand, they're definitely going to be scrolling through and looking what is actually on page two, I don't need one that's one mile from me only I'm willing to drive 10 miles to go to a better place or one that I'm more comfortable with takes my insurance or is more dog friendly, anything like that.

Ryan: 45:59

These are major investments in people's lives, so they're going to scroll and scroll till they find a thing that fits perfectly for them.

Phil: 46:08

Do you think Google's boss control the algorithm and it's just completely being controlled by AI at this point.

Ryan: 46:14

Oh my God. That is the best question. that is such a fun question. well they did get rid of the, don't be evil, so maybe the AI has officially taken over and they realize that, , the scifi movie brain in me of like, wants them to like, lose control of it. I think they still have control., I still think they're a pretty top-notch company. Obviously. I, you're not going to be with everything they do or their implementation of the algorithm, but, I mean, if they called me tomorrow and said, Hey, Ryan, we want you to be our SEO director. That would be hard to say no to. I think they still know what they're doing. I think you, I mean, you type in a search. you get what you want., it's been a long time since I've typed something in and I'd be like, oh, this is nothing that I'm looking for. What's going on., so I think the algorithm is still quite strong and, I am curious to see where the algorithm goes.

Phil: 47:02

How long do you think until Google is going to be able to predict your search to the point where you just type Google and it already has the answer you were going to search.

Ryan: 47:11

Hopefully never, but also, they're so good at collecting and putting things together of what I'm interested in. So, you know, I'm looking up airfare to Hawaii and, I go to Google and they send me a new pair of rainbow flip flops for my vacation coming up, oh yeah, I could use a new pair of those. Why not? Those will look great. You know?, actually I have a I want to find this book. It's called life after Google, the fall of big data and the rise of blockchain, , economy, it came out a couple of years ago. I mean, more or less, it's kind of like what happens. We know when Google like finally falls and is no longer the search giant data. It is. Curious if you ever see like life after Google,

Phil: 47:50

Sears was the number one retail store and it has gone My space was the number one social network and it's gone. I think Amazon's days are going to be numbered., as much as they are an e-commerce giant, my guess is in 10 years, they're going to almost completely pivot. Just being warehousing, both of data and of, logistics. I think they're going to just turn into a logistics company and get rid of the e-commerce component.

Ryan: 48:20

But you know, like you said, like Sears was the biggest, you know, retailer, my space was the biggest social media net, things change. And unfortunately, I also feel like if you have one major slip-up that, that could be it, you know, Google could do an algorithm update that just absolutely ruined everyone's results and makes everything topsy-turvy. And they were just trying to do something that they thought would work. Society hates it. And now we're on Yahoo , because Yahoo is doing okay, you know, or

Phil: 48:46

Or the AI actually does take over and predicts what we're typing and it just shows it, and it freaks too many people out

Ryan: 48:52

which absolutely would happen.

Phil: 48:53

that might've already happened. And we just don't know it.

Ryan: 48:56

I love our Google overlords.

Phil: 48:58

I think there'll always be a place for an SEO, but I think that the role will transition depending on the search engine and how much we'll be able to affect that to maybe search experience optimization, and it's just ensuring that what people see on the search engine from your site, whether it's FAQ, PAA, just extensions that get pulled from schema. What the search engines actually able to pull in and provide to people and then the actual UI and UX on the site. And I think the SEO is, are gonna just be that much more involved in engagement and are people engaging with the site.

Ryan: 49:36

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's always about ROI. 10 people go to a store, but only two of them are buying the products., is that a good day of the store or not?

Phil: 49:44

I don't know about the, the future of Google who knows, who knows? I mean, Ford still around

Ryan: 49:49

Ford is still around

Phil: 49:51

Well, it was definitely a pleasure having you on any kind of final words that you've gotten.

Ryan: 49:55

I said the other day, when the Beatles finished their get back concert, thank you very much and I hope I pass the audition.

Phil: 50:01

Well, really appreciate you coming on and talking about kind of the transitions. You've had some of the experiences in SEO, especially local and how you've been able to apply that to some national brands. So I hope everyone out there enjoyed this. And if you guys want to get ahold of Ryan, what's, what's the best way for them to find you.

, Ryan: 50:20

slickettsdigital.com or@Slicketts it's on Twitter., look me up on LinkedIn., there's another Ryan, Ricketts. He does SEO. He's in charge of REI. I'm not him.

Phil: 50:29

So the non REI Ryan Ricketts. All right, guys, as always thank you for listening. And until next episode