Episode 31- SEO Talk with David Kaminski

 In this episode of "Small Business, Big Moves,". Thomas Bennett is joined by guest David Kaminski  to explore creative strategies and innovative approaches that have propelled small businesses to new heights. Discover the steps to SEO to empower small businesses.

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Small Business Big Moves is a podcast where innovation meets entrepreneurship. Join Tom Bennett as he explores all things  business growth! From business funding and business tax credits to conversations with leaders who have grown successful and innovative businesses! 

Transcript

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Welcome to Small Business, Big Moves, the podcast where innovation meets entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Tom Bennett, and we'll explore all things business growth from business funding and business tasks, right? And it's to conversations with leaders who have grown successful and innovative businesses. Welcome to the show. Today's guest will be David Kaminsky. David, I'll let you introduce yourself. Yeah, I'm Dave Kaminski. I am the founder and owner of Collaborate Pros. Essentially, we are a marketing firm. We specialize in getting your business to show up on the Google Maps, Google Organic Search and then we do paid ads as well. But, I'm Dave Kaminski. It's nice to be here. It's great to be here. Thomas? Absolutely. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, and wanted to To take a quick minute to for you to go back and talk about really where you, where you started in the journey and how you, how you ended up where you are today and how that's been going for you all. Yeah. First and foremost, when I say like SEO, like most people cover their ears and go running for the Hills at stay on this podcast. I'm going to. Show you actionable steps. That's really easy to get really big results. Okay. So I just want to get that out of the way. Somebody's like, Oh, this is boring. I'm getting out of here. It's actually really exciting. So I started in the window washing industry back in 1999, actually 25 years this year. This month is our 25th year anniversary. Pretty excited about that. 25 years ago, I was I was excited and naive and I didn't realize it, but you know, you just get into business and you, you work your tail off, you hustle, you look around, you learn from other people. Hopefully you find a mentor along the way. But you know, back then it's crazy to think like you just put the biggest ad in the yellow pages and your phone started ringing. Well, now there's so many different ways to do it. digital platforms to advertise or spend your money on. It's really confusing. So what I did was I dove in and I started paying for Google ads many years ago, and it actually worked. I stick a hundred bucks in and man, I get like four or five new customers. I'm like, this is great. Well, then it's kind of stopped working. And, and I thought, you know, if I could figure out how to get my website to show up when people are searching, I For my services, then I probably don't need to pay the Google machine, right? So I surrounded myself with some of some of the industry leaders. And, and learned how to do a search engine optimization. I call it coding your website for success. That sounds way cooler. Right? Like I said, SEO, people close their ears and go in and go run. I say coding your website for success. So when I figured out how to do that, I grew my business into the largest in Arizona, the whole state where the largest window cleaning company we're also in Denver as well. The good news is I still own those companies. There's like six of them. I don't run them, which is fantastic. My new joy and passion turned into helping other business owners, learning how to get a leg up on your competition and learning how to actually get your website to show up for search terms that people are searching for. So that's kind of, I guess that says enough about what I've done. Awesome. I love it. That's exciting. You were able to grow those businesses and still kind of stay on, but focus on what you're more passionate about. I love hearing stories like that. But I wanted to to really just jump right into it, right. And it led you into the the cheat code and kind of cracking the code for making your website or business pop up in the in the near me search term. I know that's, that's something I think a lot of small businesses could get value out of. Yeah, so let's take an example. Let's say you're a landscaping company and you get on your phone and or somebody's searching for any search Landscaper near me or landscaping company near me. Most people think there's a like a voodoo Algorithm that Google has and you find the nearest landscaping company, but there's actually a way to code your website It is simply a search term. So like I said, I'm in Arizona and I have certain searches For my business. I also rent out some equipment that I own. I got some really large equipment. That's pretty niche specific. And if you're in Los Angeles and you search for this type of equipment for a near me search. So Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Orlando, Nashville, my company in Arizona shows up number one above all the like rental companies above United Rentals, Sunset, like all the big rental companies, and it's because I coded my website to show up for the near me search term. So the kind of the magic behind it is, and this might sound boring to most people, but my favorite thing in the world is a blog post. Now, again, people are gonna be like, Oh, this is so lame. Why a blog post? Well, I'll tell you a blog post is breaking news. So you have a website and you have all your pages on there. Your city pages, you know, your about us, the stuff you do. And it's, it's static. It's just sits there, right? However, if you do a blog post, it's considered breaking news and Google's like, wow, what's going on with this company? So like I said, if you're a landscaping company and let's say you're in the city of Dallas, Texas, well, you could do a blog post and title it. Get this, you title it landscaping company near me, and that's the title of your blog post. It sounds weird. Most people do a blog post or they pay an SEO company to do a blog post. And it's like 10 tricks to enhance you, you know, your curb appeal for your house. Well, that's, that's a nice read, but nobody's searching that. So when you do a blog post, you need to title it exactly what people are searching. Landscape company near me. Sounds revolutionary, right? I love that. No, that's spot on. Like you said, it's something that. That a lot of people probably don't even think about and just hearing you explain that I can tell that would make make a huge impact on a business just like you said, landscaping or me it doesn't doesn't matter if like you said you're in California, New York, that definitely helps us good stuff. And then I know that's a huge example of a blog. Do you have other examples of how a blog may be beneficial to a business or some other creative ideas on that? Yeah. Yeah. So a blog post is like opening the windows and doors to your store. For different search terms, obviously. You know, somebody is going to search pricing options. Another really powerful way to get customers to your website without being spammy is to educate them. So if somebody is coming to your website and you educate them and the processes that you use for your business or the services or the prices, or just simply a DIY person, if somebody is like, Hey man, I want to. You know, what's the best way I can create a garden in my backyard? Like, I don't know what people search in the landscaping world, but if you go to Google and if you were to search Like, let's say a roof. Like, if you're a roofer, how much does a new roof cost? Like, people search that all the time. Like, oh my gosh, I know I need a new roof. Like, how much, what's the price range? So, if you search price range for a new roof or repair my roof, Google will come up with a bunch of people ask questions. And it's really cool because when you click on those, more people ask questions will come up. So, a huge value add to your website is take one of those people ask questions And put a little FAQ questions on your homepage of your website. The homepage is the most powerful part of your website. So you put those people ask questions somewhere in your homepage of your website, and then you put a little article underneath there. You can embed a YouTube video, which I highly recommend, but the benefit is. Like how much is it for a new roof on a 3000 square foot home? So put that content on the homepage of your roofing website. Now what you want to do is link somewhere within that content to a blog post that's you titled. How much does it cost for a new roof of a 300 square foot home? One of those questions you see where the people ask. So you just keep clicking on those people ask questions and one you'll find that really relates to your business. So create a blog post. That's exactly that search term and put a lot of information on there. Educate your customer, educate people on why you're the authority. You don't always have to make the sale. You just want to educate people. So now what you're doing is you're putting a nice big blog post. That's, that's breaking news, right? And you have a link on your homepage. That's the same type of content and you're linking your homepage to that blog post. Now Google's going to value you because now Google's like, wow, these people are actually educating people. Let's send, let's send traffic there. Yeah, you could just go on forever about that, right? With the questions that people ask and name. Start making blogs about each one that relate to your industry and really start growing that so that's a great example Yeah, you do a blog like if you do a blog a day man at the end of the year you have 365 blogs, right? That'd be huge. Exactly. And then obviously the more you do the more confident and easier they become so it definitely definitely a good habit to get into Can I tell you a secret on those also? So if you're doing a blog, like the near me, like I mentioned Dallas, Texas before, so a lot of times the blog posts, you want to put really nice looking images in there. So when Google looks at the code of your website, an image that you put in your blog post, well, it needs to be titled. Right. Landscape company near me, Dallas, Texas. Right. That's a great title for the image that you saved. Well, you also want to geotag that image. So if you ever look at your phone, like you pull up your phone and you see your photos and you can see where you took them and it places all the photos in different areas of the United States that you visited and took those photos. Well, Google is the exact same way. So when you have an image within your blog post, make sure it's geotagged. in the city or location where you're trying to draw traffic from. So that's how I can show up in Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Orlando because when I did the blog post, I geotagged the images as if I were in, in Orlando, Florida. Great stuff. Yeah, no, that helps a lot to kind of decide how much you want to turn it up or turn it down. Obviously, if you're a landscaper in New York, you don't want to be targeting landscape near me in Arizona, necessarily, but for a lot of things, maybe they get into offering some sort of product or service that they can sell, then that's, then that may be beneficial to them. So that's a good point right there for sure. Yep. Yep. I know another area too, I know we've all, or I think just about anyone in business has heard of SEO, right? Or been approached by someone and maybe even been burned by someone. So that's why I'm excited to hear already the value that You're providing obviously you're a leader in the industry. What would you say separates that really like top 1 percent or the people that are actually doing things differently in the SEO space to help generate results? So yeah, that's a great question. What, what are they doing? The top 1%. So it's kind of funny when we work with clients or customers, we tell them, Hey, like, give us like the top 25 search terms you want to work. And if you go to a tool called semrush. com, it's S E M rush. com. You can plug your website in there. And we work with a lot of dentists actually. And the surprising thing, well, to dentists, it's surprising, but let's say your dental practice, say you own a dental practice. Thomas Dental Agency, whatever, or agency, Thomas Dental practice, whatever. Most dentists only show up for the search terms. That's their brand, right? Thomas Dentistry, Thomas Dentistry Dentist by Thomas and Dr. Thomas Bennett, right? Like that's the only search terms your website's gonna show up for. So you wanna plug your website into simr.com and see what search terms are coming to your website. So the top 1%, if you're gonna work with a marketing or an SEO agency. Or if you want to do this yourself, it's, it's very easily done. You can go to our website and get resources. I'll share you later. But what you want to do is you want to track the keywords that are coming to your website. Now, when you start writing all these blog posts. You're going to have more and more and more and more search terms. So most like when we show up or we start looking at a dentist website, they're probably attracting about maybe 10 to 15 different search terms. And they're usually related to the name of their practice and the doctor's name. And that's it. So they're not getting emergency dentists near me dental implants near me, best dentists near me dentists you know, local dentists. Like there are literally hundreds and hundreds of search terms to show up for in the dental industry. Same with, you know, pretty much any industry. You want to do your city name plus your service, your service, plus your city name. So when you start doing blog posts and you're doing one a day, you want to blog on all the different search terms and all the different services And all the cities around you. So that's, that's what the top 1 percent of a SEO firm should do for your business. If you are, if you have an SEO firm, now listen to this, most of them would be like, you know what, we're going to even give you one blog post a month. So what's one times 12. You're going to have 12 search terms by the time the entire year is overworked. Right. Or you can do the blogging yourself one a day. And by the time a year is done, you're going to show up for way more than 365 search terms, because Google's going to love all the content you're given. You see the difference? Paint an SEO firm, really. Really does the minimal versus, you know, actually somebody who's going in there and getting you to show up for all these search terms. And I think that that's eyeopening as well too, because like, to your point about That like one blog posts a month or whatever it might be, right? 12 blog posts a year versus 365. And then obviously the more you do, the more eyes you're going to get on your website. But I think that other thing is kind of like you just said, it's almost like getting the business owner in that mindset, right? I know a lot of business owners got a lot on their plate, but if you can get them in the mindset of. Just starting that first blog or just getting going on one. It may, may kill them on the first one. Right. But then I think once they get that going and then they do the second one now, now they can easily or much easier to get to that 365 that you were talking about instead of just relying on and a basic SEO company to give them one a month and just rely on that and think that's going to change the business. Yeah, it's, it's not going to that's, and that's why SEO companies have just a bad rap is I'm telling you, like I'm on calls all day, every day and my sales team to like, it has 95 percent of the websites we look at get one blog a month or even less. Like it is really rare that we hopped into a website and see active blog posting. And I didn't share this before either, but when you do a blog post, there's things called tags, right? Like hashtags. Like if you write a blog post on landscape company near me, when the tag section, you put in all the search terms, you're literally telling Google what search terms this blog post should show up for. It's like a no fail. Like, and then I go in and see these other. SEO agencies when they do a blog post, they don't even put any tags on it, which is ridiculous because tags are free and you tell Google this is exactly what I want this, this blog post to show up. Yeah, that's incredible that in a bad way that there's SEO companies that aren't utilizing that. So I'm glad to hear that you guys are kind of going in and fixing probably some of those. Those other issues that they dealt with before. And then before I I wasn't familiar with this before I looked into more about what you guys do and what you had going on, but walk us through transactional search terms and why that could be beneficial to a business. Okay, so yeah, like a transactional search term a lot of time is the near me if you're a dentist emergency dentist near me like man, my tooth is killing me, right? So somebody will go on their phone and search emergency dentist near me probably gonna call the first person they find They got a credit card in their pie. They don't care what it costs Like I need this tooth fix right or a plumber right man. I got a plumber like man my tooth The house is leaking. There's water everywhere, man. I need a plumber near me now. So that tool that I told you about, semrush. com, you can type in like landscaping or whatever roofing or roofing company, and it'll give you hundreds and hundreds of lists of search terms and they categorize them. One is informational. So informational would be like Dr. Thomas Bennett dentistry. That's informational, right? They kind of know you that they're investigating informational is also you know, how much does it cost to repair my roof? That's informational. I just want information. And then there's transactional. Transactional is like, Hey man, I I'm searching this because I'm ready to make a purchase. So you really want to gear your website. And, you know, all of your blog posts around transactional search terms.'cause then you're gonna get people showing up who's got money and is ready to spend it. Yeah, that makes sense. Definitely. And then I, I think you and I have a similar opinion on this, but I wanted you to talk about a little more about really the benefit of collaborating with similar industry leaders or. businesses like yours. How, how can that help a small business owner? Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's why we named our company collaborate. Like if you think about like a huge project, like building a bridge or building the Titanic or something, what did they do? They just got a bunch of people together and collaborated. So really in this world, like Make friends with people, like, and especially with people in your industry, like, especially and if you're not, then go get out there, go to some conventions, some conferences in your industry, and there's wonderful people all over this country, like, I love going to conventions, but collaborating with like businesses. So let's say. You're a dentist, right? And let's say I'm a window cleaner and you put some information on your website and you talk about what are an amazing window cleaning company. I am Google's like, what are you talking about? You're a dentist and he's a window cleaner. So what you want to do is surround people like, like for instance, we work with, I don't know how many dentists, quite a few, but if we put content on one dentist website, and then we talk about how amazing the other dentist is, I think Our new dentist here, Dr. Thomas Bennett, right? And we put some information on one dentist's website and we we give you kind of credit for writing this content Well now we're connecting two dentists together. We do this in the roofing industry We do this in in we actually have insurance clients all sorts of stuff but like if one roofer is connected to another roofer google's like All these roofers value this roofers information and how important he is. So when you start collaborating, like make friends with other people in your industry and say, Hey, you know what? I'm going to write a blog post on my website. And I'm gonna talk about how awesome landscaping is. And I know you're a landscaper, so I'm going to give you credit. I'm going to put a link on my landscaping blog to your website. And if you're cool, could you do that for me? And when you start doing that with other people in your industry, like I'm telling you no lie, I've seen people get to the page one of Google rankings, literally within 30 days. Usually within 60 days and almost always within 90 days. Like you'll get up to that page one spot for search terms in your industry. If you simply collaborate with other people in your same industry. That's great. Yeah, I think that's huge and definitely a way to help everyone. You know, there's enough business out there for everyone. So that's a huge way to grow your business and others at the same time. I love it. That's like a secret. Don't go, don't go telling people. Exactly. Absolutely. You got to listen into this to get the insider info for sure. And then feedbacking off that a little bit too, right? If I'm obviously collaborating and teaming up with other businesses. Now, what if you were your business, like your service location is separate from your office in the sense where I live about 30 minutes north of Boston. But maybe my ideal service location is maybe 10 or 15 minutes north of Boston. Is there a way that you can specifically cover certain areas or what would you recommend there? Yeah, absolutely. So you want to do it in your Google Maps and you want to do it on your website. So a lot of people don't realize this. Like when you look on your Google Maps, a lot of times if you're searching for like a dentist near me or a roofer near me, Google's really going to give you love, like, like a mile radius of where your office is. Outside of that, Google doesn't really give you much love. So it's a combination of the two within your Google business profile. You want to upload pictures that are geo tagged in the areas that you want to service. So I did this for my my business in Denver. Like I wanted to do a lot of the high rise window cleaning offices. So I literally tagged an image on every single high rise building in the whole city of Denver. It took some time, but I did it. And there's software that you can do that with. And then people think about this. Somebody sitting in this high rise building and be like, man, I need a high rise window cleaning company. And they searched that Google's algorithms like, well, this guy's company has pictures all over here. They work in all these buildings. So I'll show them in the, in the Google in the Google maps. So what you want to do is, and also make that congruent on your website. So you want to have location pages within your website. And then again, when you have those location pages, geotag. As if you're 15 miles or 15 minutes north of your location, where your ideal customers are. And that's huge for service industries who go out and do service away from where their office is. Dentists are a little bit different because they want everybody to come to them. So you still want to, you still want to sit those images out away from where you're looking. That's huge. I love it. And then I know you and I both agree that content's king, right? And how powerful content is. But obviously there's a lot going on these days with AI and the, the the little takeover with artificial intelligence. Is there possible, I know, I know there's other sites and ways to. notify or track things, but can Google notice AI written content? Can that impact your business? What are your thoughts on that? Yes. So we've actually, we've been using AI actually probably started a couple of years before chat GPT really even came out or got popular. But you do want to be careful and content. Yes, it is keen. And it is a lot how you structure your content. So you can go into chat GPT and say, Hey, write me a. You know, 800 word blog posts on, you know, why I'm the best landscaping company or why I'm the best roofer. And you'll get kind of a basic. Result. But what you want to do is how you prompt the A. I. Can you give me some benefits? Some advantages and disadvantages of doing your own D. I. Y. Roofing job, right? Like you're gonna screw up your roof, right? Can you give me some advantages of working with a licensed company or a contractor? So you want to guide the A. I. And so that you have different subsections. Now, if you're When you have AI write all that, you, you need to pre proofread it. You need to put human eyes on it and change it up a little bit, make it seem friendly. And you can also ask AI to write it in a friendly tone. You can ask it to write it in a B2B tone or a B2C tone. And, and Google and, and search engines will recognize AI content. But it's also like. We've been using it for like three years now, four years, I think four years now. And the content we write and produce is kind of the way I just told you the roadmap. How the AI tool write it, we guide them on different sections and subsections. And then we have a humans look over it and then we put it into a blog post. Then we geotag the images. And then we put links to authorities, like if you're in a city of like, like say New York, New York, which is a humongous city, you want to link to like the Wikipedia page of the city of New York or Manhattan or wherever it is you're at, or let's say Buffalo, New York, you want to kind of like narrow it down where you're at. So all that stuff is, is Google kind of. Google figures out what this blog is all about and how the content's written. So you don't just want to grab it from chat GPT and throw it in your website and be like, all right, sweet. I'm done. It does take a little bit of time. It does take a little bit of effort, but the rewards are huge. Absolutely. No, that's huge. I agree. I know it's a, it's a powerful tool when you can leverage it in the right way. I'm not saying replace the business or let it do everything, but when you can leverage it and at least get, get you going in the right direction, I think that can. A lot, especially with the small business owner that already has a million things on their plate. You can also use AI to say, Hey, can you give me 50 different topics to write on landscaping or roofing and AI be like, Oh, Hey, here's 50 different topics. And then, then you get a blog post for each one of those topics. Cause I was like that when I was a kid in school, like English, I'm like, Oh, I hate writing this paper. But when I just kind of started getting it going, I'm like, okay, now I'm good to go. So when you get. You know, AI to write the outline for you. You're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This makes sense. It does get a lot easier. Definitely. No, really does. I mean, I know we do a lot, Adam, today. Anything we might've left out or didn't cover that you wanted to leave the listeners with. Yeah, I'll give you one big actual golden nugget here. So, the whole story of showing up for a Near Me search is this. So, I'll give you the whole, the whole thing. Okay, so you write a blog, landscaping company Near Me, Dallas, Texas, right? Now, that alone's not gonna get you to number one spot. It probably won't get you to page one. Okay, but it's a good start. On your home page of your website, you want to put a little, I call them accordions, so you click on it and more content opens up. Talk about being a, you know, the one of the best local landscaping contractors in Dallas and have a little bit of content there. And you want to put a link from your homepage that says landscaping company near me. That's the exact link and link that to your blog posts. That's landscaping company near me or roofing company near me. Okay. So now you have a link on your homepage. That's the exact search term you want to the blog posts. That's the exact term. Now, If you go to our website, collaboratepros. com, I have a podcast section that you can see videos on how to do this. Okay. So there's your free tip. Now you're going to probably jump, maybe jump to page two, hopefully page one with that. But what you really going to have to do is you're going to have to find some friends in your landscaping industry and ask them to do a little blog post. And in that blog post, you, I want them to link from that blog post to your blog that talks about being a landscape company near me. So you get three, four, five, six other landscaping companies to link to that one blog post. That blog post should start, it should be on page one and it'll start creeping up to the number one spot. So that's the whole formula to getting you to show up for a near me search term. That's fantastic. Yeah, I love it. Thanks for sharing that. Good stuff. Yeah, that's going to be a wrap on this episode of Small Business Big Moves. If you know someone that could get value out of this, what we ask is that you like and share the podcast. And you can find me on all social media at Tom Spennett. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.