120: SEO with Amy Toman
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Summary:
SEO doesn't have to be scary or confusing. Amy Toman, from Pet Sitter SEO, breaks down the common misconceptions of SEO, the best practices we should all be doing, and how to optimize our websites to drive more local traffic from the clients we want.
Topics on this episode:
SEO Basics
Best Practices
Things to avoid with Google My Business
Main take away? Keep your ‘Google My Business’ listing updated and active!
About our guest:
Amy Toman is the founder of Pet Sitter SEO, a digital marketing company that specializes in SEO and Google My Business audits for small businesses in the pet care industry. She's worked with pet sitters for over five years, and started her company in 2017.
Amy's written for Pet Sitters International and NAPPS, and has spoken at PSI's, NAPPS's, and the Texas Pet Sitters' Conferences. She's been cited in many SEO industry articles as an SEO to follow, and has been featured in several podcasts, discussing both SEO and pet sitter SEO.
She loves solving puzzles, which is why she loves SEO. She's married, has three adult children, and two happy cats. And when she's not buried in websites, she loves to read and watch classic movies.
Amy may be reached at amy@petsitterseo.com or at her website, PetSitterSEO.com.
Links:
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Facebook: petsitterseo
Email: Amy@petsitterseo.com
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, seo, google, page, website, business, work, pet, pet sitter, reviews, optimize, called, listing, search engines, mentioned, big, links, months, site, small businesses
SPEAKERS
Collin, Amy Toman
00:17
I'm Collin. And I'm Meghan. And this is pet sitter confessional, and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter
Collin 00:24
brought to you by time to pet. Well, hello, and welcome back. Today, we're opening up yet another black box of running your business. There's marketing, finance. And today we are tackling SEO. So to do that, we have Amy Toman, owner of pet sitter Seo with us, Amy, thank you so much for coming on the show today and tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Amy Toman 00:52
Oh, hey, Colin, um, okay, I have been in the dealing with, with pet care professionals for over five years, I started out at a at a hosting and website design kind of templates company. And then when I left there, I kept having people ask me what questions you know, come back to the pet sitters who I've met, kept coming back and asking me, you know, if I could help them further, and I ended up starting my own agency, which is pet sitter, SEO, and I, I have I have been, I've been growing, I've been learning, I've been trying to spread a lot of the good news out there of different you know, things I find that will help I think, I hope will help people log. And, you know, now I do mostly just audit by I look at people's Google listings and their websites, and give them an audit, you know, explain what's up and what, what would help them. And I also, you know, I work on other projects outside the pet industry as well, which is probably one of the best things because that way I bring, I bring that kind of high powered information back down to people, you know, just letting them know, some new things that have come up things that they should act on things they shouldn't worry about. And, you know, that's, that's kind of where I am right now.
Collin 02:11
So I got to ask, why Seo? Why is it something you're so passionate about?
Amy Toman 02:17
Ah, really good question. Um, when I was at that other company, people would call and ask, you know, should I do this? Should I do that? And a lot of it was to me kind of logical, like, what pages should I have? Should I move this? Should I move that? What do you think about this, and I was just giving people really practical advice. And I started doing some research. And I started realizing if that actually has a term, search engine optimization, so you find out right, so you're putting things on your site in a way that both helps both your the people who are visiting, right, your, your website, visitors, as well as the search engines, because if you don't put things in a way that they are going to use the best, and it's kind of your efforts have kind of been useless, you know, you kind of waste your time. So that's pretty much it once I figured out that, that that's kind of what I really like, you know, try to help people present things to the world in a way that's going to get them the most, to be the most efficient, the most successful. That's when I started pet sitter SEO, because I really wanted to use the knowledge that I had gained, and I wanted to gain more. How about, you know, my pet sitter friends and, you know, small businesses that I ran across them? Right?
Collin 03:37
Yeah, no, it's just being able to look at it in a practical manner. And it sounds like it just kind of clicked for you, and just kind of all made all made sense.
Amy Toman 03:46
Yes, step? I don't know. I don't know. It all makes sense. But I try a lot of because a lot of what it what it is, I think is a lot of people, it's trial and error, like sitting there say, okay, you know, people have done it like this for a while, is that actually the way it still works? Or is there a better way that we can do things so it as much as I don't actually do a lot of the experimentation. I am more than willing to amplify someone else who has right somebody who has come up with with a great new, you know, a find a new find that they figured out or something that and I've had a few of those, you know, I figured out things that Google has done and I got a little credit for it, which is nice. But a lot of times it's just kind of it's a combination of common sense and figuring out how something has changed from the last time. You know, that's that's the thing that we didn't you know, it worked a few years ago. It's not working now. We got to figure out, you know, what's changed and then how we can adjust to that.
Collin 04:48
Well, maybe walk us through how the landscape of SEO has changed over the course of time.
Amy Toman 04:55
Okay, when I was when I was first I went, I went online the first time, it was after I was working after college. And there wasn't, there wasn't a worldwide web, there wasn't a graphic representation of data that was going back and forth, there were no websites, the whole drop. Well, when the websites first came on, they had it was basically do whatever you can, it's fun, it's interesting, but you weren't advertising yourself, as that gradually came in, standards have developed, right? We no longer have things like you go on a website, and music starts, music doesn't start anymore, you don't have things you don't have a black background and things shooting, just to get your attention. You know, it's it's things have have pretty much mellowed out. And you can't you expect things to be in certain places, right? You expect people's logos to be in the upper left, you expect their contact information to be at the top, you expect the nav bar to be at the top, you expect be able to find all the pages from the nav bar, you shouldn't have you you also, the easier it is to find something, the better for the user, right? If I have to go search for something, a lot of times, I'm gonna say forget this, I'm not bothering and I'm gonna I'm gonna head out. We've all done that. So I think I think from where we started to where we are now, it's just gotten things have standardized, because they have become the easiest way to do it. Right things have become very, very user centric. If people were doing something and they kept complaining about it, a lot of times, either Google or one of the other search engines said you know what? Well that I'm just not going to have that anymore. And there you go. So that's the biggest change, everything has become more user centric.
Collin 06:43
Yeah. Which you know, might not you know, it, it's amazing to see that progression over time. And you mentioned how SEO was this balance are working in tandem with you the user interface of a website, and what the search and what the algorithms are looking for, and that they that you have to satisfy both of those at the same time with your website,
Amy Toman 07:04
one of the pieces of data that Google uses, and they all do so. And when I say Google, I don't necessarily mean Google, you know, the company. I mean, Google, like the search engines in general, it could be being that could be, you know, DuckDuckGo or whoever. Right? Well, I mean, a lot of the things that they do, they're doing it because one of the one of the things they do what they look at click through rate, CTR, right. So if people are not are typically not doing a certain thing, then they're not getting a high click through rate. So eventually, Google is not going to look for that whatever that one thing is like, say if they said, Okay, we're looking for everybody to click on this, well, people don't click on it, they're going to change. And and you know, what, human beings changed as well. They're not looking for things that they used to look at 20 years ago, we still had all those bright colors, and this music, and it said that it was kind of like people did it because they could, and now, you know, because it has kind of morphed into more of like an information slash marketing media. You know, you don't see that anymore, because it's just not what people need and what people want. So, when you when you look at a website, if it's not user friendly, if it's hard for people to find information, it usually is not going to come up really high, because it's not what the search engines believe people want. I mean, the other thing is that, that search engines are looking to answer the query. Okay, so if I go into, if I just type in pet sitter, right, the assumption is that I am asking for a pet sitter near me to provide a service, right? It used to use to that they're, they're getting a lot more intuitive in terms of what the information that they give back to you. So they made they're making a lot more assumptions now. But the assumptions are based on their prior experience. So these all these things, all these things come into it. It's just it's, you know, very interesting to me.
Collin 08:58
Yeah, absolutely. Because it's tying this human behavior level into it to, like you said that click through rate is actually a measurement of human behavior. And so as Yes, the as clients change, as the society changes, the algorithm inherently also changes in response to what people are clicking on.
Amy Toman 09:18
Well, it doesn't inherently change, it changes because the search engines make it change. Remember, this is all driven by humans on both ends. Right.
Collin 09:26
Right. Right. Right. So I guess we may need to take one step back here and and talk about what SEO means and maybe why a business owner should should care about it.
Amy Toman 09:41
Okay, SEO stands for search engine optimization, is it you know, it's it. I think it's like a standard term, but it's not for everybody, but what it means is getting your website and you know, whatever else you have, like a Google listing and some other things, you want to have them so that they're up optimized for the search engines meaning that they're optimized for anybody who's going to come through whether it's going to be Bing, whether it's going to be Google, whether it's going to be DuckDuckGo, you want to have your properties I'll say, in the right organized the right way, so that you get the most positive feedback, right. So whether it's people coming to your site, or people clicking through to make an order, or clicking through to call you. That's what that's what this is. That's what SEO is. And an SEO is a person who does SEO. So it's, it's both the person and the practice. I don't think it's a science, it's a little bit a little bit of an art, but it's definitely a bit of a science.
Collin 10:43
Yeah, and, and the business owner should care because their stuff it's trying to get their stuff surfaced to the people who need it in the fastest, most reliable way.
Amy Toman 10:52
Exactly. And the way the reason why business owners should care, is because if you're not doing, if you're not placing your information in the way that the search engines want it flesh expected, you're not you're gonna sit on page two through, you know, whatever, and you're not ever going to kind of get yourself up to where you need to be. Because word of mouth is cool. But these days, I mean, I don't know if y'all remember, there used to be a thing called the Yellow Pages, nobody goes there anymore, right? And the Yellow Pages, you would just go to like, like say, say dog walker, and people would be in there alphabetically. So the smart ones would name their business beginning with like, you know, triple A, you know, pet sitting service. Why? Because, you know, those were the ones that came up first. And so you inherently, you know, oh, you know, there's pet sitters. Look, there's this one, and I'll go to that one first. And that's not the way it works anymore. The way that the search engines work, is they are trying to answer the query the best way possible. And so you have to try to organize your properties, your online properties. So they're the ones that get picked by that by the search engines to, you know, to present the answer. So, yeah, business owners, you can't you can't ignore it any more, whether you're doing it yourself, or you're hiring somebody to do it. You have to be paying attention to this right now. Because it's, you know, you're really, it's very important.
Collin 12:17
Yeah. And just to be clear, when you say things like properties, you're referring to, to websites that does that also include social media presence as well.
Amy Toman 12:25
Yeah, yeah, it does, it does to a degree up because I mean, the goal and all these things, right, the goal and all these things is to get somebody to convert become a client. And a lot of times what you want to do, because I'm not I will I try to be very honest here. I am not a social media maven, but what I will say is, a lot of times even the goal of social media, is to get people to go in this case to your website. So when I when I talk about your social media property, or your Say, say your online properties, I'm talking primarily about your website, but also things like your Google listing, right? Your Google listing is important and and other places where you have your your business information like you right now links are very important, right? So when you have, you should have links to your local, say, your chamber of commerce, but you should also have links in industry specific directories also, like the psi locator, naps, if you're in ibpsa, if you're in any one of other industry groups specific to the business that you're in, right, but what I'm saying about about properties is, they all need to be specific. And sorry, consistent. So if you have your business name, in one of them one way, they all need to have that same business name, you can have three different addresses. You can have different phone numbers, like somebody has an 800 number here at our Hall and a regular number here and a different number there. When I talk about properties, I mean, all of these kind of working together the ones obviously you have the most control over is your website. The second most control you have is over your your Google listing. But still that's that's what I'm talking about when I mentioned online properties, every place in your business has mentioned now
Collin 14:12
we'd love for it have you to break down some of the most common misconceptions around SEO because I'm sure that there are a lot
Amy Toman 14:22
there are there are and I think I think the biggest one is that I can't do it myself. A lot of people in really small businesses. I primarily my experience pet sitters. They think that they can't necessarily do things by themselves. And to me that's a misconception. Yeah, I know sometimes worse. Sometimes websites are hard to edit, you know on your own. But it's not that hard. If you can almost always find somebody who can either help you do it for you or show you how to do it. Another thing is when people say to me, yeah, I got my Google listing a few years ago. And I can look at it and tell you that was the last time they touched it. They a big misconception is that Google listing is not really important. And right now, it is the most important thing that you can, can work on. To some degree, it might even be more important than your website right now. So that's, that's definitely a misconception that I run into a lot people just don't understand the importance of it these days. Another one is that the pages everybody kind of has the same pages on your website. The problem is that if you're a certain type of business, meaning a business that goes out to somebody's location, you have to, you have to actually say what those locations are. And you have to have it in more than one place, like a lot of people will have, they will list it, say the list say a what we call the service areas, they will list them just kind of on the bottom on the footer, or they'll list them on their contact us page. But when you're a service area business, you have to have entire page for that. Which to me is like a big, big honkin deal. I think the biggest the biggest misconception is that SEO is something for other people. And it's it's hard when you're really small business because you don't want to do any of that. So you want to concentrate on whatever your businesses, right, you want to concentrate on learning more about, you know, dog behavior and cat behavior. And, you know, how, what do I do in this situation? And how do I perform CPR? And you know, what is what is at first aid, you would much prefer to do that. So the marketing and just kind of flips off to the side unless you have a crisis, and then all of a sudden, it's like, you know, wait, what do I do I have COVID. And people are not calling me and what do I do? So I think I think the biggest misconception is that these things are things that you are not in control of. And I think you have to I think you owe it to yourself as a business owner to learn how they work. And even if you're not, even if you're not the one who's kind of making all the changes, making all the updates, you need to know enough about it to be able to control it for yourself. That's probably the biggest one.
Collin 17:10
Yeah, recognizing that there are sure there are probably some large things to make sure that you have but there are these small things to have just these small changes, that a make your website probably better for people who visit it and be you know, what you're after here is the the search engines are also going to better be able to pick up on that too. So you know, it might it might sound very well it sounds kind of scary, especially this big black box, don't know what's going on, don't know exactly how it works. But as you said, taking some time to learn about it, but in some of these simple practices, and then tweak over time and take a few minutes or you know, an hour or so a week to look over it and to refresh it.
Amy Toman 17:52
Right. Exactly, exactly.
Collin 17:54
Because I know one of the things that I hear an awful lot is that SEO is all about, quote, beating the algorithm. So I was curious, you know how you respond to that, or how you think of the phrase beating the algorithm.
Amy Toman 18:08
You know what I I really wish that I would love to know where that came from. Because the problem is that so many people want to get what's like a quick, you know, a quick update, they want to do something that's going to get them to the top right away. And the problem is that most of the time when those things happen to you as quickly as you get to the top, you then fall, there are people who you know, they kind of do things, they buy things, right. They buy reviews, they buy links, but the problem is, the links are, if you're not doing the specific type of links that you need, they're not going to help that's money wasted. Or if you are, you know, buying reviews, which some people like Oh, you know what everybody says, I have to have more reviews than the next guy. I'm just going to go out and pay somebody and they're going to get me these reviews. But when Google finds that out, which they will never really do, you're going down. You're like, yeah, literally, your Google listing will go offline, and nobody can see it. And you can't get it back for you know, yeah. So beating the algorithm is not a lot of people to also say that beating the algorithm is going to be pricey. The problem is that you don't necessarily you can, you know, quote unquote, beat the algorithm. But the problem is that you have to do it kind of the right way. You have to go slowly, right? I'm the kind of person who like I know, when listings get suspended, I know how to get the back. The problem is I also know how to get them to go away. It's because I'm looking to see if people if they're breaking the rules, and because I know how to how to do it both sides, right how to how to take people down because they're breaking the rules, but also how to bring people back if they get suspended. I can tell you, there's no kind of quick there's no quick way to either beat the algorithm or There's ways to get yourself back but be in the algorithm is not really is not should not be a goal. What should be a goal is slow and steady kind of wins the race, meaning you have really good content on your website, you know, what are the questions you get asked and answer them. Right? What do you do? I always tell people, here's the thing, there's, there's five things I always say that you should have, I should see on your homepage. And this is something I hope people write down five things I think you should have on your homepage. And I should see these anyone should see this as soon as the page loads, okay, it's who you are, what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you. Okay, those should be on the first screen. And those are something that people, you know, it's a quick win, it's a quick win, right? So he's talking about beating the algorithm, that's the sort of thing that way you want to do it, you want to have those five things on the very first screen, there are also pages you should have. But these are not necessarily things that you want to do quick in a row. And I think when, when I think about building the algorithm, that's what I what I'm thinking about people who are willing to either pay a lot for something, or they wanted to shoot right to the top not realizing, I mean, I've had clients where they weren't getting many reviews, they got them a whole bunch within like a week, and then they didn't get any for a month. So yeah, they got the big shoot up. And then they kind of went back. And then they kind of stayed at the lower bit, and I never moved again. So you don't really want to try to beat something, you want to try to work with it. It's the elephant in the room, people will say, well, that's not fair, Google does this, or Google does that. And like, you know what, you're right. They're making bad decisions. That's not the sort of thing that's going to work for you. On the other hand, it's the only game in town. To kind of, say, the sky is green, go with it, you know, if that's gonna get more clients to come to your website? Yeah, you got to do it. It's sad, but it's, you know,
Collin 21:59
yeah, it's just recognize that, you know, you mentioned there like that. It's just, you know, being doing doing it the honest way, doing the slow and steady way. And part of that, just, as we mentioned, like taking the time to learn some of these practices, and then and then do it and know that
Amy Toman 22:15
it might not pay off
Collin 22:16
the second you hit enter or submit, right, it but it's gonna pay off down the road as as things happen.
Amy Toman 22:23
Yeah, that's exactly it. And, you know, when you go into something like a, you know, a data source, like tracking source like Google Search Console, or, or analytics, you go in there, and you can literally put in like a whole year's worth, and you can watch your, you know, hopefully your traffic moving up. And but it takes some time. Why? Because the search engines have to all they have to, there's so many different things they do, they don't just look at your website, then look at all the other places you're mentioned. Right? They will look at your Facebook, they will look at, you know, obviously open part, they will look at your personal right, like say, say, say you do this job. Like I like I've said before I do other projects, I do, I do primarily, you know, petsitting, but I also do projects in other places. I'm also quoted in like some SEO, you know, pages, sites, surveys, things like that. There's another one that's coming out either this week or next. So the Google then takes me my name. And it associates me with all these things. And that gives me a little bit more what's called authority. For what I do say something, I do post something, right. But if you come out and say, say you call and have don't have much an online presence, and you come out and say something, it's not going to be given as much weight in the results, as say, like, if you come out and say something about SEO, and I come out and say some bad SEO, most likely, because of all the associations that Google's made, I'm going to come up higher, yours may be right, I may be wrong. But because I have all these other things associated with my, you know, my name and my business, then I would probably come up higher. So that's one another reason why you don't want to quit when you want to time to to get those associations with your business, right? You want to have the have Google sees the Better Business Bureau has done their background check and approve and appreciate you, you know, and that you have insurance with this company or you have you know, you're you're in a three industry directories, those are slow wins, but their wins that are going to last you a long time. And they're just going to build, right, they're just going to build if you if you get mentioned in your local newspaper, or you sponsor something in your neighborhood, these are all things that go online and stay online and get appreciated. So this you know, slow build, but once you're there, you're not going to go anywhere.
Collin 24:47
Right. Right. Absolutely. It's having this this eye towards the future and no, as you said, it's a slow process. That's because, you know, the the search engines it takes it does take them a while. Took For all everything and to make these associations in the background, and add the new data as it comes in as you put that online, and so again, this payoff that we're working towards, not going to be tomorrow, but we don't want it tomorrow, when, as you mentioned, what goes up must come down, we want this nice, slow, solid build towards the future.
Amy Toman 25:18
Right? Exactly, exactly. Because you, you it's a nice Foundation, that's a great, great way to think about.
Collin 25:24
Exactly. Now, you mentioned them a couple times, or you mentioned one already about the things to include on your homepage. But I was wondering what other best practices for SEO pet sitting businesses should be doing?
Amy Toman 25:38
Okay, the best thing you can do, the most important thing I think, is make sure that you have your contact information, obvious, okay? Have it at the top of your page, have it at the bottom of your page, have it within your page, you know, have like a button that says contact us on on every page, if you can have it, it should be clickable, right? And so your your your email, and your phone should be everywhere, and they should be clickable, somebody who's looking at this on your phone should be able to just press that button and immediately have you know, their their phone started. That to me is like the the biggest honkin deal that people don't realize you want to have it at the top you want to have it, you know the header in the footer, and then in the pages as well as on your pro more prominently on your contact us page. Another thing is just answer the questions. Right? Think about what what you if you were looking for a pet sitter, what questions would you want to answer? Answer, answer them on the homepage and answer the more in depth and other pages. Right? So don't just say, if somebody says if you thinking okay, I want a pet sitter in my town? Well, I don't know, if you said go on that go on. Now, the nearest a pet sitter page, that pet sitter page should be mentioning that on the homepage, and then it should have other pages that specifically mentioned that. I mean, you can mention it in the footer. Yeah. But that's not as important as having a specific page that is called you know, service area. Right? So having answering the questions is the basic deal. The first one is, you know, how do I reach these people? What do you mean, what do they do? And how do I reach them? That's the the biggest one. And then just thinking in advance? Or even like I said, if you have a current website, what sort of questions there are, what are people googling to get to you? Right? Are they googling, you know, just pet sitter in my town? So then you know, that you should be making sure that you have the town name in all the pages, you know, are they looking for cat care? Right? Are they looking for cat care? Are they looking for cat sitter? Whichever one seems to be you know, you get more queries for optimize your page for that. It's it's the big deal is getting your year out finding out what people are asking and answering those questions. That's that's the biggest thing I would think for SEO is figuring out what those questions are going in, you know, say you put a site up, go in and within search console and see what people are asking how they're getting to you, and optimize those, you know, your site for
Collin 28:19
that? Well, and on that, you know, how does blogging play into SEO because I hear that talked an awful lot about to
Amy Toman 28:26
blogging is really good, because what it does is it kind of backs up for your, for your users and for the search engines. What what your interests are, and kind of where your authority lies. So if you are a pet sitter, who specializes in cats, you should be writing about cat all aspect of cats. You know, their their their their behavior, their psychology, their health, toys for cats, training for cats. I don't know cat yoga, just anything that is associated with cats. So in other words, don't be a cat sitter, who that writes about he want us to know, because that's not going to help you and it's kind of actually distracts. You know, people are like, I don't understand this. No, but but so what law does is logging kind of it builds up your what's called authority with the with the with the search engines. Just make sure as I said, though, that you also have and I'm sorry, this is going off the subject of it, that you will win in terms of blogging and blogging builds you up as an authority in a certain area. But it only does it partially The other thing that you really need to do is regardless of what subject you're working on, you need to have a page that describes what your credentials are. So if if if Collin is going to write about the care or raccoons, okay, but it doesn't bug Collins bio page. Wasn't explained doesn't even mention anything about raccoon care doesn't mention any sort of credential that would even remotely relate to that. People aren't going to care. And the search engines are not going to recommend the page. So if you want to be mentioned as an expert in say in, say dog training, okay, on you on that page on that blog page, you have a little blurb at the bottom about yourself, and then you on your about page, you explain, I have received, you know, I have done training with, say, this person I have done, you know, I have taken these classes, I have received this certification, you know, I've worked with this rescue or that police force, or you know what I mean, so you have to kind of so blogging is the first part, it does build up a bit of authority, but you can't, I mean, I know somebody who, when I looked at this and amaze me, she had mentioned in some groups somewhere that that oh, you know, Google's doing bad things to us. And what I looked at was, that what she was writing about was nutraceuticals, which is fine, you know, everybody's interested in different topics. But nowhere on her website, anywhere, is she mentioned what her qualifications for that work. So if you're, you know, she's recommending you're giving, you know, you know, give your pet, I don't know, special food or special, you know, pills or medications or whatever. But it didn't look like other than she just felt like it like there was any kind of background, you know, like medical background or behavioral background, anything that would qualify her for that. Now, she could have been absolutely perfect. She could have been a, you know, a vet for 30 years. But unless you tell people what those are, and you lay them out for people and the search engines, they're not going to believe you. And they're not going to understand. So logging is a big deal. But you have to remember to to back up whatever it is that you're talking about.
Collin 31:57
Right? Because it's almost sounds like I mean, both in human behavior. And in the search engines. It's, it's almost making these word associations of Oh, okay. It's called my
Amy Toman 32:07
friend. And it's called entities. You're, you're now a junior SEO to may have made that connection itself. They are called entities. And that's exactly what happens is that Google says, okay, remember I said the nutraceutical person, that person now Google associates nutriceuticals with that person, but then they go out and they look for other connections, right? Whether it's on that website, or maybe they'll look and see if she's certified somewhere, or if she's gone to a certain University that's going to reference her, or if she's, all of that is called entities. And it's become a big deal in SEO in the last few years, which is, again, why you want to make sure that if you're out there, anything if you're representing your business, if you're representing a certain concept, right, say if your business specializes in a certain thing, you want to go out there and talk about it in as many forums as you can get people to, to link to you, for whatever reason gets certified. All of that is called entities. Yeah, it's building that recognition between that and and strengthening that and, you know, you keep pointing out of like, it's not just having it on the website, it's having it in these other places consistently out on the web as well to strengthen that, that that connection. Exactly, exactly. And that's from again, that's from local places, like you know, your local you know, 4000 subscriber newspaper, to your chamber of commerce to Better Business Bureau to maps and psi, or ibpsa. Where they have you know, finders where, where it'll have a link back to your site. All of those figure and all of those figure into to create the the online kind of profile of your business you and or your business.
Collin 33:57
Have you heard about time to pet Doug from back to the bone pet care has this to say
Doug 34:02
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Collin 34:20
the cracks. If you are looking for new pet sitting software for your business, give time to pet a try as a listener of pet sitter confessional, you'll get 50% off your first three months when you sign up at time to pet.com slash confessional. You mentioned earlier about the extreme importance of having a proper Google My Business what what sort of things should we make sure we are avoiding on on the Google My Business to make sure that it's functioning as it should be?
Amy Toman 34:51
This this is my favorite topic at the moment. I am so into I'm actually known. Oddly enough. I'm actually known in SEO areas for Because I love Google and distance learning so much, okay, the things you want to I will tell you right now avoid, because these are the things I have come across. In so many pet sitter and pet I should say pet care, Google My Business listings, you want to avoid putting any words into your business listing the name of the listing, that are not in your register the not that are not in the name your registered with your state or province or municipality. So say you are your Jack's pet sitting right. Do not add and how sitting or and cat care or have Middletown can't do that unless they are part of your registered business name. And that's that's the first thing you you cannot get suspended for that, but Google will remove those. Another thing is, and these two these two can actually get you can get you suspended your address. If you provide the Google has very specific guidelines for whether your address can show or not. The easiest thing to remember is if you if the majority of your business is going out and going, you know, walking dogs providing care at someone's home, you are not allowed to show your address. Okay? If you provide services at your home, and you have a sign out front, and you have somebody there during the state of ours who you pay, like not your mom or your sister, your child, but who you pay to answer the phone during those hours, and you can have your address show. So if you're not sure people can always you know, send me a message, I can always look at your listing and tell you, you know if it's set up, but basically, if you are going to show your address, and you have to have a sign at your location, let's just start with that. And the last thing is, the big thing you don't want to do is don't have fake reviews. Don't ask anybody who you're related to. Don't, you know, don't go in and do them yourself. I've seen all these don't have somebody who provided services to you, you know, to come in and say she's great with pet care when it was really your plumber, you know, because eventually those things get found out. They really don't. And so those are the things you want to avoid the big, big things you want to avoid are keyword stuffing in the title, showing your address when you're not supposed to. And really asking appropriate people to do your reviews,
Collin 37:35
as I mentioned about the fake reviews, because that can be really tempting, especially if we get you know, a negative review from an actual client. It's really tempting to reach out to family and friends and other people to try and boost boost the score back up. So we maintain that 5.0 or whatever. But it can be very damaging. It sounds like
Amy Toman 37:55
Well, let me tell you, the first thing to remember is the sweet spot is that 5.0 you would think it would be but it's actually not the stay say the sweetspot refer reviews is usually like four point like six five to 4.85, something like that. So having having you know, a few four star, you know, three star reviews, as long as they're reasonable. That's okay. You know, you don't want to you know, excuse me, personal opinion is if you have too many purchases, five star reviews, it looks fake. I'd like to point out that mine are not fake right now, I would like to tell you, I can contact every one of the people who caught it, you know what for me, I but you should be able to know that right? You should be able to know who those people are. But now it is very tempting. And I understand that. Um, but and I have seen people go absolutely like, you know, kind of, you know, crazy notes. I have to have, you know, five surgeries? You don't you have there's a sweet spot in there. And don't worry if you have ones that are not five star, what it proceeds to do is make you look human and out. But yeah, but fine. But fake reviews are you can also be reported to the in the us too. I think it's the Federal Trade Commission too. And there have been lawsuits about them. I know, at least I know, I know, at least two lawsuits that are going now about fake reviews. So you don't want to go there. It's a really, it's a really bad idea. You don't wanna misrepresent your business or ask others to help you do that. Can I tell a bit talk about the good things you want on your Google listing? Because I do have some good ideas there. Yeah, please do. Okay, good things to have on your Google My Business listing. You want to have good photos. Okay. So when I say that, unless you run a dog or cat rescue, you don't want all your photos to just be cute dogs and cats. You want photos of you and your staff providing services, right? So say if you walk dogs have photos of you walking dogs, maybe at a dog park throwing a frisbee, maybe putting food down You play with cats, right? Maybe just one of you sitting on a chair, I have a pet sitter, one of the first people I ever worked with, she has a lovely photo of her just sitting on an island with a rocking chair or something. And just sitting there with this beautiful cat, she's just petting the cat. And she looks in control. The cat is well, it's well fed and friendly and happy and content. But you want to show humans in your photos, that that's one thing. Another thing these days, that is really important. And people, I think it's going to become very apparent very soon, because a new survey is about to come out within this week or next about what are the most important ranking factors for Google for well for for websites and Google listings. But one of the most important ones right now for Google listings, is reviews. And when I say reviews, I don't just mean you know, stars. I mean, Google reviews, meaning both the stars and the text. That has become very important. So so it's great for you to have, you know, 250 reviews and restaurants mostly have big ones like that. But you want to have ones that mentioned the services you provided you wanted and I kid you not, there is a thing called sentiment, if you can believe this, Google actually looks at whether people are being positive or negative. And the reviews, say if somebody gives you a five star review, but but mentioned the but in there. Well, Google knows that. So even though they will take it as a five star, they will listen to the five star but they've noted elsewhere that that was kind of like a so so review. So you want Google looks at both the content of the stars, the content of the reviews, and they they're getting to learn how to learn to read those reviews, and they will pull things out and use them elsewhere. So reviews are a big thing, all sorts of photos and reviews. And then just generally filling everything out. If Google gives you an option, if there's if there's like a new thing in there use it, the more interactive you are with those Google listings, the better it is for your website, you wouldn't think it but the website doesn't help your Google listing. But the Google listing helps your website. So those are the things that I will concentrate on.
Collin 42:13
It's it sounds crazy to think of it sounds crazy, you know, just to think of how Google is parsing how the search engines are parsing the words there, but but knowing that they are looking for certain things, and they're again, they're trying to tie back what they see as ones and zeros coming through the internet, and trying to tie that to human behavior and the way humans think and and they're constantly looking for, you know, these these little affectations and writing or however things happen. And just know that that is definitely something that we as business owners need to be aware of.
Amy Toman 42:46
Yes, and it's, it's, it's hard, because like one of the things that I do in my, my Google My Business, I call it an action plan, because it not only tells you kind of what you have, and what you should do, but it tells you why and gives you like a plan for kind of moving ahead. But one of the things I do in there is I include some resources, I think one or two of which is how to ask for review to get the right response. Right. So because if you say if you have a certain type of say, say pet massage, right, and it has like a fancy title. So what you know, if you want somebody to mention that in the review, it gives you some ideas on how to phrase things, so that you can ask them, Hey, were you happy with you know, ex service? Would you leave us your review here? You know, something like that? So it's it These things are they become? You don't you don't think about that a lot. But the the way that Google is doing things these days, it's just so far advanced, it's no more like, you know, did you like it? Yes or no? and move on. It's, you know, the more that people can put in there, the more they're given Google to use to help you know, your business. So it's kind of like I posted today, someone posted, oh, would you vote for me and like best of my city or best my town. And what people don't realize is that's not they're not that's not just this business owner being annoying. Because if that business owner wins for whatever, the year, the year, the six months until the next one, they have a link going from that site, which is probably, you know, a major metropolitan paper like maybe again, at paper to their listing to their business. You know, so it's all you know, it's reviews, yeah, but it's something can be considered something bigger than that.
Collin 44:33
Yeah. Well, and on that on that, you know, we talked about big things, but we're all mostly running very local businesses. So is there a difference in SEO challenges for large scale versus more local businesses?
Amy Toman 44:50
I will tell you at the outset that I specialize in, in local, which is, you know, smaller businesses like pet sitters, you know businesses under about 20 locations. From what I understand, yes, because a lot of the small businesses if he kind of easier to get these citations, right, it's easier to get when and when people say links and citations, they're kind of the same thing, where, where you're getting the Better Business Bureau, you know, something like that those are a little bit more important to the smaller businesses, you know, you're not going to get the same credit from the Better Business Bureau for, for, say, like a big box store, as you are for a small business. There are a lot of, it's funny, because sometimes I look at my friends who are doing kind of big SEO versus smaller SEO, and they're dealing with a lot, a lot of other things they're getting, they're getting links from like, you know, really bad place. And they're disavowing and they're telling Google ignore that all the time. But smaller businesses usually don't have to deal with that as much, there's a lot more technical aspects that apply to big SEO that don't apply to, you know, small business SEO. So I kind of like that kind of like dealing with smaller businesses. For that reason, I kind of, I think that it's just a lot less technical. And it's a lot more personal, you know, getting reviews and talking to people in your neighborhood, things like that. The scale is also you know, it's both good and bad. As you mentioned, you don't have you don't have these deeply buried links that you're trying to root out constantly. But I'm sure it's also might be harder to initially generate the the number of links and references that you're needing to build up. But that's why it's the slow process. And we're thinking of long term it throughout this. Exactly. It's also I mean, there's also a lot of really heavy duty structural issues, you know, you're having like thousands of pages, for products, you know, and that that can be a beast just because of how you're going to structure everything, then you have to worry about the speed, everybody has to worry about the speed of a website. But it becomes even more important when you are doing e commerce. I like my little niche. I'm happy.
Collin 47:02
I did want to ask you about the speed. Because that kind of that was interesting to me. You. I see I've seen you talk about that before. And how does speed influence Seo? And I think more importantly, what what can I do about that?
Amy Toman 47:17
Really, I like how you phrase that Google has, when we were talking before about things that that Google likes and encourages, you know, in terms of human behavior, you don't like in a lot of cases to wait. As a result, the standard amount of time that that websites need to come up, like the amount of time that they take to come up has really gone down a lot. Partially because Google says you have to come up, you know, within this time, because we're talking before about how things have progressed. Well, one of the things that's that's progressed or not, is, if you remember used to be I used to have to click on something, and then you would just wait forever until it came up. It just it just was interminable. And then but the thing is, if you get bored, now, if that happens, you go, oh, there must be something wrong with the site, you either refresh, or you say, Oh, the heck with it all back out. Well, that's the thing. These days, people because they want that that faster experience. Google recommends your site comes up in under three seconds. And I I am telling you, three seconds. I'm not always good with numbers and data. But this one, I can tell you, it's three seconds. So if your site comes up longer than that, if it takes longer than that to come up, you really need to work on it. I mean, free is not a hard number. But still you need to work on it. My the things that I've noticed that it takes the most of is some technical aspects of things like lazy loading and cache, cache, test, loading, test, display, configure the other work. But the biggest thing that that I find that people can actually control is the size of their images. And when I say that, images are very interesting. They if you think that I explained this to somebody else the other day, and she went, Oh, when you put an image online, it takes longer to load when it is a more densely packed image, right. So if you take an image off your phone, this is not I will tell you, this does not count for Google My Business. And I'll tell you why in a minute. But if you take an image off your phone, and then you you download it, you make it all pretty, and then you put it on your website, a standard phone is going to take a really very detailed photo, right? So when it goes up onto your website, you're still going to have all that detail. The problem is all the details gonna take some time to load. And can you imagine if you have like five or six of those on a page, so what you want to do is you want to opt it's called optimize your image. And that what that means is if you think about the difference between a piece of say, I don't know, just take regular cheese, okay, like Swiss Edom Edom Carlsberg one of those, and then you take, you take Swiss cheese, right, they both if you look at the outside of the, of the wheel of cheese in it, they look the same. But when you cut them up and they don't, the Swiss cheese have holes in it. But on the outside, they look fine. That's, that's what it is, is when you optimize an image, it's going to look the same, but it's not gonna be as dense. When it's not as dense, it loads faster. So one of the things that that I recommend almost all the time is if your site is moving slow, if you are on a site where you can control this, which is WordPress, you want to you want to make sure that you optimize the images before you put them up. So do them, like you know, in a text and an editor, photo editor, what but once it's on the site, you can also load what's called a plugin, that will also do the rest of that an image optimizing plugin. That's a little tool that does that. If you were on a site, like another platform like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, GoDaddy, they sometimes will optimize them for you. But I still think that you should optimize them before you put them up there. And as I said, you can usually find optimizing in in some of the software, the image optimizing like software, you know, where you'll go in and say you fix the filters, and whatever, a lot of times, they will, they will do it all. So I don't think they do it on your phone, but they will do it on desktop. But that's the biggest thing. Speed is not speed. It's not cool. Nobody wants to wait, Google wants that under three seconds. Biggest thing you can possibly do. Make sure that your images are not big, when you put them on there that they're not as dense. They don't take up, you know, four megabytes, they take up 100, you know, 100 kilobytes totally cool, biggest thing you can do for speed. Now, why? Why does the image size not relates or matter for Google My Business? Okay, it does not matter, because Google My Business, put it this way, they should be smaller. But if they're not, Google basically does it on its own. They optimize the images on their own. So they do it on their site, as opposed to you doing it on your site. Kind of like when I said that, you want to have that plugin, if you have WordPress, you can add this little thing called a plugin. It's like a little tool. And so say, the, the one way you would do it is you would optimize the images and upload them to your website, and then that plugin would optimize them further. It's the same thing as Google, you know, you do whatever you're going to do. And then if you give it to Google, Google puts it optimizes it to the point that they think it will be appropriate.
Collin 52:43
Sure, okay. Well, that makes it easy, then, because you're not having to worry about that. They're they're taking care of it on there. Right?
Amy Toman 52:47
Exactly. Google takes care of it on there. And again, sometimes, and I'm not sure to what extent sometimes some of the other platforms like GoDaddy and Squarespace may do that. But I would rather be safe than sorry. And I would rather optimize the images before I put them up there. Because I'm not like I said, you could probably do the research on this, but I'm just saying at the outset, I'm not sure how good they are about that.
Collin 53:11
You know, we've talked about the importance of patience. So I, you know, let's say, we've we've made our homepage answer those five things, and we've got good call to actions. We're blogging Well, we're being consistent we've got a well set up Google My Business. You know, what if I implement all this today? I wasn't doing it yesterday, I start doing it today. What a realistic timeline to start seeing a response or a payoff in this what would that be?
Amy Toman 53:39
Um, some people will say six months? I it depends to me, I'm a big one for Google My Business, like really, you know, do stuff on your site slowly doing your Google My Business a little bit more aggressively? You know, I've seen people tell me that they're seeing results in a month. But But again, See, the problem is it's always such a variable, because I had somebody who told me that hers, her because of changes that she made. And this is in one of my reviews, that that she went up some some enormous amount, I mean, over 50% within like six weeks, but what you always have to remember is where were where they where they started it out. I mean, because sometimes people just haven't updated their sights in a while. So when I go in, they asked me what to do when they implement stuff. It's like they're going from like, you know, zero to 60. So or 100. So, you know, just to get themselves back up to where they need to be. So I would say reasonably, you're going to see a real you're going to, you're going to jump up and then go steadily once around, like six months, I would say three to six months, three to six months. But if you've heavily optimize your Google My Business listing, meaning you're using all the options, you're updating on a regular basis, it wouldn't surprise me if it was faster than that.
Collin 54:51
Give some sort of perspective on that. And again, if we're not talking about overnight here, we're still talking a month now maybe more and being me just being realistic. About that, and being and then and then staying on top of it staying consistent with these kind of behaviors.
Amy Toman 55:06
Exactly. And, you know, let me I would like to point something else out that that hasn't come up that much. But I would like to bring it up. One point, I think a few months ago, I had a gentleman contact me and say that, you know, he had been working with an SEO agency. And the SEO agency had not really he'd been working for them three months, giving them a fairly substantial amount each month. Now, I don't run campaigns. But I know what a campaign is. I didn't years ago, but I do now. And they were running a campaign for him. And what campaign means is basically they were doing SEO work every month. And so he came to me, and he said he hadn't seen much of a difference. I said, Okay, I said, I said, How long have you been with them? He said, three months, because people just call me all the time and just ask me questions, which is cool. And I said, Okay, you've been within three months, tell me what their budget was. And I said, What have they been doing for you? And he said, I don't know. And I said, Have they been giving you reports? And he goes sometimes? And I said, Well, have you asked them questions? And he said, Yes. But they use such industry industry terms. And I didn't understand what they meant. And I felt silly to ask. So if people are listening to this, just remember, please, if you have signed up to get something, a service from somebody, you know, SEO or something regarding your businesses, make sure that you get a regular report and that they tell you what they've been doing, and that you see results. Because I know that a lot of pet sitters operate on a really kind of low, we call it profit margin. And I hate when people you know, get get cheated, I guess is the best word. So if you ever worried that you're not asked somebody else, you can send me a message. You know, is this the way it should be? Because a lot of times, I think people I think people, you know, put stuff over on small businesses. I ended up having a conversation with this gentleman, and he came off the phone, he said, you know, what, can you just do the SEO review of me, okay, the audit method, okay. And he said, I've learned more from you in five minutes, and I have from them in three in three months. And it made me feel both really nice for me, but really bad for him. So I'm just saying that just make sure that you're getting actionable results from somebody and make sure that they are responsible for explaining to you what they are doing to help you.
Collin 57:24
I really appreciate you pointing that out. Because as business owners, like, we have a responsibility to make sure that when we're asking for things like they're getting done, and while SEO can seem overwhelming and confusing, and and things like that. So you may just go, oh, I'll just have somebody else do it, I'll just have somebody else do it. And they'll take care of it. Well, you're putting an awful lot of faith and trust in somebody if they're not updating you, if they're not taking the time to teach you and explain it. And so I do appreciate you, you know, calling us out and saying, Hey, you know, make sure you know what you're getting, and then ask for updates. Yeah,
Amy Toman 58:03
yeah. And I mean, it shouldn't be even be a matter of you asking for updates, they should be providing you updates. I mean, the kind of the kind of things that I will say, just just again, I know, I'm going off track here. But the kind of things that are contained in an SEO campaign, right? Are people putting extra things onto your website, maybe changing your text a little bit, maybe adding pages, maybe changing formats, on pages, maybe blogging for you, things like that, but they should be they should be telling you what they did. And even if they don't tell you specifically what they did, they should be able to say, you know, created three new pages or change this format, or, you know, so I just don't like when people get I don't like when people cheat or get cheated.
Collin 58:46
Yeah, no, absolutely. No, again, thank you. That's a, that's a good reminder to us all to make sure that when we ask for something that we understand, we understand and have expectations about it, and people are being being honest. So you know, we've talked about a little bit of the history of the SEO, you know, here here at the end, was curious what what the future for SEO holds whether you have a crystal ball or not, or what you hope for it to happen, I guess.
Amy Toman 59:12
Well, what I hope to happen and what's going to happen? Hmm, I don't know if those are two the same things. Um, but it's a good it's a good question. It's a good it's a good thing to think about, um, what I hope is that, well, the first thing is that I hope things get a little easier. And the way that I hope they get easier is for small business owners is that I wish that Google would be a little bit more transparent about about things specifically about the Google My Business listings, because a lot of times people will get suspended and it's up to the people to figure out what they did wrong. And that's, you know, that's a little frustrating, you know, when you have no idea what's going on, and then they just say Oh, you've been suspended for quality issues. And that's all they say. It's you're sitting there like what I wish Google would be a little bit more more transparent. But I also think too, and as much as I don't want to, you know, I don't want to tempt fate, I do think that paid Google My Business listings or paying to have yours rise to the top is coming. I don't I think that they in their, in their quest to optimize everything you know and monetize everything. I do think that's coming. And if it is, if it is, as we heard earlier this summer, if it is going to be $50 a month for you to get your listing to rise above somebody else's, I think unfortunately, I think that's something that, that PepsiCo is going to have to, you know, eat the cost and just, you know, make sure that you you can pay it. Right, but I you know, other than that, I think hopefully things are just gonna get a little bit easier. I don't want to say more standardized, but to some degree, yeah, in terms of the expectations, I don't necessarily want people to have to concentrate on and listen to people like me so that they can get the, the the right the same, the results that they want. It would be nice if people could just, you know, get what they do things themselves and get the right, you know, results. But I I don't know, it's hard. It's hard to say where things are going right now. I don't think there's any one other than the fact that I think that Google My Business is going to monetize those Google My Business listings. You know, I I just like I said, I just wish things were a little easier for small businesses to understand.
Collin 1:01:36
Yeah, I'm sure as we all do, right, as we, that's a little bit more transparency. And so hopefully, that does happen. And hopefully, you know, part of that is, is educating ourselves and taking some of these simple action steps that you've given us today, Amy, it's been a real pleasure. I know, I have a page full of notes, and a lot on my to do list now. So I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this topic. And helping us understand it just, you know, a little bit more, but I know, there's a whole lot more to cover. And people may have a lot more questions. So how best can people get in contact with you?
Amy Toman 1:02:13
Okay, great, thank you for asking I am, they can always email me it's Amy am ly at. And so one word pet sitter seo.com. or on Facebook, I'm on Facebook, a lot of just petsitter SEO, you know, right on there. You can send me a message if you'd like or I have a phone number listed. But people don't tend to call and that's probably fine. People want to give me more information. So you can go onto my website, or you can message me on Facebook. Those are, those are the two best things that you can do.
Collin 1:02:48
Wonderful. And I will have links to that and few of the other things that we've discussed in our show notes and on our web page, so people can click right to those and find those easily. Amy, once again, this has been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on today.
Amy Toman 1:03:02
Okay, thanks very much. Take care calm.
Collin 1:03:05
I'm not kidding when I say that I have a page full of notes for my interview with Amy. This year, Megan and I have been doing a complete revamp of our pet sitting business. So this was a great reminder of a lot of the little things that I need to take a look at for our website to make sure that we were as optimized as we possibly can. And there's always something else to do here or little things to be working on. I love how Amy broke it down into some simple things that we can have, especially on updating and staying consistent with our Google My Business listing and just how essential that is that is becoming almost exceeding what a website is worth these days, still having the website so people can book through that. And you can start building those links and those connections. But if we are ignoring that Google My Business, putting good photos on there, and everything that Amy talked about, we're really not getting off to the races too. Well, thank you so much for listening. We'd like to also thank our Patreon for supporting the show and this week's sponsor, time to pet head on over to type two pet.com forward slash confessional. Check out that discount. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and we'd like to hear how you have worked and tried to understand SEO, in your business and all the things that you do to optimize your website and your presence. Send us an email at feedback at petsitter confessional comm or get connected with us on Facebook and Instagram
1:04:30
at pet sitter confessions.
