Episode 24 - How To Grow and Scale Your Online Business Using This Powerful Tool: SEO with Brandon C. White
Mary Harcourt
This episode features Brandon C. White on the Ready.Set.Glo! Podcast 💫
Brandon White is an entrepreneur with two exists (so far), lots of strike outs, angel investor, former venture capitalist, and worked in Marketing at America Online.
He is a Co-Founder of FileFinder.io, ISC Security Training Co, angel investor in startups and hosts several podcasts from his recording studio in Half Moon Bay, CA.
His first company was a wild ride where among other things, he had a partner from Sequoia Capital show up on his doorstep in Easton, MD, do the business plan on the back of a placemat at lunch and on the way back from fishing that same day writes him a check with no contract, just a handshake.
How To Grow and Scale Your Online Business Using This Powerful Tool: SEO with Brandon C. White
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Transcript
Mary Harcourt 0:05 Hi and welcome to Ready Set glow, a podcast where I interview entrepreneurs, brands and idealist, people and the stories behind it all. Discover what it took to get started, lessons learned along the way, and the advice they have for you starting on your own journey. So join me and my guests as we talk about all things business, beauty and brands. I'm your host, Mary Harcourt of Cosmo glow, as we discover the stories behind the names have an amazing guest today, Brandon white, Brandon was early to the internet scene. He even had Jeff Bezos cinema t shirt for being one of the first Amazon Associates in 1998. He worked in marketing at American online, better known as AOL. And currently, he's finishing a book on how to build a business plan from a course he taught guys like Shark tanks, Daymond, John and Robert. He also had Grant Cardone, he's had over 1500 students so far through this course, scaling and growing his own online business, we're going to talk about SEO, how powerful, useful and helpful if a tool can be, and how you can use SEO to implement things on your own webpage to drive more traffic to your site organically. Please welcome Brandon Franken Welcome to the show. You are just we could talk for hours, you have so much great knowledge and experience to talk about, it's going to be hard to cram it into about an hour. But tell us about who you are. I know you've had multiple companies give us a summary of your extremely interesting life.
brandon white 1:45 Well, I was thinking about that when you sent me the notes on how I was gonna talk about myself. And I don't know what to say, I've lived a life of adventure. That doesn't mean that I haven't worked, it means that I've just had a really crazy career that you couldn't have planned, necessarily, but the best way I could describe myself is a repeat entrepreneur with two exits. So far, about 20, absolute failures. I've worked at a fortune 500 company in marketing. I've been worked into venture capital firms. And I've been pretty lucky along the way that the ones that did work, do work and did work, while one was a save, which we can talk about. But I just been really lucky Mary and I sort of haven't had a, it hasn't been this progression of you would say, well, you started off in the internet early years, and you just stayed in the internet while I stayed in tech. But I sort of went from consumer to business, to business to government, to back to which I would probably call prosumer. Now, and I just been really lucky. It's been. It's just been a real adventure, to be honest.
Mary Harcourt 3:00 I mean, who doesn't love adventure? So I love that you brought up 20 failures along the way, because I think that's the untold story that people forget to mention when they are highlighting all those amazing things that they've done, where you don't get it right all the time. And sometimes it hurts. What were some of the things that you just decided to scratch.
brandon white 3:22 They kill you. But the truth of the matter is, is I like to talk about it. And it's easier, I think to talk about it once you've had the success because it gives you the ability to reflect so for all listeners understand it becomes easier. Along the way, it was not as easy to talk about that sort of stuff. But they're just things that just didn't work. I mean, either I tried to raise money for them or not just raise money, but tried to sell the product. Like let's just go back to the basics. And I had really good ideas that everybody wanted, no one would pay for. And you know, that's a hobby. You can continue doing it. I just tried a lot of different things, for better for worse, maybe some of those things in those 20. And I'm just use the word 20. Because if I went through all my notes, and we really went back through the folders, it's a really long list of things that I've tried. And yeah, I don't think that people talk about that. Because failures, just maybe here in Silicon Valley, it's more embraced and people talk people use the buzzword phrase, Mary, hey, talk about your failure and failures. Good. But no one really wants to talk about those failures. Like no one really wants to talk about the time that I did sell a company wasn't for a ton of money. And I sat on my couch for eight weeks. Like you don't no one really wants to talk about that. And some people when they see you like oh well brain and I could never imagine you. I couldn't even imagine myself quite candidly. But that type of stuff that happens when you're just exhausted, burnt out and dejected. And you know, there's there were times when I was like, I just did not know if I can do this again, I remember my wife saying she's like, you'll figure it out. I'm like, No, you don't understand, like, I'm at a point where I don't know that I'm gonna figure it out. And she's like, you'll figure it out. And it throughout my entire life, I've always figured it out one way or the other, mainly not because I wasn't scared, you know, people will say, you have to be determined and all that. Yeah, true. You just have to have courage. I mean, I'm scared all the time. I'm scared with the current thing, software company. That means some guys have started that I have no idea that it'll work. And I'm still scared, mainly because I'm scared of being rejected. And I just don't think that people talk about that. And that's ultimately, like, what really holds people back, Mary, what really holds you back is the fact that you've built this thing up in your at least my take, is you built this thing up in your head. In fact, you may have even spent the money that you think make and then doesn't work. And now you're just, you know, you're blown up. But I think what I learned over the years as an entrepreneur is, and this will make no sense to your listeners may not even make sense to you. Well, it'll make sense to you, because you're, you've been through this is you have to believe you can do what you don't believe you can do. And you have to wake up every morning and do that thing you're not sure you can do. And that makes no logical sense. But that's basically what it's like. And I think for me, it's not that I've had a sense of calm, I've been reflecting on this. Like, why am I so calm going into this new one that I've started after I got out of another company recently. And I think it's because I expect there to be total failure, I don't even expect that it will work. I want it to work. I believe it'll work. But I don't know that it'll work. Because I know how hard it is to get from zero to one and one as you do to like a million in revenue to 510 2050. It's just, it's really hard. And there's so many mistakes, you can get away along the way you can make and you can't control everything. There's things that just aren't in your control. It doesn't mean you can't overcome them. It just means that you can't necessarily predict them. But I think it's this confidence that I know that I don't know. And I'm comfortable not knowing and at the same token, know that I will figure it out because I've got skills that I will figure it out. And that's where people fail, I think is they just don't believe whether you have impostor syndrome. I was taking some notes beforehand. I think I have the worst impostor syndrome all the time. And it's all about perspective. My point is, is that I think we sometimes just don't think that we are as qualified to do it. And most of these battles are just in our own head. I mean, you know, I've tried to figure this out for a really long time. Eric, I, I got an undergraduate in psychology, I got a master's in psychology. Then I got an MBA, searching for answers. I think I've written read every Tony Robbins book known to man and every other quote unquote, self help self help book looking for this answer. And I think the answers just really deeply in yourself. And it takes so long to get through those layers to get there that and once you do get there, I will tell you, it's, you know, it's really liberating. But it's really hard to do that. I heard one
Mary Harcourt 8:34 time I can't remember where the quote came from. But it was the the journey of entrepreneurship is the most pull back, see who you are, what your character is, and what you are made of trip that you will ever take in your lifetime. And I think it's everything you just described, because you will figure it out. But you don't think you can do it until you think you can do it. And sometimes you wake up going, I don't know the next step. But by the end of the day, you are at least one step closer to finding where the next step is. And I think entrepreneurs are so amazing because of that, that failure is not really an option. They're not the like, let's just roll over and die. It's okay, I have no clue what it is. I don't think I should even be in this position. But I will find a solution, I will figure it out. And then I think through that you gain so much grit. And I feel like the grit is what makes you persevere. You've had so many amazing businesses, but you've learned these skills and lessons and everything that happened from one that works so great that every time something doesn't work, I was telling my husband like there's a lesson in that it might be painful, and you might not understand what it is now, but it's going to help you get across that bridge late in life. So that lesson is going to be the bridge that gets you further ahead, wherever and whenever it comes into play. So I just think it's so fascinating to go back through someone's history and talk about like, it's not a straight path, and it's not a Golden Road. And it's not every day is a perfect rosy day. Like you mentioned sitting on the couch for eight weeks. Sometimes you are broken and are just you are destroyed, and you have to rebuild and remember what matters to you and why you're doing it all. But it's so fun to get to a point where the you are making a difference. And you are doing these amazing feats.
brandon white 10:21 Yeah, I think that the I think you're absolutely right. I as you were talking, I don't think when I'm in it, in my life I've ever thought like, failure. It's not. And I don't know how you feel like you're doing it with blue light, and you did it with your salon, you're scared that it won't work. But it's not that consciousness of failure. It's just like, Hey, how are we going to figure this out? And I think the other mistake that people make, and I've made it, and it will, it can end your entrepreneur, I mean, it can break you. And I've seen it break people is, you're so married to your idea, what if you were so married, that you to your idea that you needed to run a salon, and that was your, that's your calling. That's the way it's gonna work. You could never be a person who manufactures light. And and if you weren't open to that, and able to switch and say, Well, I can still get to my goals, whatever those are, or this still is success. And what I've got, I'm not going to name the person, I've had a person call me marry one of my students. From a while ago, I teach a class on how to build a business plan. And this person has been calling me call me the other night. I didn't answer. He called me and he's been pitching the same idea for five years. And, Mike, my question is always the same? How much sales Do you have? Like, I don't care about the idea. I don't. And I don't mean that in a bad way. There's like a million ideas, and everybody thinks their ideas. Awesome. That's awesome. I will give you my software company's business plan, I'll give it to you. It's a great effing idea. Go do it. Like that's where the real work is not the idea. It's, it's the work in between the idea and turning an idea into a product, which you know, is hard enough. And then actually turning the product into a business and not all products, make it into a business. And you have to be willing to be like, hey, look, it didn't work, you know, and can I do something else. And I think people get so married to that idea. And they won't switch that ultimately, that is your failure.
Mary Harcourt 12:36 The line in the sand for me it was I had to make a I have a conversation with myself, I have a pretty nice setup, things are working things are great. We have the highest rated salon in the area in Los Angeles, zip code like we are, we're doing great. But I will always be in the salon in Los Angeles. Or I could take this other venture and see where it goes and the conversation was. But what if you lose it all, and you start over and you start over at nothing, you start over at negative money, negative road forward negative opportunity where you're gonna go next. And I thought that's fine. I've started over several times in life. And each time I start over, I take less shit than I did before. And it's always treated me better. And it was a conversation I had with myself or if I lost it all I'm okay with that. What I'm not okay with is staying in my same life and watching someone else do it and knowing I had the opportunity to do it, that would have burned me more than anything else. And so that was the conversation. It's once you have that conversation you face the devil going I'm okay to lose it all if that's what it happens. I also know myself, I'm a fighter, I won't lose it all. Going back to like, failure for me. It's not you fail. I refuse to stop at failure. Failure for me is a pivot. Hey, that didn't work out. No, go figure it out. That wasn't exactly how we had it planned to to happen. But that's how it has happened. No, go make it better. And I think for me as well like leaving the salon, it was a choice to say I have no clue what my potential is. But I do know what it is if I stay here, and I want more. That's what it was.
brandon white 14:19 That's it. I mean, if I would have if you would have said hey, Brandon, my first company I started I can tell the story but was what became the largest social network and an E commerce site for sport fishermen. And if you would have said, Hey, Brandon, you're, you're not going to fish your whole life. You're gonna have to do something else. I can tell you that. In 1990 e 9096 9798 99. When I was in it, I would have been like Mary You're crazy. I'll be doing this forever. And I didn't do it forever and and thank God Like, I'm better for it, because of it. But I ultimately did sell that company. But I think that's where, you know, I'm just going back to this main thing like, don't be so married to your idea that you won't switch because you could have stayed in your salon business and you were doing really well. And you probably would have made a very great living, my gut tells me from our conversation, that glowlight probably is going to be bigger than the salon. I'm, I'm just guessing here, but it's just going to be bigger. And if you had not let that go and been willing to do it, and I understand the pandemic came and things came, but the point is, is that you're willing to adapt and be open to that, there's another idea. And you just have to, you know, the truth is, other people that you've told won't understand, they will not understand. If you told all your friends, hey, I'm selling my salon does, I'm gonna go do this light company, they're like, I don't know, Mary, like, you're making probably decent money here, you're giving it up to go to zero revenue again. And you're gonna start over? I think other people won't understand. And you have to be okay with that. Yeah, I
Mary Harcourt 16:08 say the same thing all the time. I can't involve into the world of the unknown. And I had no clue what I was getting myself into. But I was fully in an if I knew what it really took, and what it was really going to be like, and I had the choice, I don't think I would have done it. Maybe Maybe I would have. But it's sometimes really good not to know what it takes
brandon white 16:31 is. But once you do know, the true test is will you do it again, and you've done it again, I've done it again. Because you understand that it's worth it at at the end. And I think that's really, for me. And quite candidly, I'm probably not cursed. I think people might say that. But I, there's something in me that just isn't going to work for someone else. If you're always going to work for your customer, like make no mistake. And if you're that arrogant to think that you don't work for your customer, then you probably shouldn't be in business. And the reason you're in business is because of your customers, but bins, some corporate structure, something just just not for me. So call it, you know, continue to opt in, or the realization that it's just really hard for me, I'm not saying I've worked in organizations, and I can work in organizations, and I have been a team player my whole life. I just don't like the politics. Because I feel like why would I spend any amount of my time on managing my career? Why wouldn't we put all the energy into this product, but the fact of the matter is, is that if you're in that corporate environment, you have to spend time on your career. Because if you don't, someone else will come in there swoop in and take the spot. And it's, you know, it's just a different thing. So I just, I just mentioned that, to say that, I think everybody, everybody just has to figure that figure that out for themselves. But mainly, it's not, it's not about not being scared. I am scared all the time. I mean, I keep a sign in my office, it says Be brave, just as a reminder that, you know, when you're faltering, like, just just embrace it, figure out how you can use that energy. But, you know, my stories has been, you couldn't have, you couldn't have written it. And I'm, like, okay, success, I mean, compared to the general population, and I'm probably wildly successful. But in my mind, I'm like, Ah, I still gotta get this other thing. And living in Silicon Valley certainly perpetuates that when it's just, it's just an enormous amount of wealth creation here. And my brother sometimes says, he's like, You don't live in reality, like, people don't just buy multimillion dollar homes. Like that's not how it works. Do you remember? And, you know, keeping perspective is really good.
Mary Harcourt 18:52 It's also so good to be in that environment. That was the first time that I my, my mind was opened up to that QNB reality. It was the first time that I saw everyone, not everyone, but I mean, the most part of people being so successful and building their wealth and having an idea and turn it into a business that turns into a multi million dollars that turns over and gets sold. It was being around that environment sometimes is exactly what you need to have that little voice in your head. So say, I can do this too. And I'm going to
brandon white 19:23 Yeah, I don't disagree. I think I've always put myself in highly competitive. And I am highly competitive. There's no mistake like I don't apologize for it. I'm a type A person and I want to win. And I want I'm in I'm in the thing that I'll say about this before I forget because I think it's important to at least put out there take it for what it's worth. But if you are going to do one of these things and you are going to be great at anything, there will not be balanced. So don't buy into the bullshit that someone trying to sell you that you're going to have a balanced life. I know that's not popular to say but you're not going to have a balanced life. I don't think Usain Bolt is the fastest man on earth human. He's the fastest human on Earth, because he had a balanced life. I think he trained his rear off. I think professional athletes do that. I think entrepreneurs do that. And I think entrepreneurs are being truly honest, will tell you that there's something that's off. I'm not saying that there's some people that absolutely can do it, and God bless you. But it's just really hard, mainly because building a business just takes an enormous amount of energy. In the beginning, I will say that, I think once you get 20 3040, even 50, I don't know what the magic number is, if there is one. But if you've designed your business, that it that it doesn't require you at some point, I think you can pull back balance, but in the early stages, which I tend to always find myself coming back to because I sort of like creating something from nothing. For whatever reason, it's just not, you know, it's not, you're not going to be balanced, I just don't know how to do a balanced thing and achieve that. Would you agree?
Mary Harcourt 21:09 Everyone thinks work life balance is 5050. So you have a person that's holding a scale and the scale goes up or down, you have kids, you have a life, you have this you have that you have all these responsibilities. On top of all your goals and dreams balance. If you have a tight rope across Niagara Falls, and you start one side, and you got to get to the other side, and you're taking with you all of your dreams, all of your goals, your family, your responsibilities, your worries, your fears, all of that, all of that goes on a tightrope, and you put one foot in front of the other and some days, you go a little to the left, and then you correct and you go the other side. And some days you're perfectly balanced. And you can make really good progress and to step more ahead, but then wind blows, you blow off to the side and you blow the other side. That's the work life balance is taking everything and making forward motion to get where you need to get. It's not 5050 You're not going to have a restful 50% of your day and a stressful 50% of your day. It's can you take everything in your life and still make forward progress and not fall off the tightrope. And once I leave, like learn that it reset the whole clock for me where it's like, that is work life balance, it's making sure that you have everything that you need with you and still making forward progress.
brandon white 22:28 Yeah, I really liked that. Mary, I think it's true. And I think that, that your point is not equal. Um, you can definitely I mean, I ride my bike, I stay healthy, I spend time with my family, I do those things. But if you look at as a pie, it's just not all equal, does it? Sometimes it can swing back, back and forth. So I love that analogy. I think it's absolutely right, the main thing is, is really to keep going forward. And to try not to beat yourself up as much when you don't do that. I mean, sometimes it just doesn't work out. And I and you do have to learn how to stop. I've learned how to do that I actually, I made a sometimes I don't know how you handle it marry or, or listeners. But the way that I've learned is, is that running a business, there will always be something to do. And we as business owners want to keep doing and we want to be successful. And we're going to stay up until 1130. And then we're going to say we only need five hours of sleep and done at a desk. But what I've learned is there's just times when I just stopped. So as an example that came in last night. And it was I don't know what time it was, it might have been six or seven. And everybody in you probably know this when your partner significant other comes in. And they're not like hey, let's hang out. But they're coming in to talk to you. Yeah, like, hey, what's happening. And I've learned, not everybody's going to articulate that. It's very hard to express yourself, and really what you feel and and humans just don't do that well. So I have learned that I literally will just stop. I mean that like I'm not going to stop this podcast, obviously. But if I was working on something writing last night, I was updating our YouTube channel and doing some SEO which I do want to leave you and your listeners with some SEO because I know that that was one of the things that we wanted to talk about. And I had built that first company entirely on SEO other than maybe 50 or 100 bucks a month in advertising. But I literally when she got up I was like, You know what, this is it. And when I logged on this morning, to come and answer some emails and sort of get my head together before we jumped on here. That page was literally still up. It's still like that when I say I stopped I didn't finish that task. I got up at that exact moment and left and I've just learned over two decades that if you do not do that, you will get into this cycle and be like oh He bet, let me just finish this. And finishing never takes five minutes, in general, even an email, I will stop reading the email in the middle of the email, because it just won't end and then you'll click that you'll hit enter, I would hit ENTER on that YouTube page. And then it'll be like five other things that I got to do. And it's just, it's easy to get back into that. So I just say you've got to, you've got to set your boundaries along the, along the lines of your tight rip example where you're swinging left and right. And if you go too far, right, you got to know that you're probably going to fall over and you need to swing back, and there's no time to discuss it, talk about it, debate it, you just got to bring that wire back to the middle. And otherwise, you're going to fall. I agree.
Mary Harcourt 25:47 I'll chime in with that as well. I'm learning to stop because I'm somebody I could work till three o'clock in the morning, and then get back up and work till three o'clock in the morning. But by the time I get to Thursday, I can fall asleep standing up. And that's not really helping anybody. And I learned how to separate things where if my husband comes in or somebody makes a phone call, or we go hang out and have dinner with somebody, my first frame of thought is No, I must get this done. I have to stay here and work. You go. I have to work I have to work I have to work. And I have learned to ask the question. Is it going to be there tomorrow? Yes. Is anything going to change between me doing it today? And tomorrow? No. So go. And sometimes the answer is yes. Hey, I have to get this in today or it doesn't get published or it doesn't get posted or it doesn't do anything. But if the answer is it doesn't make a difference. If it happens today, tomorrow or next week, then stop and go on because you do have to enjoy life and smell the roses and see the blue sky because that's what makes it all worth it.
brandon white 26:49 Yeah, I totally agree. But I think you absolutely have to just get up. You can't. Oh, five more words. Mary got five more. No, there's not five more words. There's like 500. Mark, just get up. And, and walk out?
Mary Harcourt 27:07 Yep. That was a lesson I learned early in entrepreneurship is my husband say like, Hey, let's go get dinner, dinner. Okay, five more minutes. And then an hour later, it was Oops, I missed the moment denied. Now we're all starving and the restaurants are closing. And I caused all of that. I am so sorry. I really thought it was five minutes. I don't know how an hour and a half went by. And lately it's become stop doing this working more right now. change the outcome? Or can I come back to it tomorrow? I can come back for tomorrow. Stop. I'm done. So I agree with you on that. So let's talk about SEO. You're like SEO master? I don't know anything about SEO? What is it? How do we get more of it? And why is it so important?
brandon white 27:50 So SEO is search engine optimization. It's basically organic traffic that people find you organically from mostly Google searches and or searches on social media or even on podcast player. There's SEO for Apple, there's SEO for Spotify, there's all these different. Basically all these algorithms work in different ways. And you can design I don't want to use manipulate, you can design your pages, let's just talk about let's use a website to start even an E commerce site or a website that has an E commerce component. You can design those pages to be optimized so that the algorithm or spider, which is this think of it as like a little agent that goes out and read your website, and then turns it into some sort of code based on how many keywords and how many links and there's the Google algorithm has 1000s of variables, but I'm pulling them down. And basically what the end result from this is, is that you get free traffic. I got really good at it. Because in the early days, I was really on the internet in the beginning, not like 1970s government, internet. I'm talking when I was starting to get commercial. And back then we didn't have our websites weren't even run off of the database. Our websites were flat file HTML files, quite candidly. And we were doing all sorts of tricks that sort of make it scale. But you optimize your pages, so that they are specific to keywords. And I was taking some notes before we jumped on here married leave people, because you and I could literally I could teach an eight work week course on SEO. But what it comes down to is that every single page that you publish every single page on your website, every product page, every post, every podcast title, every podcast description, should be researched. So every page on our websites that we run for different companies, or let's just talk about I'll talk about our edge or edge website, every single title is researched. And we have a spreadsheet that targets a specific keyword or phrase for that page. And it's a total pain in the butt. I use Uber Suggest on you could use there's H refs, there's all these tools that you can use to search for how many times someone searches a keyword or phrase, and how easy that could be. So there's domain rank is does your domain have a lot of? Let's call it juice, its rank from zero to 100? Does the page have juice? Meaning? Does it have a lot of for lack of credibility? Does it have a lot of links coming into it? And the reason I'm jumping a little bit all over, but the reason you want SEO is because it's free traffic. So let's start there. It's not paid. It just means someone's Googling something and they find you in the top of the search rank. And that's free traffic for you, which is driving down your customer acquisition costs. Right? If somebody searches cosmetology light, I think you want blue light to come up in the first three rankings. Ideally, you want it to come up number one. So the question is, how do we do that? Well, we find every permutation that someone searches for about a light in their nail salon, hair salon, eyelash salon, every single thing. And we research that with one of these tools. Like I said, Uber suggests, H refs, there's some other ones out there that there's actually Google native tool that you can just Google but it's a tool that Google actually gives you that you type in that phrase, and it'll say 200 People search on this a month. And in other tools, like Uber suggests H refs, or these others, it will tell you how hard it is to rank for them. Because it sort of reverse engineers this algorithm, and you basically build every single page for the keywords that you want. And you do that by multiple things, mentioning the keyword, but you don't want to do what we call keyword stuffing, you want it to be mentioned enough that a that a little bot would understand that you have enough of that word that that's a topic of that page, you at the end of the day, really just want to write something that people want to read and share. I mean, that's what you really are trying to do here is white things, design things that people want and would share. And then there's some technical things that you need to do to get pages to rank high, which is you need links coming into it from other pages, that that's a signal one of many, that your pages popular. So it's effectively a very, where people will build a webpage website. And they'll be like, Oh, is this pretty is this that actually, I don't build web pages like that, I don't really care. All I care about is does this page rank. I'm not saying there's other, I'm gonna talk about what you care about on the page, but it's not designed. First, I understand your brand has to mean something. But design is so hard now that almost going to minimal graphics and text is better. Because everybody's looking at it on a computer and iPhone, iPad, or Android phone or tablet. And you have to optimize for all of these, what you really want to optimize for is that keyword speed. So you can go to Google PageSpeed checker if you Google that. It will actually tell you how your website and or page pages, how fast it loads in a computer, and how fast it loads on your phone or a mobile. And Google actually uses that ranking. I think they do one to 100. If it's 90 to 100, you're in green, if you're under if you're under 70, you better figure something out. Because what they're saying is if your page doesn't load fast, we're not going to rank it high. Because you and I both know that if we bring up a page on our phone, and it takes more than probably four seconds to load, we click off. And Google's in the business of serving ads. So they're not they want pages that people want to read and can read quickly. And then they will keep track of how long someone stays on your page, how many pages they go to within your website, do they just come to that one page and then bounce off. That could be a signal that your content sucks, or that what they ranked you for isn't the
searchers or person's intent. So it's you're sending all of these signals your website is actually a story that is sending signals all day long, based on user behavior and performance. But stepping back to get started, you should research your keywords You should map out every permanent rotation of your main keyword for your company product or service. And then you should design your website very purposeful ly, that every page is targeting a keyword because you don't want your every page on your site to rank high for nail salon, beauty light, I made that up. You do not want that. Because then Google gets confused, and says, Well, which page here really is the authority? So you have to be very purposeful. And I will tell you that it is painful to do this, meaning it takes time for me to write the blog content I'm going to use as an example. Not terribly long. I write 900,000 words and, you know, an hour to have it edited. That's not the hard part. The hard part is, what is this article about? What is the keyword that we are talking about, or subject could be a phrase that we're talking about? And what's the title going to read? Because the title isn't just about click being click Beatty, which is part of it. In marketing, it's also
the title of your page is in general weighted more as a signal to the search engine, whatever that search engine is. So if you get all of your content, right, and you don't get the title, right, you could confuse the algorithm and not rank. And then there's tools that you if you use WordPress, I'm trying to throw as many tools for your listeners in you as possible to sort of just get you started. There's plugins that most people probably use WordPress, for their website. In general, if you do, there's a million plugins that you can put in I use Yoast I pay for it. And what Yoast will do is Yoast will tell you what the keyword density is. It will say, Hey, your meta descriptions too long, your titles too short, it actually coaches you through it. It's not perfect, because SEO is as much of a science as it is an art. But it will at least get a novice person using your high wire thing bumped right and left, it's sort of keep you in the middle so that you are moving forward with a decent SEO strategy. And it will go through your site and say, hey, you've got duplicate titles where you have duplicate meta tags, you have duplicate this, you need to fix that. So it's it will run these audits for you. And these other tools like H refs, and Uber suggests will also run a Site Audit on you. Not only that, but you can use those tools to understand your competition. So in those tools, you could put in a your competitors website, and it will tell you all the pages they rank for what's getting them the most traffic. And then you can go back, reverse engineer those pages, and try to replicate that. And ultimately, then what you're trying to do is do trying to get your content spread. So you want it if you write good content, people will share it. You know, if you write something good about building a product company, I'm probably going to share it with my list of, you know, email list, which you have 10s of 1000s of people or someone shares out on social media or even better, another writer uses you as an expert in their article in a major publication or something. And then links to you, I want to say it's complicated. It's not super complicated, just a lot of moving parts. But ultimately, it comes down to your keywords, your phrases, and making sure that every page on your site does that I did that for a fishing product company that my brother and I had on T on fishing shirts. And it literally every page Mary, we are trying to figure out, we want to own fishing shirt. Well fishing shirts going to be hard to say, yes, we want to own it. So we're going to take this page, and we're going to talk about all the best attributes of a fishing shirt. And that's the page that we're going to dedicate to say, that's what we want to rank high for fishing shirt. And then from that page, we're going to create, quote unquote, your sales funnel to say, Oh, and by the way, here's the lateral line, tropical fishing shirt that has an SPF of 45 because having a high ranking and SPF is important. So you're thinking about this from a ranking standpoint and also a funnel standpoint. And it requires a spreadsheet, some form in my opinion, and whiteboarding. This literally whiteboarding your website or websites and saying, Hey, what is this? What does this look like? And I don't know how many of your listeners have podcasts or or do anything in the sense of videos or audio but this applies to everything.
Mary Harcourt 39:53 Okay, so tell me about your podcast because that's how I know you and you have an amazing podcast. It's called the air edge What is it about? And what do you hope that all your listeners gain from it?
brandon white 40:04 Well, I appreciate that Barry, the edge is really designed to help business owners win in their business and in their life. And we do that with science backed research that I do solo episodes on. And also unscripted conversations with a variety of people who can offer our listeners the edge in your case, your the amazing story of how I built this. We've had National Geographic adventure of the year we've had professional athletes, we've had venture capitalists we've had, oh, we just had such when I look back such a variety of people but it basically I want everyone to leave every single episode with actionable things that they can use and start doing. There's certainly a little motivation in there, that motivation is out wanes. So if you can give people those tools, and that's what we try to do with every single episode. So the idea is, is that you're gonna live leave with some edge to make your life whether that's your healthier mindset that's overused but your beliefs and or your business better.
Mary Harcourt 41:26 Learn more about my guest today brands in his podcast edge classes and background at Brandon See white.com And also at my edge podcast.com You can always find me on Instagram at Mary Harcourt underscore in app the cosmic glow light. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and many more to come
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