Internet Marketing and SEO Presenter: Thomas Watson Lisa: Good afternoon and welcome everyone. This is Lisa Kurtz, welcome to our regular training webinar. I'm very excited to introduce Thomas. Thomas Watson is the founder and CEO of Roots Family History. His company has become the largest digitization studio in Idaho, and has a prominent presence in New York. AS for Spring 2019, Roots Family History will be known largely for its game Pando. I know a few of you purchased Pando last year, and loved the game. It'll be sold in stores nation-wide. Under his direction, Roots Family History is building an open-source schema for genealogical data that will make it more accessible to humans and software. He'll be using that schema to build graphics for its project under development, Cotton and Clan. Thomas spends his spare time with the only thing that really matters - his family. Thomas is going to be sharing his knowledge on internet marketing and SEO. Just as a reminder, if you have any questions, I encourage you to wait until the end of the presentation to type them in the chat panel, in case Thomas answers your question thorough out the presentation. Of course, jot anything down that you'd like him to answer for you, and I'll read those questions aloud to Thomas at the end of the presentation. So Thomas, I'm going to hand it over to you. Let's talk about internet marketing and SEO. Thomas: Awesome, thank you Lisa. HI everybody, I'm Thomas. You just got my little introduction; I'll give you a little bit of my background so you have some sort of idea about why I might be talking about SEO and marketing.

Before I started my company, I worked in SEO full time for a real estate company out here in Idaho. At the time I was studying Computer Science at BSU, along with International Business. I grew really curious and interested in the art of being found on Google, and how I might be able to use that to my advantage. I think it sort of excited me, as a college kid, just to think about, "Gosh, there's all these services out there and all these things people do, and many people are really not very good at the web game." You know, people were behind on their website, people weren't being found for what they're looking for. So I started looking for niches; long story short, the niche that I ended up attaching myself to in Idaho was the conversion of analogue media. What really excited me at the time was VHS tapes. I just thought, "Gosh, there's so many VHS tapes in this state, and everybody wants to convert them." Everybody in Idaho at the time was either taking them to Costco or shipping them out of state. I got really excited about calculating the numbers of people that would be shipping these off, and could we possibly get them locally? If we did get them, what would our profit margins be? We started doing charts and projections and at the end of the day, it became a big marketing SEO game, to figure out - can we get people from every city in this state shipping to our store, rather than shipping out of state? That really was SEO, and it was marketing. So that's me. Today, I'm going to talk about SEO and marketing. I''m starting off with this lovely little quote: "Social may be sexy, but search still pays the bills." It's good to keep that in mind. I think it's really easy to get lost in social media. Social media is amazing; it's beautiful. It kind of makes you popular, and you get the comments, etcetera, but at the end of the day there's some pretty

amazing statistics surrounding Google and how people buy things. You really have to think about how people are buying your services, and how that should dictate where you put your time and effort. Before I get going on the variety of things I'm going to cover, let's go over a few statistics that I've gathered. These are all vetted stats. 93% of al online experiences begin with a search engine. That's a staggering` number. That means that every time somebody lands on website, 93% of those hits on websites came from a search engine. Google currently holds 80.5% of total search engine market share. It used to be 65.5 back in 2016, so they just increased and increased and increased. If you're not paying attention to Google, you're not really paying attention to how you should be getting clients. You should be very, very focused on those numbers if you're trying to generate traffic online, and if you're trying to generate sales of your products and services online. 81% of people perform some type of online research before making a large purchase. That is sort of an obvious statistic; the number's not obvious but you know from your own experience, I know from my own experience. If I am going to make a large purchase I am going to do research; if I'm going to do research, it is going to happen online. 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines. That gets a lot of hype, this idea that if you're not in the top ten on Google, then you might as well not even exist online. It gets really interesting when you start using various tools online to figure out you keyword traffic and you start to see, "Oh my gosh, there's 3000, or 1000, or 2000 people in my area searching for my keyword, my service, and I'm not being found by a single one of them."

Instead, they're going to my competitor's websites, or informational websites on different topics, or they're just confused but they're really not continuing to click that next, next, next button until they find your website. So if you're not in the top ten on Google, you might as well not even exist, for the most part, in terms of being online. You might get clients elsewhere, that's fantastic. This is separate from that; this is the clients that you would be getting if you were positioned when they searched for the service, and if you could convert that using your fantastic marketing skills. Last thing before I get going is, you can't really have a conversation about SEO unless you first have a conversation about keywords. From my experience, this is where a lot of people will go wrong. They will do SEO for the wrong keywords. That sounds silly but it's very, very easy to do. It's just a head game. Are you really thinking about how are people finding me, or are you thinking about, what are the list of keywords in my business? What's the jargon that I'm using to describe myself? You rank for those keywords, and then you pat yourself on the back when you go to Google and you look up something like "Digital Asset Management Kentucky" and you see that you rank first. That shouldn't excite you, because nobody else is searching for that. You really need to be thinking: "What are people looking for, and am I being found for the thing they're looking for? Am I converting that into a phone call?" The keyword planner tool - I've got a link in here, and I'll share this whole presentation with everybody so they can click directly on it. Many of you have probably used this; if you haven't used it you should get obsessed with it for a little while, because it's really going to give you the most insight in how your audience is trying to find you, as compared to pretty much anything out there.

I can't think of something else that performs this task as well as the Google keyword planner tool. I've got it open right here - it's actually built into AdWords. If you log into your AdWords account... If you don't have one, sign up for one. It's free. You don't have to use AdWords to do paid ads. You can actually just use it for the keywords tool. Before I ever start an SEO strategy, I’m going to come in here and I'm going to spy on my potential customers. I'm going to just demonstrate a few of these. Let me get inside of your head for just a second. I might say, "Okay, I'm a photo organizer, I help people go through generations of photos, I get them into one place, I get them searchable." My brain has to be thinking - how is that client searching for me? Are they even searching for me? How do i get a phone call from somebody I've never met? Come to this keyword planner tool and just start brainstorming. Start thinking out loud. Sit down in your chair and think, "Okay, I'm this person, maybe I'm going to type in 'photo organizer'." Let's just test this theory. If I run 'photo organizer', there's a big Get Results button so you just click Get Results under Photo Organizer and you're going to start to get traffic numbers. You're also going to get broad based results on, basically, people who search for Photo Organizer also search using these other terms. We get the average monthly searches in the US, and you get the competition. It's interesting to note that the competition level does not always correlate to the number of searches; sometimes you'll see monthly searches, you know, 100,000, and competition low. And it might be because the product or service

or whatever the thing is, isn't profitable. It's not something that makes money, it's not competitive because people are not paying for space there, etcetera. If you see something like Photo Organizer and it says "Competition High", we have to analyze that deeper and think - okay, people who typed in Photo Organizer, what were they searching for? Me? Or were they searching for what I do? I come to Google and just do a test - Photo Organizer. Hit enter. Obviously, you're going to see immediately products. You've got products for organizing photos. You've got this Canto, these guys are paying per click. So if I - oops, I just charged them. They probably paid 50 cents to $1 for that click. It's funny, it's actually a tactic of these, they call them "black cat SEO companies". They will hire people to come in here and click all day on people's ads so that they meet their thresholds and their ad gets turned on. Be aware of that with AdWords. It's extremely useful, but it's also something that can be gamed. Anyways, Canto's advertising. Coincidentally, what are they marketing for? They're paying for an ad on a terrible website, as you can see. They're marketing Photo Organization software. Still, nobody performing the services that you perform. I scroll down a little bit, I'm getting "Best Organizer Tool for Windows", so another software. "Best Photo Organizing Software", again, software. The next two results are both APPO, and then immediately "12 Free Alternatives Image and Photo Organizer for Microsoft". So, software.

It looks like the whole front page is dedicated to products and software, minus the exact keywords matches from The Photo Organizers and APPO of course, itself. So you start analyzing - okay, are people typing in Photo Organizer, and then hiring a Photo Organizer? The answer is probably a grey area. You're going to have a lot of people buying software, you're going to have a lot of people buying containers, you're going to have a lot of people who never have even conceived of the idea of hiring and paying somebody for this service of photo organization. And then you're going to have some people, by word of mouth because APPO's gotten pretty big, that go straight to APPO and they find a photo organizer. You've got a mix, at the end of the day. I very large mix. If I'm in that position, I'm going to continue to think, and I'm not going to stop there. I'm going to say, "Okay, I live in Boise." Let's just use me as an example. From my experience running my company, the same clients who have the money and the time and all the other factors present to hire a photo organizer, they're the same people paying for things like Genealogy Research. They're people who are pay9ing for photo scanning by the thousands. They're people who are bringing in 50 videotapes to have them converted. They have discretionary income to spend on preserving their legacy. That's sort of the audience that you want. They may have no clue. To summarize that point, you cannot just put all your eggs in the basket of your exact keyword match "Photo Organizer". You've got to think about these other keywords where people who type these keywords in and pay for these services are also your clients, and I would argue heavily that people who pay to digitize analog media are your clients. People who pay a couple thousand dollars to hire a private genealogist are also your clients. It could even be people who are paying for professional photographers, are your clients. You might think.

"How can I capture that audience and convert that into a phone call and get them curious about my service?" One way is to rank for those keywords. You can do that without offering that service. I know some of you do offer the service of photo scanning, you offer the service of video digitization. If you do, all the better. Rank for it first. Once you get them paying for that, you can have the conversation about photo organizing, and they're going to be so excited about it because it's an invention. It's a new product, or it’s a new service they haven't heard of, and they're going to be very excited. I'm sure you guys have experienced that over and over again, when you hear, "Oh my gosh, you guys can literally organize this entire collection of media that I have. You can put it on a hard drive or online account. You can make it searchable." That's an exciting thing, Even if they didn't search for it on Google, they found you through another keyword. You're going to want to make a really good list of keywords. You're going to want to make spreadsheet; come up with 50, come up with 100 different ways that you think people are going to find you so that you can put together a strategy. For things that you're not going to do yourself, like, you're probably never going to be converting 8mm film. You're not going to want to make a huge investment into converting film, that's not in your core business. You come up with an outsourcing partner - I know many of you already have one. You need t think heavily about getting links from those outsourcing partners. You nee to think about doing a lot of writing and a lot of video content and a lot of work to rank for the thing that you're outsourcing. That way, you get the phone call and they didn't call you for photo organizing, they called you for something else. You can still end up converting that.

I think you guys get the gist of what I'm saying. Come up with a big list of keywords and be really smart about how people are finding you. Don't think that it's so obvious. Use the keyword planner tool, use Google, and figure out how many monthly searches there are for every keyword. You can imagine, you could spend hours and hours here on the keyword tool, typing in everything under the sun to figure out how many monthly searches there are. VHS to DVD, I'll come in here and I'll say, "Okay, get results. Is this a business I should be involved in? “Well, there's 14,000, roughly, monthly searches there. Add up all the other pieces to it - VHS to DVD Convertor, because it's giving you the different types of strings people are using to find the keyword - you can kinda add those up to get a monthly national. Then compare that to analytics to see what you're getting. You can put together a really good plan and a really good strategy to get a lot of traffic on your website, and that is whether or not you offer the service in question. It's just got to be a service that you have a really good outsourcing partner for, or a service that you offer. But at the end of the day it has to be a service that you've written a lot about and that you've got great content on. Enough about Keyword Planner Tool. Come up with some good keywords. While this is loading, I'm, going to go to Matt Cutts here. And then hopefully, I've got something for you that maybe you haven't done before. If you don't know Matt Cutts, he's sort of the guru of SEO. He works at Google. I don’t know what his exact title is over there, but he's basically the head of their algorithm writing department. He's behind a lot of that, and he's the public face of Google when it comes to questions about search. I love this quote by him: ":The objective is not to make your links appear natural, the objective is that your links are natural." It's really easy when we start talking

about SEO to really start talking about gaming Google's algorithm. That used to work a decade ago, a few years ago. These guys just keep updating their algorithm. It gets harder and harder to game the system. At the very end of the day, don't game the system - just make the best content. I'm going to put that into five bullet points here for us. One that you should really get into and you may have not gotten into at all, or you may have never heard of it, is Google's schema.org. This can give you a massive competitive advantage over your competitors. Second one is writing content, third is image metadata - you guys know all about that. Four is a few good links, and five is video marketing. First, let's talk about Schema.org. Schema.org is micro-data. To make it easier to think about, I'm going to come over to Google and just type in "Showtime’s in Boise, Idaho". These results down here, the organic Google results, you know about those. We know about how Google's algorithm works to rank these. The results up here come because the companies who have theatres who are showing them are using Schema.org to tell Google that they have a theatre, and they're showing Ant Man and the Wasp at a certain time. That's Schema.org. Here's another example of Schema.org. Let's just say, "Roots family history business hours". So you already know about Google maps. You know about the search results. This data up here that shows up in the box, that a lot of times only larger companies will have - all that is, is Schema.org. It means that on my contact page, I have specified to Google what my business hours are, so that not only it appears here, it also appears here and on the contact page. You kind of have a triple whammy here; it makes it really hard for competitors to get traction.

You can use Schema.org for pretty much everything. It's a way to tag the content on your website. Think of it as metadata. You're very used to tagging photos with descriptions, and alt tags, and titles, and dates, and names and places. Well, Schema.org is a way to tag the words on your website. If I go to my own website, let's just think about this - this is something very applicable that all of you can do. If I go to RootsFamilyHistory.com, there;'s a big difference between what I see on this website and what Google is looking at. A good example here - I'm going to go to my Print page. Let's just say, Custom Prints. If I look at this Print page, I immediately for the customer divided this up into tabs. I have canvas wraps, custom prints, mural mounts, fine art prints, custom frames, and a little about section. What most people do, is they do what I did and they leave it there. On the backend of this, I've used Shcmea.org to tell Google that canvas wraps is a service that our company performs - same with custom prints, mural mounts, fine art prints. Google not only sees the keyword, but they know that mural mount means it's a local service that a local company provides. It's not information gathering, it's nothing else - it's an actual service or product that we provide. Now, Schema is a little bit complicated. It's not that complicated, it's a little bit complicated. If you are a Wordpress user, if you are a person who tags your own photos, if you use Photo Mechanic, you can do Schema.org. It will give you a massive competitive advantage over pretty much any of your competitors. Again, I've placed a link here because I'm going to share this with everybody. This Schema.org service, it's going to give you the how-to. I'm not going to cover it right now - I don't think it's a thing you can learn from somebody

talking. This is something you will do at the backend of Wordpress or Wix, or whatever your website builder is, as a way that you're going to tag the images. I'm going to show you just really, really quickly a small idea, so you at least have some sort of thought process behind it. This is Schema.org. Notice I just Googled Schema, but again, I have the link for you. Right here, this is what you're used to seeing in Wordpress if you click on the HTML section or the Plain Text section. You see all these divs and spans. All Schema.org is - they are words that you type into the divs and into the spans, to define if you span "Director: James Cameron". Using Schema, you don't simply put "span James Cameron". You've got to place the "span itemprop equals director". That's going to tell Google, James Cameron is a director. let's use Schema to place him high up in the search results on Google. It would be really boring for me to go through much more of that. I will say that if you use Schema.org, I would bet that very, very quickly, within a couple of weeks, you're going to see results in Google. You're going to start passing competitors that you would have thought there would be no way that you can beat. That includes national competitors. If you guys are local companies offering local services, and you use Schema.org to do your business hours, to highlight your services, to highlight your products; if everything you do is wrapped in Schema.org tags, you're going to see an increase in search and that's almost a sure deal. That's one piece of SEO that a lot of people forget. I should mention before I skip past Shcema.org, that this isn't just an open source way to tag images. This is actually something that Google, Bing, and Yahoo are collaborating on to

create. If Google is collaborating on it, they're using it in their algorithm and they're using it to link pages. IT's a very, very important piece of your SEO puzzle. I made a lovely little note here - if you don't have time to learn and implement Schema, because many of you may not; you may be thinking, "I'm never, ever, ever going to touch Schema. I'm not going to do that," - doesn't matter. Hire a student, hire an intern, get somebody to quickly learn Schema and tag your pages. It's as simple as HTML. I use interns here at our company periodically. maybe it's a software issue, maybe it's a programming issue - but I have something that I really don't have time to learn. I only need o hire it for 2-3 days. It's the perfect opportunity to get a high-scoring intern. A little bit of experience, bring them in and have them tag your website for you. It would be worth the couple hundred bucks that you might spend for them to sit for a day or two, to Schema up your website. Either learn it yourself, or hire somebody to get it done for you. Big part of your SEO strategy. Let's move on to something a little bit less code-y, and talk about writing content. This one seems blatantly obvious, and if you do any SEO research - and I Imagine that many of you have done some SEO research, because it's just natural to get curious about, "Why am I not ranking for something, how can I get more customers online?" Content writing, they always come back and say content is key. Write about your services and Google will thank you. Your services, that I can think of - I've listed out 1 through 5 and obviously photo organizing is the common service that you all have. Digitization seems top be something that some of you outsource, and some of you do yourself in your shops or in your homes.

Then, I think many, if not all of you, do in-home consultations, perhaps even before you do any photo organizing. Those are your services, and those are the topics that you better write about really well on your website. You need to audit your website. Go through it, think of those keywords - those topics, your services - and ask yourself, "is my website the authority on photo organizing? Or is it simply 3 or 4 images and then a phone number to call?" That's really not going to do the job. You're going to have to go into depth about what you do, why you do it, why you're passionate about it, how it preserves legacies. What the point of it is, how useful it is when it's all done - you've really got to go to town and become an amazing platform on the services. Think about yourself in terms of a customer. You're really looking for somebody who's authoritative, who's knowledgeable. You guys need to become those authoritative and knowledgeable people on those topics. Another little stat here: the average first page result on Google, that page consists of 1,892 words on average. Usually, the first ranking page on Google has a lot of content on it. You guys should have a lot of content on your websites if you want to rank. Show the customer in Google what you do. This page on my site is a pretty good example. Back when we first got into prints, I could have just placed a few tidbits here and there, but I always find that I don't rank. I also find that I waste a lot of time talking to customers on the phone about things that they could have already gathered from the website. I'm weeding through clients, too. I like to put my prices out here, and I like to be proud that my prices are expensive in certain categories. I don't hide the fact that a canvas sky-wrap is

a 47 dollar canvas sky-wrap. It may be twice as much anywhere else, but I would rather do that then get the phone call from the person who's really never going to pay that much money for something. It helps my SEO because I've got lots and lots of information on what we do, and Google wants to rank that. It's a very useful page for customers to land on. Again, make sure that your website is the king of content, in terms of what you do. I love the little graphic here: "The optimist says the glass is half full, the pessimist says the glass is half empty. The SEO expert says it needs an Alt tag." That's sort of the brain that you guys have already developed with APPO, this idea that there's so much behind the image doesn't change on your website. Don't use these sort of file names, DSC blah, blah blah; straight off your camera, upload, and then display to your client. You've got to properly compress the image, give it a lovely file name, add an ALT tag, add a title attribute. Make them good, make them descriptive. If you don't do that again, the image is not really being seen by Google. It's just pixels. Attach information to every image on your website. Again, do an audit on yourself and make sure you've got that done. Wordpress makes that simple. I imagine that many of you are using Wordpress, but this is similar to many back ends of other platforms. Go to the media gallery; you've got this lovely section, "Caption ALT Text title". Just fill them out for every single image that's being displayed on your website, and again,. you're going to see your rankings increase. A few good links - this one I could go on and on about, but the easiest thing to think about is: get links from relevant companies, focus on .org, .govs, or .edus,

or again, reputable companies that have been around a long time. Get as many links from those companies as you can. Three or four of those links are worth more than a thousand links from blog commenting, or, gosh, there's a lot of blog cap methods for grabbing link stuff. They'll do sidebar links on irrelevant websites - you need to get highly relevant websites linking to your content so that Google sees, hey, this person is a trusted person in the photo world. Really focus, again, on .orgs, .govs, or .edu. You can do year of SEO by simply getting a .edu link pointing to your website. A lot of strategy on that, and I've done a lot of wild things to get some .edu links. Try to make something useful for them. Get a link from them; it's going to pay dividends for you in the future. Websites don't link to other websites; people point to other people's work. everybody knows how important links are. It's a huge deal in SEO. But you really shouldn't think of yourself as a link gatherer. Think of yourself as a person making something useful that other people will naturally want to link to. SEO really doesn't have to be a lot of work if you're already working on making your business, and making your content, the best that it can be - a lot of SEO will happen naturally. SaveFamilyPhotos.com is a prime example of that, where you've got thousands and thousands of people who are naturally wanting to link to, wanting to cite, wanting to talk about that content. It's sort of addictive, beautiful content, and on a topic that a lot of people are interested in. The focus there being on content, naturally, is going to acquire links without you ever really having to say, "I spent time doing SEO." You just spent time building your company, and people wanted to link to it, so make something useful.

Google owns Youtube. Google love Youtube. A great strategy if none of your competitors are using it is to start building a lot of video content for your services. If you do that, then you caption them - and there's a caption tool in Youtube video editor, you'll see once you start doing YouTube - put those on your website. You'll see that YouTube outranks websites in many, many, many cases. If you're having a lot of trouble passing a natural competitor. a really great suggestion is to say, "Hey, what's the thing that I'm trying to rank for? I'm going to make a ten minute video on it, and then I'm going to caption it and watch it outrank the national competitor." It won't stay there forever, but it will outrank them temporarily, especially if it's a great video and it gets hits. Videos, videos, videos are a great SEO tool that a lot of people look past. Quintessential SEO; I just want to mention a few quotes or tidbits about SEO to close this thing out before we go to questions. Quintessential SEO is building the best website with the best content, period. WE could talk for hours about the technicalities of Schema.org, and properly tagging your html code, but at the end of the day the best company that has the best website with the best content is going to win that SEO race. Wikipedia is a prime example of an organization whose focus is on content. You'll notice in almost everything that you search for, Wikipedia ranks first, second or third for it. It doesn't really matter what the topic is. That's because again, content is key. Make sure that your content is the best within the niche that you're offering in your service area. If you're doing competitive analysis, analyze your competitors, make sure you've got the best content. It's a really great way to win the SEO game and to rank first.

Another quintessential SEO - make something useful for the world. I've got a little image of somebody taking a mason jar and turning it into a Kleenex holder. It illustrates this idea that if you make something useful that people have not heard of, and photo organizing is a great example of that - if you can put that into a graphic form, put that into a video form, or an excellent blog, people will want to read it. They will want to link for it. It will rank not because you used a lot of SEO tricks, but because you built the most useful trick in your niche for a specific thing that affects people. They're going to want to put t on Pinterest, they're going to want to put it on social media. You're going to get a lot of natural links. Always sit there and brainstorm - what can I do today that's useful? What can I do within photo organization that's useful? Get clever with your marketing, there, and make sure that people can see that in one simple graphic or one simple sentence. make something useful for the world. Another quintessential SEO - solve problems and answer questions. If your website is constantly in the business of solving problems and answering questions, that people actually ask - us the keyword planner for that. If you answer those questions, you will rank first for them. If you find a question that's not covered very, very well, then write an essay on that thing. Create a blog article for it. Get ranking for it. Become the guru of your niche. I'll just keep going back to that, because at the end of the day, that will be any SEO master. Just have the best content. Solve problems, answer questions. The last thing - and this has again to do with the keyword planner tool, is speak their language, not yours. You need to spend a lot of time on the keyword planner tool making sure that the things that you're writing about, the images that you're creating, the videos you're creating, are not using your language

They're using the language that you found people are searching for. If you're not doing that, you may be wasting a lot of very useful hours creating amazing content - but nobody will find it because you're just not using the right words. Really ask yourself - how are people searching, what are their questions, let me answer those questions and let me speak their language. That's it for my Marketing SEO. I know that was kind of fast. I looked down at the clock and saw that it was 30 minutes already and though, oh my gosh, I have to race through that. That kind of does it. Any questions? Lisa: Well, I've got one right off the bat. Just a reminder to everyone - type your questions in the chat panel and I'll read them aloud. Tell me first of all about the importance of inbound and outbound link on your website. Would you just review that quickly for me? Which one's better for you in terms of Google ranking? Thomas: So, the one that you really really want are inbound links. You want to show Google that you are a trusted resource in your community or in the country for a topic. That's not to entirely discredit outbound links. Outbound links are great. When I do outbound links, I'm linking to organizations or companies that I trust to a certain, sort of a high level. For instance, I'm linking on my website tot he Library of Congress. I'm linking to the United States Conservation Society. If, say I'm writing a blog article on a topic that has to do with how long a DVD will last, I'm going to want to cite a very useful statistic from the Library of Congress. I want to show people that's where I'm getting my information.

Those outbound links are fantastic, but they're nothing compared to the inbound links that you will get from other companies. Those are the things... if you get an inbound link, you're going ton notice a search result improvement immediately. Almost a week later, you'll get a link... I can place a link to a company that maybe ranks on page 3, 4, 5. Give it about a week, and they're probably ranking first or second or third. The power of getting linked from a company or institution that's been around for a long time or has a high PR on their website; that power cannot be overstated. People will pay a lot of money for those links. They're incredibly useful for moving yourself up in search results. Focus on the inbound links, but place very relevant outbound links on your website when it's applicable. Lisa: So, for example, the Association of Personal Photo Organizers is a credible organization that you're all affiliated with. It makes sense to have an outbound link on their websites - link their certification badge, or link their member badge, or something like that. Make sure that they've put all the right information in their certification badge for example, and link back to the website. But alternatively, all of our members have their own personal profile that is an independent URL on our website. You can take that personal profile and add your website link in that personal profile. So now, it looks as though APPO is linking back to you, onto your website. So those are two way linking that are really important for your website, so make sure that you've got your website in your personal profile on APPO. Also, make sure that you're linking to APPO. When we get more traffic, we send people

back to all of our members when we rank high in Google searches. It's a two way street there. Thomas: If there is an organization like APPO and they are offering you a free link, and you're not taking the time to get that link, you are doing yourself a massive disservice. You've got the opportunity to have a profile with an actual link right back to your website - I would make that a very, very high priority. You're already there., You're an actual member of APPO - get that done. It's the same with the BDD links, or any directories that offer links to you. That's sort of the easiest ones to get, and the ones that you should be really focused on. APPO is going to be your most credible, most obvious, most important link that you can get right off the bat. Get that one, and then start focusing on your libraries and your schools, and anyone else who's in preservation or observation, or anything related. Lisa: Then of course, keep an eye on any broken links. You should constantly be making sure you haven't got any broken links on your website, because that can impact you negatively as well? T: Yep. L: Okay. T: Yep, don't have any 404s, don't have any broken links. Lisa: Kathy is asking about how, "How many hours should I expect to devote to developing and maintaining a website - say in Wordpress - with this in mind?" Thomas: That's a tough questions. I will answer it this way - I spend probably 10 hours a week working on... It's hard, because it’s not that I'm necessarily working

on SEO or development. Usually for me, it's that I'm working on marketing. But when I'm working on marketing, I'm also creating fresh content and I'm helping boost my SEO, or I'm contacting people. I'm making connections that end in link relationships. About 10 hours a week for me, ends up being enough in my two areas to make sure that I keep my ranking fresh. I'll also say that if you quit that work, your ranking decreases rather quickly. Other competitors will start doing it. You do need to devote a certain period of time when you're first starting out. You may only have an hour to devote to it - then devote to it. Do whatever you can do. If you're serious about competing with people, spend every waking minute that's not performing services for your clients on marketing. I would just drop SEO into that marketing bucket and say that "SEO is part of what I do for my marketing". It's all about getting to know more people, and getting more clients. Lisa: You should also monitor where you're seeing the most results. If you've got a local business and you're getting most of your clientele from word of mouth, and networking in person, then make sure that you're... and you're not getting a lot of business from your website, and you've got enough business, then keep doing what's working well for you. Most people find that they're trying to keep that pipeline full of business coming from a variety of sources. If you're spending money, if you're going and printing material and brochures and all that kind of stuff, spending time on your SEO and all that... that's a way to boost your advertising for free. This is all stuff that you can do that doesn't cost you any money, that gets you better visibility. And it doesn't cost you any money. If you're spending money on local and print advertising, or any of those kinds of things that cost you money, or you're blindly going out there and running Facebook ads without really

understanding all that stuff, then just pay attention and know that there are other free ways to make sure that you're getting the best bang for your no-bucks. Thomas: And remember that stat that I put up there, that 80% of people are scrolling right past the ads and going to the organic results. Even if it takes you 3-6 months to rank, that 3-6 months of your time is going to pay dividends, perhaps for a decade. Once you rank organically, those clicks then become sort of free clicks, discounting the labor you put into it. Eventually, you're going to just start generating traffic, and you're going to think - oh my gosh, I'm not paying for this traffic! Finally! That's because you really focused on ranking first, doing your SEO work. Lisa: Right. Good. Dianna is asking, "When looking to hire an intern, what skills should we look for - other than general SEO knowledge?" Thomas: A lot of people who are available to intern... nobody's really going to be a specialist in SEO at a college, really. They're going to be in Computer Science. I would look in the Computer Science department. For SEO, it's really the lowest level of [?] out there. You know, there's not a ton of coding involved other than the Schema.org stuff. Someone who knows HTML is good enough to do your SEO. Most of it. However - that's a huge however - don't hire an intern to write your content. You should write your own content. Or, get content - Google is amazing at detecting poor content, so you need to write highly intelligent content that covers your topics well. Don't pay somebody $10 an hour to come in and say, "Hey, do you write articles about how long gelatin on a photo developed in the 80's lasts," and sit there and Wikipedia. That needs to be you.

The expert stuff comes from you, the HTML stuff, though? Just bring an intern in and say, "Hey, I'm looking." Go to the Comp-Sci department of your local university and ask for an intern that knows HTML, in the Comp-Sci department, is what I would do. Lisa: Good. Speaking of Google and content, this is a good reminder: when you create your own content,. you've got to be careful that you're not grabbing other people's content and replacing it with a couple of your own words. Google really is intelligent enough to recognize when you've used plagiarism in a sense, or adapted other people's content. Correct? Thomas: Yes. You can even run a fantastic experiment with that. IO did that in my SEO days, where I'd go copy and paste six articles from Wikipedia, or any great resource, put them on your website, don't cite them, and you'll just watch your website decrease in ranking. [?] article and Google knows, "Oh, that came from Wikipedia, oh, that came from that company who posted it first and they didn't properly cite it." They will devalue your company and your organization and start to think of you as spammy, or not authentic, and they don't want to rank you. So be very, very careful of that. Write your own words, use your own content. Lisa: Right. And, if you're using other people's content,. make sure you're citing the source. T: Absolutely. And, if you get really clever, use Schema.org to properly cite it. Get your intern to do that for you. L: Excellent. Next comment, Maureen's saying: "Thank you, this has been a great presentation."

Dionne is asking, "My name and business is at the top of the list when I Google "Photo organizing [?]". [?] is the city that she lives in. "I have people visiting my site, but few contacts. What can I do?" Thomas: That's that topic that I would have talked the most on. That's going back to the keyword planner tool, and asking yourself - if they type in "Photo organizer [?]", what exactly were they looking for? Are they looking for a service bureau providing that service? Did they even realize that it was a service? If they weren't, and you rank first in that and they land on your website, all they're going to do is click the button the second they see you don't have the plastic container that they thought they were searching for. I would use an entirely different strategy and say, "Okay, I'm not converting people from the keyword term 'photo organizer'". Which, don't be scared by that, that makes sense. It's kind of like when people land on my website, having had typed in 'VHS converter'. They're not looking for a company, they're looking to buy a product to use at home. I've gotten really good about not getting that traffic on purpose, because I end up either paying for it on an AdWords - I'll pay $3 for that click and there's no way I'm going to convert it. You just need to get smart about, "Okay, what other keywords should I be going after besides just 'Photo organizer'?" Some people who are looking for a photo organizer don't even know that's what they're looking for. These are confused people who have a mess at home, and they're trying to solve it. When they start to try to solve it, their first thing might be looking for photo scanning service. Or, it might be looking for how to save space with photos.

You've got to just use the keyword planner tool to figure it out, but I really think a lot of people, because they don't know where to get started, a lot of times step one is digitizing. Even if you're not digitizing, it's a great thing to rank for and outsource because you've got them on the phone now. You can say, "Oh, you're calling to scan photos? Tell me a little bit about what's going on." They'll say, "Oh yeah, I've got a box or two of these..." You can have this lovely conversation, but you're only having that because you rank for scanning or digitizing or whatever that they find you for. Just be careful about where you're getting your traffic from. Lisa: That's a good idea. And certainly, I know for me personally, if I were going to sit down to figure out how to organize my photos, I'd probably type in, "How do I organize my photos". Everybody's a little bit different depending on what they have to do. At the same time - I hear so many times, photo organizers say things like, "I'm so much more than just organizing photos. I create photo books, and all that stuff." Of course, those are the keywords you want to use. But also be careful that you aren't calling yourselves something exotic. "I am a photo concierge". People aren't... T: No, I think you need that branding. Like you're saying, you've all got a uniform badge, a uniform brand. You are a photo organizer. I would really embrace that title, like you're saying. Embrace the title, because APPO, the organization, is going to give you so much link juice, and so much credibility. You sort of need to sell what a photo organizer is and does, and have maybe related services or however you're going to do that. I would definitely not downplay the idea of the title, because that's your biggest asset.

L: Exactly, right. I've seen so many people shift to, "I manage people's photos", but people rarely type that in. Playing on those words, even if you offer a boutique type service with a different name and you call yourself the photo curator, or whatever the case may be, still use those terms "photo organizing", "organize photos", "organize my photos". All those things that are really important. T: Have your title. It's a hard conversation, because at the end of the day, you kind of want to look at the 150 different ways that people are going to be finding you, and you want to rank for all of them. But, you don't want your website to look messy. Even though you want to rank for 150 keywords, you don't want them to land on your website and see all of those keywords instantly. You've really got to be clever about how you use them in metatags and behind the scenes, so that yes, you're a photo organizer, and that's the main thing that they';re seeing, and they're finding the service. You can be a great resource, but be very, very uniform and nice and neat with your marketing. Get those keywords in there and get the traffic, because at the end of the day, you just need to have a phone conversation. Once you get them on the phone, you're probably really good at selling your service. But you've got to get them on the phone. L: Would a good strategy be to present maybe one or two different case studies that involve different assets of photo organizing, and then use your schema to cite, to compact, some of the information in that? T: I really like case studies. I think a lot about it. Now that I've been exposed to APPO for a few years, it's really interesting to me because I have the 500-100

human bodies in my store digitizing every single month. There's probably, I don't know, 20-50 of them every month that come in , who would be willing and able to pay for the service and would pay thousands and thousands of dollars for somebody to go in and organize that collection. I'll sit there and think about, if I was to get into photo organizing, as an APPO member if we were going to find an APPO member to do this, how would I market it? I always come back to, any time there is a new service that people haven't heard of, I'm going to try my best to do amazing video work. I think that's the best way to sort of sell something new. If I was to do a case study, I would probably turn that into an amazing video,. I want to show this story, of how somebody wen from this big mess to, "Oh my gosh, it's all in one place and I shared it with my six kids." Watch how we search. I want that to be a really succinct sort of invention. I'm saying hey, look what we can do. People didn't used to be able to do this. Look what we can do as APPO members. We can literally take 10,000 photos, and we can get it on this one neat little tiny device. You can give that to your six kids. Done deal. It's sort of this huge, eye opening thing for clients. A case study would be fantastic. You just have to think about how are you going to post this case study so that lots and lots of people see it, so that you become... just to excite people, about this thing that you've invented or this service that you sort of invented, because photo organizing is one of those things. It's really... It's almost as though a new software is available and people need to hear about the software. They need to learn about it. You've got to have some abilities to tell them.

L: Jordan is asking me, "Can you talk about the words SEO tagging in the back-end, versus the front-end, and the best way to tie those together?" Is that clear, do you want me to get clarification on that? T: I'm guessing... I'm assuming by front end, they mean they have the photo on their computer, or [?] Photo Mechanic, or in properties on Windows. The back end would be... So in the back end, when you're on a website and you're trying to do SEO work on your images, the main two things to focus on in that image tag is the Alt tag and the title tag. Those are the two first tags that Google looks at. Description would be the third one, but if you don't have time, make sure that every single image tag has Atl =, and then in quotes, put your keywords there. You cannot fool Google. If it's a picture of a girl and she's flipping the pages in the album, you can't say, "Boy organizes photos for family of 12". You have to actually describe the image because Google can see images now. They know that that's a girl looking through a photo album, so you have to actually type those keywords in and be really smart about your graphics and what you're uploading and how you're describing them. So, Alt =, and then in quotes, just put your keywords. Title =, and in quotes, put your keywords. If you don't want to do that, it's much easier just to do it in Wordpress in the media gallery. Fill in the metadata fills that it has available. L: Right. Or, whatever your gallery is. Squarespace, or whatever you are using. T: Right.

L: So [?] is asking, "Can you talk about photo tags again? I believe you said not to use a date taken file name, but rather use that file name that speaks to our services. Is that as simple as changing the file name or do I have to create some other metadata within Wordpress?" You probably just answered that, didn't you? T: Pretty much. It is just the file name. Change the file name. L: Perfect. Jordan says thank you for that answer. That is the end of the questions. That's it. T: Alright, awesome. L: Wonderful. This has been great. I had never heard of Schema.org. I've made some notes about that and I'm hoping that someone on Fiverr could do that kind of work. T: That's actually a very good point. I bet there is somebody on Fiverr. L: I'll bet there's someone on Fiverr. I'm going to go and do a search right now. Thank goodness for the power of search. Thomas, thank you so much. T: Thanks for having me. L: We've had you on our Open Mic Monday before and you're just like a deep pool of information, so I appreciate you taking some time today to share your expertise here.

I hope people go over and check out Roots Family History, and also Cotton and Clan on Instagram. You have some of the most beautiful... I know everybody at our conference loved the... Do a quick description about Cotton and Clan, and what the end result is? This beautiful artwork that's actually your genealogy tree? T: We're launching that a few months from now, but it's essentially software that converts the information from Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, or manually inputted data, and it converts that into a fine art family tree - or what we're calling a Name Map. We have a schema, that's a way to place data in an organized fashion. We haven't really showed that to the public yet, how we're doing that, but it organizes your genealogy information into art form, and then we ship a print to a house. That's going to be launched probably in October, but you can follow us @cottonandclan. L: Absolutely, go follow them on Instagram, because it's beautiful. I love looking at all the different pieces that come out. I want to be able to get mine when you're launching. So beautiful. Thank you. T: Awesome, thank you so much for having me. L: Thanks everyone, have a great weekend. Thanks again,. Thomas. T: You're welcome, bye everyone. © 2018 Association of Personal Photo Organizers www.appo.org