Getting to Page One on Google: Winning SEO for Financial Advisors-Session recording

Session recording
Video Transcription
I'm here to introduce to you Rich Brooks. Rich is the president of Fly New Media. It's a digital agency in Portland, Maine. He's been in business for 26 years. He is nationally  recognized and travels all over the country speaking to other people in the digital marketing arena. He has an Agents of Change podcast is where I found Rich. I would suggest that  you listen to that. He also has an annual conference for the Agents of Change and he focuses on digital marketing tactics that drive results. I think you'll get a lot out  of this and we want to welcome Rich. Thanks everybody. How's the mic volume? Good? Excellent.  I see people saying yes so it must be working. I know that you've been going to a lot of different sessions and I know most of them are involved in your industry. This is going  to be industry specific information but this is about how do you generate more traffic and more leads through search engines. Obviously there's a lot of different ways that you're  going to attract clients. I'm going to really focus on this aspect of it which is SEO or  search engine optimization. Today's objectives, what do I want you to get out of today? We're  going to be talking about how do you optimize for local search. If you don't know all of these terms, don't worry. I'm going to try and explain all of it plus I'm going to leave  time for questions at the end plus I'll hang around and answer any questions you may have  after that. Then how do you organize for organic search? What do you need to do to your websites for that? Also we're going to talk about the role of paid search or Google ads, pay  per click. How does that figure into you getting more qualified leads to your business? Finally  basically just if I can help you rank higher you're going to get more business from more like minded individuals and everybody wins. Whenever I talk about this type of digital  marketing I always talk about what is the customer journey? This is something that you have to be aware of. How do your prospects, your clients, how do they find you? What is  that journey they take? There's a lot of models out there for the customer journey but I like  to keep things really simple. Awareness, consideration and decision. So in the awareness stage we're  often just suddenly aware that we have a problem or an opportunity. I have a new baby and I realize holy cow I got to start saving money for college. What do I need to do? Or I need  to refinance my house or I'm going to get married or I'm going to get divorced or I'm nearing retirement. These are some of the things that might spark some of your best  clients to start turning to Google and asking some questions. Consideration is like okay I know what my problem is or I know what my opportunity is. Now what do I need to do?  What are my different options? Do I do it myself? Do I take some online classes? Do I go to a professional who knows what they're doing and have been studying for this? Do  I just go to a subreddit on Reddit and start asking questions and subreddit personal finance  and hope for the best? Like what are the different ways that I can get there? And I might even  start to find out that there's a fiduciary financial advisor compared to just a financial advisor. And Joe and I were just talking about that. Most average people have no idea that  not every financial advisor is a fiduciary or even a fee only financial advisor or even what that means. And then finally decision. That's when it comes down between you and  somebody else. I'm going to go with you or I'm going to go with somebody else and how do I make that final decision? That's basically the customer journey and what you want to  do is understand what that journey looks like. And usually there's more than one journey. So you need to kind of reverse engineer. How do people find me? And how do they make that  decision? And then your job is to set up roadside attractions and information booths all along that customer journey so that they make the best decision possible, which is obviously  to go with you. Right? So that's really what we want to do. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to trust us, to know us, and ultimately to go with us. And there's  a lot of journeys they could have taken. One might be through referrals. I heard nobody does cold calls anymore. That's great. If you did, that's fine for you. Networking events,  social media. But today the one specific path we're going to talk about is Google and the search engines. This was a search I did in preparation for today. I did it up in my home  in Scarborough, Maine, just outside of Portland. Financial advisor near me. Very typical type of search. What do I get? The first thing I get is the sponsored ad, which is an ad  somebody's bidding on it, right? Now for all of you who say, I never click on those ads. Who clicks on those ads? I don't care about paid search. Google makes over $40 billion  a quarter on paid search alone. Someone's clicking on those ads. So, I get the results. Ads. Then next I get local. Local, this is the local pack, which is three and no more  than three, unless there's an ad in there, which there is in this case, for Edward Jones financial advisor, Jeremy somebody. So there's four here, but generally there's three. And  you need to get into that local search. So you need to be the top three results. One of the top  three results for a local search. And the reason why I'm doing, why I'm getting this, the ads,  because this is a transactional search. There's commercial intent. Google realizes I'm in the  market for a financial planner, so it's going to start showing ads, because it knows it can  make money. It shows me local results, because this is often very much a local solution. If  you're going with, I'm sure almost all of your clients, if not all of them, are local to you,  at least for part or most of the year, if not the entire year. And as we scroll down the page,  then we get the people also ask, and below that is the organic listings. The original big top,  by the way, I know, please feel free to take notes, take pictures if you like. I'm going to  make my slides available. I've got a QR code at the end. You can just scan it in and get all the  stuff, plus a bunch of other things. Then we've got the organic listings, the original big blue  links, the meritocracy. What are the best results possible? But as you look through this, with the  exception that number two is NAPFA, good for you NAPFA for optimizing your website. All of these,  NerdWallet, Edward Jones, US News and Money, major publishers, not one local result in the organic  results, because Google tends to trust giant corporations and media publishers more than they  trust small businesses. That's just the way their algorithm works, like it, hate it, it doesn't  matter, that's how it is. And as we keep scrolling down here, we continue to see more of that,  until we get another sponsored ad at the bottom of the page. So that was Maine. So then the next  thing I did is I did a search on, I, still in Maine, I did a search Boston financial advisors,  and you start to see something a little bit different. And it could have been because I was  in Maine doing a search out of my area, or it could just be because Google likes to try different  things to see what's going to give the best results and the most money to Google. So then  the very first thing I see is sponsored, so these are ads, financial planners in Boston, these are  Google screened. So these people, Google has basically given a check to them, which kind of is  like a badge of authority, and a lot of people are going to trust that. It's not, and I'll talk more  about in a minute, it's not for every industry, but it's for yours, and it's definitely something  that if you're looking to grow your business, you may want to invest in these local service ads.  Below that, I get more sponsored ads, and then I start getting some more organic stuff, but again, smart asset, U.S. News and Money, so again, it's just the big publishers here.  And hey, we're in Louisville, I say Louisville, I hope that I'm coming close to pronouncing it for  all of you locals out there. And up at the top, we see more sponsored ads. Now we're getting photos  of people, and then we're getting sponsored ads, and right at the bottom, you can see that word  businesses, that's the beginning of the local search. All of these also are screen captures  I took of just the top of my page. So this is what I see without scrolling, so keep that in  mind. What is the most important real estate when people go there? Most people are not going to  scroll very far. Then, let's get a little bit more niche-y, a little bit more specific. How  about Louisville estate planning? That's, there's going to be less people searching for that than  Louisville financial planner. So now we get into estate planning, it starts with the local searches, and then all of a sudden we're getting into expertise, which is a big  directory just here, which is, but they actually give in their results a specific link to, in this case, dot and dot attorneys. And then finally, the third link is we have an actual  local business getting into the organic search results. Another thing I could do is Louisville  fee-only financial planners. And again, we're getting sponsored, sponsored, and sponsored,  finally down at the bottom we get another organic result, and this one's nice because it's what's  called a featured snippet. So Coats Financial Planning, we had a nice photo of a woman, I assume, working for Coats, and it's nice and big, and all this great stuff. And here's the  takeaway. Paid search dominates most of these results. When I say dominates, I mean it's at  the top of the page, and most people don't care that it's sponsored ads, they just care if it's  relevant. Local is next underneath that, and then you get to organic, and until you start to niche  down, you have almost no chance of appearing in the organic results for the best keywords you want.  So as you get more niche-y, meaning there's less people searching for these search terms, but they're more relevant for your business, that's when you can start to come up in the  organic search results. So one of the first questions, or one of the common questions I get  when people are asking me about SEO, they're like, how long is this going to take? How long before I  can start to be at the top of Google? And the answer that I'm sure you hate, but must have given  at some point in your life is, it depends, right? It depends on how competitive your industry is.  It depends on how competitive your geography is. It depends on what services you're offering in  that, and whether or not somebody, a competitor of yours, has invested in a lot of SEO and paid  search. So, how long does it take? Well, there's certain things you should keep in mind. The  fastest way to get to page one on Google is paid search, because you are guaranteed to be there.  Maybe not every time somebody searches, but it will get you to the top of Google search if you're  willing to invest some money in these paid ads. You could literally start getting leads the very  day you start your ads. Chances are you won't, because Google uses machine learning to get  smarter about who they show your ads to, based on previous performance, so that you tend to get  better results over time, and also if you're doing this yourself, or working with an outside agency,  they start to understand better like what search terms are actually leading to conversions,  not just to traffic, and they may start doing some things like changing the way the ads are worded,  or starting to use negative keywords, which we'll talk about in a minute. The next fastest way you  can get to into the page one of Google is through the local search. So, I'm going to talk to you  specifically about things you can do in local search to improve your visibility there,  and finally, organic search. That is the slowest possible way to get in there, but, and as we saw,  very difficult for more general terms that you'd love to rank well for, but there's a lot of  other benefits to organic search, so we'll talk about all three of them.  I'm going to start with paid search, or Google ads, or pay-per-click.  Officially, this is not SEO, so I hope you'll bear with me, but I can't have a conversation  about how do you rank well at Google without talking about paid search, as we've seen from  those previous examples. So, a few things you want to keep in mind if you're doing this, or if you're  working with an outside agency, just so you can ask them intelligent questions, right? It starts  with keyword research. What are the products or services that you bring to market? What are the  questions that you tend to get? Where are you? All these things start to work into a brainstorm  of keywords that you might want to go after in the Google paid search. Once you've done that,  you use a tool. There are free tools out there, like Google Keyword Planner, and I'll show you  a screen capture or two of that later on in the presentation. There's also some paid tools as  well, but most people doing paid search are at least starting with the Google Keyword Planner.  You plug in your keywords. Google will tell you, are there better keywords out there? Are there  related keywords out there? How much competition does it have? How many monthly searches?  I mean, why would we pay for ads for things that are never going to drive us traffic? So, we need to  know all this. Google will even tell you what you should expect to pay when you're bidding on these.  The way that paid search works is you bid. You say, I'm willing to pay, in your case, probably $10,  $20, $50 for each click, but you only pay if somebody actually clicks on your link. So, that's  how paid search works versus the other. Once you've done your research and you know what are  the words in the, oh, one more thing. As you're doing this, you may have multiple services. Maybe  you do estate planning. Maybe you do retirement planning. Maybe you do saving for college,  529 work. You don't take all of your keywords and put them into one campaign. You break your  thematic ideas into different campaigns. Otherwise, Google doesn't know what you're looking for,  and you're also going to be sending everybody the same page, and that's a terrible idea.  You really want to focus on it, and if you have a limited budget, what's your number one priority?  And start your campaigns there. If you can afford multiple campaigns, let's try that again, Rich. If you can afford multiple campaigns, then you start to really focus those in.  Then we get into targeting. Of course, targeting is based on the keywords that people are searching for. So, you're going to bid on those keywords, but you also want to target  geographically. Like, you mostly are going to want to go with very local people. So, you may,  if you are in Louisville, you're only going to go and show your ads in Louisville and maybe the  surrounding communities. But you can even go down to specific zip codes. So, if you know that your  best audience is in specific zip codes, you can actually narrow your advertising so it'll only  show when people are searching from those zip codes. So, you can really get good at that. Also,  there's, I'm sure you know this, Google knows a lot about you. Google's been tracking your searches,  your website history. They know when you're planning on having a baby. They know when you're  planning on switching jobs. They know all this about you. It's scary, but we can use that for  our own good as well. Because if we know there's certain trigger actions in the customer journey  to work with us, we can also say, hey, Google, I know you know when people are planning on having  or have just had a child. I want to show my ads in this geographic area to this audience who are  planning on or just had a child who are at the 75 or above economic background. And Google knows  enough that they can show those ads just to those people. So, we can get really good with targeting  even with all the new privacy laws that are out there. Bidding, Google will tell you how much  it's going to cost. Just stay on top of it is what I'd say because sometimes things can get out of  control, but you can set limits daily or monthly. Negative keywords are an important thing as well.  So, as you start doing this, you're going to start to get reports on what are people searching  for and they're clicking on your ads. If you're going after the word retirement, that means that  Google could actually serve up your ad when somebody asks, when did Tom Brady retire? And you  might say, well, those people are smart enough not to click on my ad after they ask that question,  right? You would be wrong. Because people don't think they click, right? So, once you start seeing  things like that, you can actually start saying to Google, this is a negative keyword for me. I  wouldn't do Tom Brady, but I might do something else where it's just kind of like a little bit  broad. I don't want you to show my ad when people do these kind of search queries. And then landing  pages. One big no-no that I see almost every company do right out of the gate is you do not  send traffic from paid search to your homepage. They just searched. Why would you make them go  search again for this information? In fact, I wouldn't even send them if they did a question  about saving for college. I wouldn't even send them to the page on my website about saving for  college. I would create a brand new landing page. Basically, the only thing you can do is get down  to the bottom of the page and do like what I want you to do, whether it's to download a calculator  or worksheet or to click on my calendar link to book a time. I only want you to be able to go  forward or hit the back button. And you'll find that your conversion rates go up dramatically  when you basically put people into that funnel. Landing pages are critical. And then lastly, I just  want to touch on these local service ads because they do not affect every industry, but they affect  yours. And we saw before, there's some great real estate at the top of the page for these LSAs.  So if you're doing searches on the kind of things you want to rank well for and you see your  competitors coming up here, that means that there's LSAs in your geographic space and it's  something you should look into. And there's a process online for financial planners about how  Google screens you and there's a process to go through, but that's a great opportunity to get that little green check mark, which definitely can drive additional business for you.  Some of you may be saying, okay, Rich, that's great, but what about Bing?  No, I'm just kidding. I don't think any of you thought that at all.  But we have discovered that Bing can be very good for certain industries and yours is one  of those industries and here's why. A third of the users are over 55. By the way, does anybody  recognize this guy from memes? Yeah. He looked familiar, right? Yeah. Over 50% of people using  Bing have graduated college and 38% of US users of Bing earn over $100,000. Those numbers are all  bigger than the averages for Google. So in other words, Bing users, older, more educated, and more  affluent than the typical Google user. I would still not start with Bing because the percentage  of people using Bing is so much smaller, but it's kind of like those old Avis ads, we're number two,  we try harder. What I recommend for most of our clients who are good candidates for Bing is start  using Google ads. Get your ads working and then Google, Bing has an import feature, Microsoft has  an import feature. You can basically take your campaigns and bring them right over to Bing and you  can be starting almost immediately with just a few clicks. That's usually a better way to go because  then you've already done the work on Google to find out what are the best performing ads. And as  far as preparing for organic or local on Bing, there's really nothing you have to do different,  so just follow all my recommendations for Google and you'll be great. So with that being said, that  was the paid search side. I have in those downloads and those resources more information for you on  that, including a worksheet that you can use for Google ads, so there'll be some more information  at the end. But let's move into the unpaid side of search, the true search engine optimization.  There's two main categories here and the first one is local. Now local and organic have a lot of  overlap, but the algorithms are slightly different and so this is something that you really need to  pay attention to. The number one factor in how you will rank in Google's local search, appearing in  that local pack with the map next to it, is unfortunately proximity. And I say unfortunately  because there's not much you can do about it. You are where you are. You may have multiple offices  and you can put those all into your Google My Business, which we'll talk about, or Google  Business Profile. That'll help you have a wider range, but the bottom line is I can do a search  while I'm at work for a financial advisor, take a 20-minute commute home, do the same exact search  and get absolutely different results. Because how close I am to your offices makes a big  difference. And there's, like I said, not much you can do about it unless you really want to get  creative and maybe open up a food truck that also offers financial planning. I actually think this  is a brilliant idea, but I leave it to you. That's a business decision and I don't know if you have  the right licenses for that. But outside of this, you're really kind of stuck. So the next biggest  thing is your Google Business Profile, formerly called Google My Business, and this is the number  one thing that you can affect. So one nice thing about Google Business Profile is if somebody  searches on your actual brand name, and a lot of business is driven by searches that are branded,  your company's name. So if I do a search and I do this on Oak Street Advisors because I knew  Joe was introducing me, and I can see a lot of great information about it, that's like a huge  piece of real estate on Google's home page that Oak Street just got because they've done their  work on Google Business Profile. This is absolutely free. There's no cost to it. It obviously increases  your visibility. You have more control over your presence. Once you've proven that you can speak on  behalf of your firm, you can add new photos, you can add videos, you can put in your hours, you can  answer questions. There's all this information that you can take care of on your own that will enhance  the way you wish to be seen when somebody does a Google search. You can respond to reviews. All  right, caveat, I do not know if you can respond to reviews because of your industry and compliance,  so please check with your compliance officers. I absolutely can. Most businesses can, but you  are in that kind of like gray area where I would definitely talk to somebody in compliance on  whether or not you can respond to online reviews or not. And just more marketing opportunities,  here Oak Street has the ability for people to make appointments with them right without even  getting to their website. I'm here, I see this big write-up, I see all these five-star reviews,  I can make an appointment right here and I don't even have to click through to their website.  A lot of opportunities here just on this right here, but it goes much deeper because these results drive a lot of the local search results. So sticking with Google Business Profile,  basically if you Google Google Business Profile you get to this page, I think it's business.google.com  and basically you just can log in here. Usually what you'll need is some sort of Google related account, but what they want to do is just you need to be able to claim your account,  which if you haven't done already usually just requires a phone call or a postcard and then you  type in some digits that they mail to you. When I log in, if I do a search on my own company, I can see right here my profile. It gives me some immediate feedback on how I'm doing,  but also I can log in here and make some changes if I want to. And so I can change, when I was, I just happened to look at this and I'm like,  wow, some of this information's really out of date. So while I was in there, I just made some changes. And within 24 hours, Google's updating all the information  for my company, Flight New Media. And I can, like I said, add me to new categories, optimize my description, add photos, add hours, add Q&A sections, the whole collection.  And I, and I said before, I know I can, I'm not sure if you're allowed to, I can also respond to reviews. If you can respond to reviews, if that's okay,  absolutely respond to every single review you can, but I know that there are compliance issues here. But it does show, in general, it shows that the business cares.  It's never about responding to that one person. It's about showing that everybody who comes afterwards sees that you actually care  what people think about your business and your clients. Also, once you've done the Google Business Profile, this is a smaller impact,  but Bing has something very similar, Microsoft does, and Apple does as well. And beyond just Apple Maps, there's a lot of rumors that Apple's about to drop its own search engine,  which would obviously become the default search engine for all Apple products, all iOS products, and we know how popular the iPhone is, so this could be a huge difference maker  in the next couple years. It's just a good idea to also do the same thing you just do with Google, with Apple, and with Microsoft.  And then reviews. So people are going to leave you reviews whether or not you want them to, period. Sometimes they might do it on Facebook or LinkedIn,  sometimes they'll do it on Google. These reviews are allowed by the SEC. This is something they said, yes, it's fine for people to leave reviews.  However, you cannot cherry pick them. Now, in Google, you don't have that opportunity anyways, but if you're on another platform,  there are places where you can actually delete reviews, probably not a good idea. You can't lead people. You can't tell them, hey, it'd be great if you leave me a review on Google.  You can't lead them in terms of telling them what to say. You need to avoid any entanglement, which basically is everything I've said so far.  There are strict rules when it comes to this, especially for financial advisors, and even with all this being said, again, you really should talk to compliance  because your business may have different rules, even though the SEC has said, yeah, it's okay, your business may have different rules,  and you obviously need to stay in compliance for all this.  And then it's what can you do on your website? Everything so far we've talked about is kind of off your website. What can you do on your website that will improve your chances  of getting into that local pack and ranking higher for local-based searches? The first thing is you wanna reference your, yes, question. I'm just making that up.  Nice.  You came all the way up from Maine just to see me speak? I literally speak there about every other week. All right, well, nice to see you here.  And I brought this up as a good example, so now I feel good. I'm not gonna break you over the cross. Reference the location. Now, obviously, she's done this here  with Bangor and Portland being their two offices, but what I'm talking about also is throughout your website, a natural-sounding copy, just work in the city, the state, whatever.  You wanna paint a picture for Google and the people visiting your website that you are integrated into the community. That's really the goal here,  but every time you mention your city without overdoing it, it kind of reinforces to Google this is where they are.  The physical address of where you are, which they've done here. They are not putting in P.O. boxes. P.O. boxes mean nothing to Google, so you really wanna have a physical address,  and it's supposed to be where you can see clients. Local phone number. For us, it's 207 because there's only one area code in the great state of Maine,  and it's probably gonna stay that way. But use your local phone numbers. Don't use an 800 number.  Make sure there's a page for each location. If you only have one location, you still should have a page on it. Talk about the city. Talk about the neighborhood.  Talk about the local schools. Talk about the local sports teams. Anything you do to really reinforce that you are a physical location here, and you serve your local community.  And if you're lucky enough to have multiple locations, then a page for every single location that you have.  I would embed them, yes.  It's trickier for you. You can put into your Google business profile a service area. They give you a map. You can draw a line around it, but it never seems to have as big an impact  as when you have a physical location. There are some hacks and workarounds around that. Google usually finds them and squashes them, because they're Google.  But there are some things that you could do. And you might even consider, is there a tech hub or something similar where you could rent out a space?  That probably wouldn't be the first thing I'd do, but if this is a big issue for you, it might be worth, and I don't know what real estate goes for in your neck of the woods,  and if there's something that's $500 or less a month just to do it, it might be worth doing it, even if you just are there once a month. Was there another question? Yeah.  Yes. Yeah.  Sometimes, if you try enough times, you'll get in, but there is no guarantee, and it may not be where you wanna spend your time, quite honestly.  Yes.  Is it a business profile? Is that one of the best there? I would do different ones for each branch, for sure.  All right, I would embed a map. I would embed, obviously, a Google map. I would put it on my contact page, and potentially, in the footer of every single page.  These are just, Google loves to see you using Google products. It's just another great way of doing it.  And then get local links, and I'll talk a little bit more about links later on, but getting links from other businesses, local businesses, and organizations to your website  can be very beneficial for your local search visibility. So that's what you need to do for local search. Let's move into organic search,  and I can see already that I'm gonna go over, so I'm gonna, oh, actually, no, we go till quarter of, right? Yeah, all right. I'm gonna still go quickly,  and I know everybody here is like, he hasn't even breathed yet. Like, how is he gonna go quicker than this? Yes.  I feel the same way about SEO companies from India, quite honestly, so I feel your pain.  I think it's a little bit of the cost of doing business. There are things you can do with captures, but I'm always worried that really difficult captures  would keep away legitimate businesses, so I try and just think of it like, if I get three a day, and one of them's legit, it only took me a few seconds to hit the delete button, so.  Organic SEO, and I know we saw that it's often at the bottom of the page, and you're never gonna rank well for your most promising, juiciest keywords,  but there is a lot of benefits to it, so I wanna kinda talk about it. To rank well in the organic area, there's on-page things you can do. There are off-page things that you can do,  which is basically link building, and then there's some technical SEO, and I'm gonna go through all of them right now. So, like with paid search,  the first thing you're gonna do is some keyword research. You may think that everybody's searching for fee-only financial planner, but maybe people don't search that way.  Maybe it's fiduciary. Maybe they have no idea what either one is. So, brainstorm your best keyword phrases for sure. Think about things like,  what are the products and services that you bring to market? What are the informational queries that you get regularly? What are some long-tail searches,  which basically just means those more niche-y topics where people might add in a bunch of words or ask a longer question that you can answer,  and then what are some FAQs, some frequently asked questions that you get too? This is the beginning of your keyword research. So, you wanna brainstorm all the different things  that you do, the questions that you get that would lead to business, all this sort of stuff, and then you're gonna use a tool like Google Ads Keyword Planning Tool,  which I mentioned earlier. Yes, this is organic SEO, but this is a great free tool that you can use if you wanna do this on your own, and here I put in a few search terms,  financial advisor, fee-based financial services, and fiduciary financial provider. Google started to make some suggestions on related things  because they have this history of search. They know what people are searching for. They give me some of my different ideas, and then they also show me here the two that I had.  Financial advisor has 135,000 searches a month. The fee-based financial one had 40. So, we just immediately know which one is gonna get us a lot more traffic  if we can rank well for it, but it'll also tell me what the competition is, and if I am gonna do paid search, it'll tell me what I should expect to pay for that as well,  but it also gives me a bunch of other related search terms that might be good, and generally what I would do is I would take the one that's most popular and use it first on my page,  but then I'd also use semantically related search terms later on my page, too, to kind of catch all those possible searches.  Another tool that we use is something called Ahrefs, and this is mostly more of an agency-level tool, but you can definitely use it. Anybody can spend money to get it,  and so this will tell you how likely you are, how easy it will be or difficult it will be to rank for a specific keyword. So, I typed in financial advisor,  and out of a possible hundred, it said 93. In other words, super high. Like, you're just not gonna rank well for this search term for your individual firm probably ever,  and it's probably not gonna be worth it. It tells me how many searches there are per month. It tells me who's the top result, how much traffic they likely get a month from that,  but like I said, it's gonna be hard for you to get there, but once I narrow this down to financial advisor Louisville, suddenly it's easy. It's a four.  Now, this isn't every aspect of SEO, but it does start to give you a sense of what are the keywords that you should be going after because you're gonna get better results.  Now, obviously, if you put in Louisville financial advisor  or financial advisor Louisville into your pages on your website, you're also getting the benefit of having financial advisor.  So, you're getting both, but you really wanna be focused on those longer tail searches to get the quality traffic, even though it's less. So, I think a lot of people sort of like  to go to financial planner and try to keep the advisor off of their website. Okay. I've heard people like making, writing financial advisor in like the columns  in the background so that it's on their website.  Never do that. So, just for people who didn't hear, two great points. One is, don't try and hide words on your website because that went out of style in 1997  and Google will definitely penalize you for that. The second thing is if you like financial planner, but people are searching for financial advisor,  and I don't know which one's more popular. I did not look into that. You should use what you wanna be known as, but you also have to use what your customers use.  And early in my career, we had a lot of plastic, I'm sorry, cosmetic surgeons as clients and they would wanna talk about rhinoplasty  and I would say, nobody is searching for rhinoplasty, but people do wanna get nose jobs. So, we can say, nose jobs, professionally referred to as rhinoplasty, dot, dot, dot.  So, you can explain, what is the difference between a financial planner and a financial advisor? That's literally like one of the first blog posts that I would probably write.  Versus fiduciary financial planner. You know, to work that in there because those are some great keywords and you can educate people as they're on their journey.  That help?  I can also use this tool for competitive analysis. So, I can take in one of my competitors, put their URL in there and start to see what kind of keywords are they ranking for?  Maybe there's some keywords that I hadn't thought of that they're actually ranking really well for. I should add that. I should write content about that  and put that on my website as well.  Like, that's Ahrefs, great tool, maybe more than you necessarily need unless you're gonna be doing this for a while, but it is a great tool. So, it's Ahrefs, A-H-R-E-F-S.  There are a bunch of tools out there, that's just the one that we ended up settling on.  Once you know what the keywords are that you wanna go after, then it just comes down to creating that optimized content for your website.  And I know I've talked to hundreds of businesses over the years and one of the things I always hear is I actually want less copy on my website,  people don't read, we've got too much content. And I promise you, if SEO is one of your goals, you do not have nearly enough content on your website.  People may not read, but Google does. People skim, so using headers, subheaders, breaking it up, making it easy to read, lots of white space, lots of images, lots of examples,  that just makes for great content, but you still wanna have that copy on your page so Google understands what you're all about. You wanna focus your attention on your homepage,  which is the number one page people will link to and the number one page people will visit. Your service pages, don't combine all your services  onto one page, every single service deserves its own page. Google loves focus that way. Your about page, this is a great opportunity to talk about the people on your team,  your neighborhood, all that sort of stuff. And then I'm a big fan of blogs, if you don't like the term, you think it sounds kind of too, I don't know,  new agey or something, then just call it your article section or your news section. But you wanna have a resources section where you can create content whenever you want to,  really going down those long tail search terms.  So some SEO copy considerations as you're writing, again, focus each page on one specific search term you're going after.  Every page gets a title tag, which I'll show you in a minute. Always lead with the keywords that you're trying to rank well for.  Always put that at the beginning of your page titles. Use those keywords in the headers and subheaders on that page.  And use semantically related words, financial planner versus financial advisor versus fiduciary, so on and so forth. And use power words, best, world class,  whatever it may be, but these are words that have almost nothing to do with SEO, but tend to really help when you are using them in your copy.  I'm not saying like braggadocio kind of things, but there's certain keywords like most renowned or whatever it may be that can actually make a big difference to your conversion rate  once people get to your website. And if I didn't say that before, one important thing to keep in mind is optimizing your website for SEO  and not having a website that convert visitors into prospects and customers is useless. So at the end of the day, we still need to have great websites  that talk to our audience and build trust and get them to take an action. So here's a typical page, and I wanna show you where you put your keywords.  So this is a page obviously on investment and retirement planning. In the title tag, I know it's almost impossible  to see this, but the title tag says investment and retirement planning, Chris Reddick financial planning LLC. That's perfect. It's exactly what they are offering for this service,  and then they have the brand name at the end.  And this is what it looks like when you do the Google search. It's usually big blue, but I visited this page so I got purple, but it's right up there and that's what you see.  You also wanna make sure that you put your keywords into your H1 tags. I didn't look at the underlying code, but there's one H1 tag per page, which is your header tag.  That goes there, but then you also wanna use it in your H2 and H3 tags as well, which are the subheads. I probably would have written something differently here.  I would have changed up the wording here, made it semantically related, but not the same thing. Also, this could have been like, I don't know where Chris is,  but it could have been something like Louisville retirement and investment planning, or Louisville's best retirement and investment planning,  something like that, similar but not the same. And then he's also got it down here as well, he's broken it out, so it's in the H3 tags too.  And then they've also got really relevant keywords in their body copy, investment planning, exchange traded funds, ISOs, RSUs, all these sort of things.  These are all great related semantic keywords that help Google understand what this page is about, even though I don't understand what this page is about.  And the only missed opportunity that I can see here is all of these should have been links that went either to deeper service pages  or blog posts that they wrote on these individual topics. That great intra-linking is really powerful as well, and it helps Google understand what your site is about  and what the most important pages are.  And so then blogs and articles, and I have been a big proponent of blogging since almost the beginning of blogging. It's been huge for our business, it's been huge for our clients,  it really can make the difference. It's great for that early stage awareness and possibly consideration phases of the customer journey. It's great for long-tail search.  There's more opportunities to rank. As we saw in the first few slides, the nichier you get, the more likely you are to rank because there's less competition there.  Links from, so you can take these articles that are getting SEO traffic, link to the service pages that they're related to. So in this case, it could be,  you link to your estate planning page. That passes that search engine juice along to your service pages, so that can help too.  It helps establish credibility. There's a lot of evidence, research-based evidence, that often the first person you engage with or hear from or connect with  is the person you end up going with. So if somebody's just starting their journey and they find you, and maybe you've got a reason for them to join your email newsletter  to stay on top of all the recent trends, now you may have a customer for life. So getting in early can be a real huge benefit as well.  And one other tool I wanna talk about, this is actually an AI-driven tool called Market News, and I use this quite a bit. So here's a search I did on Boise Financial Advisor.  What it will do is pull the top 20 results from Google and it will tell me basically how they're doing on a specific, on specific search criteria  so I know could I rank well for Boise Financial Advisor if that was my business. It'll break it down like you're seeing here. The other thing that you can do  is use this to rank well for specific search terms. So if your goal was to rank well for estate planning, I can take an article that's already on my website  that maybe used to rank well or maybe is just off the first page of Google search results and I can plug it into this tool and it will tell me how I'm doing  versus how the average page in the top 20 is doing and give me hints. It's almost like having an SEO coach and they're yelling in your ear telling you,  oh, you need to use this word a few more times. And so I can, as I'm making changes, like if I work, I don't have estate plans on this page at all,  but the typical page that ranks well has it one to two times I know that I can just type it, work it in in a natural way one or two times  and that's gonna be another check to my benefit. Now that doesn't mean that I'm gonna rank well for this. Again, I'm probably not gonna beat out NerdWallet,  but again, if I'm going for something like Boise, like for a specific geographic area, now I have a lot of opportunity to rank well here.  So this just helps you, doesn't guarantee it, but it helps you write content that A, answers your prospects questions better,  but also will help you rank higher in the search engines. So a great tool that I love to use.  And then inbound links. So when Google first came out with this thing called PageRank back in the late 90s, one of the first things they did,  which was different than any other search engine at the time was they said, we're gonna pay attention to who's linking to who, because those are votes of confidence  the way that we look at it. And although it's changed quite a bit over the years, they still look at inbound links as a really important criteria.  So if you're basically trying to get higher and you've done everything you can, especially on the on-page stuff, this is the off-page stuff that's gonna make the difference.  How do you get these inbound links? Google will find out if you just pay for them. It's not a good idea to just pay for them, but you could write for other publications.  There's guaranteed to be fiduciary blogs out there that are looking for guest writers, and if you like to write, you write for them. Chances are you won't get paid,  but you'll get a link from their website, which is all about financial planning, to your website, usually with a keyword link to something like Boise Financial Planner.  That's a huge benefit to you. If you don't like to write, the next thing I'd recommend is get on some podcasts. Get on a podcast. Besides getting in front of an audience  that you might not get in front of otherwise, most podcasts have show notes, and in the show notes, they'll link from their website to your website.  So I would go for, are there some local podcasts? Usually these days, Chambers of Commerce have podcasts. There's all these local podcasts as well.  Are there also more business-oriented or fiduciary podcasts that you could get on that would link to you too? So those are all places you can get inbound links.  There are directories for financial advisors. We saw some of these. You may need to pay to get to the top of their list, but that's still okay as far as Google's concerned,  and you'll get links off. Also, if you're a paying member to an organization like NAPFA, they may have an opportunity for you to get a link as part of the membership directory,  and that can be beneficial as well.  Sponsor local events. This is something I just recently learned. So Google will penalize you if you pay a local organization to link to your website,  but if you give them $500 or $5,000 for their local fundraiser or their annual this or whatever their sponsorship is, and part of it is that they'll link to you,  that's totally kosher. So find local organizations, support them, should be in alignment with your belief. Financially, get a link from them, go back to your website.  That's also gonna help as well.  And then any sort of local guides or directories or a lot of them out there, sometimes if you just Google, you'll see some local ones,  and those are probably the ones that I would start with. All of those are great opportunities for you to get inbound links to your business. They tend to stay up for a long time,  and as long as they're relevant from the topic or geography of the blog or podcast or resource in question, they will benefit you.  And then there's some technical SEO as well. So technical SEO is basically what do you need to do on your website so that Google will have the easiest time possible  understanding what your website is, and are you giving a good experience to the visitor to your website? And a couple years ago, I put together a proposal for a local client,  a local prospect. Here's the SEO we can do, the local SEO, the paid search, and the technical SEO, and they're like, well, we're just gonna go with the technical SEO for right now,  and then we'll see how it goes, and if we rank well, we'll hire you for more. And I said, keep your money, because the bottom line is you're never going to rank well for doing  just technical SEO. That's like, you're going to be in a road race, technical SEO is making sure your shoes are tied.  Critically important, but it's not going to make you a fast runner. That's the least you can do. Technical SEO is like that.  Critically important, it's going to prevent you if you don't do it right, from ranking well at Google, but in and of itself it's not going to make a difference.  So what do you need to do? Make sure that your website is HTTPS versus HTTP. That's been around for a while, but that's a critical thing, and I still see that out  there where people are not using the SSL certificates on their website. Page speed is becoming a critical factor as well, although Google overemphasizes how important  this is, because one of the things I've noticed is the best ranking pages on our website that  get the most search traffic are also the slowest loading ones, because they tend to be much longer and more in-depth articles, sometimes with videos embedded and things like that.  So all that sort of stuff will slow down a page. But you do want your website to load really quickly, and you can look in your, used to  be Universal Analytics or Google Analytics, now it's GA4, you can get page rankings and page speed improvement recommendations right from Google.  Make sure that all of your images have alt tags behind them. That's a critical thing as well, and that you're using meta description tags.  Meta keyword tags don't matter, never have, but meta description tags, which are the one to two sentences that often appear under your search results, those do have, if not  direct impact, they have indirect impact, because very often, if you have a really juicy description under your link in Google and people click on you more than the people above  you, which happens all the time, Google starts seeing your pages more valuable and moves you up in the search results.  Make sure your website doesn't have any broken links, either internal broken links or even external broken links, and there are tools you can use online for free or nearly free  that can check that for you and let you know. And finally, anything that's a bad user experience.  Have you ever been to a website and they've got like some sort of like rotating images and as they do, the copy on the page shifts up and down, like things like that that's  a terrible user experience, or I doubt any of you have ads on your website, but sites  with too many ads and too many pop-ups, those all negatively impact your search engine visibility, all other things being equal.  And then I just want to wrap up, we're getting close to the end, with a couple of tools. So if you want to do this and understand what's working and what's not working, you really  want to have some tools like the Google Search Console, which is free and can be connected  to your Google, to your GA4, your Google Analytics 4, but this will give you more information  about what search terms are you ranking for, how often you're being clicked when you appear  in those searches and other information that's very beneficial to you or your SEO to improve your search visibility.  And then there's GA4, which is the new iteration of Google Analytics, if you do go into your  Google Analytics, you may have noticed that as of July 1st this year, it's not collecting any new data.  Google has replaced it with GA4, they actually ended up just giving everybody GA4 and setting  it up, but you really need to spend some time on GA4, understand it and then you kind of  make it trace how people are using your website, so it's an iterative process, it's an amazing tool but it has a sharp, steeper learning curve than Google Analytics ever did, but  you can get great data about how people are finding your website and using your website and what type of search terms and how you're ranking for all this.  If you are nerdy like me and you like this stuff, it is absolutely fascinating and you'll learn a whole bunch.  And then Ahrefs, that tool that I mentioned earlier, this is a great tool, one thing Google doesn't tell you is how you rank compared to your competitors, but with a tool like  Ahrefs you can tell them all of your competitors, who you decide are your competitors and track  for specific keywords and see how you're doing versus them, are they starting to take the  lead on you, are you overcoming them, so that's something to keep in mind too because although you may be friendly with some of the other financial advisors in town, the bottom line  is they're your competition and you want to get as much of the relevant business as you can, so these are things to keep in mind.  And then the last thing I just want to touch on is YouTube. As you probably know, YouTube is owned by Google, it's the second most popular search  engine in the world, obviously it's all videos, and this is a search I did on what is a 529 college saving plan.  Now you may say, I would never go to YouTube and search that, but other people have, a lot of other people have, and because Google owns YouTube, if I did the same search in  YouTube, in Google, they're going to show, they'll often show me results from YouTube, so that's another way that you can be driving traffic.  So we create these videos, all these different 529 ones, and as you can see, some of them  have over 100,000 views, that's pretty impressive, you create a three to five minute video explaining  one small thing about your services or business, you're building trust, then what you can do is you can take this video, you can embed it back on your website, pop it in a blog  on the same topic, now somebody's spending one, two, five minutes longer on that page, and you know who's paying attention to that?  Google through their Google Analytics 4, and they start seeing, wow, people are spending  a lot more time on this page, it must be valuable, I'm going to raise up the search ranking for this page, all things being equal.  But so videos can have a huge impact because it can improve your opportunity to be found on YouTube, in Google search, and also has an SEO benefit when it's placed on your website.  I'm sure you feel like I've thrown a lot your way today, I often get that response, but what should you work on first?  As you go back home, wherever home is, after this weekend, after you've enjoyed the Kentucky Derby or the Churchill Downs Museum, after you've enjoyed all the local bourbons that  they have here, what should you work on first? And I would argue that the first thing you want to work on is actually fixing your website.  As I referenced earlier, if you spend all this time and money on SEO and paid search and you drive all this traffic to your website, but your website isn't ready to convert those  visitors into prospects or clients, you've wasted all your time and effort on this. So I really recommend making sure that all your pages are set up to build trust and get  people to take the next step in their customer journey, which is hopefully booking a time, giving you their contact information, joining your mailing list, whatever your calls to  action may be. After that, I'd probably optimize my site for local. I would go into Google My Business or Google Business Profile, sorry they changed the name  on me, Google Business Profile, I'd go through that whole process, I'd optimize it, I'd also probably think about the reviews, what can I do there, find out from compliance, all  the things that we talked about, focus on local next. After that, I'd probably go on paid, and the reason why I say paid is because we saw the  real estate that's available for people who are willing to pay for it. You obviously have to be smart about, you know, your spend.  I always recommend that people understand what is your customer lifetime value. There's a big difference if your customer lifetime value, if your customer spends $50,000  with you over their lifetime versus if they spend $5,000, because then you really know how much is it worth to get that client, how much should I be spending on my ads.  And then after that, I'd move on to organic. There's a lot of benefits to organic, it does take a little bit longer to get started.  I obviously want to see you do all of these things, but that is the priority that I would take if I went back home this weekend and was trying to get more search traffic for  my own business. One thing I do want to hammer home is that you do not need the world to see you.  You cannot, if everybody wanted to do business with you, you wouldn't be able to handle it. What you want to do is make sure that the right people find you, and that's why we talk  about focusing your ads geographically and with the right keywords, why we talk about creating content that's going to bring the right people to you based on who you want  to work with and who you can best serve. You really need to make that a big focus. SEO is really just a culmination of business best practices online.  I mentioned I've got some free resources, I'd love you to take advantage of them. I have a paid search, actually I shouldn't call it a guide, it's a workbook.  You can basically fill in your own information. I've got a financial planner keyword list, so I did some SEO keyword research for you.  Obviously it's not specific to your business or your geography, but it at least will get you started if you want to start doing this.  I've got a couple of videos on local SEO so you have a better understanding of what exactly you need to do to rank higher in local search, and a few other fun things as well  in there, definitely worth it. I'd love to take questions, love to answer any questions, but first I just want to thank  you all for your time and attention today, and I appreciate you giving me undivided attention during this period.  All right, and I see some hands, I don't know if we have a mic guy here, otherwise I'll just... Oh, we do. I'll let the mic guy decide who we're going to answer questions.  On the Google business page, how often should you be updating pictures, things on there?  I don't think you have to do it regularly. I think you need to put more time and effort into the beginning.  That being said, it might be not a bad idea to every six months check to see if it's still fresh and relevant.  Every time I forget to when I go in there, I'm like, that person hasn't worked here in five years, why is their photo still the primary photo, things like that.  The other thing we didn't get into is there's something called Google posts, where you can  actually post, it's almost like a social media post except zero people see it, but for some reason it benefits your SEO, so you could be talking about an open house or a lunch  and learn you're doing, and that's a great place to put that too. So we didn't talk about it, but Google posts in your Google business profile can be very beneficial. Thank you.  Other questions? So could you talk a little bit more about landing pages specifically for our industry?  Because you see a lot of like really high pressure sales landing pages when you click on a link from Facebook, that's not going to work for us.  Right. First of all, I'm sure there are people in the audience or outside of here who might feel like, oh no, I definitely want to do high pressure, that's our vibe.  So I would say that my recommendation is just lean into whoever you are. If you're more supportive and more helpful and that's your thing, then make sure the  words on that page represent that. But landing pages are obviously, or not obviously, they're all about like what was the link that  somebody just clicked on, because they were off of our website and we're trying to drive them to a very specific message.  So it could just be something about like agitating their pain points, like, hey, are you looking to save money for college?  Are you unsure if it's the 529 plan you need or something else? Or which 529 plan? We've worked with a lot of people who've gone through the same thing you have and we've  helped them save enough money for college. And if you can, you can even have customer testimonials there, but maybe you can't.  Then you might have things like, here's what people have said about us online. You could actually take copy and paste and show reviews right there. Again, talk to compliance.  And then what is the call to action? Book a time with me. Book a free consult. If you have questions, I would love to be able to answer them. Book a free consult.  Or download this planning guide where you can literally plug in some numbers and it will get, and it will provide you how much you should be putting away and what the best  plan is for you. And obviously, I'm shooting from the hip on some of these answers, but that's the idea.  It's like you want to be there to build trust and just kind of like provide them some sort of value.  And very often what I'll do is I will require somebody to give me at least an email address and then I'll send them the information.  And anybody who scanned in the QR code probably already has discovered this because you have  to give me your email address to get all that good stuff, but of course you can unsubscribe at any time. That's how I do it and I found that to be the most effective way.  Not high pressure. That's not my vibe either, but giving people enough information that it's helpful to them,  that there's a trade-off, and then they can always walk away afterwards if they want to.  And I'll stick around afterwards because I know I've seen some other hands here too. So I'll stick around outside if we run out of time. Yes? Comment and then a quick question.  Sure. So one website hosting, we had a fairly reputable large firm hosting our site, but they were not monitoring it and our site crashed and we had somebody come in.  We had 26 plug-ins that were out of date and so they basically shut us down. So we had that cleaned up and our SEO kind of went through the roof.  So paying for monitoring is just something I wanted to, because I don't think any of us think about that.  I surely didn't. It's a great point. Yeah. You never want your website to be shut down because then Google's like, maybe they went out of business.  It can really be a negative impact and take a while to build up. It sounds like you're on WordPress, which is our favorite platform too.  And so basically, this isn't a pitch for us, but we have plans that we look in every month to make sure people have all the plug-ins up to date.  If you don't have a developer who's doing that, that is something at least once a month you should go in and WordPress will actually tell you what should be updated and just stay  on top of all those security. Because that's why they shut you down, because those plug-ins were out of date and they become security risks.  And once one person's in through your website, they can affect every single website on the hosting environment. So, yeah.  It's probably not your hosting company's job to be on top of that. It's probably your web developers, quite honestly, or your own. Yep.  And we just kind of didn't know the responsibility. Exactly. We had a beautiful site, but then it went out of sight and we're like, oh, I guess we didn't do that. Right.  That's like that technical SEO thing. If your website's not up, that's also a problem. Yeah. So it helped a ton. Yeah. I'm curious on reposting.  As new things come about, we have a pretty long blog. Is that valuable? Like, should you repost it again under the same or just make a whole new post and copy and paste?  I think the best thing to do in general, if you've got a page that's already ranking well, but maybe information's out of date because new laws have been passed on 529, I would  have had a blog post that the URL or the slug might have been like mycompany.com slash blog slash 529 rules, right, something like that.  When it's updated, I would go back to that page, update that information, and then just hit the republish button on WordPress or whatever your platform may be.  That's the best way because you have likely other people have linked to that page, and if you create a new piece of content, they're not linking to that new piece of content.  So best practices these days is have a non-dated blog post URL and then just continue to keep it up to date as necessary. Some stuff may be evergreen.  Some stuff, the laws change, you want to stay on top of that.  You talked about reviewing the ad costs compared to the lifetime value of the client. Do you have a percentage there that you like to target or how do you know when is it too  much, not enough? Well, the way that I would normally work it, there's not like one right answer for everybody,  but if you know what your customer lifetime value is, which is not something most businesses look at, maybe fiduciary financial planners are different, but most businesses I deal  with, it's a foreign concept to them. So helping them get to the point where they understand like how much money do people spend  with us on average over the lifetime, and then starting to work backwards. So if I send out a proposal or whatever you do in your industry, I know that 33 to 35%  of our proposals close. So then I work backwards from there, okay, so how many do I need, and then I work backwards  from there, like how many people who fill out my contact form end up with me sending them a proposal.  So I work backwards like that until I know how much can I spend on each ad that somebody clicks on based on what percentage of people who click lead to what percentage of people  who fill out my contact form lead to what percentage of people who get a proposal lead to what percentage of people commit, obviously that's some math there which I don't like,  but once I get to that number, then I know exactly what's the highest amount I can pay per lead and still make money, and that's how I look at it when I'm being fiduciary about it.  Did I use that word right? Thank you.  Yeah, I was just curious if the goal is to increase the overall domain authority of your  website for organic traffic through link building, what's the latest thinking on if social backlinks  matter at all, because obviously Google and Meta don't like each other, and so does it matter? Right.  So almost every link from a social media site carries with it what's called a nofollow, which basically tells Google there's no SEO juice being passed.  It doesn't mean the link is bad, and obviously a link from social media can get you business  so there's no harm in that, but social media is not where I go for link building, I definitely  go for established websites, blogs, podcasts, or online guides as the most valuable, and if by chance you can get links from .govs or .edu sites, maybe you're teaching a program  at a local college, or they're using some of your resources, sometimes you can talk to the professor and get them to link from that, or you're doing something for the government,  that can all be beneficial. Those links, not because they're .gov or .edu, but because they tend to give out fewer links, the links to you carry more juice.  I've heard people say that sometimes doing page search can help your organic search, it's sort of a back door bribe to Google essentially.  Google says no, and I've never seen any evidence to refute that, so my belief is those are two different things that both get you to the front page of Google, but how much you  spend, it's not like Yelp back in the day where it's like suddenly your rankings went up if you started spending money on their ads. As far as I can tell, they're very separate.  And lastly, do we have evidence yet that Google is sort of penalizing people that are using chat GPT? Great question, I love talking about this.  The short version is Google has come out, and of course you can only believe Google as much as you can believe Google, but they've come out and they've said it's not about,  we want the best content possible. If the best content possible that you're creating is created by chat GPT or that it is enhanced by chat GPT or any other AI, that's fine.  So it's not a penalty per se, but I will say, although chat GPT brings up the bottom half  of America in terms of their ability to write, I will say that good copywriters, good content  creators can still outperform chat GPT, and I actually have an article on my blog recently talking about how do you keep a human voice in the age of AI and some of the specific  tactics you can use to write higher quality content than chat GPT can come out with, but it is an ongoing battle.  And if I came back here next year and gave the same presentation, I might have a very different answer for you. And when I say next year, it could be next week.  But the bottom line is right now, there's no penalty for AI-created content, but there is a certain sameness in most GPT to AI-created content.  There are ways around it, but it does take extra work. So I love chat GPT. I actually prefer Claude, which is a competitor, but I use it for ideation and I use it sometimes  to frame out an article just so I understand what are the things I need to talk about, but I always end up writing it myself.  Then sometimes I'll go back to Claude or chat GPT and I'll be like, how could you improve this article?  And I'll see if they have any comments or topics that I want to kind of work into it. But right now, I still think that humans have to be involved in this, but Google has basically  said, as long as it's the best quality content, that's all we care about. I don't know, there's a hand here and a hand back there.  For those of us who have virtual firms and maybe where our fiscal location is, it's not where our target clients are, what is the best approach to show up in local searches  elsewhere other than the paid ads, or is it just the paid? Paid is going to be your number one.  You can still rank in local search, but probably not in that local pack, unless you're service, like are you a national, like, okay, well, do you have offices all over? No. Okay.  That is a challenge, so it's going to be harder to, I don't think you'll have much left getting in the local pack, but you might in certain areas.  If there's not as much competition in a certain area, probably more rural areas, you'll have better chances of being found there, but it is going to be more difficult.  You can go in and put in your service location, but if your service location is U.S., it's kind of going to be so diluted, I don't know that that's where I put my effort.  I'd put it in paid search, and I would focus on the locations where I most want to build my business. Okay. And there's one more.  Yeah, how about using virtual offices where you don't even have an office there, but it's, you know, like...  Google's gotten much stricter about that in terms of doing that sort of thing. I'm not saying you can't do it, and we've certainly worked with some of our clients  on that when they don't have it, or they have like a subsection of their business, and so they come up with a new office number within there, but, you know, there's ways around it.  Google will... It's just tricky. Like, sometimes it's just brute force trying again and again and again until you finally get through, but there's no guarantee.  At a certain point, you might just say, this is not where the ROI is. I need to look elsewhere for another solution. And was there a hand over here somewhere?  Are there safeguards in place to prevent people like with malicious intent from clicking accessibly on paid ads in Google? There definitely are.  That was a huge problem maybe 15 years ago. It's much less of a problem. There's a lot of things put in place to limit... Doesn't mean that it never happens.  But what usually can't happen is somebody regularly abusing it. Like if they see that one person is clicking on the same ad over and over again, first  of all, they wouldn't show the next time, they wouldn't count it as another link. But if you went every day and clicked on your competitor's link, Google would start to catch on.  Okay. Because obviously there's a conflict that exists for Google not to stop that as well, right? Because... In the short term, yes, it's against their...  But in the long term, it makes a lot of sense for them to put those safeguards in place so you can trust them. Can I ask one last question? Yes. All right.  What does it look like for Google? That was one of the first jobs I was drafting as far as, you know, AdWords clicking? Yeah.  It doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, but it's kind of like the... It doesn't happen as much and it doesn't... You can't like just kind of pile on.  Like, you can definitely go to your competitor's website and click on a link once or twice, but you know, what's that going to do besides waste everybody's time?  I know it was a big problem.  It was a huge problem back in the day, but they've gotten much, much stricter about it because I think when they first built it, they never thought that people would basically  try and drain their competitor's budget by clicking on it 17 times and then they're like, oh, I guess this is an issue because people are jerks. So... All right.  I don't know if anybody has any other questions. We're definitely out of time. I have some business cards up here if you want to talk to me and I'll be around for  a little while longer if anybody has other questions they didn't want to ask in front of the group. Thanks again. Appreciate it. Thank you.