Six Ways To Improve Website SEO And Attract More Visitors - With Joey Donovan Guido

Tom Bailey, founder of Succeed Through Speaking, interviews Joey Donovan Guido.

Joey Donovan Guido is the owner of Cuppa SEO Web Design, and author of the book, A Holistic Guide to Online Marketing. In addition to running his web design firm, Joey is a speaker and consults as a marketing director to large organisations — improving their overall marketing initiatives. Joey is an expert in the areas of web design, SEO, user experience and website conversion.

Resources / Links

https://www.cuppaseo.com/seo-checkup/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeydonovanguidocuppaseo/

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Transcript

Tom Bailey  00:07

Hello and welcome to succeed through speaking the place for experts and entrepreneurs who want high value ideas to boost business results. Hello, I'm Tom Bailey. And in today's episode, I'll be getting to know Joey Jonathan Guido, who is the owner of copper SEO, web design, an expert speaker, and he's also the author of the book a holistic Guide to Online Marketing. So, Joey, hello, and a very warm welcome to today's episode.

Joey Guido  00:43

Hey, Tom, thanks for having me today.

Tom Bailey  00:45

I really appreciate you being here. And just out of interest, I guess for everyone listening whereabouts in the world are you right now?

Joey Guido  00:52

I am in Madison, Wisconsin, but I'm a native New Yorker.

Tom Bailey  00:56

Excellent. Thank you so much. And never been but one day, hopefully I can head over in that direction. If these COVID restrictions are ever lifted, yeah. And so yeah, incredible. Thank you for that. And I just want to share a little bit more about you before we do get started. And that is that Joey is an expert in the areas of web design, SEO, user experience, and also website conversion. And in addition to running his web design firm, Joey also consults as a marketing director to large organizations, helping to improve their overall marketing initiatives. The title for today's episode is six ways to improve your SEO on your website and attract more visitors. And Joe's gonna show us how to do this in just seven minutes. And no pressure at all. First question is, who are your ideal clients?

Joey Guido  01:43

Yeah, so my ideal client is kind of shifted over the years. But right now, it's kind of landed on larger small businesses or to enterprise level, so that usually somewhere in the millions had a couple that have been beyond that into the billions, which is like, just hard to fathom. Yeah, yeah. And it's really, it's really clients that that, you know, have short term needs, like SEO or web design, build. But then longer term needs, like maybe help with their content long term with their blog, or with training their team so they can so they can do some of this work themselves long term?

Tom Bailey  02:19

Absolutely. And when you think of these large million, potentially billion dollar organizations, what would you say is the biggest challenge that they typically face?

Joey Guido  02:27

Yeah, that that's a great question. And that the biggest challenge they typically face, it's varied, of course. But there's there's three major areas that that they all seem to struggle with, which I think every business struggles with. The first one is just getting found more often in just organic search results, right, which is the SEO portion. The second part is the user experience on their website. And there's usually something that can be improved there. And if the user experience is poor, or dreadful, even if you wind up getting someone to your site, they might just go ahead and leave. Right? Yeah. And then the third component is sometimes businesses struggle with what's called conversion or, you know, making it easy for someone to take that next step. And that's something sometimes there's too much information sometimes is that enough, sometimes they're trying to strong arm you into making a, an action. So those are the three major areas. They're all kind of connected holy.

Tom Bailey  03:20

Yeah, it's it's that getting found, if you get found, how do you make sure it's a good experience? And then, once it's a good experience, how do you make someone take that next logical step, to move towards working with you? And so I guess, if you don't have these three things in place, what impact might that have on the business?

Joey Guido  03:38

It? I mean, it's gonna affect your bottom line. Yeah, that's probably the biggest deal, right? Because your profits going to be less, but it also hits softer areas that you might not be well aware of, like, just like customer engagement, customer trust, which of course, still leads to loss of income. But you may not, you may not see that as easily. Yeah, yeah, no,

Tom Bailey  04:00

that makes complete sense. And that trust impact bottom line, all big, big things for business owners, I'm sure a lot of people listening can resonate as well. So given that, what would you say is the one piece of advice that you might give to somebody to really helped them start in solving this problem?

Joey Guido  04:17

So it's gonna sound funny, but an awkward, but I would say but to buy my book, if they needed one thing. And this is honestly not self promotion. It's just everything that we do as a business, my team and I is in that book. So especially if someone is just getting started, and they have little to no budget to do what we're talking about that book is a gold mine to really give you information. And if you have no budget at all, go to my blog, and start searching for what you need help with. There's a lot of good answers there.

Tom Bailey  04:51

I love that and like he said that, you know that book is for, you know, a few dollars 1020 30 years worth of research and information value packed into a book. So absolutely great investment as a starting point. And if people do want that, where do they find it? Oh, they

Joey Guido  05:06

can go to cup SEO calm. And then it's on Amazon, but that you can go to cup SEO and read about it and then click on the link to buy it.

Tom Bailey  05:14

Excellence a cup of seo.com. I'll put that link in the show notes as well. So people can click on that, and, and dive in. So in terms of that's a great resource. And have you got anything else that people can do in terms of? And, you know, I think he's an SEO checkup? I think you did. Have you got something you can talk about there as well?

Joey Guido  05:32

Yeah, absolutely. So I think you probably referring to those six items that maybe we want to be aware of to optimize?

Tom Bailey  05:39

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I know, they can help people with their SEO. So yeah, let's let's talk about that for a second.

Joey Guido  05:44

Yeah. So I just Just a disclaimer, we can't learn how to do it all in seven minutes. But But, but I can absolutely make you aware of it, give you a snapshot of what to look for whether you're doing yourself or having someone else do it. And that's important, because if you do hire somebody else to do it, and you're in awareness of what they should be doing, you have a much better chance at hiring the right person. Absolutely. So there are six areas on every single web page homepage sub page blog, doesn't matter, that you're going to want to make sure it's optimized. Okay. And really, what you want to do is think of your website as if it were a sandwich. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, any website could be like two pieces of bread. All right. And in life, you know, we could sustain life off two pieces of bread, but nobody wants to do that. It's not very palatable. So any website that has a URL that's paid for year after year, if I know, the web address, I can get there. Right. But otherwise, maybe I'm not really getting found organically. So what we want to do is turn those two pieces of bread into a triple decker sandwich. Yeah. So now we're talking, you know, Turkey, lettuce, tomato, mayo, or mustard if you prefer. My son, Max, if you put mustard on his sandwich, I'm sorry, nail on a sandwich. It's bad news. Yeah. Yeah, so we skip the mail for Max. But you get the idea. We there are these six items that when we stack them together, we start to build a really robust SEO website. So the first thing is you want to optimize every single title tag. And those are the little in the little gray bar at the top of the page. Yeah. Next thing is every single image, whether it's an icon, a logo, or a picture, or art. The third thing is going to be to optimize your meta description. Yeah. Fourth thing is every single headline h1, h2, h3 or whatever you're using on the site, okay, yeah. Fifth thing is your content, or your body, copy the actual copy on the page that visitors see. And the sixth thing is going to be your text links, which are kind of not used as much, but some websites still have text links. Yeah. And they still do hold SEO value. I'd say the biggest thing is when you're optimizing those headlines, and that page content, you want to make sure you're not being spammy. Yeah, it has to really still read well. And that's why I love making sure that we're optimizing every image name and alt image name I forgot to mention, as well as title tags that really can do a lot of work on the SEO and without without people being kind of bombarded by it.

Tom Bailey  08:24

And I guess this is this is what Google's algorithms read, isn't it? It's, they read that. And then they provide the best results to the searchers. So yeah, it's very, very important. Yep. Yep.

Joey Guido  08:35

Yeah, yeah. As far as your content goes, you want to make sure it's well written that it's value based, because they're looking at that, too. They're not just looking for keywords, they're looking for something that's really helpful. And then there's kind of a kind of an extra tip I can give you really quickly. And that's once this is all done. Right on your on your website, you want to do it once do it right and leave it alone, you're going to find that some SEO firms are going to offer you like a retainer based SEO freshen up every month. And unless you know, there's something they tangible that they're doing. This can often be a waste of money. Yeah. But you do need to make sure you're having fresh content on your website. Yeah. And that fresh content can come on your blog. That is where you do it.

Tom Bailey  09:21

Got it. Yeah. And I guess then, you know, Google will look at how long that web page has been there in that, you know, with those tags. So it's important, like I said, to not just keep tweaking it and changing it and having the ongoing content if you're gonna do that. Do that in the blog.

Joey Guido  09:36

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. You keep changing your content. And all of a sudden, it's like changing your phone number. And Google's like, Oh, where'd they go? Yeah. And they don't care though. This go they go to the next one in line?

Tom Bailey  09:45

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the one that consistency and that robustness of we know this is a trustworthy source because it's been there for a little while now. Okay, fantastic. That's really, really useful. Thank you and and what about yourself? So this is more of a, I guess, a personal question. And when you look at your career or SEO, your websites, what's one of your greatest mistakes or failures or key learnings that you've made? And what did you learn from it?

Joey Guido  10:12

Yeah, yeah, I try not to look at things as failures. Because I think when something does fail, there's an opportunity to learn right or for growth. And But to answer your question, you know, I say that the biggest thing that I that I feel like I failed at or struggled with was when I was in my 20s. And I was a screenwriter and an actor. And I did, I did not have the discipline to really do what I needed to do, and to focus day after day on on what I needed to do in order to become successful. Yeah. And that's something that now you know, as I'm older and running my semi second business now, there was another one years ago in New York, I've learned that, you know, I just wanted someone to knock on my door back then and say, Hey, here's a great part for you, hey, we want to buy your screenplay. And now I realize it's really comes down to, you know, the discipline of showing up every day. And building relationships, not trying to sell not trying to coerce anybody, but just really literally just building relationships, and seeing where they go.

Tom Bailey  11:16

Yeah, most people look at the Hollywood actors as Oh, you know, they that was easy that, you know, they had the natural abilities, but what you don't see is the day after day after day, you know, showing up interviews, failing roles, that yeah, it's important that you just have that consistency in that.

Joey Guido  11:33

daily action. Yeah, yeah. And that's a great point. Because just because you may fail 1000, Thomas Edison failed, like 10,000 times before he invented the light bulb. I think it's important for us to not internalize that or judge ourselves. Yeah, to look for the opportunity and to try and let it go as best as possible.

Tom Bailey  11:53

Yeah, I love that great, great learning, and that consistently show up and add value and not trying to coerce people. That's so important. Now, more than ever, and great. Thank you. And the last question for me today is what is the one question that I should have asked you, that will also bring some great value to our audience?

Joey Guido  12:10

I think I wound up answering it earlier. But I've got to have another one for you. I would say when you're looking at your website, try to look at it as objectively as possible. That's really hard. Because we are emotionally attached to our website and our businesses, whether we're a team member or the owner. But if you can look at it as objectively as possible. And just think about how do I feel about where I just landed? You know, if I'm seeing confusion or distraction, a lot of times that's very popular, have all this movement. You know, when you scroll, there's all this movement images and copy come in. And it's real fancy. And it's real cool to design. But for an end user, it's almost like a bunch of people shouting at you at the same time. Yeah. So how can I remove all that distraction? Still keep the website beautiful and engaging visually, but just serve up? What I do and how I do it and how I help you? Yeah, let's address that pain point. Yeah, that most visitors are having. Yeah, I love that. It's, yeah.

Tom Bailey  13:22

Simply simplicity, sophistication, I think is the famous saying here is and focus on that one thing that you do amazingly and help the customers find that as quickly as possible on your website. Incredible, so And Joey, it's been so useful, lots of value in this episode, and I'm so excited about sharing it with my audience. So yeah, thank you so much again for coming along today and sharing that.

Joey Guido  13:44

Thank you. Thank you, Tom.