Building a Strong Foundation: Local SEO and Beyond

Hey, hi everyone. Now, welcome to your show, E-coffee with experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Amanda Jordan, who is the Director of Digital Strategy of Ricketyroo Inc. with us. Hey, Amanda, how is it going?

It’s going great. Thank you for having me.

Lovely. Amanda, before you move forward and pick your brains, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey and how you landed in the digital marketing and SEO space? And more about Ricketyroo as well, your agency in terms of what you guys do, what you guys specialize in, and we kick it off from there.

Sure. I started that I wanted to be an engineer at first.

I am one. You won’t repend it.

We ended up in the same place. This is where all engineers end up, an SEF. I thought I wanted to be an engineer at first. On this side, that was a little bit too much math for me. I always had a love for psychology, and I was trying to figure out how I could take the design and creative elements and also some of the mathematical and scientific elements of engineering in Marriott with my love for psychology. Marketing is how you do both of those things. I just happened to fall more on the analytical side than the creative side. I went with SEO and strategy versus graphic design, which is what my actual degree is in. So many SEOs started as something else. My first job out of college was local SEO. I’ve been pretty much doing that ever since. I’ve done some e-commerce, too. I vary from very small businesses, one to two locations to hundreds of locations, doing projects with enterprise-level clients, big service providers, some of the military branches, and things like that. I’ve been around for a while, and have worked on a few different types of projects. I think one of the things that I think about differently in the agency I work for, Ricketyroo, thinks about differently, We consider all parts of SEO, local SEO, essentially, because when a client comes to us and they need to rank in Houston, Texas, it’s not just for Google Maps.

Their website needs to rank there, too. We focus on all the things that you would expect someone to focus on for a website to rank, content, link building, technical site speed, and structured data, all those things are part of our strategies and what our team does. We’re really in even conversion rate optimization. We’re trying to hit all the things that matter to our clients, and we’ll give them the best overall SEO performance because it’s not just enough to bring in traffic. We want them to convert and be actual customers for our clients.

Great. Quite a journey. I see a lot of marketers and a lot of them coming from psychology backgrounds. I have to ask you this, how much of it helps understand the brain of your target audiences when you’re doing SEO?

What I find is that for me, there’s not an overlap. Honestly, most of the overlap for me is communication with clients and understanding what they care about. Just because I think if you’re coming from a psychology background and you’re working in content, it probably plays a lot more of a role in your day-to-day and how you think about how you do your job. But because I focus on strategy, it’s interfacing with C-level executives like directors, and VPs, and making sure that I’m speaking to the things that they care about in ways that they understand and making sure they see that I’m on their side and where you have a common goal. That’s usually how it comes into play for me. It does help you be influential in getting buy-in for projects, too. Having an understanding of motivations for people and how to use that. Essentially, when an SEO is asking for buy-in, it’s because we think there’s something that we’re missing that can work. But it’s easier to do when you can communicate that effectively to the client. So that’s psychology, interest, and background and help with that as well.

Amanda, you are a speaker at some of the biggest SEO conferences. Talk about the Mosca and the bright ends of the world, right? What is your favorite part of sharing your knowledge with the SEO committee? And how is that feeling of getting on the stage with 100% in front of you and just going gaga about SEO?

Yeah. So my first time at Maascon, after I got off the stage, I immediately was like, Oh, I would do that again because it is exhilarating. One interesting thing is that for most of my life, I’ve had crippling social anxiety, but I actually love SEO so much and talking about it so much from just problem-solving. It hits all the things that I need as a person to feel fulfilled. I have a lot of intrinsic motivation to be good at my job, and I just like sharing that information with others. I genuinely just enjoy sharing information and seeing other people grow and do well. That is, of course, I love it when my agency gets more clients to you. That’s great. If I tell someone something, it’s generally what I think is the best thing for them to do, whether they’re an SEO who’s interested in moving up an industry or someone who’s, Hey, I’m in-house, and I’m not sure what to do about this problem that I have. I also enjoy putting ideas out there that will help move the industry forward. We all know SEO still has a reputation for being a little sketchy, and I think people leading the way and showing that they have integrity and care about the industry, caring about their clients, and communicating that with other SEOs and showing them that there is a way to do it where we don’t have to churn and burn clients and do things the quick and easy way.

I think it’s super impactful. The people who find a way to do it in a way that is sustainable and works for clients and can build those relationships are the ones who are truly making a difference for their clients and truly contributing to the greater SEO industry.

Absolutely. And then talk about the industry you’ve worked across quite a few, right? So what made you decide to specialize in organic growth for enterprise businesses in particular?

I like complex problems. I don’t like it when things are super easy. I don’t like having to do the same thing day in and day out. Enterprise is a match made in heaven for me because I enjoy the difficulties and the struggles that come with working with enterprise there are also opportunities to see something grow and do a lot of testing and see what works in one area and what doesn’t work in another. Do a lot of testing just to validate what you think works in SEO and what doesn’t. There are a lot of different things that are cool about working with enterprise-level clients. It’s typically when you’re working with an enterprise, you have someone in-house on their side who understands what you’re doing. You’re not trying to convince someone that SEO is important. They already understand that it’s important, and they’re just as curious and excited about the ideas you have as you are. It allows you to have some great partnerships with companies when you work on an enterprise SEO client site.

Absolutely. This is a use case of the client being aware of SEO and the overall processes. What about those clients that you’ve come across? You must have them where they would not understand that it is a marathon, not a sprint like PPC. It’s going to take 6-9 months to make things happen and see the needle moving. How do you Tell me in those clients that SEO is all about time, you have to follow the process, and not back out midway, right? What is your experience of handling such situations with such clients?

A lot of the time I do a competitor analysis and show them how far ahead their competitors are and how they likely got there. In addition to having my thoughts and philosophies about SEO strategy, I like to learn the SEO strategies of others, especially those that my client’s competitors are using for their clients. I do a lot of that, the determine, Okay, your competitors have built, I don’t know, 60 internal links to each of their location pages. You don’t even have enough content to have 10 links going to each of your location pages. We know we need to build more content in addition to having more internal links. While we’re at it, why not make that content worth something valuable to us? These are the topics that we know are related to things that your customers care about. These are people who also ask for opportunities. These are the competitor keywords where we’re not ranking for these keywords that we need to focus on as well and put those all together to be part of that strategy. Then, of course, link building also often comes into play, and they’re typically very behind in links or referring domains or just general backlinks.

It’s often one of the things, too, is we can do a lot of things right. We can do almost everything right. But if there’s a huge gap between those backlinks and your competitor editors doing everything just as well as you, there’s no reason for you to be the choice over someone who’s spent more time and energy in their strategy. That’s a lot of the conversation. The way that we talk about SEO with potential clients, we tell them that we want to see consistent, positive growth. Our goal is not to see spikes because a spike is a good sign that there’s probably something for your black hat going on that is going to eventually get caught, and then eventually that traffic is going to reverse. We want to see something that’s consistent and I think we’ve done a really good job of figuring out how to get that consistent growth. We do have clients that do have an insane amount of growth, but that’s not necessarily because we’re doing something so out of the box and amazing. It’s just that there are so many things that we had to fix, and once all those things are fixed, they’re not ranked at all or right where they should have been in the first place of the things we’ve done.

That’s how I approach those situations. They have been pretty successful at getting clients to understand that it isn’t going to be an overnight thing, that we’re just looking for sites that we are going in the right direction. Over thinking that overnight we’re going to go from ranking 45 to one for something extremely competitive and extremely competitive market.

Absolutely. And then talking about backlinks, what is your take on guest posts versus niche edits on LinkedIn sessions?

Yeah, guest posts, I don’t think it still works. It’s not like it doesn’t work or anything like that. We just find with a lot of our local SEO clients that getting topically relevant links on existing posts or existing sites that already have a lot of authority or traffic works better or focusing on truly local things. What we find a lot of times, even with franchises, is that on a location level, the competitors don’t have a ton of backlinks, even when they’re beating you out. Building out those local-level backlinks, those truly local backlinks, not citations, But from local sites, from local businesses linking to your site is impactful. We’ve even seen sites that were brand new, sites that were brand new that gave a client a backlink, and that client immediately saw a lift in visibility in traffic. It was because it came from someone who was well known in their area despite their site being brand new. It’s not always about domain authority. There’s sometimes that local relevance, especially if you can get it from a true local entity, is going to help a lot in comparison to your competitors.

Of course, it also always matters what your competitors are doing. That’s one of the cool things about local SEO is that you don’t have to be the best on the entire internet to rank for something. You just have to be better than the people in your area.

We say in our year, it’s just about staying that one step ahead of your competition. That’s the job. That’s the job that you need to achieve, right?

Yeah, that’s it. We’re just trying to be the guy who’s beating us. We’re not trying to be number one nationally for the majority of our clients.

Absolutely. Then you work with enterprise clients, which will need a customer approach. It is not like a cookie-cutter approach that you can fit in there. Can you elaborate on the importance of creating customized SEO processes for different clients from different niches or even for similar niches for that matter, because they will have their different problem statements, right?

Yeah. That goes back to what we’re just talking about with beating your competitors. In every market, it’s different. Even when you’re working with a client as a franchise, something that works for one location is not necessarily going to work for another. That could be based on the general competition level in that area. It could be based on where they’re located in that area. There are so many different factors outside of making sure they have good content, making sure that they have backlinks that we don’t have control over, and that if we just do those things and rely on those things, we’re going to be missing something in some areas where they need more of a push than that. That is when we do really deep competitor analysis to understand those strategies that the competitors are using and to understand what they’re doing that we’re not doing. Then when we find out those strategies and we get that one location or those locations who are struggling to improve, we do it for all the locations because now, as you said, we’ll end up all of our competitors where we were already beating them with just the things that we knew that we need to do in the first place.

Now we’ve taken the thing that helped struggling locations and added it to the ones where we’re already performing well. Now, all of our locations are on a level playing field again, but our competitors and those markets where we’re already beating them now have to find something else that we’re doing and try to win up that on top of already outperforming them in rankings and traffic. That’s the approach that I take. I do think a lot of it is trial and error. I never tell anyone just to take my word for it, test and verify for yourself, because there are a lot of factors, like competition level, like your competitors, like what’s going on your client’s website. The structure of your client’s website can be completely different from mine, and that alone means that what you should do is different from what I should do. Make sure that you account for all these different things that are going on that don’t seem to be SEO-related on the surface, but truly do end up having an impact on your SEO as well.

Absolutely. Talking about clients, give us your favorite client story, Amanda.

My favorite client story. Let’s see. One of my favorite client stories is one that I shared recently with a member of my team, Caleb. He was like, Hey, can you send me some recent lenses? And one of them is a client that I met at Mazcon last year. They came on with us, and we looked at what was going on on their site, and we immediately found some troubling things, like no internal links going to their location pages. They were not getting very much traffic, things like that, and some of them were not being indexed, things like that. They had very little content on their site, so they were not performing well. In some markets, they were doing okay, and that was because of the low competition level, not because they were doing something so great that in those specific cities, they were outperforming others. It’s just that the competitors weren’t doing anything either. We came up with really a content-based strategy for them because they were still low on content. Once we have the content, we can get the backlinks, turtle links the authority, and all the things that we were missing altogether.

That was our strategy. After doing that, their Google Search Console clicks for non-branded keywords grew by 300%. There was nothing insane about our strategy. It was just thinking about how all the different parts work together and putting a strategy together where the things we were doing on one side would benefit the things on the other side, too. It was course versus It doesn’t matter what type of content we put up, let’s just do this type of content. But every piece of content we created was related to another piece of content that we were going to create or have already created. We were building an internal linking structure between all the content we were creating before it was even created. We already knew how they were going to be related to each other and help each other out and then help the key pages that we wanted to ring to.

Absolutely. Thank you for that story, Amanda. But before we let you go, I would like to have a quick rapid-fire with you. I hope you’re going for it.

Sure. Yeah, let’s do it.

All right. Your last Google search.

My last Google search probably was related to real estate in my local area because I’m looking into real estate investments.

I thought it might be your prospect.

No, real estate investment for myself, thinking about the future for my son. Not very exciting, but yeah, that was my most recent

He plays quite a few video games with you, if I’m not wrong, right?

Yes, he does. We’re getting him ready to go back to school, so he hasn’t been playing as many video games. He starts in a couple of weeks. We’re like, You want to play video games? You need to read three chapters of a book. He hasn’t been playing that much in the last couple of weeks. But we’ve been playing a lot. I’m very proud of him and his video game skills. He’s improved significantly in the last year.

Lovely. What is your favorite video game?

Right now, I’m playing Rise of the Rōnin, but he’s been playing a lot of Halo: Infinite and Spider-Man, too. We’re nerds. We have every console. We have pretty much every major title in the game in the last year or so. So he has a lot to bounce around between. But he also likes Forza a lot, too, because he likes cars.

Lovely. All right, moving on. Your celebrity crush?

Probably Liam Hemsworth He’s just handsome. That’s it. That’s all of it.

That’s okay. All right. What did you do with your first paycheck, the first paycheck of your life?

My first paycheck of my life. Oh, dang. Probably next to nothing because it was not a lot of money. I probably bought candy at the grocery store or something like that. That’s definitely what I do with it.

All right. If not SEO, what other career option would you have taken?

If I were not in SEO, I would be doing something behind the computer screen still, but exactly what it is, I am not quite sure. Yeah, something analytical for sure. Maybe medical coding because of the job security of it and because it does pay pretty well. It is also something you can do from home, from behind a computer.

Lovely. Thank you for that honesty, Amanda. Perfect. Lovely. It was a great session. I appreciate you taking our time to do this with us. Finally, for our listeners, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m Amanda Jordan, or you can find me on Twitter at Amanda T. Jordan.

Lovely. Once again, thank you so much, Amanda. Cheers.

Thank you for having me.