The Impact of Google Updates on SEO

Hey. Hi everyone. This is Ranmay here, back on your show E- Coffee with Experts. Today we have a very special guest Jeremy Thompson, who is the CEO of Cyber Pros SEO with us. Welcome, Jeremy, to our show.

Hey, thank you for having me. I appreciate it, Ranmay.

Great, Yeah. Jeremy before we move forward and, pick your brains on the subject that we’re going to discuss, I’d like you to introduce yourself, talk a bit about Cyber Pros SEO, what you guys are into, what are your primary offerings, so that our audiences know whom they’re listening to, and then we will take it forward from there.

Oh, yeah, sure. Cyber Pros SEO is a company that focuses on marketing our product called the MSP pro-growth system to help I. T. M. S. P. and cyber security firms. Grow and scale through online digital marketing. So I would focus on 5 main core areas in that SEO good website that converts PPC, Google advertising, social media, brand building, and ads as well as Reputation management and marketing. So those are the key areas, helping them just be a little bit more relational in their industry with their customers and helping them make that true connection, online, getting them results, getting them leads, and then, creating, helping them dominate in the market that they’re in.

The term relational websites suggests, a focus on building relationships with visitors. So how do you infuse this relational aspect into the websites that you create? And I know what strategies you employ to ensure that users feel a genuine connection with the brands that they encounter online regularly.

That’s a great question. It just goes back, to how we were talking about earlier, 98, 99% of the time when you see a Coca-Cola commercial, you’re always hit. Remember what I said? You’re never 98, 99% of the Coca-Cola commercials are always with a human, a polar bear, or Santa Claus. You know what I mean? And very rarely are you going to see a Coca-Cola commercial where it’s just the Coke by itself, right? And the reason why is because they want to show a human enjoying that Coke. And because it creates a mental and an emotional connection. People get emotional about that.

We’re dealing with humans here. We’re not dealing with robots. And because of that. And that’s the reason why because they want to connect humans to that product, right? And that’s the relational part. The informational part focuses on, the data, the science, the math, the statistics, the features, right?

But it’s the relational part. It’s the benefits. How does it benefit you? How does it fix a problem in your life? How does it make your life better? Are you going to lose out on something if you don’t connect with the product, or you don’t buy it or you don’t hire these people for a service and it takes the features and then adds human elements? Okay, so this vehicle has Bluetooth.

Okay, that’s great. That’s a feature. Now let’s add some benefits to make it connect to humans. Now you can use your digital device and hook up to that Bluetooth and play whatever kind of music or watch whatever kind of show you want and hear it through the speakers of the brand new car or hear it through the Bluetooth speakers, of your computer or of whatever, surround sound setup that you have. So when it comes to web development and it comes to marketing, it’s not about the tactics, sorry, I get so passionate about this because I go for it, man. SEO experts are a diamond dust.

Okay. So when you go online, you can search for an SEO expert and you can find them anyway. Web developers, oh my gosh, they’re a nipple a dozen. Okay. You can find website guys anywhere. You can go to your local freaking junior college and find some kid that just learned how to build WordPress on YouTube.

And you can do that. Heck, my 16-year-old daughter can build websites. She’s running her server, on Discord. This new generation, they’re really smart. So what I’m saying is you can find anybody that does PPC. You can find anybody to do social media, posting for you and stuff like that but just because you can find anybody to do that doesn’t mean that they’re the right person. The whole thing about it is it’s not about your company. It’s not about, what you want it to look like and how you want to communicate. It matters. What do your customers need to see? What do your customers need to hear?

And the relational, not information. Information is good, but it’s better to be relational in your marketing than just informational. It has to be good. An equal mix of both. I would say probably more on the relational part, right? We get a good example. We get real estate agents to come in all the time.

They’re like, real estate comes. We want a website. We want to do online marketing and we want to do all this other stuff. And I’m like, okay, great. That sounds awesome. Okay, so let’s talk about what kind of pictures imagery, or graphics you want to show on your website. Oh, I want big 500,000 to 1,000,000 homes.

I want those kind of pictures on my website. And I’m like, why? Have you sold a 500,000 home lately? Have you sold a 1,000,000 home? No, but I’m going to, Those are the kind of houses I want to sell because I’ll get big commissions on those. And I’m like, but really, that’s not what you sell, you don’t sell houses.

What you do is you sell a dream, you sell a vision of an individual or a family having a home, that’s what you sell. So instead of showing pictures of beautiful houses, let’s show an image of a backyard with bright green grass, and golden retrievers chasing young kids around. Mom is at the back porch furniture table sipping wine and Dad’s on the brand-new grill for flipping burgers, right?

Let’s show pictures of that or a young couple sitting on a couch in front of a brand new fireplace looking at each other in their eyes enjoying their brand new fireplace or mom and dad in the kitchen with their three-year-old daughter who’s standing on a stepstool at the kitchen island and they’re making cookies together and they’re laughing And dad’s got a little flower on his nose or his cheek, right?

Yeah, they’re enjoying their brand new kitchen so that adds the human element that adds the mental and the emotional connection when we show images like that, it’s that human connection. It’s all about experience. It’s all psychology. If I can paint a picture of what it might look like for your family, showing a picture of a house doesn’t do that. Showing a picture of a product doesn’t do that. If you go to the grocery store and you’re looking at all the different products that are on the shelves, if you look at the labels nine times out of 10 or eight times out of 10, like when you look at the cereals, when you go down the cereal aisle and they don’t show you a picture of one piece of cereal by itself.

No, they show it to you in a bowl with milk and fruit and with somebody they’re enjoying. Yeah, human element. And that’s what we do in our marketing. That’s what we do on our websites. And the first step is getting to know our clients on a human level, there are a lot of times they come in and they’re already doing all these tactics, I try to SEO when I’m doing Facebook ads and I’m doing this and I’m sending out a newsletter and I’ve got an email marketing campaign and they’re doing all these tactics.

And I was like, yeah, but what’s your strategy? Tactics are what happens inside the battle, but strategies, are what happens before the battle, right? So clients come to us, Ranmay, and I know I’m on a rant here, but I’m very passionate about this. I think there are a lot of companies out there that need to up their game because they’re so focused on just building what the customer wants.

What their clients want instead of understanding their client and understanding their client’s business and most of all what is beyond, most important out of all of it Is understanding who their customers are. Yeah, and reverse engineering the marketing and the website and everything else based on who their customers are, not just solely based on what their client wants, but with their customers need to see so that’s where you know It comes back to strategy.

Let’s talk about strategy Okay, where are you at? We always start with this. Where are you at right now? How many clients or how many people are visiting your website? I don’t know. You can track that. Yes, we can track that. Oh so if you don’t know how many people are coming to your website, then you don’t know how many people are buying from you because of your website.

How many people are visiting you off of Facebook? How many people saw your Google ad? And they’re coming to you. Do you even know how to read Google Analytics? Do you know how to go through the reports? You’re just doing it. Because another company down the road that’s just like you is having some success and they’re doing it so you went and did it?

So now you’re just doing a bunch of tactics that another company is doing But you don’t even know if they had a strategy and if they do have a strategy, maybe it’s different from your strategy. Where do you want to go as a customer? What are your targets? What are your goals? We always do 90-day quarterly planning with our clients, a little close to the beginning, usually halfway through the first quarter, because after we get all the set up and we get the website launched and we get the PPC going and we get the social media brand building and ads and reputation and we get all that, once we get everything going and get them some immediate wins, we’re trying to get them some quick wins within the first couple of weeks and we get things going, the first month is always a crapshoot anyway, because you’re setting everything up, and you’re trying to come up with a basis, a zero basis, that you could work from and then be able to calibrate and dial in as the months go on, as you AB test, everything and see what clients, are, or see what users are reacting to and what they’re not reacting to out of the marketing.

But that’s the first thing is, Where in 90 days, what targets do you want to hit? How many clients, how many customers do you want? How much money are you wanting to target and then reverse engineer? And then when we talk about, as we talk about, okay, what could be bottlenecking or be a barrier or could be standing in the way between you?

From connecting truly with your customers, you’re just showing them a product and expecting them to buy. So where’s the breakdown in the relationship, where’s the breakdown in the connection? We’ll ask them a lot of questions. Okay, but is it robotic? I always think of used car salespeople, there’s come in and they’re like how many kids do you have?

How many dogs do you have? This and that, and a great way to relate to your clients is to talk about something they’re excited about, and what they’re excited about is they’re excited about their customers. Correct. And always starting there, asking tons of questions about their customers, and then you’ll start to see by the answers they give you psychologically, you’ll be able to start to see how they relate to their customers by the way they talk about their customers.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. I just wanted to bring this on that you have been in the industry for 22 years now, how do you think the overall landscape has evolved?

We have seen so many Google updates, so many winters and summers now, What critical shifts, which you felt, tilted or, actually moved the industry? Those major shifts that you have gone through in these last 20-odd years?

Wow. That’s that is going to be a crazy question. Let’s see. How do I say this? I was around before there was Facebook, right around when Facebook was first getting started, it had to be in some college to be a part of it. We’re talking very early days when SEO was just starting to be talked about.

You know what I’m saying? Life was easy. Life was easy to rank on the first page or the top three or the top position for that matter.

Oh Yeah. We’re talking about companies that were getting kicked off of Google and they were getting fined because they were hiding words in the background of their website, making it the same color spamming and stuff. I won’t say which company it was, but there was a very large, very well-known car company. I’ll say out of Europe that Google kicked off. I know this.

I know this. Yeah.

You know what I’m talking about? And they charged like 2.5 million to get back onto Google, but it kicked them off because they were hiding keywords in the background of their website.

I remember that. And they had to pay a fine. I think it was like 2. 5 million or whatever, man. I remember those early days. So when we first started, before I started my company, I worked for the largest leading website company for churches and ministries nationwide.

Oh, okay. Wow. Yeah. And so I was there and I left them and I learned from their model. I took a little bit of their model, but I fixed it. I utilized their model, created my model, and then fixed a lot of the customer service issues that I noticed that they had in their model so that I wouldn’t have those same issues in my model, setting proper Customer Expectations and making sure, where they would only spend 20 or 30 minutes with the client, talking to them about their website or training them on their website.

I would spend however long the client needed, as long as it wasn’t ridiculous, and because I realized it wasn’t about me, it’s about them, it’s not the Jeremy Thompson show. It’s whoever my client is, it’s their show, right? Always. I’m behind the scenes.

We’re supposed to, encourage them and build them up and do what we can to help them connect with their customers better and to sell their products better, really connect and get their service out there better. But the landscape, yeah. Oh, man, the early days of, back, this is back in the days we were, Ranmay do you remember marketing on MySpace?

Yeah, we were hitting up MySpace and Twitter. Those are the two places, and then LinkedIn a little bit, but I think LinkedIn was still trying to figure out what kind of company they wanted to be back in the day. But still, LinkedIn, what an amazing company. When you think of Oh, what’s his name?

That started LinkedIn. I just had his name that read, Hoffman. Yeah. If you remember I think it was a college project that was called Six Degrees of Separation. And it was based on that. He came up with the idea, but I remember the exact day.

Talking about, how the landscape has changed and I’ll move forward, reminiscing about the early days, but I’ll move forward, as things change, but I remember the exact day that Steve Jobs was on stage. And he said I want to announce a new partner that we’re bringing in that is going to help Apple get to the next level, basically is what it is saying.

And then all of a sudden, we have him here. He couldn’t be here with us live. So he’s here with us on satellite and then boom, Bill Gates comes up on the screen. It talks about, how they’re investing $150 million into Apple, and the partnership between Windows, Apple computers coming with Windows installed, pre-installed on it, and stuff.

And man, I remember that day I was amazing. That was a stellar day. I was down in Austin Texans and I remember, yeah. Oh man, I remember that. So I’ve been around a while. And I’ve seen things morph where, Hey, now let’s, there was the there was the. com bubble.

Then there was the real estate bust and all of that. But one thing that’s always made true is there was always an email that kept going. The internet was there. It kept going. Social media was there. People were still talking to each other. Even though they were griping about everything going on, politically and, and in the country and things that are around the world.

And the Iraq war and Afghanistan and everything else, Kuwait and all that stuff going on. And 9/11 and things like that. There’s still the Internet. There’s still email. There are still people, doing business online. I don’t think that ever really stopped. And I’m sure there were some blips and some bell curves in that probably it increased, and then you have things like COVID that, man our company exploded during COVID.

Yeah, everybody’s at home. They’re at home. They’re no longer out of a job. So now they want to start a business. And what’s the first thing you want to do? They want to get a website, they want to do some online marketing. And yeah, so we exploded during COVID, but I will tell you that, watching the first iPod came out and as a matter of fact,

I have a wrap in plastic protected. I used to get business week religiously. I used to collect business weeks back in those days. I have the original Business Week silver edition of Steve Jobs. I put it in a protective plastic. It’s only been touched once. Cause as soon as I got it, I put it right back.

I put it right in that comic book plastic sleeve and it’s sealed off. And not because I’m going to sell it or anything like that, but I think down the road, I think it would be cool to get it out, show my grandkids and stuff like that. They’re using their little iPhones now.

I’m like let me show you the guy who helped invent that.

Lovely. Yeah. Brilliant stories, Jeremy, great. And before we wrap this up, Jeremy, I would like to play a quick rapid-fire with you. I hope you’re game for it.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

That sounds great. Okay.

What was your last Google search?

Oh, my last Google search? Oh, that’s a good one. What was my last Google search?

You can check your system. This is an open book!

Let me just check, see, what was my last Google search Oh! I know! Alex, it was Alex Hermosi’s account balance dot com.

I was on his website and I was looking up his stuff because I needed to buy more of his books. I needed to have his links saved. I just pulled up Alex Hermosa. He just did a book launch, which I was at. This last Saturday $100 million leads and he’s getting ready to come out with his next book.

I ordered several copies of that ’cause I have some colleagues and some people that I wanna put that book in their hands. I love, it do you listen to Alex or me? He’s just freaking just down to earth and it’s just so simple. Just a common sense way of marketing, and he’s very relational there and you’ll hear it in all this stuff too.

It’s so easy. Why? I just don’t understand as marketers, as online digital marketing consultants and strategists, the way we get so caught up. In automation and the shiny red toys and software that, yes, I understand. We need to have email sequences in place. I understand. We need to have campaigns.

I understand that, certain things that we have to automate, to make things easier for us. And make things good for our employees, our teams, and stuff like that, but I’m going to tell you. Even from 22 years ago to right now, as far as the digital landscape, as far as, you know how we market and things like that, there’s the one key factor, and that’s human relationship.

Absolutely. That is the number one denominator is just human relationship. So people are not going to get along with, some people, you’ll have their back and they’ll have your back when it comes to skills and performance. But when it comes, maybe you don’t trust them, or maybe you trust them, but they don’t have any skills or performance.

I’d rather have somebody that I trust that doesn’t have any skills or performance because I can teach them the skills and performance that can be learned than to have somebody, the opposite, but that’s going down a different tangent.

Lovely. Yeah.

Jeremy Thank you so much for taking the time and doing this podcast with us. I appreciate it, man. You have a great day.

Yes, Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you. I love what you guys are doing over there and keep up the good work. Cheers, man.