1546 – Caring For Who You Work With with Digital Neighbor’s Eric Ritter

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0:58with us right now it's eric ritter eric you are the seo sommelier uh you are the founder and ceo of digital neighbor you found on the web at digital neighbor.com and then your personal website um where you do a little bit more thought leadership on this is hello eric ritter.com eric Thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Josh. And I should also point out a fellow Floridian. So I'm in Orlando. You're down the road in Tampa. And so how is life in Tampa these days? Hey, it's great. I can't complain. You know, the weather's good. Business is going well. So I'm enjoying myself here in Tampa.

1:40That's awesome. Who does Digital Neighbors serve? Are you primarily working with local folks within Tampa? Yeah. So our primary clients are here in Tampa, but we also work with several companies or brands around the country as well. So we always like to say, you know, Tampa is home and we love working with our neighbors here in Tampa, but we don't limit ourselves just to Tampa. Yeah. And what makes Digital Neighbor unique in the world of like, you know, if I were to hire someone to help with SEO, how could I understand who Digital Neighbor, kind of like what your your superpowers are? Yeah, no, great question.

2:20So it's in the name, right? We don't just have clients. We don't just want to be, you know, churn and burn. We want to be your neighbor. We want to have that long-term relationship. We are compassionate. We are caring. We always want to have skin in the game and make sure that the people we work with are successful. I'm building that long-term relationship of trust and results along the way. And I think that's what makes us different is that we really do care about who we work with and making sure that they are successful. So it's not just one size fits all. We really want to get in there, understand what are the business KPIs, what are they trying to achieve, and how can we help contribute to that through our digital marketing SEO activities.

3:05Yeah. Well, what is working really well in SEO today, or what would you say is pretty vital? Yeah, so really the tenants of SEO haven't changed as long as I've been doing it. It's really all about having quality content on the website, making sure that what you have on the website isn't just what we in the industry call thin content or just low quality. You want to make sure that there's a reason for everything on your website to exist, to make sure that it really speaks to the person, to your target audience, and that you're keeping your target audience in mind when you're creating your website and when you're creating the content that you're putting on it.

3:48And how might we, it's like if we know who they are, what type of content should we be creating? Yeah, so for a website, it's really anything that you can think of. So So blogs and written content is always going to be kind of that cornerstone, but also videos and infographics and illustrations all help, right? Because when someone comes to the website, a video or an illustration might be able to explain a complicated concept much better. For myself, I'm a visual person, right? When I go to a webpage or a website and it's just a wall of text, I lose interest and I leave, right? But if it's broken up and there's images in there and it's easy to digest that page there, I'm going to spend more time.

4:38I'm going to engage. And so that's something to keep in mind is just putting up words to put up words isn't always the best strategy. Yeah. So the value from Google's eyes, like if we're thinking strictly in what is Google going to like, they're going to be paying attention to time on site. And is that kind of where the, so we're kind of reducing the bounce rate. If I click through to an article and I stay and I'm watching this video, it's primarily about the TOS as opposed to Google saying, okay, we really love the content in this video or are they really taking into account how good the video is?

5:25Yeah, no. So great question. And so it is really primarily a play for those engagement metrics, right? Making sure that people are engaging with that website, which is the time on that page, the time in sight, the bounce rate, making sure people aren't clicking to your page, going back to Google and clicking on a different page, because that's a signal to Google, like you didn't have the best answer for them. They had to go somewhere else to find that, right? So with the specifically the video, it's one way to kind of get people more engaged. And it's also potentially a way to engage people in a different way because they might consume your YouTube video.

6:02You might have a great YouTube channel. They might find you over there. They might subscribe to your content and follow you there as well. So it's another potential avenue to bring people in and learn about your brand, your products, your services. Yeah. As a podcast guest, which you're guesting, what would you recommend to other podcast guests who are appearing on shows if they're thinking about the SEO value of this activity? Like, oh, yeah, here's my checklist. Yeah, no, great question. So if you're going to appear on a podcast, make sure that the podcast is going to link back to your website, right?

6:47You want to have that backlink. That's really important to Google is getting that backlink. If you're posting the video somewhere, put a transcript along with it as well, because Google likes to crawl those transcripts and read what the content of that interview is. Include any kind of keywords that you want to come up for. You want to be relevant in the title, in the description of that as well. Make sure that you're sharing it as much as you can. kind of having that social engagement as well can be powerful. People liking, sharing the video can be a great signal to Google as well from a branding standpoint.

7:33I always say, do real company shit. Act like you're a real company and you're out there, you're promoting yourself, and you're getting your brand name out there. All that contributes to SEO. Yeah. So, yeah. And are there any, I don't want to say, obviously there's our own blog, there's our social media. Are there any other like medium or like repurposing our content on some of those types of platforms? Is that valuable? And if so, which ones would you recommend? Yeah. So the answer to that one really is it depends, right? Who's your target audience, who you're trying to reach and where are they spending their time, right?

8:18But to me, a long form piece of content, whether it's a podcast or a video can create so many other pieces of content, right? Work smarter, not harder. So taking out the nuggets, taking out kind of the key takeaways out of a video or out of a podcast and repurposing those on other platforms. So wherever your audience is spending time, whether that's on LinkedIn, right? LinkedIn is really, really popular right now. It's really powerful. So I always recommend looking at LinkedIn first. Twitter definitely has its ups and downs, but Twitter looks like it's still here to stay. TikTok can be really powerful.

8:58People love videos on TikTok, right? Right. Especially if it's edited, if it's really snappy to the point, that can be a good place as well. And really all the others, no matter where people are spending their time based on their demographic, psychographic, could even be Facebook, Instagram out there. You mentioned Medium. Medium is a great one, right? Because a lot of people go there because it's almost a trusted kind of resource, a trusted website on Medium. People get paid by Medium to publish on there, right? So it's almost becoming kind of a journalistic platform there where there's trusted publishers.

9:37So I'm always a big fan of cross-posting there as well. Yeah. If someone is a, let's say they're either a podcaster or a YouTuber, like they're creating multimedia content, you know, obviously I think, you know, taking that, embedding that on your site, creating a really, really great blog post to accompany that is probably going to be pretty valuable. And one tool, obviously, I think that folks are looking at, like we're doing this now a little bit better, is, you know, I can take a transcript and or I can take parts of that and I can put that into an AI tool like ChatGPT and I can create something that's going to be a little bit more readable based on that.

10:30Any other guidelines you'd recommend for kind of what I'm talking to me. I'm just kind of sharing with you kind of some stuff that we're doing. You got any tips for me on like what you'd recommend from an SEO perspective? Yeah. I mean, you bring up a great point, right? And again, coming back to working smarter, not harder, using the tools available. ChatGBT is a fantastic tool to kind of repurpose, to aggregate, to rewrite certain things. It's all about the prompts and all about the inputs there, right? And it's kind of funny, just a kind of semi-related story a couple of days ago, I was talking to someone who's just coming out of college and just worried.

11:06It's like, oh my gosh, you know, it's a bad economic climate. And then, you know, there's these AI tools that are going to take the jobs. I'm like, no, you got to turn it around. You can become an expert in these tools that a lot of old farts like myself are afraid of, you know, and there's brand new jobs coming up like a prompt engineer. And a prompt engineer is someone who can use a tool like ChatGBT to do exactly what you said, super efficient, right? Like, hey, here's a podcast, you know, go ahead and cut that up into four, create four different blog posts that are all unique, focusing on these different keywords for me based on the transcript here, right?

11:40So it's all about kind of how you're using that tool there in order to generate more content, you know. Word of advice, though, or warning, I guess, with chat, is always proof everything, double check it and read it yourself, right? So I've definitely seen quite a few false items come out of any kind of tool like that. But again, it saves time, right? And that's what we're all about. We're all busy. We all want to save time. We all want to be efficient. And a tool like ChatGBT really allows us to do that to kind of expand upon what before would take hours within just a couple of minutes. Yeah.

12:21Eric, when folks work with you, what does that engagement typically look like? Yeah. So it can either be kind of a more consultation standpoint where they're paying for my time. Like, hey, we were looking for SEO, but we don't want to make a big investment. We know SEO can take time to work. So I can come in and help consult, like spend a day with them, walk them through kind of an audit, an assessment of what they're doing for SEO, come up with an action plan and put together recommendations. and then on the other side it can also be in an ongoing relationship to help them achieve their goals you know whether that's getting more leads getting more online visibility driving more traffic to the website building out that plan up front and then helping execute that long term as well so it can be either bidding consultation putting together that plan for them or actually executing that and kind of hitting all those SEO checkboxes.

13:21Yeah. And then would you say in the world of like, you know, where SEO agencies like on their range of like what their investment is or engagement fees, you know, that sort of thing, would you put yourself as like a one, two, three, four or five dollar sign agency? Gotcha. Yeah, no, that's a good question, right? So I'm just going to say it really depends on how much is getting done. So we personally, we price our engagements based on the amount of time that it's going to take to complete something. So we know we've been doing this for digital neighbors, been around for seven years. We know how long it takes to write a blog post.

14:00We know how long it takes to do outreach for digital PR. We know how long it takes to do technical fixes on the website. And it really just depends on how much work needs to get done. And another thing to consider is what niche you're in, right? So if you're, you know, you said you're in Central Florida as well. So I'm sure you've on the way to Publix down the road, you're driving by 12 different personal injury attorney billboards. It's very competitive for personal injury attorneys out there. Same thing in SEO. So that's gonna be a bigger investment, right? Because it's a very competitive niche.

14:32And so it really depends on how much work it's going to take and how competitive that niche is. but long answer short, I would say we're right in the middle. So we're not at one or$5 signs. I would say we're somewhere in the middle there. Yeah. Yeah. And then, um, so your websites, um, hello, Eric Ritter.com and then digital neighbor.com. Um, for someone that's listening to our conversation, you know, maybe they're kind of in the research phase and they came across you. And so now they're getting to know you, what would the next steps be? Um, I don't know if you have some, you know, long form content, you know, just something that you'd recommend next, or, you know, maybe that conversation is the next step.

15:13Yeah. So actually on my personal website, helloerikritter.com, where I style myself as the SEO sommelier, right? So bring together my two passions of SEO and wine, where I kind of, you know, I love wine because of all that goes along with it, whether that's kind of the community that goes around it, all the different types of wine. And a sommelier helps you enjoy that, right? And breaks down something that might be very complicated. It might be out of reach to something that's really enjoyable. And that's what I want to do with SEO, right? I want to make it approachable for everyone, make it enjoyable so you understand it.

15:51So on my website, if you sign up, there is a tasting guide with kind of my top 10 SEO tips, kind of getting a taste of it there with the notes and everything there. So if someone's interested kind of getting just 10 little bit more high level SEO tips, they can definitely go to my website and download those. But if you know what you need for SEO, you can set up a meeting with me. I'm happy to do a SEO consultation with anyone and help them kind of figure out what those next steps would be for them to execute a successful SEO campaign. Yeah. Eric Ritter, again, the founder of Digital Neighbor. And again, that website is digitalneighbor.com.

16:38And then, of course, your personal website, where there's a lot of good stuff there as well. You also speak. And of course, you hit the media circuit talking about SEO. That website, again, is helloericritter.com. Eric, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us. Likewise, thank you so much for having me.

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