1549 – Understanding Usability and Relevancy with GreenBananaSEO’s Kevin Roy

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0:58with us right now Kevin Roy Kevin you are the CEO of Green Banana SEO found on the web at greenbananaseo.com Kevin thank you so much for joining us yeah thanks for having me 15 years in business 50 over 15 years in business congratulations on your longevity that is saying something for an SEO firm. Yeah, it's been quite a journey. What has, why have you been able to continue and thrive and grow when maybe others have not? So I think it's almost two things. It's, or I would say three. It's number one is relationships. So forming relationships with our clients. Number two would be transparency. So we're really transparent about what we do.

1:52And then the third is referrals. So we have just started to drink our own Kool-Aid and apply SEO to our site almost as early as six months ago. The rest of it has been referral business and we're helping people succeed and we're being transparent about everything we do. And next thing you know, you're getting a call and then another call and another call. And I think that's what's, you know, that's what's helped us grow. And also staying, you know, staying current with all of the SEO updates and what changes. So I'm continuously learning the newest and greatest tricks to things that are rank factors to get people ranked and applying them.

2:33Yeah. And I think a lot of folks have had experiences with kind of more very transactional service providers, maybe a higher freelancer. And, you know, you had mentioned that relationship is pretty key. Can you break that down? Like, what does that mean? So, so part of it is when you're in the digital space, people are hiring us because they don't understand what we do and how we do it. So when, when, when someone starts at Green Banana, especially if they come from another agency, the first thing that I say to them is that if you're really, really good at this job, you can sell reporting for a couple months, but you can sell leads forever.

3:17right so it's really important to talk with a client and say um hey i i rather than hitting them with this is the click-through rate and this is what latent semantic indexing is and we're going to do all these you know funnel pages to this that they typically have no idea what you're talking about and a lot of them come because they've been burned by another agency but they so they already have their guard up so it's really about hey what do you need to do to be successful and how can we help you and how can we explain to you what we're doing enough so it makes sense that you're comfortable with us.

3:52And let's say that one of our larger clients, we're running a big Google AdWords campaign with even, you know, we do more than just SEO. And part of our weekly calls are with their sales team. So when leads come in, we're asking them specifically, hey, when we're running a campaign for you and we're seeing these leads come in, we can't tell if it's a great lead or a crappy lead. We need you to help us get more information. And so they'll come in and say, these leads were great. These leads were terrible. Well, why were they terrible? And what can you tell us about that? What that does is helps them trust you a little bit, but it also helps our team learn even more about the business.

4:37So we have like fintech clients and biotech clients and chiropractors and defense clients. And our job is to learn from them as much as they're learning from us. And that kind of the whole ends up being greater than some of its parts. And the one constant between successful campaigns at Green Banana and campaigns that just wither on the vine are the ones where the clients are participating and sharing with you is much about their business and trying to understand what we're doing and how to make them successful. So that, then that builds relationships. Yeah, right. So it's more, you know, kind of a holistic alignment with what their actual goals are.

5:20You know, my background in PR, I mean, that was the mark of a decent PR firm versus is an amateur one. Amateur one is just going to sling placements. They couldn't care less what happens after they get that placement, as opposed to it sounds like you're tapped in a little bit more to, well, what are your actual goals? Rather than, well, we got you this ranking. Cool. Am I making any money with it? Not that I can see, not that I know. It's going to be hard to keep that client on the books if they're not meeting their goals. They might have some good vanity metrics or something like that, but it's not going to do anything to drive sales.

5:59Right. And a lot of those people, a lot of the people that you're working with are not the head of the company. So they have to talk up about what's going on in marketing. So they're going to, they might, if you arm them with enough information and you focus on their goals, their boss is going to come down and say, what are we spending all this money for? And in advertising, and they're going to be able to come in and say, well, this is how much we spent. This is how many of our goals that we hit. It's going to be really hard for them to say, well, our impression share increased significantly in our market region and we have a higher click-through rate.

6:35It's hard to sell that. It's hard for them to sell that to their superiors. Yeah. So, Kevin, obviously, you've seen trends over the past 15 years. What is Google really liking today? Yeah. So one of the things I tell people is that if you understand the principles, the core principles of SEO, and there's two of them, then the methods will all make sense. So there are two core principles. One is usability and two is relevance. And the reason that they're important is that Google wants people to continue to use Google. So the usability piece is it'll all make sense when I tell you. So you do a Google search, you go to a website, and it doesn't work on mobile.

7:23You get frustrated, and then you leave. You go to a website after a Google search, and it takes 17 seconds to load before you can interact. You get frustrated, and you leave. You go to a website, and it's not relevant to the keyword that you typed in. You get frustrated, and you leave, or you get a virus. You get frustrated, and you leave. So Google's going to ding you for those things. But SEO aside, you should have a site that loads fast. You should have a site that works in mobile. You should have a site that's secure. So you check off all those boxes. You're in good shape. That's the usability piece.

7:56The relevance piece is Google's job is to return the most relevant page, not keyword phrase. I mean, not website, but page for the keyword phrase that you type in. So if you Google the word basketball, more often than not, Wikipedia outranks the NBA because that page is just about basketball. Yeah. Right. And it's got other other like they have content about scoring. They have something probably about LeBron James or Michael Jordan. They've got when basketball was originated. And then there's all these other links in that page that go and support that relevance. So those those are the things that Google is always focusing on.

8:36So if you are talking about, let's say, chat GPT, right? Can you write content to help with SEO? You can help it to structure something with content, but the content has to be relevant to that. There's no the the big secret to ranking and SEO is there's no secret. You have to create relevance. You have to be the most important page for the keyword phrase you're typing in. And your website has to has to work. um so all these other things that that i hear um like uh are gimmicks for seo if they don't align with one of those principles then it's usually junk like i heard the other day uh uh a client called and said i need to um i need to register for voice search i'm like what do you mean you need to register for voice search well someone's gonna you know if you can't do it i'm gonna pay someone else to do it.

9:32Like you don't need to pay me or them to do that. So just think about when Alexa comes out and you say, Alexa, where's the closest pizza shop to my house? Do you think Alexa is only going to return the people that have registered for voice search when that first came out? No, it's going to go look at Google Maps and say, all right, I know your proximity. I understand pizza. You're two and a half miles away from this pizza place. That's what they're doing. So the registration doesn't make sense. It doesn't align with use. It doesn't align with relevance. It doesn't align with usability. So it's, it's just a gimmick.

10:08How are you seeing, or like, if you were to look in your crystal ball, how is AI going to ultimately impact SEO and people getting search results? It's, it's exciting what's happening, but I'm pretty uncertain what the future looks like. So am I to tell you the truth. I think that good SEOs are going to use it to their advantage and they should be smart enough to know that they're not going to cut and paste something from chat GPT or AI or ZimWriter or any of these things and put it into their page. I think what I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around is how is Google going to process the amount of content that's being pumped out on a second-by-second basis if you and I can write 1 ,500 words in two and a half seconds, and it takes another five minutes to put it on a web page and a minute to hit publish.

11:12Right. Think about that. So I I think that Google is going to Google and Bing or who the search engines are really going to have a hard time processing all this information and all this data that's pumping out. And then the other side, I think people that are savvy are going to go right to to chat rather than a Google search. So it's going to start taking away some market share because it can answer a question faster. but it's also the data is two years behind. So there's a little bit of that's, I'm sure that's going to catch up. So the answer is, I don't know the answer, but I think that if you're in this industry and you're not paying attention to it, you should.

11:55Yeah. You know, certainly from a content perspective, I mean, it's been brilliant for us to at least get blinking cursor out of the way. Right. And so, and, and, and then that would be my biggest criticism of chat GPT content. It's just, it just doesn't, there's not, there's no human stories in it. Like it's just, it's dry. It's very, very dry. And it's predictive. So you can tell there's a, there's another, there's a myth out there that there's code inside of a chat output that Google can see. I think that's a, I think that's a complete myth because you can take it and stick it in a, in a Word doc and then stick it in a Google sheet and then puppet.

12:37You can move it from place to place so there's no code in there. But I think what chat does not so well and what Google can see is the predictive nature of the story. So, you know, I like long walks on the beach at, it's gonna be like night every single time, right? What you should be saying is, I like long walks on the beach with a beer in my hand and sandy flip-flops, something like that. So you have to go in and look at all that predictive stuff and go change that. That's why it's dry. It doesn't understand everything. There are super cool prompts that you can do to make it a little bit more human, but it's still predictive.

13:26Yeah. A lot of folks that listen to this program, they serve clients. In addition to offering frontline services through Green Banana, you have a partner program. Can you share a little bit more about that? Yeah, we have a program where we have other agencies, like creative agencies that are super, super good at branding. Like no one hires us to do branding. And they don't have the technical chops. So we're like executioners. So if someone is running a campaign for someone and they don't know Google ads really well, I mean, we do, we manage about$800 ,000 a month in just Google AdWords. So we do a lot of Google ad campaigns, we do a lot of Facebook campaigns, we execute.

14:10Um, people typically don't call us to say, I need a beautiful brand position. People call us to say, I've built my client, this beautiful brand position. I need to get it out there. I need to market at these events or I need to get them leads. So that's what they hire us to do. Yeah. And then to our friends that are listening and they're like, man, I can identify when they've, you know, when maybe they've had like a not great experience with an SEO professional. what would you know let's say they came across this podcast because they're doing some research on green banana and now they've listed our conversation what's kind of that next step that they can kind of learn what engagement might look like and maybe help set kind of co-create some goals together potentially so that's a great question I think the first thing that you should that they should look at is do they need seo so google what if google what you do what you sell if you're local, what you do and where you do it, right?

15:08Like, you know, sneaker shop in or, you know, pizza in. If you're ranking really well, you might not need SEO. So I've had people call me and say, I got this really nasty report from an, you know, online and it's got a lot of red lines and bad graphs and things in there. And I need to fire our SEO agency. And then I go and Google everything I can possibly think of and they're ranking in the top three. I'm like, well, you might not be happy with the interactions you're having with your SEO agency, but they're doing a great job. Right. So if you're ranking for, because the only reason you need SEO is to bring relevant traffic to your website.

15:46So if you're ranking for all the keyword phrases that matter, you don't need SEO. If you're not, then you need SEO. If you're not sure what keyword phrases are going to produce the best results, you can try Google AdWords campaign because I can get you on page one in 48 hours with a Google ads campaign. And you can find out if that's generating leads, you know, or, or you can go look at your competitors and see what they're ranking for. Yeah. Kevin Roy, again, your website, green banana SEO, your CEO and co-founder. Is there anything that like, what should folks click on or when they go to the website, what should they look for?

16:26So they can just go to the homepage and hit contact if they're looking for us, you can fill something out. And if you have a question for me, the team will route it to me and I'm more than happy to help. We don't charge for recon and proposals. If someone's stuck, we're happy to help. Yeah, excellent. That's what kind of makes this fun. Yeah. And hopefully you're comfortable with gigantic gorillas because you're going to see a 900 pound gorilla right on the front page. There you go. Yeah, I know. Love it. Awesome. Again, Kevin, Roy, thank you so much for joining us. GreenbananaSEO.com. Thanks, Kevin.

17:05Thanks so much.

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