257: Market Your Killer Website with Exposure Ninja Tim Kitchen

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show Episode 257 market your killer website with exposure. Ninja. Tim kitchen, hey everybody, and welcome back to the program. Our guest today is Tim kitchen, and Tim is head ninja at Exposure Ninja, which is a British digital marketing agency specializing in building and ranking websites, which has grown from one employee to 75 employees in just four years. Tim is also the UK's best selling digital marketing author specializing in SEO. So Tim, welcome to the

Tim Kitchen 0:30 show. Thanks, Robert, glad to be here.

Robert Plank 0:33 Cool. I'm glad that you are here. And so you know, talking about SEO today, can you sort of get us all caught up and just make sure that we're kind of all on the same page. When you say you're a specialist at SEO, and we talk about SEO, can you sort of tell us what that means exactly?

Tim Kitchen 0:48 Okay, so SEO, or search engine optimization, is basically making sure that your website ranks well wherever people are searching for it. So usually this is Google or Bing, and our definition of SEO is arranging the information about your business in a way that makes Google want to rank your website highly. So every business has a bunch of information in it about the products that they sell, the services that they sell, the solutions that they fix for their target audience. And what we're trying to do with modern SEO now that we've moved away from some of the shady practices in the past, is just give Google this information presented in a way where Google can say, Yes, this website is a real authority in its market and it deserves to rank well. So that's basically modern SEO in a nutshell, awesome

Robert Plank 1:35 and so a bunch of cool things in there. So one is that, so you kind of mentioned there that the sort of the olds tired out. Doesn't really work anymore. Way of going about things where people would try to trick Google sort of doesn't work. And then, and then let me know if I'm understanding this, right? So then your your specialty within SEO is so you can get that structure in place so that people do rank highly on in those search engines. Is that right? Yeah,

Tim Kitchen 2:01 that's right. It's not all just about the structure. So take, for example, a local accountancy website. They might want to rank top in their area. Most of the sites in that market will be like a five page website, and they'll have a bit of information about what they do, and they might have a blog post from three years ago where it says, Welcome to our new website. And then that's pretty much it. So Google's looking at all of those different websites, they're all basically a version of that and saying, okay, not really too sure which of these deserves to rank. Well, compare that to an accountancy firm which takes SEO and content really seriously. They might have lots of in depth content about each of their specific services. So they might have a page about account, small business, Accountancy. They might have a page about tax returns, about payroll, you know, lots and lots of information. They might have a really active blog where they're talking about trends and current regulations and things like that. So they've got this website which has got loads and loads of content on. They might be doing some digital PR, so they're getting outreach, and they're getting other people linking into them. They might have a really strong following on social media. So compare that to the small, Dead website, and you can see that it's relatively easy for Google to say, Okay, this really active site with lots of content, this deserves to rank. Well, this is definitely going to be the most useful resource for people. So that's kind of how we think about this, this kind of arranging content

Robert Plank 3:29 awesome, and sort of along those lines, as far as, like, you know, coming up with all the content and arranging the content like, you know, I'm looking at Exposure ninja.com right now, or, you know, even we, like you were mentioning the that whole thing with the accountancy firm. Like, how do you sort of decide between, like, Well, are we gonna have a blog? Are we gonna have, like, you know, 20 pages, 100 pages. How? I mean, it looks great when we see, like, the final product and stuff. But like, how do you sort of keep all that straight? How do you say, Well, you know how we need to have 50 pages and a blog versus 10 pages? How does that sort of come together?

Tim Kitchen 4:05 So how we like to think of it is? And going back to the accountancy example, your business usually has a few different core services, right? So if you're an accountancy, if your accountant firm, you might have small business accounting, you might have tax returns. You might have paye if you're a plumber, you might have boiler repair. You might have central heating. You might have gas repairs. So each of each business has a number of kind of sub services, which they cater to and which they specialize in. So you definitely want a separate page for each of those, because if I've got a broken boiler, yes, I might type in plumber on Google, but I also might type boiler repair or broken boiler. So if you've got an entire page on your site which is focused on boiler repair, and it mentions the fact that you fix broken boilers, and it talks about the different brands that you work with, and talks about. Got some testimonials from people that you fix boilers for. Google's going to see that page as really authoritative for that topic of boiler repair. So to start off with, you need separate pages for each of your services or each of the different kind of variations of what you do. Then every business needs a blog. There's absolutely no question. It's too much of a good opportunity to say, Well, do you know what? We're not we're not going to have a blog because we're not interesting, or we don't have any news or anything like that. Most people think of a blog as a bit like a journal or a diary, which is maybe not necessarily the best way to think of it. We like to think of a blog as a place where you answer your audience's most important questions. So what are the what are the questions people have about your service? If you write a list of, say, 20 of the most popular questions that people have about your service, and then you turn each of those questions into a really in depth blog post which answers that question in all the detail that you possibly can. It rephrases the question in a number of different ways and answers that you know those variations, then all of a sudden you've got a really good resource. So if somebody goes onto Google and types in when are small business accounts due, and you've got a blog post called how to tell when your small business accounts are due, well you've got a really good chance of showing up for that phrase. So your blog is a way to get search visibility as well as a way for you to kind of introduce your business to people who might be new to

Robert Plank 6:27 you. Awesome. And that makes a lot of sense, especially if we're, you know, talking about SEO and stuff. It's like, well, you know, of course you would, you would, you know, have these blog posts or have these sub services pages be about things people actually type in order to end up on, eventually on your website. I mean, it makes perfect sense. And so, so, sort of to kind of get an idea about like you're, like, your your thought process and your sort of taking action process. Can you walk us through? I mean, either with this, this, you know, this consultancy thing, or the plumber, or whatever, like, have you come across sort of a client where they came to you and they were at sort of like the starting point, and then you said, Okay, we're gonna do this handful of things, and you kind of took them from that point A to point B. Do you have sort of a case study like that to share where you sort of took someone from that point A to that point B? Yeah,

Tim Kitchen 7:16 so that the plumbers are the perfect example, because they, when they come and they need a website, they have just no idea about anything, right? Yes, there are some switch on plumbers, but a lot of them, their specialty is the plumbing and the tools, where I just like, if I had a leak in my bathroom, I would just have no idea what to do, right? So they have very little idea about the website stuff. So what we do is we sit down with them and say, Okay, what are the top services? What are the what are the things that you really want to do. So it might be the most profitable services that you do. It might be the ones that are most popular. It might be the ones that you enjoy doing, or that you're best doing. So we'll make a list of all of the different things that they might do. So taking the plumber example, they might say, we want to fit bathrooms, because when we install a bathroom, we get loads of money for that. We want to do boilers. Because, again, that's a really high ticket value, high value service. So we'll make a list of all the high, high value services that they do. Then we'll make a list of all the most popular kind of catch all services. So for example, plumbing, right? Really general phrase. So we'll have a page about plumbing, as well as these, all of these, these, these kind of targeted and very specific services. So that's the service pages. And then for the blog, what we'll do is we'll sit them down with a piece of paper, or just say, online, think about the top 20 or 30 questions that your target audience has. And the goal here is just to write them down as quickly as possible. You don't need to overthink them. We can filter later. Just write down all the questions that you're when you walk into a house and you're ready to fit the boiler. What is that? What are these people asking? They're asking, how long is this boiler going to last? They're asking, How can I tell if my boiler needs repair? They're saying, How much should a boiler cost? They're saying, Should I have my heating system blur? You know, whatever it is. So you as the business owner, will will know these questions. Then you can use a tool like answerthepublic.com and if you go to answerthepublic.com and you put in what you do with your business, it will give you the most common questions that people ask on Google. So that's another really good source of common questions. So once you've got this list of questions that people ask about your business, it's just a case of picking off 123, or four of them a month and writing a really complete, complete blog post about each of those questions. And by doing that over the course of a year, you'll have a really visible blog,

Robert Plank 9:31 awesome. And as you were explaining that, I was looking at that, that answer, the public comment, that looks amazing. It's like a Google keyword tool only kind of narrow down to to the like, the things people want to know. So just to make sure that I'm sort of getting your your process right, so you have the have a new client, and they kind of take the inventory of their sort of top, profitable, high value services and have that list, and then they figure out, like the catch all, like plumber could sort of a. Mean, mean, like, a lot of different things, and then use that answer the public tool to get those top 20 or 30 questions, and then that sort of make gets the content from there, I'm not sure, to getting

Tim Kitchen 10:10 that right, yeah, spawn. Note, it perfect. And

Robert Plank 10:13 so, so, you know, as we're describing some of these case studies and things like, I want to make sure that, you know, as people are, you know, listening to today's episode, like they've, for sure, gotten a lot of little takeaways and things, but to make sure that you know, like, we send the right people to you. Are you there certain industries where, like you and your team, are there industries that you guys prefer, or where you work with anyone, or what's the deal with that? Most

Tim Kitchen 10:36 of the businesses that our agency works with tend to be small and medium sized businesses. So we've worked with a few corporates, people like DHL, but really that's not what we love doing the most. What we really love doing is working with businesses where we can double their traffic over a year, or something like that. And we're not going to do that with with a company like DHL. We like big results. So typically, we're working with businesses that have a turnover up to about 10 million, 10 million US per year, and that's our that's our kind of core base. So we like, we like big changes. We like transforming people awesome,

Robert Plank 11:10 and get and get into those untapped resources and stuff and then, so you're also UK based. So do you only work with UK based, or do you work with everyone? No,

Tim Kitchen 11:20 we've got clients all over the world. Most of our clients are UK us, and then typically English speaking countries, because what works on Google in the UK works exactly the same on Google in the US. Of course, there are some regional variances with the sort of publications that we'd want to get the businesses featured in according to according to the territory, but it's the same principles that work everywhere. Already awesome,

Robert Plank 11:45 good to know. And so when you you know, you deal with these people all over the world and different industries and stuff like that. Do you see universal number one common mistake happening all over the place as far as SEO and websites and stuff like that goes?

Tim Kitchen 11:59 Yeah, definitely. There's, there's two main ones. We haven't talked about links at all, but that's okay, because both of these are actually on people's websites. The first is the page titles that they're using. So the page title is a little bit of text that you can see at the in the top browser window when you're on your website. This page title is so, so important, and every page on your site has its own page title. The main problem that people will make is they will call their page title something like home or their business name. Well, this page title is a really important ranking signal for Google. So if you put your target keywords in that page title, and usually at the start of the page title on each page of your site, then you'll typically see some ranking movement just from doing that. And it's like a simple thing that can take a few minutes. So that's the first thing. The second thing is text. So almost every site that we work on, we end up recommending that they add more text to it. This is particularly common on E commerce sites. So if you are an E commerce site, let's say that you sell shoes, and let's say that you want to sell ballet shoes, right? So you sell shoes as your big product category, and then ballet shoes is like a sub category of that. The page on your website called ballet shoes will be a product category page listing all of the different ballet shoes. And usually this product category page will have no text on it at all. Well, the trouble is, text is how Google understands the internet, so we need to make sure that that page has some text all about ballet shoes. So what you'll notice with high ranking e commerce sites in particular is that these product category pages have a bit of descriptive text talking about the different types of ballet shoes available, maybe having a link to a ballet shoe Buyer's Guide, giving some explanation about the different shoes that are available in this category on the site. And by doing that, Google can look at that text and say, Okay, so this is a complete resource on this particular topic, just like where we're talking about the boiler repair page, rather than just having a big page that's just all of our services lumped into one. It means that Google can see that that ballet shoes page and say, Yes, this is an authority for this topic, so this deserves to rank. So those would be my two things, having enough text on every single page of your site, and making sure that you're optimizing your page titles. And

Robert Plank 14:17 why do you think those sorts of things happen, like with the non optimized page titles and with not enough text, you think it's a matter of, like, people working with designers who aren't trained in SEO? Or do you think it's a matter of, you know, people making the sites themselves or using some sort of WordPress theme? I mean, why is that such a common problem?

Tim Kitchen 14:36 I think it's a combination of all of those things, really. I mean, a lot of web site builders like designers. They're they're good at the design part, but they don't necessarily understand the marketing piece, or they don't understand the SEO piece, which is, you know, totally fine, fair enough. We build websites as well, and our website builders don't necessarily understand all the SEO pieces. So we have to get SEO people to help them. These are totally different skill sets. So anybody who says that they build. And they optimize a website and it's just one person, then, you know, I'd be a little bit skeptical about that, because those are vastly different skill sets. So we're not necessarily expecting designers to build well optimized websites. So that's definitely a part of it. And then part of it is just the lack of knowledge about about the impact that these things can have. And then for the text side, it can be quite difficult to come up with, say 200 words about ballet shoes that just describes a category page for ballet shoes. So a lot of people will just, they'll see that task, and they'll think, Oh, do you know what I just I can't do it. There's other stuff I need to do. And they'll skip over it, not realizing how important it is. So again, using tools like answer the public can be really good way of triggering them and helping them to see that actually writing 200 words about each of your product categories doesn't have to be difficult at all, because people have so many questions about these things. How long will ballet shoes last? What sorts of ballet shoes are out there? You know, what the different types? You know, what are the soles made of? What the uppers made of? You know, there's so much you could write about these things, but people often they just get kind of writer's block, or they just freeze up and they just can't think, and they're like, I can't write 200 words about this thing. Well, they could, they could probably write a book about it if they really needed to. Right?

Robert Plank 16:14 And what I'm hearing a lot of it is it almost sounds like maybe some of these business owners are too close to their business, and they think, you know, like, like you said, How can I possibly write 200 words about violations? But then you as someone who sort of comes in from the outside and uses answer the public and does your best to kind of get in the mind of that prospect coming to the site, it's, it sounds like just by having the sort of fresh perspective from the outside can help to overcome that writer's block and help to catch those things that that they otherwise would have missed, just because they're so dang close to it. You

Tim Kitchen 16:45 are so right. They are so close. And the thing about being close is that they don't realize how little their potential buyers understand or know, like people are asking the most basic questions. So the ballet shoes thing. Well, I can't really talk about ballet shoes, but if someone came into the shop and started asking them about ballet shoes, they have so much experience, they just think that I don't know. People aren't going to ask these questions, or people aren't interested in these things. Well, look and answer the public. Look in the Google Keyword Planner. People are asking these questions every single day. People don't know anything about your product, so you've got to tell them, and you've got to imagine that your audience is like, Homer Simpson, right? That's the sort of level that you're that you're pitching to. We're not saying they're stupid. We're just saying they don't know your business like you do. So the stuff that's obvious to you might not be obvious to them. Awesome.

Robert Plank 17:34 And so if someone is saying, Okay, well, I need to have, you know, the site, you know, could be better. It could rank better. Maybe I need to, you know, take care of all these factors, like have, you know, relevant text on the page, or maybe even, you know, speed up load time, or have SSL certificate or or responsive website, or all these things that drive us crazy. I mean, what's the next step if someone were to contact you and your agency? I mean what? I mean what, what would be like the that first meeting be like, or what would they need to come to you with? Or what would that, what things would you guys discuss like? What would sort of happen when they contact you to sort of solve this problem?

Tim Kitchen 18:10 Okay, so the first thing that we do for everyone, whether that, whether you want to become a client or not, this is something free that we do, and we spend 1000s on doing this, is we do a free website and Marketing Review and plan. So obviously, today we've been talking about SEO, but there's so much other stuff which needs to be kept in mind with your website. So the conversion optimization of your site any pay per click that you're running what your competitors are doing. So we carry out this free plan for people. Now this is normally a 30 minute video, which one of our team will record for you, showing exactly what to prioritize. Because, like you said, there's so many things that you could be doing, and a lot of people just get totally overwhelmed and they just do nothing, or they put it off. So we'll show you, okay, these are the things that you need to prioritize. This is the most important stuff. This is the low hanging fruit. This is the stuff which you need to do later on. So it's a, normally, a 20 to 30 minute video. Sometimes we'll send it over as a written report. And this is a plan that you can follow, or if you want to go to an agency like us, they can follow it too. And this is totally free of charge. We do loads and loads of these, but it's awesome, because people, when they see the detail in the report, they're like, Okay, this is brilliant. These guys must be good, so we're happy to do it. So people can go to www dot exposure, ninja.com forward slash review, to get that, as I say, totally free of charge. There's no catch at all. No salesperson will call

Robert Plank 19:34 awesome. So if everyone right now listening goes to exposure, ninja.com forward slash review, make sure to to to fill in that form and get that 20 to 30 minute video, or sometimes written report about SEO and what you can do with PPC and competitors, and about what's the the turnaround time on that, like, if someone goes and claims that that free 20 or 30 minute video, I mean, how long can they expect to. To wait before getting that video back.

Tim Kitchen 20:01 Usually it's a couple of working days. We have a little bit of a backlog at the moment because we've been flooded with requests this week, but I'm sure by the time this podcast episode goes up, we'll be back to the two or three day turnarounds.

Robert Plank 20:13 Awesome stuff. I mean, super generous. That's super human to for completely for free. 20 to 30 minute video showing all the strengths and weaknesses of the website a few days just to wait on that awesome stuff. So everyone right now go to exposure, ninja.com, forward slash review, and before we sign off to me, any, any sort of last statement, or any sort of last word to tell people to to sort of drill in their minds, or get, you know, get, get this in their head about how important SEO and all these things are for their websites. Any last thoughts?

Tim Kitchen 20:43 Yeah, I mean, it can be so tempting to feel totally overwhelmed by this and just think, you know what? I can't I can't do it when we're not even going to bother with SEO. For me, just put more text on your website. Make your website the place where you share all the information about your business. If you do that, you will get more traffic, but you'll also convert more of that traffic as well. So if in doubt, just put some more text on your website. Start blogging, start beefing up your pages. Tell other people more about how you can help them, and you will get better better visibility and more more customers as a result.

Robert Plank 21:16 Awesome, great advice. Just help people, and the same way that you're dishing out lots of helpful advice in today's episode, those people with websites should be dishing out helpful advice, just because that seems, that seems to be what the new reality is now, as far as what Google wants, as far as what the internet wants. So why not sort of go with that? So everyone should go right now to Exposure ninja.com/review E, x, p, o, s, u, r, e, n, I, N, j, a.com/review, and thanks Tim for stopping by the show and telling us about what we need to know about our websites to make them up to date, to make them current. So thanks for stopping by the show and telling us that kind of stuff.

Tim Kitchen 21:53 It was great to be on Robert really enjoyed it. Thanks, buddy. Subscribe to

Robert Plank 21:58 us right now, while it's still fresh on your mind at Robert plank.com/itunes or just search Robert Plank in your iTunes app. You.