Building a Dynamic and Engaged Digital Audience

If you want to learn how to build this audience, join us for this MFG eCommerce Success episode to hear Ira Bowman, President, Bowman Digital Media, share how businesses can build dynamic and engaged audiences behind their businesses.

Are you trying to build a digital audience for your business or industry?

If you want to learn how to build this audience, join us for this MFG eCommerce Success episode to hear Ira Bowman, President, Bowman Digital Media, share how businesses can build dynamic and engaged audiences behind their businesses.

Ira Bowman is an SEO & social media expert, 2X TEDx Speaker, photographer, founder of ProjectHelpYouGrow, and awesome dad of 8.

Download our free business valuation guide here to understand more about business valuations and view our business valuation FAQs to answer the most common valuation questions.

As a 2X TEDx speaker, Ira shares the methods he used to create a following of over 200,000 on LinkedIn, 148,000 on Instagram, and 21,000 YouTube channel subscribers.

Ira uses the knowledge from building this massive community across platforms to help others grow their communities and website traffic. Ira’s work at Bowman Digital Media helps clients increase their audience on social media and their websites with the proper use of messaging, SEO methodologies, video, and images. Ira and the Bowman Digital Media team show clients how to build and engage their digital audiences to grow their sales.

Ira’s ProjectHelpYouGrow.com is his philanthropic website, where he helps people looking for jobs connect with employers and recruiters. ProjectHelpYouGrow has over 25,000 followers on LinkedIn to increase job search success for job seekers.

Do you want to know if your business is ready for your exit or what you should do to prepare? Learn this and more with our business exit assessment here.

Damon and Curt’s electrifying chemistry foretells that this session is dynamic and engaging, living up to the title’s promise. During the Livestream, Curt greets the audience and introduces Ira as the guest. He highly recommends watching Ira’s TEDx Talk, describing it as fantastic.

The host mentions that in the TEDx Talk, Ira discussed how his life transformed in 2018 by overcoming a scarcity mindset and propelling himself forward.

Similarly, Curt shares that he met Ira in June 2020, the day after a significant event occurred. He then asks if Ira is comfortable sharing what happened during that time, specifically regarding their experiences amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Get the most value for your business by understanding the process and preparing for the sale with information here on our Selling a Business page.

Ira begins his story with his sales career, excelling at building personal relationships. In 2018, he shifted to LinkedIn to connect digitally and overcome sales obstacles. Collaborating with Mike, he transitioned from a cold-call venture to online relationship-building. Despite losing his job due to the pandemic in 2020, Ira seized the opportunity to start Bowman Digital Media, leveraging his LinkedIn following for influencer marketing. This marked the start of his transformative journey in the digital media space.

 

Curt asks Ira about his journey with Bowman Digital Media, which started during the COVID-19 pandemic in June 2020. Curt mentions Ira’s recent second TEDx Talk and refers to LinkedIn as Ira’s “insurance policy.”

Ira reveals that reason to term a strong LinkedIn profile as an “insurance policy” for job seekers. He explains how a large, engaged following can give candidates a competitive edge during interviews. Ira shares personal experiences of how his network connections have opened doors to business opportunities and speaking engagements.

As the show progresses, Curt predicts that Nicole and Ira are to become besties.

Nicole asks Ira for his thoughts on Google’s new search generative feature and its impact on SEO, particularly for small businesses. She mentions that the feature was recently launched and is in beta testing. Nicole seeks Ira’s insights on the two contrasting views regarding this integration with the search engine results page (SERP).

The guest explains that Google aims to satisfy users’ queries and highlights the significance of appearing on the first page of search results. Ira mentions that Google underwent a major update in August 2022, shifting its focus from backlinks to content. He explains that Google now prioritizes pillar content and blog content, looking at the number of words on a specific topic on a web page.

Ira also talks about the importance of video and interactive media in engaging users and recommends having at least one video on every page. He discusses the transition from cookies to pixels and the impact on Google Analytics’ tracking of active user time.

Moreover, Ira touches on topics like user behavior, website rankings, and the evolving nature of SEO strategies. Nicole commends Ira for his expertise, likening his insights to a masterclass in SEO.

The SEO pundit offers an SEO organic content creation course with a 10-video series. He explains that despite not having advanced degrees, he aims to simplify complex concepts and make them accessible to a broader audience. He aims to provide actionable tips and advice to help people improve their approach to various platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

The guest suggests having high-quality and informative content on websites. He differentiated between wide content covering various aspects of a topic and deep content, which delves into specific sections in detail. He emphasizes that content creation is an ongoing process and should be treated as a long-term commitment and updated regularly.

Likewise, Ira warns that neglecting to update website content can result in Google penalizing or delisting the site, which can harm a business. He suggested that creating a new site with a new URL is often necessary once a website is delisted.

Ira shares his matchless insights into updating pillar content on websites. He recommends updating pillar content every month to ensure it remains current and relevant to Google. Google indexes websites at least once every four to 30 days, and updating the pillar content during this indexing process helps Google recognize the freshness of the content.

Similarly, Ira highlights the significance of linking all website pages, blogs, and external content to the pillar pages. This strengthens the internal linking structure and establishes the pillar pages as the website’s foundation, enhancing their visibility and authority.

Ira explains search intent’s importance in content creation and emphasizes the effectiveness of content creation over outdated practices like building backlinks. He cautions about relying solely on AI like ChatGPT to generate content and highlights the need to understand concepts like a hallucination.

The guest raises concerns about the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated content. He shares a story about a company that relies solely on AI for all its communications, highlighting the potential risks.

In the same light, Ira discusses search intent’s significance and role in understanding user queries. He mentions the dominance of Google as a search engine and its focus on competing with AI programs like ChatGPT. He speculates that Google is positioning itself to better compete with emerging language programming systems. He also mentions the potential future indexing of video content by Google, which could significantly impact SEO strategies.

Curt compliments Ira on his SEO expertise and perceives him as a social influencer. He appreciates Ira’s insights on growth and competitiveness. Curt asks if Ira was an SEO expert three years ago.

Ira responds that he was not an SEO expert three years ago. His interest in SEO began in 2018 when he launched a philanthropy project and needed his website to rank on Google. He delved deeper into SEO in 2021 to increase visibility for his business, Bowman Digital Media. He enjoys learning and actively seeks knowledge in this area.

Nicole agrees with the guest regarding having pillar content on your website, regularly updating it, and staying on top of Google searches.

Toward the conclusion of the show, Ira prescribes a minimum threshold for monthly content creation should be around 4000 words, with some websites aiming for even higher volumes, like 6000 words or more.

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ABOUT EXIT YOUR WAY®

Exit Your Way® provides a structured process and skilled resources to grow business value and allow business owners to leave with 2X+ more money when they are ready.

You can find more information about the Exit Your Way® process and our team on our website.

You can contact us by phone:  822-BIZ-EXIT (249-3948)   Or by Email:  info@exityourway.us

Find us on LinkedIn:  Damon PistulkaAndrew Cross

Find our Companies on LinkedIn: Exit Your Way®,  Cross Northwest Mergers & Acquisitions, Bowman digital Media 

Follow Us on Twitter: @dpistulka  @exityourway

Visit our YouTube Channel: Exit Your Way®

Service Professionals Network:  Damon PistulkaAndrew Cross

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Other websites to check out:  Cross Northwest Mergers & AcquisitionsDamon PistulkaIra BowmanService Professionals Network (SPN)Fangled TechnologiesB2B TailDenver Consulting FirmWarren ResearchStellar Insight, Now CFO, Excel Management Systems  & Project Help You Grow

1:01:52

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

google, page, seo, gbt, talk, content, bowman, ira, build, linkedin, website, pillar, video, business, damon, call, nicole, month, people, search

SPEAKERS

Damon Pistulka, Nicole Donnelly, Curt Anderson, Ira Bowman

 

Damon Pistulka  00:04

All right everyone, welcome once again it is Friday and everyone knows what that means. It is time for manufacturing ecommerce success. I am one of the CO hosts and boy do we have a show today? I guess I’m Damon Pistulka If you didn’t know sorry i i would got so excited that went right by that part of it but my friend, brother right over there, Kurt Anderson. Take it away my friend.

 

Curt Anderson  00:32

Dude, I don’t know if I can talk with like this, this crew on stage here. So Damon, we thought we have a special co host and I’m glad you I’m just glad you’re here today. That’s all I have to say is I’m just glad you’re here. Yes. I feel very honored. Very blessed to have two amazing dear friends we have a special co host with us. Nicole Donnelly from digital all Happy Friday, my friend how are you?

 

Nicole Donnelly  00:56

Happy Friday. It’s a it’s a wonderful Friday, Friday before Memorial Day. It’s gonna be awesome. And we get to talk to Ira Bowman today who is like I can’t wait to pick his brain about SEO and social and all the fun stuff.

 

Curt Anderson  01:11

We’ve got a ton of Pac So guys we have the one the only the only, of course a repeat offender probably multiple times but Ira Bowman from Bowman digital media but Ira How are you today? My friend?

 

Ira Bowman  01:23

I’m good man. If you don’t recognize the background, everybody I am not in my digs. Lovingly I refer to this lovingly Now I don’t mean any offense by this by I refer to myself as a branding and horror. Right like a Bowman digital media logo everywhere all the time, right? Yeah, but I’m in a hotel room. I’m in Pensacola, Florida. Which is ironic because I have a daughter that goes to PCC when she’s home in California watching the kids so my wife and I are on his birthday patient here from Pensacola, Florida. So apologize for the fan coming out of my head and all that stuff. But

 

Damon Pistulka  01:58

it’s all good, man. We got a lot of people in the house already. Holy heck, we got bombed Friday.

 

Ira Bowman  02:05

And I have shared a friend kiss just so everybody knows. Amazing. All right.

 

Curt Anderson  02:13

I Bob’s a good kisser.

 

Ira Bowman  02:14

Yeah, my wife was a little jealous. I think actually.

 

Damon Pistulka  02:18

We got Dale is here today. We got Christina Harrington who’s here today. We got I can’t pronounce your first name. We’re just calling them some. There we go Psalms here today. Thanks so much for being here. Well, this is going to be a treat, because we’re going to be talking about building and dynamic and engaging digital audience. And, you know, our friend Ira here has has done a bit of that.

Yeah, so a little bit of something. Let’s talk about it. Take it. I think you have something like 200,000 plus followers on LinkedIn, you’ve got 158,000 followers on Instagram you got I don’t know how many on Twitter and I’m missing a bunch of

 

Ira Bowman  02:59

the one I’m excited about is my YouTube following my YouTube following a crash. I tried. I cracked 20,000 subscribers on YouTube and I’m working Nice. Yeah, that is for anybody who knows that is by far the hardest one to build on. So to get 1000 people to volunteer and follow me and the goofy shenanigans that we do on video. I appreciate it.

 

Curt Anderson  03:21

I really that’s what I’d like to do is I just wanted to set the stage it’s hard to imagine anybody here of course on LinkedIn is not familiar with the one the only Ira Bowman but there might be some folks on other platforms and might be like, maybe new you know, you’re new to them vice versa.

So let’s just I want to go back in time and then we’ve got I know Damon, Nicole, you guys have a slew questions. We’re gonna dig into like marketing tactics strategies for today. But I’d love to go back in time, a little bit of like pre LinkedIn, not pre LinkedIn, Ira. I met you in June of 2020. Yeah, now I dropped your TED Talk into the chatbox. Guys, I encourage you, I invite you, I implore you, I am begging you. Yes,

 

Ira Bowman  04:02

Bob. Ira guy was good. It was a good kiss too. And I am so jealous.

 

Curt Anderson  04:08

Now whatever, Valois Val Happy Friday, we’re here with Ira. So I want to on your TED talk, you guys. You have to watch it. It is absolutely fantastic. You talked about how your life changed in 2018. Got rid of a scarcity mindset and really catapult yourself. I met you June of 2020. I met you the day after a big event happened. Are you comfortable? Can you share what happened in June of 2020? Going through COVID What was going on with with Ionic I

 

Ira Bowman  04:36

can I can walk you guys through that story pretty fast and it’ll catch everybody up. So for 20 years, look, I have eight kids. I didn’t start out with eight kids. I got married back in the year 2002. My beautiful wife and we started having babies because I can’t keep my hands off her.

It is what it is. I needed to make money but I didn’t have a college degree. I was a senior at San Jose They, they’re in San Jose California. But you know, I wanted to have a house, I didn’t want my family to live in, you know, an apartment or whatever. And no offense to people who do. It just wasn’t my aspiration. So I started working, trying to make more money. My wife at the time made a lot more money than I did, I was making 12 bucks an hour, I think when we got married, just a full disclosure as a customer rep.

Anyhow, I got into sales. And so sales was pretty lucrative for me. And I did that for two decades. In 2017, actually, I started to realize that cold calling was getting harder and harder to do in person. But up to that point, I was like, really good at, right, I can walk into an office and just make friends. That’s always what I was trying to do.

I wasn’t trying to sell you anything when I met you, just trying to learn a little bit about your business, and then figure out where maybe I can help you through the relationship building. So that was how I made my living in 2017. And really, in 2018, I put it in full throttle, I realized that if I could build my presence on LinkedIn, that would help me to meet people electronically, digitally, and start that relationship that I used to do in person.

So that was my goal. I wasn’t trying to be a media guy, an influencer. I wasn’t trying to get famous, none of that stuff, right? Like none of it. The whole point for me was getting past the gatekeeper for any sales reps out there. They’re not in their head, like, Oh, my God, I know exactly what it means. Like you walk into a place and they like out. You know what I mean? If you can’t even get in the building, the first thing you hear is get the hell out of here. I mean, they say it nicer than that sometimes.

But sometimes they are more crude. Anyways, you get the drift. So as an 18, I met this guy, I think connected to him on LinkedIn, I don’t know how we got connected. I just, you know, he sent me a friend request, and I accepted it. But anyways, Mike O’Connor is the guy that kind of changed my life. And I talked about that in the TEDx talk. But anyways, he challenged me with the idea of how the LinkedIn actually works.

And he wasn’t just talking to me at that point, it was talking to everybody. But he said at the end of this, this video that I saw that he had on his, on his profile, and it said, if you’re smart, call me and he had his phone number in his profile. So I’m like, Okay, we’re connected. I see the phone number. I called him for two and a half hours, we talked, I was working in San Francisco, I had to drive home demand Tika because that’s how rich I was. I couldn’t live inside the Bay Area I had to drive inside to work in the barrel. Anyways, that’s what it was.

So he gave me not the mythology of how to do what I’ve done. But he gave me the realization that I needed to do what I’ve done. Right, he sparked the idea that I needed it. He didn’t necessarily tell me the how. So Mike and I have worked together pretty closely through the years, building these strategies and techniques up but through that I was able to then stop cold calling, and make these relationships online.

And actually, I was doing pretty well sales up to 2020. Well, in 2020, as everybody knows, COVID hit hard the United States in March of 2020. It really hits SoCal, like, not as bad as New York, if you just kind of remember the timeline, Europe at the time was the the the major part, but la started to catch up, which is not a race, anybody wanted to win. But it started catch up, I got laid off.

Okay, so 20 years of doing really good in the print sales space. But now I find myself without a job. I actually was laid off over the phone, which is always the way you want to get laid off, you know, over a phone call. And I happen to be on a daily call, no daily call weekly call with my friend Joseph step us Joe, the finance guy. Joe had asked me a couple months before if I would build him a website, because I have some experience in web development.

So I I always told him like, Man, I can’t I’m just I’m, I’m still I would only been at that job for five months, I had moved down from the Bay Area, that San Francisco job down to LA so I could live 20 minutes from work instead of two and a half hours, right. So anyways, five months into a job I thought I was going to retire at because it was the second time I’ve worked for that particular company.

They laid me off. And so Joe goes, I mean, it’s kind of the funniest thing ever. But it’s a little insensitive, but it’s funny. And when you get to know me, I joke a lot. So anyways, he goes so you have some time to build my website. And I go you sucker? Yes, I do. And then we worked out a price. And you know, I built this, I built this website out. So you know, I really, I started my business right away. Now it took a little while for everything to become official and get set up. But you know, that was that was how I switched over spots.

So in June of 2020, I launched Bowman digital media, that’s the little logo on my shirt here. But what I did, which is interesting, because at the time I had 150,000 followers on LinkedIn, I really didn’t have much of a presence anywhere but LinkedIn at that point. Okay. So on LinkedIn, I had 150 1000 followers on Facebook, I had 1500 friends. I had no Twitter, I had no YouTube channel, I didn’t have any of this stuff, right?

So I put out a post and I said, Hey, what would you do small business owners talking to small business owners? And I’m like, what would you do if you had access to 150,000 engaged followers on LinkedIn? Would that be of any interest to you? And I will tell you my phone ringing off the hook because they’re like, Yeah, we don’t have to build out this apparatus you can be you know, they call it influencer marketing.

Now, I didn’t know that term at the time, I was just like, I’ll make posts on your behalf, right? And then I’ll get people to see it will build your will build your visibility, and you can, you know, get sales leads that way organic sales leads is what we were trying to generate. And we were you know, we did it pretty well. And so that’s how that’s how this whole crazy ride got started.

 

Curt Anderson  10:55

Okay, couple things I want to unpack is like, you know, you call it your again, guys, we’re here with Ira Bowman, thank you for joining us happy Friday, Bowman digital media media, which started was it was a COVID. Baby started in June of 2020.

Again, I dropped out, he just did his second TED talk, but I put his TED talk in the chat box. I were you call it your your it was your insurance policy. So for folks, you know, many of us, Nicole in the digital space were like really encouraging beating the drum to death, like, hey, get on LinkedIn, get on LinkedIn, am an employee. You’re you’re in a print business in using it, how brilliant? How can I get past the gatekeeper? And then you converted now you parlayed your insurance policy into a thriving business?

 

Ira Bowman  11:39

Yeah, let me talk about that for just one second. Because there there are people out there that are in sales or marketing or whatever, and they’re like, I don’t necessarily need it, I have a job. Let me tell you some interesting facts. When when you build up your LinkedIn profile, when you don’t need it, it really is an insurance policy. But when you go out there to find the next job, when you’re interviewing, and everything else is equal, your education is equal, your experience is equal, I promise you, they’re looking at your LinkedIn profile. I do this as a business owner.

If I got three candidates that are all pretty much the same, they’re willing to work and the same, you know, price salary, all that stuff is going to be the same. I’m looking at their their followings, because that’s an audience is an asset. If you have 9000 active followers, I’m not talking about people you buy, that’s a waste of money. I’m talking about people that actually follow you, because they’re interested in what you’re putting out. company hires you.

I was just talking to one of the largest financial institutions in the world. And we were talking about how they can be more successful. And I said, you know, the number one issue I see with your company right now, you guys are putting out posts on your digital platforms, and your employees are not engaging with that.

That’s a mistake. It’s absolutely a mistake. Well imagine this, you got employees that have 5000 9000 25,000 100,000 followers, how much farther does that message go? When they’re not hearing it from a cold Corporation, but a person they know like and trust. So when you are on the unemployment line, and you’re trying to find your next job, this is something it’s a feather in your cap that you can use to elevate yourself above your competition. Many of you have never thought of that right now.

You’re going dang it. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s okay. I didn’t think of that either. It’s just something I discovered along the way. So let me share that tip to you. But yeah, insurance policy is it’s huge. Who you know, in life is absolutely as critical as what you know, and your experience who you know, opens doors. I was just talking to a guy on the phone as I was walking around. I’m getting a lot of steps in these days, right.

So I was well outside in the Florida Sun walking around getting my 10,000 steps for the day. One of my good buddies called me goes, Hey, I really got these digital signs. And we’re selling the space for X amount, you know, for, for the package he’s offering to let me in wholesale to sell that space. I would not, I would not have that opportunity, which is a money making idea. I would not have that opportunity if I didn’t know him really well, but I do.

And so he called me and said, Hey, I want to I want you to participate in this you can do at it. And you know, anyways, you know, I wouldn’t be on the show. If I didn’t know Damon, I wouldn’t be on the show. If I didn’t know Kurt, you know what I mean? Like, it opens doors to I got my TEDx. I can’t tell you me. rejections I got for TEDx. I put out the same story application rejected, rejected rejected. I did my first TEDx talk in Wilmington, Delaware. I’m from Southern California, right?

But I got the door open to do my first TEDx because I knew the person who organizes he’s in charge of the event. He put me on the slate because he knew it was a compelling story. He wasn’t a fool and goes You got hundreds of 1000s followers I want those. Right. So anyways, it opens doors in a lot of ways it will open up opportunities that you wouldn’t hear about otherwise.

 

Damon Pistulka  15:10

Yeah, well, we got a ton of comments here. I just want to hit

 

Curt Anderson  15:14

this perfect. You’re kissing partner dropped a funny comment. Yeah, you got

 

Damon Pistulka  15:17

you got another follower on YouTube. We got the vol we got Diane Byers here today we got Dr. Lipman Bob talks about Michael Connor, someone I know well as well. And we got Mike, I talked about you already brother was all good. I’ve got Greg Michaud in here today. We got Jamaica, I think sorry. Yeah, I’m bad. But fola and Bob here your network is your net worth. We understand that. Whitney stopped in today, Isaac, and then Whitney drops this bomb. I found my way. Glad to hear that. And Bob says, and I am a feather in your cap.

 

Ira Bowman  16:02

Yes. Last name is feathers.

 

Curt Anderson  16:08

Well, we brought in Nicole Nicole is our SEO guru. And she is Southern Cal girl. Just tons and tons of chemistry between IRA and Nicole. Nicole, I know you’re gonna become

 

Ira Bowman  16:20

besties real soon.

 

16:22

We are Yeah.

 

Curt Anderson  16:25

Trust me. So Nicole, I know you have a lot of great questions around SEO. Let’s dig into those for folks to dive into.

 

Nicole Donnelly  16:31

Oh, Ira, I am just dying to pick your brain over Google’s new search generative fge their search and have experience that they just are beta testing right now. I think they just launched it a couple of weeks ago. Right.

And I think that’s gonna have I’m like hearing there’s like two sides of the fence on how this new integration with the SERP. But for those who don’t know, this search, the SERP is the search engine experiences. When you go to Google, you see a little search bar, you type in your keyword. And it’s all of those results that come up. And I would love to hear what your what your thoughts on how this is going to impact SEO. And you know, especially for small businesses,

 

Ira Bowman  17:13

there has been a huge change. So there’s a lot to like, get people up to speed on Google. Okay, so the number one thing you have to understand now Google is Google is a search engine that’s trying to help people find the answer or solution to whatever it is that they put they call it a query. Okay, so that search bar that we talked about, you put whatever you put in there that Google calls that a query. So the idea is when you put something in it wants to satisfy the end users query right away. Right? So how does Google decide what it shows?

First, what it shows second, and all the way down to page 1 million that no one’s ever gonna get to. In fact, in my latest TEDx talk, I give some stats. 75% of people never make it past page 190 1% of people never make it past page two, what does that mean? Let’s say you’re in the digital marketing space. Where can I go to find a digital marketing company? If the company, if I’m in digital media, or any other company doesn’t come up in that first page, three quarters of the people will never see it?

So it’s really important, we’re talking about huge, how huge glad you asked. 7 billion searches happen on Google every single day. That’s 81 million searches every second. Okay? So you have a huge opportunity far more than social media. And some people asked me, I wrote Why did you guys switch your your concentrated focus from social media over to Google?

Well, the simple truth is, it’s because the volumes are much larger, there are 310 to 320 million active users every month on LinkedIn, and no offense to anybody, but 75% of those folks are outside the United States. So if you have a US based business that serves only clients in the United States, you have a very small bucket of people that actually you can affect on LinkedIn on a monthly basis. Now, not saying that’s not a valuable bucket that’s still very valuable, right, I built my business on it.

But looking at the looking at the volumes, we switched over to Google. Now, what I started to do, and I didn’t have a background in this, so I call myself an algorithm nerd now. But three years ago, I would not have told you that I’d be like, I don’t even know what the word algorithm means.

If you’re like that, and you don’t know what the word algorithm means you want to learn more about this, you can go to my website, Bowman, digital media.com. Go to the blog. I actually wrote an article on it. So it kind of explains the basics of how algorithms work. But the bottom line is this. It’s all done on math. So it’s a rules based system. So what Nicole is asking me is what’s changing inside the algorithm with this new experience?

What started back in August of 22 So last year, last August, they came out with a major update. And what changed was really this, Nicole, and I’m you’re, you’re aware, I’m sure, but I’m gonna tell the audience all right. So they were looking mostly if your website worked properly as a minimum requirement, and there’s some things in there we could get into, but we don’t have time. But let’s just assume those meta tags and site speed and all that stuff is no broken links and all that.

That’s your baseline, that’s all good, then the main thing they were looking at was, how many outside websites are pointing back to your website, we call those backlinks. So you can have internal links, External links, you’re gonna have follow links are nofollow links at the time, that’s all there was. Now they added two more categories to that they created user generated content, or UGC. And it created sponsored links, and those are your ads. Alright, so now there’s four types of links. That being said, up to August 22, the more links you had, the higher your chance was to be on the front page.

But in 2022, because of what I said, Remember, Google kind of got lost a little bit in my opinion on what they were trying to do. What they’re trying to do is a question satisfy the question or, you know, whatever that information people are looking for. So they said, Hey, in August, we’re going to we’re going to kind of go away, we’re going to diverge from what we’ve been doing. And we’re going to emphasize more than backlinks. Now we’re going to emphasize content. They started looking at pillar content and blog content.

And how many words on that topic are actually not on the site, but on the actual page itself? Because Google doesn’t actually send you to a website, they send you to a web page. Now some of you’re like, what’s the difference? Here’s the difference. Bowman digital media is a website, but we got 1000s of pages on our website. But Google is not going to say just go there and look yourself, they’re going to actually point you to the exact URL, the exact page that has the information that you’re looking for. That’s what they’re trying to do. So what needed to happen.

There was a lot of people that went got up in arms, because they were getting so much traffic from Google, like I said, 7 billion with a B, people are searching on Google every day, right? So imagine if you’re getting 100,000, or a million clicks a day from Google, and your life is easy, at that point, right. But now all of a sudden that Firehose stops to a trickle. Because you’re no longer on the first page, because they changed the formula that they use to figure out how they rank and we call that SERP. So it stands for search engine results page.

That’s what the P stands for. I like place or position better, but it actually officially stands for page. So where you are on the search page matters because again, consumer behavior, people are searching on Google, they’re not for the most part, they’re not going to page 270 5% of people are on our page when what happens if they don’t find the answer they’re looking for, they’re more likely to put revise their search query than they are to hit go scroll all the way down and get next page see.

So now what you’re talking about with the new changes that are happening? It’s a little bit debatable. In other words, the magic formula is still something that people are beta testing, like trying to figure this out. So we AB test.

And so here’s what I think is never going to go away. Because of chat, GBT and Bard and some of this other stuff that’s coming out there, which are alternative options for people who have questions, honestly, right? Like, Google, if you think about what Google actually does, the main thing it does is it gives you website responses, it says, Okay, I’m looking for how to grow my hair, right?

I need to know how to curl this stuff, right? How does How to Grow male body? How to Fix male pattern baldness, I can’t even say But anyways, something like that. I put that in search engine. What it’s doing, is it saying, okay, IRA, you can go to these places, and it’ll give you information on that will attach EBT or BB will do is just give you the answer.

So if you ask me Google’s rank in the importance of the internet moving forward, it’s going to take a backseat. So you know, all the stuff that I tell you is for today, because tomorrow, something might change. And then you have to adjust your strategy. This is a dynamic strategy that is always being reevaluated and adjusted based on what’s happening with Google. But I study it pretty much every day.

I’m doing things to test it out and see. You can go to Google development as well as website it’s a great resources stuff that they put out. And you can find a good read it from a business owners perspective, or someone who’s got a little bit of technical skill or for the nerds like me, who fully immerse yourself in 3000 pages like Google puts out, but they don’t put out secret sauce, right? Like everything.

I don’t think there’s anybody at Google who knows the secret sauce like I think it’s a bunch of different people that they’ve siloed for protection, because they don’t want you to be able to meals like that to to hire that person away. And now you’ve got all the key Is that the kingdom. So I think that’s why they do it. But anyways, there’s nobody like me. If they tell you, they know everything about everything, you can just find somebody else because they their ego is getting in the way.

I’m sure there’s lots of things that Nicole knows that I don’t know. And vice versa. That’s just, you know, from our experience. But here’s the bottom line. The key to this right now, there’s two magic bullets, if I can give, if you have a website, and you want to improve your website, what I would tell you is focus on written content, you need to increase the word counts on your pages, you need pillar pages, about six per website, we’ll be fine to have at least four.

And you want to designate those center, some some plugins, we’ll call it Cornerstone content. Pillar content, it’s the same thing, just a different name. So it nomenclature sometimes messes you up, but designate your pillar pages. And then the other thing is 80% of folks who use the internet, whether it’s on their phone or their their desktop, they’re going to end up on a video somewhere.

So one magic bullet, I try to tell people in Google doesn’t refer to videos as videos, they call it interactive media, which we’ll come back to that in a second. You want to have interactive media on every page. But I suggest you also have at least one video on every page. And here’s why. If you know that 80% of the people out there are going to end up on a video somewhere, you want them to stop on your page, you want your page to be the place where they park and spend their time.

So give them what they want. They want video, give video. Now, with the transition from cookies over to pixels. And the way that g4 is reading the data in Analytics, you no longer get a count a hard count just for how many people are visiting the page and staying there. Like if you have 12 tabs open, I only have to open right now because I’m on the road. But normally I’ve got about 25 tabs open just full disclosure.

In the old days, what would happen is each website would get credit for having an active user for however long you had that tab open, right. But now they don’t do that. So now every time you’re scrolling, it keeps track of the time. Or anytime you’re clicking on something that says like read more or expand the thing or you’re scrolling through the the album or you’re watching the video or you’re listening to the audio file, the mp3 or the mp4. It gives you credit for active time.

And so your Google Analytics, active time probably was slashed by like three fours and you were freaking out. Don’t worry, they’re still there doing what they were always doing. Just the way Google tracks it is now a little bit different. All this goes back to answer your question, Nicole, the answers for me right now the simplistic answer is we’re adding pillar content.

We’re writing blogs are updating more information, written information, because a lot of people kind of erred on other sides there, okay. The end user doesn’t want to read all this stuff. They just want to look at pictures, watch videos, and whatever. And we agreed, like Yeah, that’s what the consumers want. And Google wasn’t penalizing us for not having it. So we were saying keep the pages leave like 600 750 words per page.

Well, let me give you another interesting stat. I’m a stats guy if you haven’t figured this out. Alright. In 2022, according to Pew Research, and there are conflicting numbers on this, so take it with a grain of salt. But they say that somewhere around 14 147 words was the average content written content on any given website that was required to make the first page of Google organic search.

Now, I find lots of websites that break that rule, but then you find others that have like 4000 10,000 words, on average, okay. But here’s the thing, if I’m in a fight, and I know that’s the average that I make that for my clients, the minimum threshold that we put on any given page that they want to rank for are some pages, we don’t care if it ranks, like the contact page or whatever, right. So sometimes you’re not worried about ranking on Google.

Because here’s another thing that most people probably don’t know, which is really interesting. There’s this thing out there. It’s really kind of kind of a fun word to say. It’s called link cannibalization. But when Link cannibalization is on Google, too. Now, it’s ironic because Google is by all definitions, a monopoly like any anti monopoly rule into their algorithm as a safety net, where this is this is a hard and fast rule.

No website will come up more than twice in any one search. So why pillar content is so important, and I can explain what it is if you guys wanted me to go into that. But pillar content is so important because you’re telling Google that these are the most important pages on my website. And this is where a person can find the most information on any given topic on my website. So Please promote this one.

Use this in the the two that you’re going to pull from me because you don’t want a crappy page with very little information showing up on the first page. Because that first impression is the only one you’re going to ever have. You want to make it a good one, and you don’t want them to leave without the answer they were looking for. They might come over and say, Hey, that’s a really cool video. But they didn’t watch the video, dude, you know what I mean?

Like they wanted the answer to the question. If you answer them, then they’re likely to watch the video, you see what I mean? So anyways, that’s that’s where we’re going with the changes right now. That’s the area that we’re focusing on is the content on the pages. We’re trying to make sure, like all the h1 tags, and h2 tags, the metadata, all of that stuff is really, really good for the whole website. And then making sure that the particular content on the pillar pages are top notch. Oh,

 

Nicole Donnelly  30:43

my goodness. Master Class. Yep. So I urge you, I feel like you need to add professor, your list of like, you’re like a renaissance man. It’s like, like a masterclass in SEO. And that’s just that was amazing.

 

Ira Bowman  31:03

Right now, for anybody watching, I do have an SEO organic content creation course it’s available. It’s 10 video series, and stuff. I’m on video, I share my screen we go into the heart of, but this is what I Okay, I am not a PhD, right.

I don’t have a master’s degree, I got my bachelor’s degree after 18 and a half years of of time, right. So the day I started college, the day I graduated was 18 and a half years and I wasn’t at school full time, I’m not. And I did graduate college was a 3916. So I’m not completely done. But just you know, it was, it was a family thing. But here’s the thing that I don’t like, because I didn’t come from upper crust I didn’t come from, you know, the academia world.

Sometimes when you go out and talk to people about what they do, or you’re trying to learn what they do, they speak in ways that are so over your head, it doesn’t help anybody. So I’m not trying to talk down to anybody, I just tried to put it in a way that most people can hopefully understand. Because I want you to take some actionable tips today, some advice today, and improve how you do things, right.

So you can get into how I built my LinkedIn, or how I built my instagram or how I’m building up my YouTube, we can talk about any of that stuff that you want, why I spent all my time on Google, when you talk about any of those things, because I’ll tell you from a from a just a base, everyday, you know, expression, why I’m doing it and how it can help people, you know, accomplish their goal, you should start with the end goal in mind, the end goal should never change.

Now, your strategy that you build out, will change over time because things change, right dynamic change, algorithms shift and 2022. That was a big one. And then they actually came out with what I call a minor one on top of that in December. So they had pretty significant seismic shifts on Google, just in a matter of four months.

 

Nicole Donnelly  32:57

Yeah, yeah. Man. Well, there’s like, there’s just so many people that are like, really, with this new AI experience that Google is going to build it to the SERP. You know, there’s a lot of people that are like, this is Doomsday, you’re gonna lose like, 50% of your search traffic, because you know, this actually

 

Ira Bowman  33:14

gonna be better. People out there that are worried, okay, here’s the people that shouldn’t be worried. Your website is built on fluff. Your website is fluff. Like, I’m not even joking. If you went to chat to BT, and had chat, GBT, right, five articles. And that’s all you got on your pager and huge amount of trolling.

Yeah, but if your website is built on solid information, and you’ve done a good job, here’s what I want to say about this, okay? Content, there’s wide, meaning, there’s all kinds of different topics in that category. So you want to go wide and hit round the basis of the topic, cover the whole enchilada, baby, right? Now, also, you want to have pillars, the pillars are deep.

So then you take each of those sections, and now you build them out. And it’s not like we’re having a one time event. And it’s just today, and it’s got to be ready today. This is the long haul think about this as the Marathon of your business, your your content, you should be contributing to that every six months literally never stops, right? So because things change, you update it, think of it like a press release a news article that comes out.

And so Okay, when it first came out, we had little little bit of information. And then as time goes on, and we learn more things, and the journalists are able to interview and more fat facts and figures come up. They add that to the story. You see that all the time. Same thing with your content on your website, if you have a website page that you built in 2021, and you haven’t touched it since 2021. I hate to tell you this. Google’s probably parked that sucker, right? Really bad.

They’ll actually D list you which you that’s your death knell your business if Google de lis your business from the search engine, you’re gonna have to you have to create a new site with a new URL. Yeah, they don’t revive as far as I know. They don’t ever revive it. Like once it’s delisted, it’s delisted. So to start over,

 

Nicole Donnelly  35:03

I love this because I think as small businesses, you know, it’s really important for you to get clear on the top topics that you want to be known for, and just go really deep on those. For you to really be able to get yourself in, in the AI, get yourself to the top rather than trying to like, just rank for a bunch of different topics and not have, you know, have more broad content.

 

Ira Bowman  35:24

Yeah, we could talk about that a second. There’s a couple comments, I want you to share. Damian if you would Kyle Harbaugh. That’s exactly what I’m hoping people will do. That. That is that is 100%. Why I’m here today. devolve 100%. Yeah. And people asked me, What’s the frequency rate? What do we need to update? Okay, here’s the deal. Pillar content up to six pages on your website. You want to be updating those every single month, not not a 30 day window, you may or may not know this guy’s but Google comes in indexes your website, a minimum of four days, a maximum of 30 days.

So there’s this one to six day window every month where they’re going to come at least one time and index your site. What does that mean? Professor? What it means is this there, they have AI bots, we call them Google bots. They come in, they crawl your site like spiders, they’re looking for everything.

Now you have a schema and you have a robotics. I won’t get into that for sake of time. But so there’s there’s some help that we provide to Google to help make their Google bots job easier, because we want them to know what’s on our site so that they can rank us for it, right. But the bottom line is, if your pillar content is not being updated every month, when they index it again, now you’re starting to go okay, this is not current, we want them to know its current.

One of the things Nicole that is new is Google is pushing new content over old content. So again, everything else being equal, you have an article from this month, you have an article from three months ago, Google doesn’t care about domain authority and number of backlinks like it used to. So the site that has a Moz ranking of eight, can outrank a site that has a MAS ranking of a 91. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, because I studied this stuff, right?

The first time I saw that almost fell out of my chair, because I didn’t believe it. I thought it was a mistake. I’m like, I went to the website and I dug in, I’m like, There’s got to be more here. No, they just have better information on that topic than the 90 ones. Right. And for those of you don’t know what DA is, stands for Domain Authority, Google doesn’t actually have a domain authority like Moz and SEMrush do.

However, those are still good tools to kind of understand get it, it’s like a quick barometer on how you’re doing compared to your competition. But anyways, for updating your site pillars content every month, so if you got six, you’ve got six pages that need to be updated every month, you can break that down, however you need to your blogs, your blogs need to be updated to not as often, but they need to be updated. I recommend at least every six months on the blogs. So

 

Damon Pistulka  38:00

every page, every blog page,

 

Ira Bowman  38:03

if you want okay, Damon, I know this hurts, I know that. The ones that you want to rank are the old blogs that you’re like, you know what, I really don’t need this to rank anymore. Just make sure you go and update those. So they point to your pillar content. Really every page that you add every new page on your website should point to one of those six pillar pages. Everything funnels to your pillar, not your homepage, unless your homepage is also a pillar, which it can be.

But it doesn’t have to be every pillar page, need every other page that you add every single blog that you write every new product or service page that you put out, every page should point back to a pillar. And then when you’re putting out blogs or content or press releases out into the world that are going to be hosted on other sites. You also point those to your pillar pages. Everything points to pillar pillar as your as your your foundation pages. Those are the ones that you care about the most. All right, Ira. First off,

 

Damon Pistulka  39:11

yeah,

 

Curt Anderson  39:12

just take a timeout right here, Damon Yeah, all right, was like, Alright, man, mind blown, right. Like this wasn’t even like Mic drop. This was like mind blown moment. So I don’t know if we caught all the comments. But you know, Christina is saying, you know, you I’m getting a lot of actual steps with Kyle. Thank you. Thank you. Well, it looks like your routine job is update content. Hey, you’re kissing partner had to sneak out so yeah,

 

Damon Pistulka  39:38

I’ve had to leave.

 

Curt Anderson  39:43

I’m just saying that out of jealousy IRA.

 

Ira Bowman  39:46

My wife just said nice. So she’s over there and just

 

Curt Anderson  39:57

how we need to define the schema for pages Is it still in the rules? Do you want to question? Yeah, so

 

Ira Bowman  40:03

okay for I wasn’t going to touch schema because it is a tech. This is probably one of the most technical things that we’re going to talk about today. So I’m just gonna lay it out like this. Imagine your family tree, the diagram. And that’s what the schema really is. It’s it’s kind of a roadmap for Google every page, where it goes and how it all fits together. Yes, you have to have it.

If you don’t have it, you get dinged for not having it. Remember what I was talking about earlier? Everything’s in working order as a minimum threshold. Believe me schema is the first thing on that list. Like if you don’t have a schema, drop everything. And will create it for you. Because you’re not going to have to do it yourself probably need somebody who knows what they’re doing to do it, but yes, absolutely have to have.

 

Curt Anderson  40:51

So I wrote on that note, I dropped your website with you mentioned your blog a while back and so I chopped your blog into the comments. So again, guys, if you’re just joining us, if you came in after the hour, Ira Bowman Bowman digital media, this is just a pure masterclass. Yes. Encourage you invite you, if you caught this later. Go back. Go back.

 

Ira Bowman  41:11

Let me let me help you guys. If you go to Bowman digital media forward slash SEO, or actually, I’m sorry, its search engine optimization, I think but maybe somebody can grab that for us in the comments.

 

Curt Anderson  41:22

I’ll drop it. We live. Here’s why.

 

Ira Bowman  41:25

Here’s want to say that. So again, Dan was asking where can I find the master class, which is it’s on that page, you can buy the course there. But I’m a free guy. I love giving away things. Okay, the bottom half of that page is pillar content. You know what that means? Guys, everything I’m telling you, and a lot more is on that page. And you can read it for free. I’ll teach you for free SEO, just on my page. I want that to come up on Google.

 

Curt Anderson  41:52

Hey, we’ve got a lot of questions coming in. Yeah, we do this in the chatbox. Guys, keep them coming. Yeah. Happy Friday, my dear friend Greg Mushu. in Madison, Wisconsin. Could you talk a little bit about search? Intent? Yeah, dropping that link in the chat.

 

Ira Bowman  42:08

search intent is relatively new. I love it. I’m not worried about it at all. I don’t think that you have to change your strategy as a content creator, if you’re doing what we’ve been talking about on the show, right? If you’re still building backlinks, look, I’m gonna I want to, I want to throw out a warning here, as a PSA for everybody and save you some money, you’re not gonna waste money, okay, you’re gonna get bombarded by emails, they’re usually from somebody.

And it’s gonna say something to the effect of we’ll build backlinks and help you rank number one on Google for $99 A month or $199 month, let me just tell you that all of those are basically based on the old formula. And they did use work. Yes, they did. I’m not trying to say that people are doing things that don’t work. They just don’t work anymore. So save your money. Let me tell you that where it’s at anymore is content creation. Now it’s a great question. And the question why search intent is a thing is a direct response to chat GBT.

That’s why they created it. That’s why they implemented it. No, knowing that Google told me that I just figured it out on my own, because I can read the tea leaves. I’m really good at that part of it. Um, I’m really good at strategy. When you when you look at Ira Bowman that the core, the thing that I’m best at is is like chip playing chess. Okay. So strategy is my thing. So why did Google put this out? It put it out. Because if you understand what Google is doing, is giving you this is pre search intent.

But what they’re doing is just giving you the results of websites, web pages, specifically where you could go and get the information yourself like self serve, but it wasn’t giving you the direct answer. What was it doing? Right? It was promoting, it’s promoting these other sites, and then selling advertising and things like that then, and there are other products. So that was the mousetrap to bring you in, make you fall in love with Google. You’re getting your business from Google.

So you’re going to advertise with Google. And you’re going to do all by all their suite of Google Suite products, right, Gmail and all this stuff for your business. search intent, I believe is a direct response to chat GBT because what does chat GBT do, instead of telling you where to go to get the information, it gives you the information now I’m going to throw out another PSA.

If you haven’t heard of the term hallucination, you really need to stop using GBT until you understand what hallucination is because I met a guy in Southern California about four months ago told me the scariest thing I had ever heard in business. He said, I fired all my content creators and all my customer service reps. And we do everything through chat GBT now.

And I said, okay, but who’s supervising? Right? Yeah, what oversight is there for this information because we don’t have any. It just goes out and said, okay, so you obviously don’t understand a couple of very important things about Chad GBT for First of all, if you go to eight open ai.com, which is chat, GBT creator. It’s not Microsoft, I think it’s Microsoft know, Microsoft bought into the project because they saw how cool it was. But open AI, the creators did not create it to be your author.

That’s not what the language program is. They’re developing this thing over time. A language model is what they call it. But what they’re doing is they’re giving you the information directly. Now, here’s the part where you need to understand hallucination. hallucination is it’s making stuff up. You think because you’re using it on the internet that the database that it’s drawing from is also drawing from current information, and it is not. It has a set database, and that set database was drawn and kept September 2021 41.

So what’s happened in the worlds in September 2021? Yeah, a couple days much. It does not have any access to that. Now this is one of the advantages of Bard if you want to understand why I like Bard over chat GVT This is one of the main reasons Bart is Google’s direct competitor to chat GBT So learn the word barg use Bard. I recommend a better, but it’s still hallucinates. They both listening. What is hallucination? hallucination is when it doesn’t have the data, but it uses logic based.

It uses its artificial intelligence to create, manufacture make up and now what’s scary is this. This is what’s scary. How much content has gone out created by chat GBT over the last year online, it would knock your socks off if you knew how much content is out there now written by artificial intelligence. And those aren’t the only two by the way. There’s all kinds that but anyways, yes, for now. Yeah, Jasper. My company uses Jasper as a tool. Now we have oversight for it, but we use it.

 

Damon Pistulka  46:58

Yeah. Bing Bing chat. Yeah, all

 

Ira Bowman  47:00

kinds of stuff. But here’s the thing, right. So now that data that’s out there is being put out by companies that are supposed to be credible on that topic. Yeah. Okay. So what happens when they’re doing their data research, and they’re finding now live blogs that are written from credible sources? They’re adding that content into their database. Now it’s drawing experience, from hallucinating up foundations? What how you build a structure on crumbling sand, y’all.

Yeah, it’s your business, it’s your responsibility to make sure that data is accurate, not the source, the tool that you’re using, that’s not their responsibility. It’s your responsibility. You are the expert. Right? So use the tool, but understand the limitations of the tool and the risks that are associated with using the tool. Oh, my gosh, I was like I said it was the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. Oh, yeah. Running Bowman digital media, because he’s talking about all communications for his company. Not on his website, but what they’re responding to clients and emails, all of it.

 

Damon Pistulka  48:11

That just makes you drop in my mouth a little.

 

Ira Bowman  48:16

Let me tell you, you don’t have to take my word for it go to open ai.com Just read what they write about Whois nation on their own website. Yes, I’m not slandering them in any way. I’m doing a public service. Because most people don’t read. Yeah, that’s the problem, right? The humans Why do I want videos on your websites want videos, because that’s what people are going to consume. Google is going to consume your written content to know what to remake recommend you for but the people for the most part are going to watch. They’re gonna look at the graphic, and they’re gonna watch the video.

 

Nicole Donnelly  48:48

Technology. So wonderful servant, but a terrible master. Right? Yeah,

 

Ira Bowman  48:54

yeah. So search intent is designed to help you figure it out. It was supposed to do just answer the question directly it was supposed to do is help understand what you’re really looking for. You might have phrased it improperly, or whatever. And it’s saying people also searched for. And now there’s this new section on the site, and the Google AI. The reason why it doesn’t bother me. And I think it’s actually going to be helpful for everybody who’s writing real content, you know, not fluff, but substance. Because, again, what it’s trying to do is not compete with Bing not compete with Yahoo.

They’re still around, believe it or not, not compete with DuckDuckGo. Let me give you an interesting fact, in my second TED Talk that hasn’t released yet. If you look at how many people use for search engines across the globe, right, search engines, I’m not talking about databases on other sites. I’m talking about actual search engines that that’s their business search engine. Okay. Google gets 92 to 94%. of desktop search, they get 96% or so of mobile. The other competitor, the closest competitor.

Remember I said they’re the biggest monopoly ever This is what I mean, Bing is their number one competitor in the search engine space, they get just over 1% of the daily search volume 1%. If you take Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, which are the next three and add them up, it’s less than 5% of the overall search volume. They are not worried at Google about Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. I promise you not at all. But they are worried about chat GBT and other programs like that. So they, in my opinion, again, I don’t work inside Google, I don’t have any insider information here.

But from a logic based standpoint, from a business man’s perspective, and trying to figure out these puzzles, what I’m thinking is they’re positioning themselves in a way to compete better with language, programming, these other systems that are coming, because we haven’t even seen the cool stuff yet. Yeah, there’s much more coming out. In fact, it’s things like indexing video content and stuff like that that’s coming. It doesn’t exist yet.

But that stuff will come. And that will change the game on Google a lot too. Because once a lot of people don’t know about SEO, search engine optimization and how it works. They think if they put out 100 videos on a topic, and they’ve got it covered from soup to nuts, that they’re good, and they’re not because Google doesn’t recognize what’s inside any of those videos, he only knows what you have in the meta descriptions that the wrapper that goes around the video, that’s all they’re indexing.

So if you right now, another strategy for content, go and take otter AI or something like it, transcribe your videos, and then add those as blogs on that same page. Now, you’ve got all that content that Google can index. But one day soon, one day soon, YouTube is going to actually I’m sorry, Google is going to actually index video content. And that will change the game dramatically.

 

Damon Pistulka  51:54

Yes, because the people that have been making good videos all along, it didn’t know how to, you know, necessarily how to put the metod stuff together, right? If they can start tagging the videos, they’re gonna find the good content.

 

Ira Bowman  52:06

Look, if you’re looking for help, right, if you’re looking for help, and you have content creators, and they do a good job, but some of this technical stuff is where you’re weak, source it, don’t try and figure it out yourself. Because I promise you, this is a full time job. Just understanding and keeping up with Google is a full time job. But that help can be the difference from being on page seven. And being on page one, just doing some simple tweaks to your standard operating procedure with how you’re loading your content on your site can make all the difference. Amen. Boom.

 

Curt Anderson  52:41

I like like yeah, the screen now I like or SEO expertise in acumen. And, you know, noon, I’ve worked on, you know, several projects together and like, you know, when and I think many people probably perceive you, as you know, the social guy, an influencer, in what I love, what you’ve just done, and what you’ve described as like, you know, you just really, this is a masterclass on how to learn how to grow, how to make yourself more competitive. You know, were you an SEO expert, three years ago?

 

Ira Bowman  53:13

No, I didn’t even know what SEO was, honestly, what is the moment I’ve been studying for the last few years, right? Because I needed to know I started my first SEO lesson started with Project copy grow in 2018. Because if those of you who aren’t familiar project kappa grow, just look it up. I don’t have time to explain it. But I launched a philanthropy in 2018, to help people find jobs. It’s one of the ways that I built my LinkedIn visibility, right, I was helping people where they were in need in finding a job, I’m really good at that. I created a website with the help of some friends. But then I needed it to rank on Google.

And I didn’t have any money to spend on advertising. So I started researching SEO a little bit back then. But I really got hands, Knuckles deep into it in 2021. Because you can take a business so far with social media, but you really can’t take it to the top of the mountain without Google, you need Google’s help.

So I was like, What can I do? Not for my clients. This was not something that was really all that concerned about for my clients is more for my own business. How can I increase my own visibility and gain traction on Google for Bowman digital media, so that’s where I started reading, taking courses, attending seminars and all this stuff. That I love to learn Anyways, if you haven’t figured that out, but

 

Nicole Donnelly  54:33

it’s clear, it’s very clear.

 

Curt Anderson  54:35

Yeah. Well, once again, man, you’re getting lots of love in the chat box here. Thanks, everybody. I appreciate you guys. So again, guys, we’re gonna we’re gonna start winding down. So the call parting thoughts kind of recap what like what

 

Nicole Donnelly  54:52

was oh, man, I think the things for people to take away for folks that are kind of just getting started or wondering where where they should focus Now that there’s so much disruption happening with AI is I love what what Iris says about, make sure your website has pillar content, make sure you’ve got that pillar content that four to six pillars, make sure you’re updating it regularly.

So that you know, you’re you’re staying top of mind. So that’s what really stands out to me, like, for people who are just kind of getting started is just really to focus on that time. I’ll even give you any help if you need help you know where to go go to IRA.

 

Ira Bowman  55:25

I’ll give you guys a hint, too. We didn’t talk about this. But when you talk about volume of content, how much how much volume should actually be writing, I recommend you do at least 4000 words every month, at least 4000 words every month. Now most of my websites were doing six or 6000 or more. But as a minimum threshold, you should be aiming at 4000 words.

 

Nicole Donnelly  55:46

That’s really helpful. And I love how you’ve just very like it’s very specific advice that you’d get on everyone today. It’s not just this high level fluff. And I think that’s really important.

 

Ira Bowman  55:56

I want to give people things they can do like you know, you got you have a task list. Now watch this video from scratch. Yeah,

 

Nicole Donnelly  56:04

exactly. It’s wonderful.

 

Curt Anderson  56:05

Well, good. As we wrap up, I just want to give you know, I just want to pull up somebody’s comments again, Christina, thank you for spending time with us today. Happy Friday. Hope you and your family have a wonderful Memorial Day. And Ira you’re getting love from Angela Angela, thank you for joining us what a rockstar she is thank you I

 

Ira Bowman  56:21

actually built I built out her website for so did you go for him and co.com It’s a wonderful site.

 

Curt Anderson  56:27

So hey, great vector 30 Angela, here’s her comment again. Great actual advice. Deval you know just a lot of great tips here so Damon dude was this like we had high expectations when I was on stage but man like completely blown away we have your TED talk guys out over the weekend you’re out for a walk with a dog or just enjoying the weather pop on iMac and listen to it is absolutely fantastic. From the beginning. Go back and listen to this discussion just was just a true true masterclass. I wrote parting thoughts, any words of wisdom that you want to leave us with?

 

Ira Bowman  57:03

Yeah, this, this is the thing. SEO is never done. Just remember what I said about the volumes on google it. It takes here’s this that blew my mind when I did the research. One month of Google’s traffic is the equivalent of 58 years of traffic on LinkedIn. Why did I switched from Google? I’m sorry, from LinkedIn over to Google as my primary focus. It’s because of the volume. There’s so many more eyeballs on Google every single second of the day than there is on LinkedIn and most of the stuff on LinkedIn again, it’s it’s not in your geo fence. So you know, even that doesn’t take into that discrepancy is not.

So just understand this about SEO, it’s not a one time deal. Like I get some people they’ll come to me they’re like, Hey, we got $20,000 that we want to invest in SEO. Like they’re thinking like, Okay. Know, what I want you to do is cut that up into a monthly budget. And we’re gonna do a little bit every month. Sorry, yeah, that came right outside my door. But we’re gonna do this every month, whether you’re paying somebody to do it, or you’re doing it yourself, or probably what’s the best is to have a little of both, right?

You have some internal people working and some external source labor helping you out, but never stop, because the algorithm changes every month. And also, like I said, they’re pushing relevant content, new content first. So all things being equal, you need to keep every time you update one of those blogs or you update that pillar content. It considers that new content. So you’ve just refreshed the created date, if you will.

 

Curt Anderson  58:50

Yeah, man. Okay. Whitney Houston. Whitney. Happy Happy Memorial Day weekend to Thanks for joining us we got Kathleen holy cannoli, man, I like that my Yeah. Ryan. That’s outstanding. Casey again, drops a line here so I guys we’re gonna wind down we have we have Iris TED talk in the chat. We have IRAs boy don’t need to look fire from finally Ivers LinkedIn profile. We have his blog we have his SEO tips. As he just mentioned, he has a course connect with Ira if you want to take your SEO to the next level. He has all sorts of powerful Tips Tools. And as you can tell, he’s just one amazing incredible dude. How about a big round of applause you guys thanks everybody.

 

Ira Bowman  59:31

I really appreciate being here. I love I really hope this was helpful. Take the advice and run with it because yeah, do it apply the things I’ve told you then it’s not going to help you but if you apply what I just told you, it’ll make a huge difference in your in your visitor traffic.

 

Curt Anderson  59:47

Well, Kate and I wrote you shared you know, you share your story, your family, your eight kids and we just want to extend our love our prayers to you, your family, good health and just safe travels you and your wife as you’re on the East. coast, getting back to the west coast at some point in time. But thank you for sharing your time, your passion, your expertise. We love you. We appreciate you. And just this was just fired beyond our expectations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Damon. Take it away, dude.

 

Damon Pistulka  1:00:19

I’m just I’m just taking hold back a little bit here, but I’ll try to summarize the call. Thanks for being here. I mean, your questions and interaction with Ira got this thing going to a level that, you know, Kurt and I are agile, they’re gonna go there. That was awesome.

Thank you. I want to thank IRA for being here. Obviously, man, just love you’re sharing your giving attitude and just turning out good practical advice for people. And in the people listening, go to Bowman, digital media.com. If you haven’t already, check it out. You can get in touch with him there, you can do whatever and just look at some of the content and see he practices what he talks about. That’s one thing you’re gonna see there.

And then finally, I want to I want to thank all the listeners today. I mean, man, Kurt and I in in, we just are so blessed to have listeners coming back and listen to these cool to goofy old dudes that started this like three years ago. We’re like, man, we want to talk about things that’ll help business people and it’s just been such volatile continues to be a ball in and having people like IRA and Nicole here today just shows and all the people in the audience and the comments and stuff just just really inspires me.

And I know it does Kurt to do do better and do more of this. So thanks, everyone for being here. Thanks for those that were listening, although you didn’t put comments in and thank those people for putting the comments in. And we are out. Have a wonderful holiday weekend. Bye, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you

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