Simple Marketing Tips that Produce Powerful Results

45:02

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, eric, reviews, google, linkedin, seo, talking, yelp, absolutely, unpack, kurt, business, manufacturers, point, website, keywords, search, domain authority, citations, learning

SPEAKERS

Damon Pistulka, Eric Antwi, Curt Anderson

 

00:00

yeah

 

Damon Pistulka  00:01

yeah good good way well we got eric here so we’re gonna get started i’m gonna get us live on linkedin we’ll get going so welcome everyone great to have you here boom we’re going live on linkedin i got to get the let the video play over there for a second and we’re live rolling all right all right everyone welcome once again to the manufacturing ecommerce success series

i’m one of your hosts Damon Pistulka i’ve got my co host kurt anderson with me today and i’m going to let curt introduce our guest and then we’re gonna begin talking about simple marketing tips that drive powerful results for manufacturers so kurt let’s go i’m going to be monitoring the chat on linkedin so if you’re on linkedin let us know where you’re coming in from we’ve already got the chat rolling there we’re gonna keep it going and we’re gonna get things rolling go ahead kirk thanks

 

Curt Anderson  00:57

gal you had me at hello thank you for being here thank you everybody for being here happy friday and this is Damon Pistulka the host for the most my partner in crime growth and exit strategy specialists with exit your way my name is kurt anderson happy friday what an honor and privilege to introduce my dear friend eric eric welcome to the program my friend how are you today

 

Eric Antwi  01:21

i’m doing well thank you so much for having me

 

Curt Anderson  01:24

absolutely so daymond eric and i go in COVID years we go way back i think what we we met in october right ark and about a and COVID time that’s like you know that’s like 20 years so we go way back and eric is a digital marketing specialist graduate of stony brook one of the top universities here in new york and so eric tell us a little bit about yourself your background and we’re going to dig right into the program

 

Eric Antwi  01:50

well i’m i’m a digital marketer at this point in my career i started off as an entrepreneur out of college we were trying to get a startup off the ground and we had some tech difficulties so i had been building websites since i was in seventh grade and in that sort of difficulty i decided to try and fill the gap a little bit and you know honestly it didn’t work out that way you know the the startup failed but it changed the trajectory of my career path so i started freelancing i started picking up jobs and i would say maybe about five years ago

i noticed that even if you build a really fancy website it really doesn’t matter if nobody nobody goes to it nobody visits it so that’s when i started really throwing my my hat in the ring and you know venturing out into digital marketing and learning more about seo learning more about paid ads learning more about outbound and inbound marketing and it’s been a wild ride even now you know everything changes every year this year it’s it’s it’s clubhouse and it’s tick

tock advertising last year it was everybody has to have videos on their landing pages now every year there’s a new set of metrics that are trending but really relevant to pay attention to and then there’s the tried and true sort of pack that you know you always should adhere to because at the end of the day you know it’s about value and it’s about making sure that your audience knows what you’re doing it’s about raising awareness and it’s about you know sort of conforming to what the algorithms are looking for to be found

 

Curt Anderson  03:31

wow so so much to unpack there now eric well where are you coming from today tell it tell us where you’re at where are you coming live from today

 

Eric Antwi  03:39

so i’m in new york i’m actually in my my wife’s office because she’s the one that set up right now

 

Curt Anderson  03:47

so name and don’t don’t hit on me i wear my yankee shirt just for me and eric today so is that all right don’t hate on us all right so we need the yankee fans out there so eric and i you know we wanted to i wanted to fly the clothes for you dude so

 

Damon Pistulka  04:02

well i’m telling ya my baseball team the mariners the only thing they can do is figure out how to how not to win the world series for 30 some years that’s what we did

 

Curt Anderson  04:14

so dan i have my manufacturing shirt on next week for your brother so anyway eric you and you man you just revealed a ton let’s unpack that a little bit sony and right out of your career right out of college you had a little like you said a little step back you know step back to the early stages of our career so we’ll talk a little bit about how did that go what happened what did you learn from that experience

 

Eric Antwi  04:37

well what was interesting there was um you know especially back then if you’re looking to do anything that was sort of software as a service you needed one of your founders to be a tech savvy individual otherwise you are going to struggle if you try to outsource your your tech especially back then you you you’re going to be in trouble like you really need to lay usually when you outsource things you need to be really piecemeal with your direction and we just didn’t have what it took right the person that we had on board just wasn’t interested enough in the project so sort of looking to salvage the product

i reverted back to my basic understanding of code and i was like well maybe we can just put something together maybe we can hold on to the email s and things like that and you know things fall apart i don’t regret going down that road because i learned a lot i learned a ton even more i’m still learning a lot i’m still learning a ton but you know looking back you know there were some opportunities though i wish we could have taken advantage of thankfully today if you’re looking to found a startup there’s a lot of no code platforms where if you don’t necessarily know

how to code something you can still sort of build out your ideas and you know every the internet’s really accessible right now i don’t know if that’s ever going to change but it’s really accessible if you have a good idea if you have a good product if you provide a good service you can set yourself up to raise awareness within days and put yourself in front of people if you know where your audience lives and you have your messaging down so it’s a good time to be in the digital marketing space man open

 

Curt Anderson  06:20

apps all the changes like our friend dan bigger says he can hardly remember his name let alone keep up with everything and my dear friend noah is in the house noah from portland oregon so no he’s an american at notre dame and he’s our speaker and a few weeks he’s speaking in several weeks noah thank you joyce’s here chaffin jerseys here but that eric so let’s dig in a little bit so you have that little setback not in and again great learning experience

they don’t teach you those things in college but it’s like hands down and have that fall back you had a couple of choices to make you could either you know walk find a job like a lot of your other classmates would have you you decide to freelance and jump in entrepreneurship what was that like was there a tipping point where like you know what i missed that really made to work for somebody else i’m going to do my own gig how did that play out

 

Eric Antwi  07:09

well that’s that’s an interesting question you know what i don’t remember if i mentioned this to you in in our conversations together but i never actually quit my job right i was terrified to quit my job so i when i was freelancing i would do the freelancer work at work and i had like an overnight gig so i was just basically like working on websites at work working on different sort of marketing projects at work and eventually i reached a point where i realized if i wanted to really become profitable i had to double down and go all in right i just had to pay attention to what i was doing i hope to build my business so at some point in about 2016 you know i had gone from full time to premium

and then as a per diem i was a i was a i was a counselor i was a youth counselor and detention centers and i just started you know like stop giving me hours i need to i need to take time and i just stopped picking up hours and it just felt comfortable i’m like alright well you know what if anything happens that’s to pay the bills i can always you know just call my bosses and be like hey man i need to get back in the game but it just you know just happened to work out i got a few good clients that you know i was on board with for a while and kind of needed me for a range of stuff so usually when i describe myself

i describe myself as a digital generalist because realistically i do i do i work around the world right like i can build you the website i can help you with your branding i can help you with your seo can help you with your digital advertising and that’s all well and good but realistically as a business owner at this point i’m looking to bring people on who specialize in those things and i try to be a jack of all trades and really just sort of focus in so learning more about the manufacturing space has been really interesting to me because it seems like there’s a lot of people in that space

that are doing great things and doing good work may not necessarily be optimized for digital right like there’s there’s not a tremendous amount of awareness about why one product is better than the other and just as a lay person looking from the outside in it seems to be it seems to boil down to two things pricing quality right and you basically trying to leverage the best of the two so it’s been really interesting just sort of doing my homework i’m still learning about this space but i’m really looking to sort of double down and focus on a certain group that can utilize my skill set the best

 

Curt Anderson  09:41

man that’s awesome and you know damon you were a corporate warrior you know a lot of corporate lawyers on the call i think jeff reelin we talked before about like making that plunge into entrepreneurship and so you know hats off to you dude for you know having that leap of faith that courage to say like i’m gonna do my own thing so let’s get like dave

 

Eric Antwi  09:59

He’s got he’s got a whole thing like what the exit exit strategy your way out? I’m trying to build up to that man. We can have that conversation down the road. Yeah.

 

Curt Anderson  10:11

So what I’m gonna do I drop So guys, so welcome. Thank you for joining the program today everybody I see everybody’s dropping your LinkedIn profile I just dropped Eric’s in there, you have to connect with Eric. Eric, what you may have the best headline on LinkedIn, can you share with everybody? What’s your headline on LinkedIn?

 

Eric Antwi  10:28

So I don’t remember it offhand. I didn’t memorize it.

 

Curt Anderson  10:34

That I weaponize companies missions with narrative right is

 

Damon Pistulka  10:41

in the powerful narratives,

 

Eric Antwi  10:43

powerful narrative power, I believe, is power powerful narratives, successful customer engagements, and positive user positive user experiences. Yep. Yeah, I think to sort of disseminate that, um, especially within the past two years, there’s been a big pivot and how I go about executing in the space. Now, I think everybody sort of has an understanding that content is king. Right. But I think what often happens is that people, you know, either if you, if you, if we’re talking SEO, we’re talking about gray hat, we’re talking about black hat.

Or if we’re talking about digital ads, we’re talking about, you know, maybe keyword stuffing, or just, you know, just the sort of interruption type marketing techniques. And I found that the best sort of engagements come from really telling your own personal story, right, and finding where your your why, why you wake up in the morning to do whatever it is that you do intersects with why your customers looking for you in the first place, right, because when you can marry those two things, not only does your customer trust you more,

but at the same time, you can be incredibly fulfilled, because you’re sharing the very thing that drives you to do the business that you’re doing. So when we do our, when we do our marketing campaigns, we’re usually looking for that sort of intersection, where we can drive the things that you’re passionate about, into the reason why someone wants to work with you and share their hard earned money with you in the first place.

 

Curt Anderson  12:16

Yeah, that is so, so good. And the thing is, for manufacturers, you know, in daymond, I work with a lot of different manufacturers, not only as a as a, you know, as a manufacturer, we want to be found, but just think of that engineer, that buyer, that’s just really struggling, finding that good vendor, supply chain is just so disrupted for this last year, and then bigger, and I’ve talked about that multiple times. You know, so just think you’re, you’re doing yourself a favor to be found, you know, from your perspective, but your ideal buyer is desperately trying to find you.

So talk a little bit, you know, we’ve had great conversations where like you help your clients get those first page rankings, you’re great with on local search, talk a little bit about how you approach helping your clients, maybe they can’t be found anywhere. What’s a good starting point for you with that client that, you know, a little bit on a rub side as far as being fun?

 

Eric Antwi  13:08

Okay, oh, that’s a really good question. So something that I found striking, even today, and I, you know, there’s a part of me, that’s still surprised that this happens, but it does is Google My Business. These days, if you have a business, and you’re not on Google My Business that from my perspective, is akin to having a storefront, with no signage. It’s just blank, there’s nothing in the windows, there’s nothing on this, there’s nothing on top of the building is just products on the shelf clear window.

And then people sitting at maybe desks waiting for people to walk in. And it’s it’s very sort of curious to me, I don’t know if it’s an awareness sort of thing. Or maybe people think, you know, just sort of work itself out. But attending to your local SEO, first and foremost, is the number one thing you want to do. You want to take control and take charge of your Google My Business profile, you want to take control and take charge of your Yelp profile. And you want to take charge of those sort of higher level higher domain authority websites that are usually going to populate when people type in your business name, or people type in your name, right.

So that’s your Facebook, that’s your maybe Yellow Pages and stuff like that. You want to make sure that you’re essentially, Google search is the Yellow Pages for today. Right? So if you’re not fundable, somebody can type in your company name and they can’t find you. That’s the number one thing you need to address. Right. So

 

Damon Pistulka  14:40

I got a quick question for you. And then I was gonna say, hey, Bonnie, she’s on LinkedIn drop. Awesome comments. So that’s good. So Bonnie, glad to see you here today. And, and she is one of those people that’s killing it on tik tok. I’m sure she has over 20 million views now because it was like 19 this earlier this week, and I talked so they’re going and they got one that’s on fire so that’s growling well but i you said yelp and to me you know hell i’m old and

i think yelp yelp is like and i know their whole game and the way they’ve they’ve hammered so many people in the past about what they do you know they strong arm people into buying advertising and really doesn’t do any good but you’re saying just getting listed on yelp helps you with your local stuff

 

Eric Antwi  15:29

so yeah that’s the kind of that’s the catch 22 with yelp and yelp actually would have gone out of business by now if it weren’t for the fact that they got into the game so early and there’s such a dominant player with regard to domain authority right because when yelp was a was a major player and they were giving offers and they were sort of competing with groupon and things like that they were the only ones really monetizing customer reviews and building value in that way where it’s like you can trust xyz business because we vet these reviews and you can trust us and you can look to us first before you try out a business

these days that model is long antiquated there’s 10s of 1000s of directory sites now they do essentially the same thing so yelps bread and butter is essentially in its domain history and domain authority so everyone should be on yelp but once you sign up to yelp and i feel so bad saying this because i must have listened to yelp customer i must have listened to sales reps time and time yeah sign up one of my customers and i just give them a shot

and they send me the same survey and you know that a 65 to 80% of the people who are on yelp five from the people who search i’m like alright i’m listening listening listening listening if your budget is such that your time is such that you can go in all directions and make the most of every platform that i’m not going to shoot down yet but what i’ll say is it is not the best use of your time or your budget

 

Damon Pistulka  16:59

yeah

 

16:59

awesome so

 

Eric Antwi  17:00

make sure you listed there that’s a minimum if you want to put money into that make sure you’re putting money into google first make sure you’re putting money into your social media first make sure your your website is on point and that the messaging makes sense and that your call to actions are good make sure you’ve addressed everything that you can adjust if you’re the type of person that wants to make $100 million make sure you do it that way first but if you want that extra 101 million then maybe they need

 

Damon Pistulka  17:32

it reminds me of that one guy that when he’s trying to get the date with a girl and she said something like totally shoots him down but he said but you didn’t say no

 

Curt Anderson  17:41

yeah you mean

 

Damon Pistulka  17:44

the last the last thing that you’re going to do but yeah cuz i was trying to

 

Eric Antwi  17:48

i’m trying to be kind to those sales reps because they work so hard i

 

17:51

know i know i

 

Eric Antwi  17:52

email you email you

 

Damon Pistulka  17:54

yeah yeah you write and then they try and analyze stuff but i was just cuz i hadn’t thought about that i thought about yelp and yahoo and the other ones the yellow pages and all the they’re antiquated as heck but you’re right the domain authority alone and getting the backlinks into it and just helps

 

Curt Anderson  18:14

there’s a lot right there so let’s unpack a few things like eric you just chopped like some just massive massive value but yeah let’s unpack a few things there for me you know for our full audience out there so and get a hello gal gal says she has fomo from from bonnie on linkedin right now but you’re you’re with the cool kids here on remeeting you didn’t see though she’s on linkedin now too she’s

 

Damon Pistulka  18:38

on linkedin and in remote so she’s got two devices on here remote a pastor i can’t recommend that she’s got her mac and ipad rolling so she hidden both sides so she’s talking with bonnie on linkedin so

 

Curt Anderson  18:50

we got paul here and paul’s gonna be speaking for us in a few weeks he’s the found him and dan usa manufacturing twitter chat will bless you guys so let’s unpack what what you just have to remember that this citation is critical if you’re a manufacturer your work you know you’re out there and you’re in you’re like yo why would i go on yelp

i’m not a restaurant like eric saying just get that quality backlink so like we have a little tool that we use with our clients it’s a wonderful amazing tool we can get your top 50 top 50 citations and a lot you know better business bureau just landed all these wacky goofy that have been around forever but you just want those high quality links so that’s one great tip that eric just dropped yeah

 

Eric Antwi  19:36

i want to throw something in there um i use something called i use a i use an app called geo center right i’m willing to give away my secret city i use this app called geo center right and i want i’m dealing with a business i take some of their their their business images especially if you have like teams members are you have places where you’ve done business a really good way to expand your search radius i wish i wish i had i had the slides for you guys because i have i’ve never been able to really capture these images but essentially if you drop a pin where your location is right if somebody searches for your business within say a mile

because they’re within that that search radius your your your rankings going to be prominent right you’re more likely to rank high yeah as further and further away from that pin your ranking drops because your your locality is less relevant now doing all those citations and all those things are fantastic for local seo you absolutely should do it but if you want to hack the system a little bit what you should do is you should take company images i like to take at least 10 but i would use 2030 i don’t think there’s really a limit on what you use here you take those images and if you can pin areas we’ve done business pin areas

where your team members have been and it’s really simple you can you can use your phone right turn on the geo settings on like your iphone or something like that you take a picture when you’re somewhere and just get that location data right and what you essentially want to do is you want to spread out those locations on the map so you have a pin here you have a pin there you’ve been there you’ve been there you expand your radius you’ve tagged these images with your geolocation and then you upload

it to your google my business profile you upload it to your yelp profile you upload it to these to these citation directories and what is going to happen is the algorithm weaponizes everything now everything from your file name to your geo tags to your metadata there is nothing absolutely nothing that they are not counting now i recently found out that if you have your keywords on your youtube video right if you’re saying your keywords and your keyword is actually displayed somewhere in your youtube video the algorithms are picking that up now yeah so there’s absolutely nothing that’s something no yeah

 

Damon Pistulka  22:07

that’s a that’s a great point that’s a great point and that’s like when you do your videos that’s what we were learning as well as if you make sure that you’re mentioning your keywords the keyword phrases that you want to cover in a topical based video and you’re then putting text on a blog post like if you do do a transcription it seems like it gets more traction he gets more jacking from that

 

Eric Antwi  22:34

that’s absolutely that’s absolutely true that’s absolutely true so you don’t want to underestimate you don’t want to underestimate the power of geolocation especially with regard to that because once you do that once you once you sort of tagged those areas around the around your locality and you haven’t old driving back to that same central point what’s what’s essentially going to happen is you’re going to bolster your radius and your blog rank about as high as you would if somebody were right at your doorstep in from from miles away so i haven’t seen the limits of that tested i don’t know if you can go state to state doing that i don’t know if

 

Damon Pistulka  23:10

we’re gonna test it i’m testing it like this week and and i’m one of those crazy people that started with google maps uploading photos like 10 years ago or something like that are long time whenever i got my first android phone i got like 15 million views on google maps so i can that’s awesome right i but i’ve got this whole register of these images that i could be sharing from places where i’ve been because i take where i do business businesses

i like and those things that we’ll try it because it’ll be fun and our partners and other people that work across the us we can actually then now what you’re saying if i’m a manufacturer and i work in seven different places like we had a client last years oilfield services there and all over in these oilfield plays well if they had people taking pictures and all over they upload that stuff to all their listings it would help them in those areas that’s how i

 

Eric Antwi  24:06

absolutely would help them and i suspect now i don’t travel all around the country but i suspect if you’re a nationwide brand that is incredibly competitive

 

Damon Pistulka  24:14

i’ve just yeah

 

Eric Antwi  24:15

probably competitive yeah so something like that i feel like should possibly even be commonplace let’s say your products or services speak for themselves and they’re already ranking well some like a like a little small tip like that a pro tip like that can be the difference between you being maybe number three and number four yeah right yeah like just something like that ton of difference

 

Damon Pistulka  24:35

yeah that’s that’s cool that’s so cool

 

Curt Anderson  24:40

let’s hit a couple things there so gail’s asked me how do you spell that tool that you

 

Eric Antwi  24:44

so i downloaded it so long ago i’ve held on to it because i just hate losing track of things i know that it was an obscure sort of tool

 

Curt Anderson  24:54

right

 

Eric Antwi  24:55

i see her i see that she has a link in the in the chat i just

 

Curt Anderson  25:01

Oh, there. Oh, Jeff dropped. Yeah, Jeff. All right, Jeff, and guidance, connect with Eric on, you know, connect with Eric on LinkedIn and have

 

Eric Antwi  25:12

no problem sharing that tool with you guys. I just want to just because that website that you guys put in the link looks a little spammy. And I’m not entirely sure that that’s the right website.

 

Curt Anderson  25:21

Thank you, Jeff. And but let’s unpack another thing right there. I mean, man, I had so much expectations, like you are just crushing it right. Now. Yeah. We’re talking about some local stuff. So I’m a manufacturer. And I’m like, dude, wait a minute, you know, I’m shipping nationwide. Why do I want local? This is this is the preach that daymond I you know, we do a lot of workshops and webinars in the in the mid 90s, early 90s or mid 90s. Say a lot of those service sectors, the plumbers, nail salons, hair salons, they’re like, you know, man, I can’t take a phonebook ad out anymore. I needed What is this internet thing, when also now.

So now you’re telling me I have to do Facebook, I have to go on these directories, I could do Yelp. Everything that was happening to the retail service sector 1520 years ago, is now hitting manufacturers. And again, the citations are so important to get those quality backlinks. But now I think you hit something really important. And I share these at my webinars, Google My Business.

Now, in the past, if I did a webinar for like, you know, just entrepreneurs in general, I’d be like, Hey, you guys need to be on Google Local. If you’re a service provider, then plumber, hairdresser. But if you’re national, not so much, not so important. Today, I agree with you, 100%. I have a person on my team. She’s working diligently on Google My Business for two manufacturers I’m working with. Talk a little bit about the opportunities there. Obviously, number one, it’s

 

26:49

Google. Oh, yeah. Number two, it’s

 

Curt Anderson  26:52

free. Yeah, talk in Google is almost like a you can blog. You can post videos, but talk a little bit about what are you encouraging people?

 

Eric Antwi  26:59

I would love to I think one of the biggest things people get wrong on Google, my business is the service category. Right? They don’t categorize themselves correctly, and they miss out on opportunities. They’re another another humongous thing that for whatever reason, people are forgetting right by accident, or completely missing the mark on and they really shouldn’t, is reviews. Yeah, really, really, really, really underestimate the value of reviews, because it’s not just in having them. Yeah, right. But it’s also the words that are being used when they’re leaving the review in the first place. And Google’s really, really sharp their algorithm is, but it’s bar none.

Probably the best algorithm out there, if not in the top three. And what they do is not only do they look at the keywords, not only do they look at the semantically relevant keywords, but they look at like pronouns, but he got how the the emotion that people put into their reviews, where if they’re there, if they have a strong positive reaction to your business, that in it of itself will add credence to how they rank you. So I completely missed the mark, when it comes to customer reviews, because if you look at your if you look at your local packs, if you look at your map listings, you know, there’s there’s a ton of people there,

but I think we all do this, you know, you have a couple of people with like no reviews, like one or two people with no reviews, a couple people would like maybe three to under 10 reviews. And then you have like you have like maybe three or four people that have like 60 or 50, or whatever reviews. And those are. So those are sort of the reviews that we grabbed, we gravitate to those first. Right. And just in doing that, just in looking at the listing to look at the reviews, your your value goes up, right, because you’re garnering attention.

Google is all about being relevant. Google is all about making sure they have the best data available for you. So if people are just taking the time to even read your reviews, it’s a positive thing. And people I think people completely completely undervalue reviews, you should be harassing the people that are like, Oh my god, I love you so much. You guys are the best. I’m so glad I did this. You find that person. You have them, give them give you a review, it’s g page forward slash, whatever you set it up under have that leave you a review, if they forget, make it easy for them.

But a step that you can do to sort of make this easier for people if they’re not if you’re not, you know, because some people they don’t know what they want to say some people overthink it, give them some options, just give them some stuff that would be it would be super helpful.

If you could talk about x y&z that we did for you, you know, if you and just give them a just give them a little like two sentence thing to get them started. Just put five stars, put your name on it, tell them that you love me for this thing. It would be a tremendous help to my business, help me get more business and it’s absolutely free. If they really appreciated what you did for them. They will leave your review if you make it easy for them.

 

Damon Pistulka  29:57

Yeah

 

30:00

eric

 

Curt Anderson  30:01

do drop the mic so alright let’s unpack that one right now okay let’s stop right there yeah let’s think about the game and i know you john reviewed yeah manufacturer how many manufacturers you’re thinking you know come on man i’m b2b i’m bending metal for somebody who’s going to give me a review let’s think about that what did eric say we’re not we’re not ashamed to bribe right we could do gift cards but here’s here’s a nice strategy i’ve had manufacturers do over the years they go on linkedin and they will go to their customers they’ll even go to their vendors enable type a wonderful raving review or testimonial on linkedin

totally unsolicited so now you’re doing that random act of kindness hey eric i love doing business with you you’re the best data dot put that on linkedin not ask for necessarily anything in return now with what you’re saying what if you go to your customers your vendors or other folks that you’re in relationship with you put out a nice google review they might do that in return so there’s a great there’s a great opportunity to do it first and then have it come back your way and just think if as a custom manufacturer if you could have even five reviews odds are your competitor has zero and they’re not even paying attention to google my business

 

Eric Antwi  31:21

that is such a that is such a relevant point that you made kurt thank you so much for saying that in the few interactions i’ve had with industrial and started manufacturing type businesses there is such a lack of competitive digital marketing in that space that people who are sort of like just sort of half cocking it so to speak are doing fine they’re on the front page i remember a guy was soliciting me for work and he was i think he did smokestack repair or something like that right and the competition was abysmal yeah and his consideration of doing good seo was like

how can i make my website just all markup but make it look like wordpress and i was i was i was trying to tell him you’re completely missing the point man like yeah i get what you’re saying your website will be faster and that is absolutely something that will help your seo but that’s not the point right what you’re talking about technical seo and it’s in conjunction with a larger strategy let me help you yeah the person didn’t want to hear it and it’s fun because at the end of the day you don’t want to sell something to someone when i am done with that life yeah if you value i don’t want to sell it to you

 

Damon Pistulka  32:40

yeah

 

Eric Antwi  32:41

right just seeing that sort of interaction it’s like wow there’s a tremendous opportunity for someone to come into this space and be shrewd and just kill it across all channels and lock themselves to a top three position because what a lot of people don’t realize is when you get into a top three position in your industry that business can get sold right yeah over 75% of the search traffic goes to the front page

 

Damon Pistulka  33:08

yeah right

 

Eric Antwi  33:09

and the numbers actually posted are 90 but that that those first three positions are like gold especially competitive industries so if you can lock yourself in to a top three position organically wow

 

Damon Pistulka  33:23

yeah

 

Eric Antwi  33:23

wow yeah wow like part of your business because i dropped my phone but in two or three years you might be able to sell that business yes is what i have seen now i haven’t done that for anyone yet and i would love to that’s that’s an aspirational goal but it’s absolutely possible if you if you if you take care of your seo

 

Damon Pistulka  33:46

yeah and when you’re a local company too this is a this is a thing that a local company if you look at it and you go there’s not a lot of competition it within five miles 10 miles 20 miles away you’re doing you have a much like you mentioned before trying to be a national brand is one thing but trying to be a local brand or regional brand is much different and you could be in a location where there’s not many people that are plumbers that know

what they’re doing in this respect and you can look at it and they all have you know one or two reviews and you’ve got 20 and you’ve done all these other things like you’re talking about and you can come up there locally in your region and that’s that is huge especially down the road if somebody wants to come in there and buy that company later

 

Eric Antwi  34:29

that is absolutely true and i’m gonna just i’m just gonna throw a little nugget in there as sort of an aside i’ve noticed something over the recent over a recent couple of months if you do a good job with your local seo the way the google pattern works like when you search on a map it’s usually two things local and one thing for out right like is usually the first with a local paper have no idea why but it’s sort of like a why if you do a good job on your local seo I’ve seen it do that state to state, right?

So somebody can be in the next state over you. Somebody can be in Chicago, and you can be in Michigan, for something in your industry, and depending on how they search for the term, it will wipe band out and still hit you in Michigan. Wow. Right, the most relevant view in that state. So it’s, it’s, it’s really, it’s compelling. And it behooves you to be really algorithm friendly, and make it as easy as possible for the search engines to know that you’re relevant and that you’re valuable.

 

Damon Pistulka  35:35

Yeah. So good.

 

Curt Anderson  35:38

In the thing, like what you’re hitting on, Eric is like, you know, what we talked about frequently are like in manufacturing, like a broad term, so like CNC, metal fabrication, plastic injection molding, 3d printing. And so you know, a lot of manufacturers get stopped stuck on at broad term, what you’re introducing is if we can go, you know, in our language, long tail, in our long tail is all simply, what are you best at? Well, I do plastic injection molding, but when I asked you for who I do plastic injection molding for turbine engines, or aerospace, or do I do, I perform the service or function for somebody or a specific product.

And if you can get that into those directories, you can get that into like your YouTube videos, and you’re putting those keywords into your video, you’re linking back to your website, Google, my business citations, everything that Eric just laid out for us. And you go after these longtail keywords, the images, you’re just gonna be dominating your search, because other people aren’t sophisticated enough to pick up these little ticks, these little tips and strategies. And what everything that you just laid out today. We’ve talked so many times.

 

Eric Antwi  36:48

Yeah, I think you, you said something I’d love to touch on I already lost it. I’m thinking about the next thing with YouTube.

 

Curt Anderson  36:55

But think about how much money did you ask somebody to spend or invest in everything that you talked about in the past? 3040 minutes?

 

Eric Antwi  37:01

How much? How much have I charged people for? Oh, no,

 

Curt Anderson  37:05

how much have you ask people to spend like virtually zero,

 

37:08

it doesn’t cost you anything.

 

Curt Anderson  37:11

As somebody who spent one penny in the past, in every strategy that you just laid out, you haven’t asked somebody to spend one penny doesn’t cost the program, simple marketing trip tips that drive powerful results. So I’m sorry. I’m sorry, if you lost your idea, your thoughts?

 

Eric Antwi  37:28

Just at the end there, because you touched on it just now when you were talking about longtail, right? Sometimes when people people, so some people who are trying to do SEO, you know, I’m a novice mistake is to do keyword stuffing a novice mistake is to just make a lot of titles that sort of stack up like I’m drinking coffee right now. So somebody will be like, you know, coffee in my locale, you know, like, so let’s use me as an as, for instance, coffee in New York, find more coffee in New York, coffee in New York near me, you know, that kind of stuffing stack on their pages.

And it’s really good to use the active tense, right? When you’re when you are actually making them happy when you are actually making those titles. It’s good to very similar to like what I was saying earlier with the reviews, and sort of the emotion that goes behind what’s being said, to put it into a context that makes it clear that it’s actionable and valuable, right.

So whatever your product or service is, let’s say you you make widgets, right, because I can’t think of anything right now, in particular, but your widgets help you maintain stability on the road, instead of just saying the most stable widgets, you know, talk about a use case, right? widgets that can help you grip to the curb in during the rain, right, just something that’s within contacts and a little bit more actionable. Your usage will raise its overall SEO value. So I just wanted to touch on that because you had mentioned. And another thing I want to touch on is YouTube.

So right now, I know this is not necessarily about YouTube, but since we’re talking about YouTube, you can geotag YouTube. So that’s one thing you want to do that the same way I mentioned images, do that to YouTube channel. Another thing I don’t see people doing right or well enough, are hashtags, right? It will prominently float three hashtags above the title. But you can use maybe about seven to 10 that will still get indexed as searchable things in your user description. Not enough people are putting their keywords in the description in the title and then their tags.

Tags are how Google videos are found on their search network. And it’s the second largest search engine in the world. And it’s also owned by Google, which means if you mark it up correctly, it will actually take one of those zero slip result positions. Right? You have a Google something and say, You know how am I how What’s the best way to Fold paper? Nowadays Google has the answer for everything. And it’s like, the best way to Fold paper is in bold, and then some link, and that’s a zero. That’s a zero position market that everybody’s gone for now, right?

Like, that’s the goal, if you’re going to bother to do some type of SEO thing for that zero position, but what a lot of what there’s a lot of room for, right? Aside from the people also asked for those videos. Because people take time watching those videos, it’s very easy to put a lot of information into a video into 30 seconds, and people will actually watch it and maybe click through to something. So do not underestimate the power of that because it will still show up in search results. And it will absolutely, positively impact your SEO.

 

Damon Pistulka  40:42

That’s freaking awesome, man.

 

40:43

Thanks so much. So much. Yeah,

 

Curt Anderson  40:46

give us some pags. Like, Eric, what a gift you are, man that was so

 

40:51

yeah. Wow,

 

Curt Anderson  40:52

everybody. Let’s get a little virtual applause AJ, and thank you for being here. Dale, judge. Noah, thank you, brother, Paul, you and Eric need to definitely connect our dear friend My beloved Val, thank you, guys. I connect with Eric and LinkedIn. I dropped us chatting here. Eric, party thoughts, words of wisdom, anything that you want to leave us with for the weekend?

 

Eric Antwi  41:16

parting thoughts? Okay. So there was a tip I wanted to share today. Because I, this is another like pro tip that I think everyone can take action on including myself. And when it comes to my own SEO, I usually spend more time on other people’s stuff than my own stuff. That is my biggest crime. Yeah. But if you have a website that has Google Analytics on it, if you have a website that should be connected to search console. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if people or not are.

But if you if you if you’ve if you’ve dabbled in SEO, and you’ve tried to optimize a little bit, and you have like, you have your stuff connected. Oh, fantastic way to sort of take action today, and start getting found for some stuff that you’re not getting found for is to jump into search console and look at your impressions, right? You want to look at, you know, there’s usually about four columns there. There’s the click through rate, there’s the impressions, there’s the rank number, and there’s something else that I usually don’t pay attention to, but it’s important.

Anyway, you want to look at, you want to look at the impressions, and you want to compare it to the click through rates, right. And essentially, something that’s getting a lot of impressions, but very, very minimal amount of click throughs, you want to pay attention to that. And you want to see what those pages are that are getting ranked. For those impressions, there’s a very good chance that if you were to tweak some of the messaging, some of the copy some of the titles, some of the meta descriptions there, that you’ll be able to earn a few more click throughs.

Because what those impression numbers are actually saying is, hey, Google thinks that what you have here is relevant to what’s being searched for. But whatever you’re saying, whatever your messaging is, on the front door, people are just sort of looking at it and walking by it. Because it’s not that there’s a missing connection there. Right. And this is actionable, almost every dam has at least one or two pages on their website could be doing way better if they would take the time to change two or three paragraphs. So so that would be something that I would want to leave people with. Is that

 

Damon Pistulka  43:24

that’s a great one. That’s so great. Yeah, now we’re, we’re good man. Cuz it’s it’s 17 after I gotta let Kurt wind us up so that so people at the tables can talk to you this. You did it. This is incredible. But go ahead, Kurt. I just I’m flabbergasted here.

 

43:41

Eric,

 

Curt Anderson  43:42

I can I tell everybody like Eric was like, a little nervous this weekend. I’m like, Eric, you’re gonna be absolutely just a rock star. And man, you just crushed it. So, everybody. So what we’re going to do, Eric, we’re going to go back to those tables that were just packed. Everybody that’s here on reimo. please jump back to the tables. You’re going to get a chance to talk with Eric one on one. Just get more golden gems here. Yeah, dude, that was absolutely priceless. Everybody. Thank you. Thank you for your time. We deeply we value every weekend. Oh, sweet.

 

44:15

Thank you, you

 

Curt Anderson  44:16

go out, crush it, crush, whatever you’re doing. Have a great weekend. Eric. Thank you, man. My man, I appreciate your time. You’ve been what a blessing you saw a friendship. And we’ve been having a great time for the past few months. And we’re gonna keep it rolling.

 

Damon Pistulka  44:29

Yeah. Thanks so much. While everyone has been watching on LinkedIn, thanks so much for watching us there too. We’re gonna drop off here. And remember, if you’re on LinkedIn, and you want to get over here and talk to our speakers and do the networking before and after, you can join us on email, you just check out Kurt’s profile or mine anytime during the week. The link is there and ready to go. So thanks for

 

Eric Antwi  44:51

having me. Thank you. Thank you so much, Eddie.

 

Damon Pistulka  44:53

It was incredible, dude. All right. Well, let’s get let’s get back to the tables here. Awesome.