Online 🌎 With Amr The Internet Guy!
Episode 9, Make your website content “KING” & Improve your SEO With Michelle Bourbonnière
Online! Episode 9:
Make your website content “KING” & Improve your SEO With Michelle Bourbonnière
My guest is the experienced editor, SEO Expert, Google whisperer & Ph.D. holder: Michelle Bourbonnière.
This is seriously a “must-see/ must listen to” episode for everyone who has a website or a business!
We share a lot of useful stuff and many ideas that you can implement right away to improve your site’s content and SEO ranking.
Enjoy!
▬ Contents ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:17 Start: Make your content KING
04:30 What is Editing?
06:55 The difference between an editor and a copywriter.
09:50 The content creation process and should you write a different copy for mobile and desktop?
15:05 SEO misconceptions: on-page vs off-page SEO
19:30 What does Google look for?
21:40 The importance of Keyword Research.
25:00 Ranking for unrelated keywords?
34:00 How to differentiate your page – outside the box ideas.
37:00 Off-Page SEO guide (ads, reviews, customer service, and Social media)
44:00 How has selling changed: The importance of Transparency 1:03:00 Refreshing your old content.
1:07:20 Off-page advice: questions and answers are a great resource to use.
1:10:30 Segmenting and writing for different audiences.
1:13:30 Showing – and benefitting from – your expertise
▬ End of Contents ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
– Need help with your website? Book a free consultation here: https://meetings.hubspot.com/amr6
– Here’s a link to The book Michelle mentioned (They Ask You Answer) https://marcussheridan.com/they-ask-you-Answer
How to get in touch with Michelle:
This Podcast is available at your favorite Podcast/Streaming network including Spotify, Google Podcasts and iTunes.
Online! Episode 9 Video:
Episode 9 Transcription:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, website, cloudflare, google, audience, business, writing, write, editor, seo, content, reviews,
question, understand, business owners, blog post, rank, types, expert, keywords
SPEAKERS
announcer, Michelle Bourbonnière, Amr The Internet Guy
announcer
online with amor, the internet guy streaming today on your favorite podcast platforms. This podcast
focuses on entrepreneurs and business owners helping them become more successful and conducting
their business on the web without being stuck with technology.
Amr The Internet Guy
Hey guys, how’s it going? So my guest today is Michelle bourbon year from Alberta, Canada, we are
going to be discussing content. You know, when they say content is king, this episode is actually telling
you what to do in order to make your content. King. Without further ado, let’s meet Michelle. Hi,
Michelle. Hello. How’s it going? Ah, very good. So, guys, I have Michelle bourbon area. That’s a
Capricorn aim here. She’s not from Quebec, but I understand she married into one. Yeah. So Michelle,
just tell people where you are and what you do, please. So I’m based out of Edmonton. And yes, my
husband is Francophone. He’s from Quebec. Um, and, yeah, I live in Edmonton. And I’m an SEO
editor. So for some time, I was thinking about, you know, content and text and SEO and stuff like that.
And I think we’ve met through Josh hole on one of these. I think we’ve met on the Facebook group first.
Yeah. And then we realized we were both on Marie Forleo scores and things like that, like I, I see you
now. It’s funny, because like, we meet somewhere, and then we realized that we’re everywhere, but
we’re just not aware. And you’re not even that far. Because you’re in Canada do I don’t bc you’re in
Alberta? Yeah. Like next door? Yeah. So what’s, what’s the difference between an editor and
copywriter? Okay, so maybe I can go back and tell you a little bit about like how I got here? Because it’s
a it’s a kind of a, an interesting, yeah. And you have a PhD as well, which scares me?
Michelle Bourbonnière
I do. Yeah, it was a long story. But I’ll make it short. So basically, what it is, is that, I mean, I have a PhD
in history. And so as a historian, we learn how to write stories, right. So like, we learn how to find stories
in the archive, we find stories that have never been told. And then we write these kind of narrative
histories around them, typically around an argument as well. So when I graduated, I went into editing
and editing is like not that I mean, it’s a fairly common career path to go from like a PhD in the humanities to like an editing degree. So I did some work at University of California, Berkeley, I took their
Certificate course in editing to become a professional editor. But of course, if you’re an editor, you need
to find a text to edit. And so editors can work in all different fields. So I mean, the most traditional editor
would be somebody working with a publishing house, where somebody written their first book, and it’s
going to get published. And then the publishing house hires an editor to look over it and be that second
set of eyes to kind of bring make that book into its best self, and to really help the author kind of bring it
up the next level. And so editors can do everything from like the most tiny technical things like
proofreading, like I took a very, very long and detailed class in formal grammar. And then also helping
authors with the more substantive issues of style and explaining themselves really well. And being clear
and having an argument and only having one argument and all those types of things. So, So
traditionally, editors worked in publishing houses. But especially with the advent of, you know,
everybody now as an author, and we can all write on the internet editors are sort of branching out more
into other fields where writing happens. And so as I graduated from the editing program, I’ve always
dabbled in WordPress, I’ve always dabbled in kind of internet stuff. So it just kind of seemed natural to
me that I would actually move into editing internet text. So I’m a, like a website editor. So basically,
instead of editing novels, or editing, even like academic texts, I
Amr The Internet Guy
just edit websites. It’s I think it’s more interesting, because websites aren’t all about the same thing. So
you get to see like different industries and different angles of what people want to say to the rest of the
world. Absolutely. Well, and
Michelle Bourbonnière
this is why I love being an editor is that I can work on different projects. I mean, just the range of
different kinds of websites I get to edit is always fascinating, but also like, people have something to
say, you know, and yeah, and it’s nice because, I mean, I was in academia and like, you know, I have a
published article by like, I can’t say that many people have read it. And you know, websites really get
read and they really have such an impact and especially with business websites, like when you start
getting into knowing just, if you could just use the convincing words how well they ate, so like, it’s just a
It’s very satisfying to be working in a field where you can see the impact of any changes that you’re
making, like almost instantly on people’s bottom lines on on, like SEO, as I’m sure we’ll get into. And so
yeah, it’s a really fun, fun way to add it.
Amr The Internet Guy
So the editor in general, right, does not change the content. No, like, yeah, as opposed to, if you’re a
copywriter, you probably just come up with your own content, instead of the person or the business
owner or the website owner, writing it, the copywriter will write it instead. But the answer will make sure
that this content is the right one for, let’s say, the message that you’re trying to say, the audience that
you’re conveying this message to? And of course, that is technically correct, like grammatically, and you
know, I don’t know, there’s many I’m like, I don’t know much about it. But like, I’m thinking, there’s
probably so many criterions to check, like, you know, check, check, check, check, make sure everything
is correct.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Certainly. So like, you know, any website, I mean, I’m sure you as you all know, like if there’s like a typo
on your website, or an inconsistency like you saw I have many. That’s why the, the if there’s like an
inconsistency between how you spell a word, I mean, there’s we’re Canadian, or
American? Yeah, American Canadian. Yeah, yeah.
Michelle Bourbonnière
And so, um, if a website that is kind of clean from top to bottom, that you’ve made a choice about what
spelling variant you’re choosing, and then like that, just that’s that extra thing that like that attention to
detail can really make a difference. Even if people don’t specifically notice, knowing that your website is
kind of consistent is is part of professional publishing. But just to say the difference between an editor
and a copywriter, you can kind of think about it as different ways that text ends up on the web. So some
people hire a copywriter and a traditional copywriter, I mean, think madman like that, you know, in the
1950s, the, these these people that were just marketing writers, and they were they were just they were
new
world, right? Well, the TV ads we used to watch on the black and white TV.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yes, exactly. So there’s, that is kind of the origins of copywriting, where you would hire a marketing
specialist to really like understand your audience inside and out, to understand what makes them tick
and what makes them buy. And then they’ll interview your audience, they’ll interview your previous
customers, they’ll figure out your buyer personas, all that kind of stuff. So it’s really like a top to bottom
approach to writing. So the copywriting bit is actually, I mean, not even the bulk of the work, the bulk of
the work is understanding what would make this group of people buy, and then what words do we use
in order to help this group of people understand the product and want it really badly. So I have the
utmost respect for conversion copywriters, and people who sort of do conversion, copywriting as a
business, because, I mean, it’s beautiful when you see, yeah, and so it really is a wonderful skill.
Unfortunately, for a lot of people, it’s also quite expensive, because it’s just so much work, right? To be
able to be interviewing all of these, all of the customers, as you can imagine, most small businesses
can’t afford that. And so that’s where I come in, because I can work with. So basically, the real
difference is how we work. So people, like you might write the first draft of their website, and then come
to an editor to sort of just like I was saying, with the book, kind of make the website, the best version of
itself. So to kind of make those strategic changes that like an outside I can kind of see and, and be able
to say, oh, maybe if we said it this way, it would be more clear. Maybe if we broke this up into bullet
points, it would be easier to read on on the screen, like on a web. Those are the types of changes that
an editor can make. And so we don’t tend to change, it’s quite almost a rule of editing is that like, if the
person said it in the text, it kind of needs to process you don’t change the meaning you don’t say, Oh, I
don’t think you should have said that. I’m gonna say my way. But it’s more helping them sort of
massage it into its best self.
Amr The Internet Guy
This brings me to a question, which is a little bit technical, but I don’t know it jumped in my head. Do we
have like, should we have two versions, one for mobile and one for desktop? Because if you put a lot of
text somewhere, somebody is reading it on a mobile app that wasn’t necessarily like it will be just too
much to scroll and read like, Well, I
Michelle Bourbonnière
think that really comes down to how it’s laid out. So you shouldn’t so not to get ahead of ourselves with
SEO, but you really shouldn’t have two versions of your website for one for mobile and one for for
desktop. I think that in the coming year. Google has even said that basically it’s going to ignore your
desktop version if you have two versions because you know, there’s these like those m dot websites.
Yes. Those are going the way the dinosaurs Yeah. So you don’t want to have two different texts,
however, you want to make sure that you’re writing for both at the same time. So like you have to
recognize, depending on your industry, but in many industries 5050, you have 50% of that are reading
on mobile and 50% of the people that are reading on screens. And so you want to design and write in a
way that works for both. And honestly, like, it’s not that hard, because you’re basically writing for mobile
in both. Yeah, writing for the web is always this short, punchy, like it’s not long paragraphs, even on a
big screen. So that that’s the problem like that I
Amr The Internet Guy
that I found, most business owners fall into one of two categories. The first one is the person who
doesn’t know what to write at all. And they have a writer’s block. And when you meet them, and you sit
with them, and you’re chatting, they can tell you wonderful things about their business. But if you ask
them to put it into a piece of paper or Microsoft Word document, they get the writer’s block, and they will
take forever. That’s a problem for me as a web designer, because sometimes I have to fish that content
out of the lions den, you know, or like, I don’t know, like the expression is totally off. But yes, yes, Lion
and banana, it’s gonna Yeah, it’s hard. It’s like extracting a tooth, basically, to get the client to give you
content. The other type is muy Thai pose very talkative in real life. And then when you toss them to
write that just put everything on like the first page, and then it becomes, I don’t know, like a dissertation
stops,
Michelle Bourbonnière
then there, yes. So So what you do is called free writing. So everybody has a different writing style. And
I’m actually a free writer myself. So when I’m writing, I mean, for my own things, when I’m doing writing,
I tend to just like, just go with it and write so so much I remember I had when I was working on my PhD,
I would spend an hour every morning, every single morning, whether I liked it or not, I opened up a
page, and I just started writing. And it would just be whatever came. And I find that that’s how I
personally get the best ideas. So it’s not that that free writing is the final product by any means. In fact,
none of that saw the light of day I printed it out, I stuck it in a binder. And then I came back a week later
and only highlighted things that were actually worth saying. And that’s how I did a lot of my like idea
generation. And then personally from there, once I’ve done a lot of idea generation, then I make
outlines. And so I need to write to an outline. So if I don’t write to an outline, then it ends up being this
like, yeah,
yeah,
Michelle Bourbonnière
and so but I do the writing, because I think it’s really a, it’s a gift to be able to just sit down and write so
so much because you get so many ideas out. And then you just have to know how to structure them
later so that other people can understand and follow what you’re writing. But for me, that’s an outline, I
write a fairly detailed outline. And then I, I kind of do a similar thing where I just like, write my way,
sometimes it feels like you’re like, I don’t know why I’m walking through mud. When you’re doing that
first draft. Yeah, you’re writing to an outline, like, it’s like, oh, there’s a lot of friction there.
Amr The Internet Guy
Or snow, we’re in Canada,
Michelle Bourbonnière
of snow here, like a foot here now. Um, so so that first draft can sometimes be difficult. And I can
imagine that for your business owners as well, that first draft can sometimes just feel like just not feel
good as you’re writing it. Yeah. But one thing to remember is that every author goes through that, like,
every author goes through that like first draft from from the writer’s block to a blank page. And then to
the final version, what I always tell myself is like it can always be perfected. So my first draft can be
pretty messy. And that’s fine. Because I know I can come back the next day, and then sleep on it a
couple days, and then come back one more time. And then then is when it starts to really shine like
that’s, and that’s really why I became an editor. It’s because I just love that process so much that I had
been doing that on my own work for so long that I was like, well, this is actually really awesome. And so
that’s why I went into not so much of the writing side of things, but helping other people do that, that
perfecting stages, so I can really take like, pretty rough drafts and turn it into something that’s
publishable. I’m glad you
Amr The Internet Guy
enjoy this because I would tell you like, I don’t know, I haven’t spoken to any person who owns a small
business will have a small website like, you know, 510 pages, who actually enjoy I think he says people
get busy Like who? Yeah, if you’re managing a ton of stuff during your day, like you’ve got your
accounting, you’ve got your sales and marketing and you’ve got your networking and you know, trying
to get more clients obviously, yeah, to survive and, and between this this and, you know, the technical
aspect of the website, the updates and the upgrades and the visual design. So people actually don’t
think much about writing. And the biggest issue that also i don’t know i don’t want to say it’s a lie but like
there’s a there’s a big misconception about search engine optimization, or SEO, like there’s a, I don’t
know, people fall into a very common trap. And no matter how many times we we keep shining the light
on it, they just fall for these marketing messages. So I don’t know, like of SEO, we could probably talk
for a week non stop word SEO. But the thing is what I try to tell people all the time is that, look, SEO
has two arms, think of it as two separate arms. One is your on page SEO, that’s your website, your page, your content, you’re in full control of that. The other one is the off page SEO. And there’s so
many different things that can happen there. But the majority of the ads that people see are kind of
either blackhat SEO stuff that’s gonna be harmful to them, or just ads, like, basically, you pay for
someone to buy ads. So since we’re discussing today, we’re discussing content and editing and making
things look good. And, you know, so it’s their own page part. Absolutely. And I think the part that people
struggle with the most is, how do i do i need to appease Google to start with, like, you know, it’s not
how do I make it? rank and whatever. But like, in the beginning, do I have to focus on Google to start
with?
Michelle Bourbonnière
So you don’t know, don’t focus on Google? Because Google is just the medium by which people find
your site, right? So people use search engines every day to find things, answers to questions that they
have, like, Where should I go get a coffee, or what’s a good recipe for chocolate chip cookies, or
whatever it is, I mean, we use we use search engines all the time. But the search engine is just the
conduit. However, unfortunately, it is the conduit between you and your audience. So you do have to
pay attention to Google. But I mean, you’re really not trying to please Google in the sense that, I mean,
Google’s not going to buy anything from you, it’s always going to be a person that’s buying something
from you. And so you do have that you do have kind of like a dual audience. But one thing that maybe
your audience might be happy to know, is that Google is getting so so much better at understanding
natural language. So it’s just it used to be sort of an old school approach to SEO would be like we have
one keyword, something really specific. Yeah. And then we write that keyword in as much as we can,
and we stuck it here and we stuck it there. And that is a really awkward way of writing. Your audience is
like, What are they talking about? Why did they say chocolate chip cookies for the 50th time. So that is
like just not a good form of writing, which would turn off your audience anyways. And also, it’s painful to
write that way. And so now, Google will understand natural language much better. That doesn’t mean
that you can ignore the fact that it is a robot that’s trying to understand a page of text, and that there are
algorithms involved. But But Google really is, I mean, if you read their documentation, so they have
something called the search engine quality raters guidelines, and it’s basically Google’s instructions to
people who evaluate how good their results are, what makes a good website, what makes a bad
website, and you can read it. I mean, it’s, it’s a really great document, it’s great for people to read,
because it really gives pretty clear instructions on what they’re aiming for in terms of what they’re going
to prioritize in the search engine rankings. And they’re really, really big now on expertise, like they’re
really big on wanting to have because of because of fake news, because of misinformation. There’s a
real push towards making sure that the things that are coming up to the top of Google aren’t like spam,
or aren’t like trying to manipulate the rankings. And so I think like what you said with you have these
business owners that if you took them out to coffee, they’ll just tell you everything they like real experts
in their field, they understand it top to bottom, of course, they are like that’s their business. That’s their,
that’s their specialty. That’s the kind of voice that Google wants more of on the internet. It doesn’t want
more like people that don’t really know what they’re writing about writing more things about very specific
keywords. They really want to like take the voices of people who are subject matter experts. And I
would argue that really all business owners are subject matter experts in what they
do why you do it. Yeah,
Michelle Bourbonnière
yeah, that’s why they do it. I mean, they’re certainly I mean, if you’re a plumber, you’re an expert,
plumber, like you know way more about plumbing and other people that don’t know about plumbing.
And so you can, you can write about it in the kind of way that both uses all the words that a plumber
would know. And that’s the real difference now, where it used to be you used to put plumber, plumber,
plumber, plumber, and maybe that would make it rank. Now Google knows that there’s a whole web of
words that go around each of these top
Amr The Internet Guy
plumbing industry. Yeah, exactly.
Michelle Bourbonnière
So those are that web of words, which really come up quite naturally. If you’re a subject matter expert,
you know, you don’t have to, like, do any tricky games to make sure that you’re using the right words,
you just do it, because that’s the language you speak. And that’s the language you write. So anyways,
that’s where I feel like Google is getting better and better at understanding language, which makes it
more and more freeing for authors to be able to publish and be seen. Now, that doesn’t mean that off
page isn’t important. It absolutely is. So I’m not saying that you can just you know, it’s not magic. Like,
oh, the world is your oyster no matter what. But in terms of the on page side, like, that is really what
Google is aiming for. They’re learning. They’re aiming to have real experts in their fields coming up as
answers. So a plumber answering a plumber question is basically what they want.
Amr The Internet Guy
But this actually means that if you please the humans, like you please Google, right? Like it’s not,
you’re writing for your audience, you’re not writing for SEO purposes. Like I mean, SEO will come
naturally. And you’ll rank higher when you write content that would be of interest to your audience. And I
think the the first challenge normally is to find who the audiences like, are you going to talk to, like, yes,
gonna be interested in that content that does, it’s not about just getting some keyword research, and
then finding out another top 10 keywords, and then hammering it, like repeat.
Michelle Bourbonnière
But it is I love keyword research, because it does give you that insight into the
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, you need to know what you’re going to be talking about to start with. Because
Michelle Bourbonnière
even just what your people want you to write about, right? Like keyword research is like a big database
of stuff that people already are searching for. So you can write, you can write lots of stuff to your
audience that they’re just like, actually not interested in like they don’t search for it. You think they do,
but they don’t. Yeah, so keyword research, is this kind of like double check to be like, Oh, is this thing
that I’m about to write about actually of interest to my audience, or has no one ever searched it before.
And that’s an important thing to recognize. Now, you might be getting your traffic and other ways not
Google, in which case, go ahead. And like if you’re, you have an email list, or you’re doing social media
or some other way directly
to you. So yeah,
Michelle Bourbonnière
I mean, people are interested in things that they don’t search for, obviously, but I do think that keyword
research can be a good place to start, if you’re starting a new website, just to get an idea of the
landscape of things that your audience would be interested in, you can kind of be like, I’m gonna have a
section on my website about that. And I’m gonna have a section around here. And then you can kind of
start planning things out by a keyword research,
Amr The Internet Guy
I find that like, sometimes, what happens is that we get sucked into our own industry as well. And then
we use terms that may be known to like, for example, website optimization. That term is known
amongst web designers, because we want to optimize the website. And optimization could mean
different things could be content optimization, which is what we’re discussing today. It could be speed,
like to make the website load faster. But if I’m going to be marketing, website optimization, to the small
business owner, they wouldn’t know that word. They’d probably be searching for slow website because
they don’t want it to be slow or fix a slow website or make my website load faster. So that’s the idea is
that the Why is my
Michelle Bourbonnière
website slow?
Amr The Internet Guy
Is Divi slow? No, Divi on its own is not slow. Is the layout that you chose? Or the amount of photos that
you put on there or whatever? It’s not? Nobody would create the slow product by design.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yeah, no. And it’s very true. Like when, when you’re looking at the keywords, I always try to like, put my
hat on me who is actually searching this, like, is this? it? I don’t know, I don’t even know how to explain
it. But it’s like, you just have to have this empathy, where you’re thinking, what type of person would be
searching this? So in a good example, is something like why is my website slow? versus like, how can I
optimize my website page speed loading time? You know, like, yeah, that’s kind of imagine that the
second one is probably a web designer. So like, if you wrote in that way? And if you answered that
question, well, you’re probably going to attract a bunch of web designers. And if that’s your clientele,
that’s great. But if you’re looking for small business owners with smaller with slow websites, then you
want to write Why is my website slow? These are the reasons why your website is slow. And then that’s
how you’ll get that audience. Like it’s quite specific the audience and how they write. And so then you
want to make sure that your text matches that language.
Amr The Internet Guy
So as an editor, mm, do you first ask the person like, you know, who’s using your service? Who’s your
audience like, do you is that part of Yeah, I mean, I don’t know.
Michelle Bourbonnière
My personal audience like who is my audience
Amr The Internet Guy
know who’s like, let’s say for example, you’re hired by I don’t know. Like, I a CPA accountant. Okay,
yeah, somebody in that domain, they have a website and they will have their clientele but like, do you
first need to find out? Who you’re trying to talk to? Right, like?
Michelle Bourbonnière
So? So it’s also, um, in a sense, this isn’t as crazy of a question as you might think, because an editor
is always writing to an audience. So, so one way to explain what an editor does, is that an editor works
with the author in, in service of the reader. And so it’s always trying to help the author get their message
across to the reader, but the reader is always a specific kind of person. Right? So who is the writer is
the reader a bunch of scientists who are very fun with the jargon is the reader like, mom who just wants
to figure out whether her kid is sick or not, like, who knows what, who the reader is. So as an editor, you
sort of always do need to know the audience. It’s not always defined as like a like a, like an in market
type audience. But there’s always a human being on the other side that you have to write to. And
people prefer different types of writing, depending on who they are. So I do always ask when I’m
working with a small business, I always ask who their audiences. But one of the benefits of being an
editor is that I, and also sort of one of the kind of reasons why I’m an editor, kind of the idea of being an
editor is that you always trust the author to know their audience best. Yes. Right. Because they like
your person who you were talking about in the coffee shop, they know how to talk about their business
to their audience. And so like, I’m not going to come in between them and say, Oh, no, like, I think I
think when I think of your audience, I think of this and this, I might be like, I might give some small
suggestions. But I think it’s really respecting the author, because they are the expert in there,
Amr The Internet Guy
like the performance booster.
I like that. Yeah.
Amr The Internet Guy
If that you put in your car to make it. I don’t know, when the race.
Michelle Bourbonnière
There you go. Yeah, I would love to be that.
Amr The Internet Guy
If you do some, you know, like, when you look at your, I’m going to take you back to SEO. But when
you look at your analytics, like when someone looks at, you know, the analytics report of their website,
like for me, sometimes I look, and I find that I’m my site is ranking high. Mm hmm. In some searches on
Google, that are kind of I wouldn’t call them not related to my business, but they’re not necessarily the
words that I would use. Do I go on bank on that? Like, if if I feel like, people search for something could
be related, or maybe remotely related to what the business is? Mm hmm. But as a result of that strain
search, they landed on my website, should I try to please them?
Michelle Bourbonnière
It really depends on what the words are and where they’re landing. So I have a good example that I can
probably tell you, I was looking at a website, once that was, had written this really nice list of 50 ways to
date your spouse, it was all these like ideas of things you could do like you could go on a movie theater,
you could like have a nice smorgasbord at home. 50 nice, perfectly fine date ideas. I mean, nothing
wrong with it. And they titled The, the post 51st dates. And so because, right, so they thought it was
really cute. Like Eau de it’s just like, there is nothing wrong with a movie. There’s and there was nothing
wrong with the post, either. The post itself was decently valuable.
Yeah,
Michelle Bourbonnière
unfortunately, because they titled it 51st dates, it was coming up for like 54 states download 54 states
review, like 54 states streaming. And so there’s a good example of Well, I mean, I don’t know who their
audience was. But I know that they weren’t looking, they did not have the download, right? They the
people that were were clicking, and they were looking
Amr The Internet Guy
trying to find the movie. Yeah. Yeah,
Michelle Bourbonnière
things that they could do with them. And that wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. So there is a
case where I would change the title and reframe it to make sure that you got the right audience, people
who were actually looking for date ideas, rather than people who are looking to download a movie. But
if in another example, if you had a web, if you had a page on your website that was ranking for
something unexpected, that’s maybe not how you would have thought that it was, but you could
imagine, Oh, actually, this, you know, Google’s pretty smart. They’ve matched me up with somebody
who is maybe gonna buy from my business one day, or is maybe interested in what I have to say, then
you could optimize for that new term, or just to kind of see how it’s working. I mean, you could also set
up conversion tracking and figure out if those people buy from you. But I think that that’s probably the
best way to think about it. So if the other thing to think about too is that there is a certain level of topical
authority that a website has. So if you’re constantly writing about websites and speeding them up, and
how to make a website and websites in Canada or whatever it is that you write about, Google starts to
understand you as the expert on that field. So if you went out and like wrote about mattresses, even if
you ranked, it was kind of not be great. Like maybe you could write a fantastic article about mattresses,
it probably be hard for you to rank if you’re normally writing about computers. but also those people are
never going to buy from you. And you’re a little bit sending mixed signals to Google about what your
site is really about. So if it’s really out there and left field, I wouldn’t do it. If you think, oh, there’s a
business opportunity here, then like, try optimizing around it. See what happens. Yeah,
Amr The Internet Guy
I can’t remember the exact keyword. I remember it was. It wasn’t necessarily web design, but it was
business related. And I was thinking like, maybe, I mean, probably people for that specific keyword that
I can’t remember now landed on one of my old blog posts that had something similar, you know,
because when I started my business, it wasn’t straight about web design and web development. I
actually, I was selling and servicing software. Oh, interesting. There was some software that was about
employee recognition. There was some software that was about ratings rating, the services that you get
in service establishments, like pretty much like what Google reviews is about. Now. before Google had
Google reviews, people used to use Yelp, but Yelp was also not working for them. So there was another
software that bridge that gap. And I think Google to cover that part. Now. Google being Google.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Don’t get into that business. Yeah,
Amr The Internet Guy
exactly. But it’s funny because like, you know, when you mentioned, plumbing, for example, Uh huh. If,
if I’m building a website for a plumber, and I’m telling them to blog, sometimes they think that people
don’t want to know like about plumbing. I mean, maybe plumbing is an obvious example. I’ll give you an
example. That’s a little bit hard at a pizzeria. So you’re as r1 Yeah, you’re building a website for a
pizzeria. And over they want to have that as maybe as a menu. Yeah, their location, and some of the
reviews and understand but they don’t want to blog about pizza. No, they need to, but they need to
write?
Michelle Bourbonnière
Well, it’s, it’s hard because of a local pizzeria. I mean, what are you gonna write about? You’re gonna
write about like, pizza recipes?
Amr The Internet Guy
No. Yeah, maybe? Yeah, exactly. But
Michelle Bourbonnière
like, wait, like, we want you to buy our pizza.
Amr The Internet Guy
You don’t want you to get home? Yeah. Don’t give them your actual.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yeah, maybe that’s the Yeah, I mean, it’s hard. So I think that’s why there is on page slash off,
just reminded me of something so funny. But like, I don’t know if you’ve watched Seinfeld, but
not for a while. But
the Soup Nazi and then oh, yeah, um, the recipes and an old cupboard?
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yeah, I’m sure people search that that would be that has some search for like minded.
Amr The Internet Guy
The recipes. Were there. Yeah.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Small businesses that are really local. Like, you can’t send a pizza to somebody on the other side of the
country. They really they’re only interested in getting people coming to their site that are really,
Amr The Internet Guy
yeah, so they’re either gonna come and dine in or order this or delivery, or come and pick it up.
Michelle Bourbonnière
I mean, certainly, for me, you know, this, of course, but certainly build out the course cipher.
Amr The Internet Guy
But being the expert, that’s the thing like you, you are the expert on pizza. So you gotta let the world
know, as well as Google. That’s what I’m saying. Like, you’re not only trying to please Google, you’re
trying to please the humans. But you got to give them some fresh content at some point, like your fresh
pizza.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yes. Or like, your specials and all that. Yeah. But also, um, there can be so if you can be really creative.
And if you have a business owner in those types of industries, where content is just legitimately hard to
come up with, yeah, that you know, content that you care enough about, because
Amr The Internet Guy
it’s hard to differentiate yourself.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yeah. And it’s kind of in written before and like, people really want to like, read more about holycross
Maybe, maybe not hard to say. I mean, certainly, there’s a lot of people that are looking for pizza
recipes, but they’re probably not as much for people. However, I mean, it’s not a terrible idea. But one
thing that can be really useful. So just to say what you could do with a business like that, is if you
manage to find something really creative and really interesting and really outside of the box to create on
the internet, that can sometimes act as a real link magnet. So I can’t I mean, maybe you made up a
game for like pizzas who knows this or that or something that was really like, actually out of the box and
interesting
Amr The Internet Guy
and then probably tell people to blog about maybe the components not not the recipe but like kind of
why fresh oregano is good. Whatever, that’s Margarita pizza or something like that. Yeah. And and also,
maybe why is or the orphans like we’ve got Somebody’s on the corner here who’s got imported the
brick oven from Italy? Interesting. Yeah, it is absolutely amazing. It’s so much different from pizza that
goes into any other like gas oven or electric oven or whatever. Because you I don’t know that. There’s
something in the burn not completely around. But like in the bird smell of the croaky. Yeah, the
smokiness of that oven. And it doesn’t stay for a lot. If you go and order. The pizza is on your table in
five minutes. It’s like what basically gets in the oven smells that smokiness comes back out and is
ready to eat
Michelle Bourbonnière
Wonderful. Well, not something where like, you would put that on your website anyway, it’s because it
makes you unique, right? So even if it Yeah, this type of thing that when people are choosing which
pizzeria to go to like, Whoa, that sounds very interesting. And like you could write you know how it got
to your company. And and you know, exactly the story of it coming on the
Amr The Internet Guy
story of importing the orphan from Italy and dislike assembling it here. I don’t know, did you have to
build it brick by brick? I mean, I’m sure that not everybody who eats there wants to know the story. But if
you put it, many people will be inspired to come and check it out.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yes, well, you’re not unique. So it’s, it’s an interesting thing. And you always I mean, anything you put
on your website, you want your existing customers, to be pleased to have seen it right. So anything you
put on your website, you need to make sure that it speaks both to the Google audience to sort of like,
establish you as a field as an expert in that field. But also, you want to make sure that if your actual
existing customers see it, they’re not like, Huh, why are you writing about? So you do have to stay on
topic for that reason? Because it’s still your website?
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, so it’s interesting, because like, for many of these small business owners, they think the, the, the
answer to their I don’t know, Google vows is to just go and get ads placement. And it’s not necessarily a
right, it can work in certain settings. But it can be expensive. Yeah, and it’s also this is the thing, you’re
gonna end up paying forever, right? If you want to stay there, you will keep paying to stay there. So it’s,
you have to have an ad budget that is there for the rest of your business life like,
Michelle Bourbonnière
and you’re likely to have to keep paying more and more like that.
Amr The Internet Guy
become more competitive the keyword, yeah,
Michelle Bourbonnière
and cause them to go down. And so it typically goes up. But the other thing, I mean, you know, this, but
just to say the other really important thing is reviews, right? So like for an for that’s kind of in a small
business, like a pizzeria, having a really robust system to try to just get as many reviews as you can
from your happy customers. That’s the money in the bank. So like, that’s how you can, that’s how you
can be ranked higher in that all important local pack right on the map at the top of the Google results.
So there are many things that play into that which part you get in that three pack. But reviews are very,
very important. And so I know like my dentist here, he’s just a maniac. And they have the best, like they
have so many good reviews. And I mean, way more than everybody else in the city. And they do it
because like they’re just a bit relentless. But like you kind of want to help them. That’s good.
Yeah,
Michelle Bourbonnière
I mean, like it is they’re just they make it really easy to give them a review, and they learn
from you. Or,
Michelle Bourbonnière
like the guy that works there is just really friendly. And he’ll like he, I mean, I gave him a review. Like,
yeah, he texted me personally said, Oh, like I had texted him and said, thanks so much for blah, blah,
blah. And they said, Oh, we would be so you would be able to write a review. It matters so much to our
business. Here’s the link, I did it. It was like a five minute job, no big deal. And now I’m one of 441
people that have read this business. It’s huge, like, but the difference. I mean, now they just they
dominate because they have so many positive reviews. And it’s because they really invested like
energy into getting those reviews. And kind of once you have your systems in place, I can imagine it’s
not as
Amr The Internet Guy
first time. No, and it’s not, it’s not hard to have these systems in place anyway. I mean, the Google map
is a link. So it’s just like to figure out, what’s the best way to send this link to your customers that same
it’s not, you know, you don’t need a web designer for that. But if you need help, I’m happy to help
people make sure that they a they do have an actual Google My Business.
That’s very important,
Amr The Internet Guy
you know, an active one on Google My Business so they can be found on the map, bees that they can
easily communicate or automate the process of asking people for reviews. And but it’s very, very
important as well, for you to answer so if somebody leaves a review, even if it’s a good review, like I
see. I see some businesses only respond when somebody is you know, kind of complaining about
something and It’s good to also, you know, to always answer a complain, because it shows the world
that you care and like, you know, we’re all human, sometimes things will go wrong, things will go wrong,
as long as you’re able to explain, you know, what happened and what, more importantly, it’s not just
what happened. But what measures are you taking in order for this not to happen again? That’s, that’s
what everyone is interested to know. Like, how, how did you fix it?
Michelle Bourbonnière
How did you deal with conflict? Right? Like, how did you like the the axiom, and the way to think about
it is you get in touch with the person who had a problem with your business, or your service, or
whatever it was in the same means that they got in touch with you. So if someone writes you an email,
you write the rights. If somebody writes you a negative review, you say, oh, my goodness, thank you so
much for bringing that to our attention, like please X, Y, and Z, and I’ll be in touch. And then, you know,
you just you solve the problem publicly. So even though you probably would have always solved the
problem, privately, you want to solve it publicly. So everybody knows that you saw
Amr The Internet Guy
Exactly. I mean, sometimes it’s something like, I don’t know, my my cell phone provider, for example.
They don’t have as many towers here. So as a result, the signal is really weak.
Michelle Bourbonnière
We apparently, we have terrible phone in Canada.
Amr The Internet Guy
Like, guys, like every time I contact them, it’s been three and a half years. And at the end, there’s a
switch provider I’ve had enough. Like, there’s no point. You know, it shows me as roaming in my house.
worse. Yeah, I’m in the bathroom. I’m roaming.
Michelle Bourbonnière
So this is slightly off topic. But like Canada in general has pretty terrible cell service. I got so I did.
African history is my degree, far, far better cell service in the middle of the Serengeti, because of
Amr The Internet Guy
the trees. We have a lot of tree I don’t
Michelle Bourbonnière
know. I think it’s just something about us being a big country. And it being expensive to put lots of
towers here, there and everywhere. But like really, truly, middle of the Serengeti, no problem data,
Amr The Internet Guy
everything they’ve got no interference is open. Yeah, just
Michelle Bourbonnière
a nice, big open send an email, it was fine. Anyways, Canada is like, just so behind
Amr The Internet Guy
it, this is something that like for every service provider, you know, it’s important for them, you know, big
or small company, I know that I usually speak about small businesses, and entrepreneurs, because this
is my you know, circle. But generally, even bigger companies like, you know, if you’re a if you’re an
enterprise or a big company, you’d be surprised how, you know, we appear on Google searches, and
sometimes you appear up high for the wrong reason, because you have many complaints and stuff. So
this is something that ties into what we’re discussing today, you have to put the content out there, even
if that content is your solution to the problem that people are googling, like, if you look at your analytics,
you probably find, I don’t know 40% landing on your page for the wrong reason, you have to address
that, that that’s bad to your reputation.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Well, and you also want to make sure that when you look through the keywords that you’re coming out
for, you need to make sure that you know they’re as tailored to your audience as you can. So I mean,
most businesses will have like their brand name, be the I mean, if you’re looking at sort of like low
hanging fruit for SEO, you want to make sure that you’re first just ranking well for your brand name that
when people go and look for you on the internet using Google, they find you Yeah, that’s like priority
number one. But beyond that, you want to make sure that the other pages on your website are ranking
in some way for things that are related to your business. So things that you sell or problems that you
solve. There’s a fantastic book called they ask you answer. And it’s one of these content marketing
books. I just, it’s one of the most down to earth content. I’ve read all the content marketing books, and I
actually, to be honest, love them all. But this one is the most down to earth, which I would totally
recommend to anybody who is just trying to get past this, like, why would I answer all this stuff on the
internet. And it just gives a really compelling reason and a lot of really good examples of why people do
all their research on anything, including what these are, they’re going to buy on the internet. And so the
way that modern buying and selling happens is that people self educate and find the right company for
them. And by the time they actually get in touch with you like by the time they fill out your contact form,
Amr The Internet Guy
they’re ready to buy.
Michelle Bourbonnière
They’re like 80% there, right? And this wasn’t what it was, like 10 years ago before Google. As a
business owner, you could kind of like hold all this information to yourself, and you could say, oh, like
I’m not gonna tell you how to fix your own toilet because I’m a plumber gonna use me. Yeah, you’re
never gonna hire me, right? But what you actually want as a plumber is people with broken toilets,
right? Like, what you really want is you want to find the audience of people who have toilets in your city
that need fixing right now that might be leaking or might be making funny noises or just not flushing
anymore. And so you want to be the trusted source. Some people might take your your like instructions
and do it themselves. But like, that’s fine.
Amr The Internet Guy
But anyway for now,
Michelle Bourbonnière
and then another people like me that’s like, Oh, no, no, I
Amr The Internet Guy
will start them about thoughts that yeah, exactly
Michelle Bourbonnière
like, Oh, this like furnace repair person. And really like the companies that do this, that answer all the
questions that they get every single day on their website, they thrive, because people do want to know
how much it’s going to cost to have an air conditioner installed, and what their options are? And when
should they buy this one or that one? Or I hate
Amr The Internet Guy
it when companies don’t put their pricing? I mean, I do understand, like, okay, I don’t have my pricing,
and I’m not doing it on purpose. But my pricing is based on what type of website what how much
content you have, is it ecommerce or not ecommerce. So there’s no one size fits all, it’s hard for me to
quote a generic price that will not serve anyone because it’s a service. But there are some services that
for the for these specific services, the prices are kind of known, like changing the oil, you know, your car
service, right? You know that it ranges from x to y you you have to put that oil change pricing because
people be googling,
Michelle Bourbonnière
they’re going to market your they’re going to go to your competitor who was more transparent. They
had when when people don’t put their prices at all on the website, it really is quite cagey. Right. Like it’s,
it’s telling your your audience No, no, no, I’m holding that to myself, because maybe I’m gonna charge
you more because you’re a big business because
you have blue eyes or whatever. Yeah. Um,
Michelle Bourbonnière
this this book, I think it’s Marcus Sheridan is I think the author, I can send you the link. But his approach
to the cost question, which is all the time people don’t want to put, especially when it’s a bespoke
service, if it’s like a
Amr The Internet Guy
glove to put it, I just don’t know what it is. I mean, okay, I would love both packages, at least to tell
peers, when you choose this package, you can choose that one.
Michelle Bourbonnière
So he his, his approach to this is just genius. Because that’s a real, that’s a reality. And I’m in very much
the same position. I mean, I have braces on my website, but only some things kind of have his
packages. But what he says is that what people want isn’t necessarily their price, like an instant quote,
that’s like set in stone, they just want to know about cost, they want to know about pricing. So if you can
be really honest about like, these are the types of things that make it more expensive. These are the
types of things that can you can save money on, like, this is an example of what this one cost, like, you
can kind of you can see how that would fit into your situation. So by saying I’m not going to put prices
on my website shuts everything down. But if you say I am going to answer questions about cost, I’m
going to do it in a blog post. And I’m going to say this type of furnace costs more because of xy and z
tends to be 20% more and last three years longer. And this one over here is cheaper. But it does only
have a five year shelf life. You know, those are the types of things where you can talk about prices.
Amr The Internet Guy
This is what makes you look like not look, you are the expert, but absolutely This is what cements your
position as the experts in your industry, even though you may think and you will rank Yeah, but you may
Michelle Bourbonnière
think it’s boring as an air conditioner, which is totally what you want to be ranking like 100%. If you
could rank for that you’d make so much money.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, I mean, this is the thing like small business owners sometimes think that people are not
interested in what they have to say that is not salesy, but actually people are more interested in the not
salesy content that you have not in the salesy, and the punch line and whatever, like the old marketing
style, you know, or I mean, I, some of the stuff that I studied in, in digital marketing, I don’t agree with,
like creating scarcity. I hate that, oh, this offer will end blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, it’s
Michelle Bourbonnière
always 10 minutes from now.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah. You go a year from now, but it’s still 10 minutes is ending. It’s totally I have this plugin, by the
way, but I don’t use it on my own website. It’s good for e commerce. Yeah, it’s good. Sometimes when
you if you’re selling physical goods. Mm hmm. And sometimes people see a discount and there’s a
counter. It actually hurts them to buy but I wouldn’t use it. You know, as a blanket for everything. Like I
don’t really believe in a service business. I don’t believe in Scorsese, the best way to go about it.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Well, I think you need to be I mean, honesty and transparency is just so important. Yeah. So if people
start just not trusting you because you seem to be lying all the time, and they’re not gonna hire you. But
if you on the flip side, if there is genuine scarcity, it isn’t very effective. Yeah.
Amr The Internet Guy
I mean, okay. I do understand if if you have an offer, yeah, like a real offer a Black Friday, right, totally
Black Friday, so you may have it for a week or a month and that’s it. It’s not going to be a Black Friday,
all year round. So that’s fine. But you know, what I disagree with is to try and make everything you
have. Oh, yeah. Seem like, you know, constantly never coming back. Yeah.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yeah, just stop your stuff.
Amr The Internet Guy
So people are still listening to us and we didn’t lose them. Because you know, guys, we’re not
digressing. It’s all related to your search engine ranking. Because it’s related to your genuine content,
positioning yourself as the expert in your domain, which is not a lie, you are an expert in your domain,
otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing right now. So
Michelle Bourbonnière
it’s very true. And Google says it like really, expert means that they have when they’re when they’re
evaluating websites and trying to figure out who to rank. I mean, this is a I mean, obviously, it’s done by
an algorithm. But when they’re checking to see how their rankings are doing, they really are does this
person have the kind of training and background in this thing that they’re talking about doesn’t mean
you need to be like a genius in all things, it just means you need to be have the background in that
thing that you’re writing about. And very few people would be writing about things that they don’t
actually care about, or know about, right? Yeah, like, if you have your own website, and you have your
own business, like you really are an expert.
Amr The Internet Guy
So just you say answer questions,
Michelle Bourbonnière
answer questions. And like, you can’t go wrong. If you title it the title with like, a how to or a question for
a blog post that you’re reading. Like, that’s honestly normally the best.
Amr The Internet Guy
There’s one thing that I’ve seen from your interview with Josh, that I liked a lot, and I started doing it. So
easy. It’s like, for example, okay, I’ll give you a ticket example. Because Sure, sure. Do I use
CloudFlare? Or do I need CloudFlare? That’s a question that people ask. Yes. Why do I need
CloudFlare? actually
Michelle Bourbonnière
need to know the answer to that. So tell me. Your What is your technique?
Amr The Internet Guy
I’ll send you the blog post. No, perfect. No, so yeah, so what I did, I created the post. Uh huh. There
was a story behind it. I had a client, for whom have used CloudFlare. Right. And I use CloudFlare for
most clients anyway, because I believe that it’s good for you. But I didn’t tell her. Then she hired
somebody else, long after our service together, ended. And that was my mistake. So here are my
apologies to you in public, you know who you are. And because she’s not a techie, and she didn’t know
what CloudFlare is, and then she hired some SEO company. I don’t know why I don’t even know what
an SEO company does. But anyway, hmm. And they got some changes done. And they wanted to
change the domain. And it broke her email. Because they didn’t know that CloudFlare was handling the
DNS service. Oh, I see. So the cheese on GoDaddy, and then they change I don’t know, Where, where,
where, where the result was, because nobody spoke to me, and nobody emailed me or call me or
whatever, I would have done it for them without all this, you know, but I realized then that for the
average business owner, they don’t understand what DNS is. And they don’t understand what
CloudFlare is. And also for a lot of web designers. They see CloudFlare, but they’re not sure. Should I
use it? Should I not use it? So I created the blog post to explain this. It was because of the bad
situation,
that you turn it around.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, that cost me like kind of, I think that it’s not that she doesn’t trust me anymore. But she felt that
something was kept from her. And it wasn’t intentional. It was because the regular average business
person doesn’t know how to manage their DNS. Mm hmm. So it was
Michelle Bourbonnière
a hard thing to explain. Exactly. And
Amr The Internet Guy
even when I did it, it wasn’t received, like I understand it’s very technical, like the best. The best
approach would have been for the techies, whoever is there, like the SEO company, to get in touch with
me and like, there’s no charge, just like, tell me why you’re trying to do and I tell you, what’s the best
way to get it done? They if you hire four or five people to do the same service, you get into a conflict.
Yeah, that’s very true.
Amr The Internet Guy
So in order for me to help others be their business owners, or they’re web designers, I created that blog
post. Yeah, you know, do you do you need Clark’s layer? So so it’s just, I can’t remember the exact
question. Do I need CloudFlare? Or do you need cloth
Michelle Bourbonnière
does the title it’s probably Google wouldn’t make a huge difference. Yeah, you’re putting one or the
other. Like the Way keywords work is they tend to work in groups. So it’s like you are Yeah, someone
needs laughter I need CloudFlare like, does the body need Probably if you look so if the way to check is
if you were to search all of those things in Google just do like an incognito window so that you don’t
have your sir.
Yeah, caching stuff. Yeah.
Michelle Bourbonnière
But if if you’re basically getting the same 10 results for all of those different things, then Google has
decided that those search things are analogous or related,
Amr The Internet Guy
you have to make, you know, there’s
Michelle Bourbonnière
really no difference, regardless of how you type it in.
Amr The Internet Guy
And what I’ve done is the first word in there is yes, so like, there’s a question up in the title. Yes. And
like, the first word in the actual article is, Yes, you do. Here’s why. And then I explain what it does. And
why do I believe it’s good and, and basically, since you asked, and two things I like about CloudFlare,
but one of them is better than the other. Okay, um, the one that’s better is that it adds another layer of
security. And usually, if somebody wants to attack your website, mm over the need to figure out is the
IP address, where your website is hosted, then they can start or mountain attack against that IP
address. And usually most of these denial of service attacks, or, as they’re called, technically DDoS,
Mm hmm.
Amr The Internet Guy
Is that just bombarding the server with what looks like legitimate requests? You know, a server keeps
on answering, hey, give me this page, they give me that page, hey, give me this image, give me this,
give me this script. And the server just gets 1 million requests a minute, to the point that it just dies,
trying to answer all of them at the same time.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Make sense. And this
Amr The Internet Guy
way, your website is taken off service, because of service, use CloudFlare, the IP address, if somebody
is trying to figure out and target you specifically, or somebody on a specific hosting server, that just get
to the IP address of CloudFlare, not your actual IP, they wouldn’t know what your actual IP is, because
CloudFlare is in between? Yeah. And CloudFlare has designed its own servers in a way to deal with
denial of service attacks. So it wouldn’t bring them down and bring your website down. Because you’re
shielded, you’re, you’re on a completely different IP that nobody knows about.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yeah, that’s interesting. I never knew that about CloudFlare. I always just knew it as a way to speed up
your website. Yeah. So
Amr The Internet Guy
it’s an additional layer of security. And it does work.
Michelle Bourbonnière
That’s interesting. It kind of makes sense. Because I think I’ve seen things where like, you can’t go to
this site, because CloudFlare has it locked down?
Amr The Internet Guy
Yes. And sometimes it will ask you to prove that you’re a human like a CAPTCHA, or, or it will tell you to
wait for a second or a minute. Yes,
Michelle Bourbonnière
I’ve seen that. That’s the one that’s interesting. So that’s there. Those are their systems. That’s so
interesting.
Amr The Internet Guy
So does the best, the best part of it, and I’m talking about the free CloudFlare, because there’s a paid
version that does way more than that. Okay, speeding up your website. It’s a myth, but really
CloudFlare has extra caching. So they can they can cache your website a little bit more. They can
minify your JavaScript and your CSS. And I’m getting all techie here. But we have many listeners or
web designers, so they will appreciate this. So it does do this for you. But you wouldn’t see the
difference that it makes. It’s a split of a second. So you wouldn’t necessarily feel that your website
loading time has been caught by a full second or something as a result of being on CloudFlare. I think
the free clock. the paid version is another thing, the plus version has proper speeding, would you say,
you know, and they would even work with your hosting server in tandem, to get things done really fast.
So they would actually make your web hosting server feel better. Oh, interesting. But that’s the paid
version, because they have like lots of different configurable switches that you can switch on and off.
And, and they will make your website they will actually make your website faster. Very cool in a way
that you’ll feel it. But that’s the thing. So I want it to be of service to anyone who’s thinking about
CloudFlare Yes. And whether they’re web designers or small business owners or end users. Mm hmm.
gorod cause like, I remember when my client was angry, and she called me angrily said, What the hell
is CloudFlare and why do I need it? So that gives me the idea that
the internet
Michelle Bourbonnière
may mean happy questions, but I guess you could do it the other way around.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, well, I come from an IT background and like being in IT support. Nobody calls you unless they’re
angry. It’s true that he was gonna call it hell best to say Hey, thank you guys. my computer’s is running
really well.
Like nothing to report.
Amr The Internet Guy
Just wanted to let you know you’re appreciated.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yeah, that’s very interesting. Yeah, that’s By the way, I mean, that’s I mean, that’s content marketing,
just writing the answers to the questions that you know, because think about it, your your audience
sometimes is searching, can I make a website or I need to fix my website, but they also are spending
time on the internet doing other things relatedly in their life, so maybe not directly related to something
that you have a service around. But it’s still that same person. And it’s still that same audience. And
that’s who you want to sort of trust you over time. And so if you can think about the other things that
audience is going to be writing about that’s related enough that you have expertise in that area, but not
necessarily like every single blog post leads towards a sale. Yeah, that is quite valuable. Because that
is, I think, Josh is probably a fantastic example of that, right? before I ever knew Josh, like I was just
working on Debbie sites and PK every time I had a question. And you’re done. Yeah, after a while, you
start to just really trust the guy because you, you recognize that last time you solved your problem. And
now this time, you’re like, well, if I’m gonna click on one of them, like, I know that this guy does videos
that make sense to me. And so then you do that. So like, if, if you can do that type of content marketing,
where you’re, you’re kind of in the area of the types of people that you would maybe want to work with
one day, then over time, they’ll just get to know you. And then that’s just like a beautiful thing.
Amr The Internet Guy
Shoutout to Russia. Good. Yeah, I mean, I, I love how he’s doing it, because I think it all came naturally.
And genuinely, it I think it’s part of it is his friendly personality. Just Josh is very friendly. And he
genuinely wants to help people. And every time and anytime you have a conversation with him, he’s so
thankful, because the more helpful he was, the more successful he became. And the more money he
got. Mm hmm. This is like, the secret sauce here that that that’s exactly what we’re talking about. yet. If
your goal is to go on the first page of Google, for a business competitive reason, I’ve got news for you
ain’t gonna happen. But if your goal is to genuinely help your audience, get better, solve problems, do
better. In general, no matter what you sell, no matter what business you’re in, hmm, you will rank in
Google as long as you keep actively, you know, you keep being active and posting about the stuff that
you know.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yep. And also going back to your like, not to plug editing too much. But to go back to old posts. So like,
I mean, sometimes you end up with just this, these gigantic websites, sometimes I’m called in and like,
you wouldn’t believe how much content they have. And like some of it isn’t relevant. Now, it’s not
necessary enough. Like most of the time, if Google has decided that something isn’t relevant, it’s not
probably holding you back, like leaving it live is probably not much of a problem. But if you see your
rankings kind of slipping, like if you can see, oh, I used to rank really well for that. And then like, other
people kind of upped their game. And now I’m not the best results on the internet anymore. If you can
go back and refresh. So if you’ve been in business for a while, if you actually do have lots of blog posts,
one of the best things you can do, that’s a lot easier than writing something totally fresh, is to go and
update to go in and like see what how you could even make it better. So it’s just another phase of
editing in like two years later. But to come in and see what other people are in that field kind of doing.
Maybe some things are just straight out of date, and they need to be updated. I mean, in your field,
things change,
Amr The Internet Guy
the terms change as well, that the actual terms that people use change,
Michelle Bourbonnière
and then the prices change, and some businesses go out of business. So like, you know, CloudFlare
will probably be here for a while, but one day, it might not be and then you need to make sure that
you’ve updated it to the new caching service, right. Like those types of things are, that can really help or
add on to old posts. If there’s new competitors in the field. If you’re writing about companies, and
there’s a new competitor that you want to write about, like don’t hesitate to go in and make those
changes because Google does a
Amr The Internet Guy
good question here. Because everybody is not just me. And I think everyone who has a WordPress
website would probably end up especially if you’ve been blogging for a long time, I think a messy
archive, like, Oh, yes, like the old, your old posts from five years ago and whatever, and you’re in the
same industry, but the industry itself has moved on. There are new terms and there are new
technologies and new ways of getting business done. Yeah. So do you advise people if they go and
revisit those old ports, now that I’m going to edit it, be it alone or using an editor like you or whatever,
but I’m gonna do I change the data make it today’s date, or leave it as old? It was or
Michelle Bourbonnière
so the danger is not or as much as you would think. I mean, you could you can add like an updated
date, right. So you can do like first published 2017, updated 2020. So that can adding that on can
certainly help and updating the metadata so that Google understands that it’s been updated. The most
important thing which you didn’t ask, but I’m going to answer is do not change the URL. Oh, yeah.
Because though
Amr The Internet Guy
you’ll lose your everything pointing,
Michelle Bourbonnière
you’ll lose? Well, there’s that even if you did all the proper redirects, you would still like, you know, but
it’s that Google really understands that that page is that page, because of the URL. It’s like almost a
unique ID, right?
Amr The Internet Guy
Yes. So does the address that’s it’s the actually, a URL is a Uniform Resource Locator. Like, I know
most of us use the word. Yeah. But you need to understand the score the locator for a reason. So
Michelle Bourbonnière
there you go. That’s a very good way. I knew it on some level, but that is very, that’s true. And so if you
Amr The Internet Guy
know, I studied all the boring internet stuff,
Michelle Bourbonnière
haha. If you change the URL, then Google actually thinks it’s just a brand new site that’s never existed
before. So when you do refresh your content, you can update the date, that’s great. I mean, it’s just
good for your users, right to know that, they want to know that it’s new, not old. So you get it as totally
new and keep the same URL, especially if it’s really substantially different, like it really is new posts on
the same topic, then you might want to just make a new post, I mean, that’s probably what I would do is
that if it was a small edit, if I was just making smaller changes, adding a paragraph changing a couple
things that bugged me about the old version, then that’s called updating. So you could say updated
2020, or updated specific date in 2020. But if it’s a substantially new thing on a topic that you’ve written
by in the past, reuse that URL, and then you take all any any sort of authority, or any sort of links that
you had to it, that now goes to the new one, now, you can get people linking to your new one, and you
get to kind of put all those links together. So that’s kind of useful.
Amr The Internet Guy
Cool. I have one last question before I let you go. Um, when we talk about answering questions, and
most of us do it on our own websites, which is a great thing to do. Would you also recommend that
people go and answer some questions on some of the sites that have questions like Cora or
Michelle Bourbonnière
so there’s, there’s like a, that’s a very good question. There’s a couple things about that. So in most
cases, like Cora, and those types of things aren’t necessarily going to be like the types of so say you
write an answer to a question. Yeah. And then you link back to your website? I think most of those are
nofollow links. So they’re not,
Amr The Internet Guy
they don’t give you the juice. Yeah. No, this is on your thority.
Michelle Bourbonnière
However, your audience is there, right. So like, if your audience is looking for an answer to a question
that you have answered on your own website, in a blog post, for example, you can give like an expert
type opinion, and then a link for like more information, you can check out my blog post that can be very,
I mean, that can just drive traffic. So while it may not necessarily specifically help with your off page,
SEO, that could be very useful. Then the flip side is, if you’re looking to try to figure out what questions
people are asking, in your field, go to Quora. People are asking questions, and go find things that
you’re an expert on to answer and then you’ll see good returns that way. So good, those those, those
bulletin boards and those types of things, Reddit and those types of things are great places to figure out
what your audience is even interested in.
Amr The Internet Guy
Here we go off page SEO in a nutshell. You can do it on Facebook, as well, you can do it like wherever
you think your audience exists.
Michelle Bourbonnière
I always like to think with Facebook groups, like if somebody googled it, you know that there is right, if
somebody’s asking it in a Facebook group.
And they didn’t find the answer. They didn’t
Michelle Bourbonnière
find the answer. So probably it’s a good thing to write on.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, I mean, I, he just sucks out a lot of time. So just be careful that he has a specific, I don’t know, a
few hours a week to work on this. You got to do it constantly. That’s the clue. You have to be constant.
Don’t overdo it. Yeah, burnout, and then stop doing.
Michelle Bourbonnière
You don’t need to like to wrap the whole internet and all those questions, but just use it as a way to get
ideas. So if you’re running dry, of things to think about and things to write about going out and finding
some outside inspiration is always a good way to start. And then you have something like I would say
the beginning of something to sit in front of when you’re like I’m just going to write and I’m going to free
write and even if it’s terrible writing and write it anyways, if at the top of the page, you have a real
question from a real person that can sometimes make it much easier for the words to come. Yeah,
Amr The Internet Guy
Gods you were to go with your thoughts. Yeah. And like instead of thinking about Oh, did I put the
washing in the dryer or like
Michelle Bourbonnière
and also you can have that that imagined audience Yeah. And that helps a lot with the tone. So instead
of being really like stilted and academic or like, just you don’t really know who you’re writing to, or
you’re kind of writing to the whole internet all at once. It’s better to write to one person. And so if you
have one person’s question in front of you, it’s a lot easier to get into that mode of answering that
person’s question.
Amr The Internet Guy
And I think some people have sometimes more than one audience, which is okay, as long as you don’t
speak to both audiences in the same sentence.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yeah, you got muddled and right. You can write the same often. I mean, if you look at keywords, yes.
Right. It’s like XYZ for women, XYZ for men, XYZ for kids. So if you were selling something to women
and men and kids, you could hit those keywords separately, or you could hit them in different sections
within a bigger blog post. Either way, you’re being specific to the audience.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah. Or maybe have I don’t know, I wouldn’t say two separate blog posts. It depends on the situation
Michelle Bourbonnière
depends on the exercise, like,
Amr The Internet Guy
yeah, recruitment agencies, for example, they have the customer is the employer, the company looking
for someone to work for them? And their other customer or the client is the candidate? Oh, yeah. Yeah,
if you’re, if you’re a dating agency, you’ve got to
Michelle Bourbonnière
are in real estate is the other one. Oh, real
Amr The Internet Guy
estate buyers and sellers. Yeah. But so if you have two groups, you can keep them separate. Even on
your like, some people want to design the website, they have two entries. Mm hmm. It’s like almost
having two separate websites, one for sellers and one for buyers.
Michelle Bourbonnière
And people to feel at home when they get there. Right. That’s them. And nothing that they don’t
Amr The Internet Guy
mistake is having a homepage that’s trying to cater for both. Yeah, and it becomes too hard. And I’m
kind of there as well, because when I started my web design and development business, my target, as
usual, is small business owners, entrepreneurs like me. But as everything evolved, the last year, most
of my clients are web designers. And I love working with web designers. Because we’re from the same
industry, it’s easier for us to connect. Mm hmm. It’s easier for me to be the techie without having to
explain how it’s done, like,
Michelle Bourbonnière
thankful that you can do it.
Amr The Internet Guy
They don’t have to just let me take care of it. Yeah, headache. I’ll take care of it. No more headache.
Just don’t ask me to show you how it’s done. I’m actually, I’ll make a course like, you know, if genuinely
many people need to know how it’s done. And that’s the idea for my course. I have some free tutorials.
And it’s, it’s okay. Every time I talk, I get a question from Michelle. But we don’t want this episode to be
mega long, as well. But if you have some free content, like Josh is doing it as well, like, you’ve got so
many tutorials, and you’re thinking to have a paid course. Mm hmm. One of the things that is stopping
me and not stopping me, but like, you know, I procrastinate, and I get busy. Sometimes I feel like I’ve
already covered everything in the free tutorial, when people actually pay for a course since like most of
the information is even how I explained it is they’re readily available. Mm hmm. So from a content
perspective,
Mm hmm.
Amr The Internet Guy
What should somebody do in this instance?
Michelle Bourbonnière
A good question. There’s two things, one, and I’m just taking this from Josh. But he said that one of the
things that he does in his courses is that he puts it in an order. And he, yes, some of that stuff is
available for free, but you really got to go look for it. And by having it like as a guide that you bring, like
there is, there is value in the ordering. And there’s value in the sort of like bringing somebody through it
in an organized way. So that that’s one piece. And then the other piece, you probably don’t want to hear
this. But the other piece is that like, if you’ve given away really great free content, hi, feel that like that’s
just a call for you to like really jump in and see what you can bring to the table that is unique and is not
replicable and isn’t already on the internet somewhere. And so like, given that you’re the expert in these
things, I think
Amr The Internet Guy
it gives us not replicable.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Well, but it’s the thing where you can go in and say the things that you didn’t have time to say, or
explain things in ways that you’re kind of not willing to give away for free, right? Like I mean, even
though you’ve given many things away for free, and so have I there are certain things that like you
know, you this is your special knowledge, the things that you are hard won, like specialist knowledge
that maybe you are willing to give away because I do think that you want to make sure that you want to
make sure that anyone that buys a course is coming away thinking wow. So you don’t want them.
Whoa. You just sold me something you gave for free, you want people looking at your free content and
saying, Wow, if this the stuff he gives away for free, I wonder what’s in the paid course. Like if that’s
Yeah,
Michelle Bourbonnière
like if that’s the mode that you can get your money, you’ll sell tons of things. And so I think that that’s
why it’s good to be generous in your content in your free content, because I think it really helps people
understand the quality that you always produce. But I am almost positive that you have more to give
when you really sit down and you can make an organized class. That’s what I think.
Amr The Internet Guy
Perfect. Thank you very much, Michelle, for being here today.
Lovely to have you here. Thank you. Thank
Michelle Bourbonnière
you so much for having us. Me. And it was really nice to chat with you about all these interesting
Amr The Internet Guy
things. Yeah. And I’m sure like people will enjoy because like, you know, I haven’t seen many episodes
somewhere else that are discussing specifically content and you know,
Michelle Bourbonnière
well, SEO editors like where nominee
Amr The Internet Guy
and editors like Yeah, exactly. WordPress. They have a role called editor but no one is using because
everyone wants to be the administrator.
Michelle Bourbonnière
Yes, indeed. Indeed. I am the editor. I own it.
Thank you so much for having me.
Amr The Internet Guy
She’s Michelle. Have a great day. Thanks.
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