Hello everybody. And welcome to episode 53 of the Easy SEO and More podcasts. I’m so glad that you’re here. I’m Dr. Ty, your host. And over the next few weeks, I’m going to be talking about the top 10 questions that I get with SEO. I figured that’s a great way to start off 2022, answering these top questions that I get about search engine optimization.

And the number one question is… can you guess what it is? I’m sure you can.

#1 Do I really need SEO?

That is the number one question that I get from people. Now, of course, people don’t call or email me and say, hey, do I really need this stuff? Do I really need to be paying you all that money to do this? No, that’s not what happens, but maybe if I’m in a networking group or if I’m in a social group and people know that I’m an SEO person, they’ll ask questions like that. I’m thinking it’s a comfort-level thing. 😊

Especially people that are starting out, they’ll say, hey, I just designed my website. Do I really need to do SEO?

And the answer to that question is an absolute 100% No. You don’t need SEO. Now, it may surprise you that I said you don’t need SEO. You also don’t need to eat, but eating is not a bad idea If you want to stay alive, and SEO isn’t a bad idea if you want your business to grow.

The number one way that people are finding businesses is through the search engine. And you have to be on page one of the search engines or they probably won’t find you.

if you don’t think that’s true, I want you think about something, especially if you’ve got your business mostly on social media.

When is the last time you went to social media to try to find a product or service? Maybe you asked for recommendations, it’s good to get recommendations from people. but then did you go to their website to check them out?

Your website needs to be your marketing cornerstone.

Especially for local people. Even if you have an international business, you want to do local SEO first. And I talked about this back at episode 38.

So you don’t need SEO, but think about this: SEO is like the background music of a movie. Think of the theme music, not the songs, but the theme music to movies like Star Wars or Indiana Jones; that inspirational music that you hear when you think of those movies.

Did you know that movie producers will spend up to $5 million just for that background music? That’s how important it is, but when’s the last time you watched a movie and thought, Hmm, I like that background music, or the score I think is what it called.

We don’t even think about it most of the time, do we? But as soon as I say something like Indiana Jones, that theme music starts running in the back of your head, doesn’t it?

SEO is something that, if done right, will never be noticed by your customers.

And no one will ever think about it, but your website will be right there when they’re looking for your products and services. It will be right at the top of the search engines whenever they type in just the right keywords that your company wants to be found for.

That’s how important SEO is.

#2, what training do you need to be an SEO specialist?

I do get this one a lot. People ask what kind of training I’ve had and what kind of training I need. And I’m glad when people ask, although the answer isn’t going to be what you expect, because my answer is, I really don’t know. I’ve been doing this for so long and there was no training available when I started.

I stumbled on SEO in 1995, and I started doing SEO in 2002 as part of my business when I started my web design business.

Now we’re a search engine optimization business that also does web design. So we switched from being a web design business to a marketing business.

I know there are a lot of places where you can get training, but here’s the thing you don’t want to get training from somebody who hasn’t done it themselves and been successful.

And you being a business owner, do you really want to learn all that techy SEO stuff anyway?

Some of this stuff is so technical that you would never want to know it. I would say about 70% of the SEO stuff out there, you can do yourself, and we offer training so you can learn how to do that part yourself if you want. Just click here for more information.

The reason why I’m so good at SEO is literally because I figured out the formula, and there is a formula for it. It’s not brain surgery, but it is rocket science. There is a certain way that you need to do step one, step two, step three, and you need to do step one before step three, you need to do step 57 before you do step 85.

Sometimes you can do step 97 before you do step 36, but not all the time.

Those are the kinds of things that I’ve learned over 20 years of doing this. And I hate to say it, but most SEO companies don’t know most of the stuff because they just haven’t been doing it that long. The big thing today is WordPress and WordPress assumes quite a lot.

There are a lot of things that you can do in WordPress that WordPress doesn’t automatically do. And there’s plugins like Yoast that work well. I highly recommend that for an SEO plugin and it does a great job, but it’s not perfect. There’s other things that you’d still need to do, even with the Yoast plugin to make your search engine optimization work right.

And that’s why people hire SEO experts. So yes, you can do a lot of it yourself. In fact, I highly recommend for smaller businesses: Do some of it yourself or hire an SEO person on staff to do some of it themselves, but then you hire the expert to do that 30% that is so technical that most people don’t even want to learn.

And it’s that 30% is that’s going to get you onto page one.

Thank y’all for listening to this episode of Easy SEO and More.

Dr. Ty Belknap, CEO, Port Bell SEO