Podcast 2.3: Getting found on Google with Nadine Nocero-Tye

Summary:

Nadine Nocero-Tye discusses how to get your business found on Google by your target audience.

Nadine has been helping companies turn ‘arts and craft’ style marketing into revenue-driving investments for the last 10 years. As a partner at SyncShow, a digital marketing agency that achieves 95% of their clients’ pipeline goals. Nadine shares secrets of how SyncShow helps their clients generate more traffic and conversions via brand awareness and lead generation techniques.

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Transcript of Biz Chat Ohio’s podcast 2.3: Nadine Nocero-Tye

Hello, everyone. Welcome to BizChat Ohio, the podcast bringing you big ideas for small businesses, and the best of small business news, and industry trends from Ohio’s thought leaders. This podcast is made possible by Lakeland Community College and the Ohio Small Business Development Center. I’m your host, Cathy Walsh, director of the Small Business Development Center. And I’m joined by my co-host Gretchen Skok DiSanto, director of the Lakeland Community College Entrepreneurship Center, and business advisor for the Ohio Small Business Development Center.

So how many of you listening today want your business to be quickly found on Google when your target customers are searching for what you provide? I think it’s safe to say that all of us want to be in that position. And we’d really prefer to not have to pay to be easily found. It is possible to accomplish this without paying. But how do you go about that? What’s the secret sauce? I’m really excited about our guest today on BizChat Ohio because I think she can help all of us crack that nut.

So today, we are welcoming Nadine Nocero-Tye to BizChat Ohio. Nadine has been helping companies turn arts and crafts style marketing into revenue driving investments for the last 10 years. Nadine is a partner at SyncShow, a digital marketing agency that helps their clients achieve 95% of their pipeline goals. At every turn, Nadine and her team are committed to finding solutions that help their clients grow. Since joining SyncShow over 10 years ago, Nadine has leveraged her experience in brand building, storytelling, and digital strategy to provide clients with custom solutions that help them meet their business objectives.

She’s also responsible for training and mentoring the company’s client services team. Nadine has over 15 years of experience in B2B online marketing and has worked with multiple Fortune 500 companies. She’s been named a top female blogger by PR Newswire, holds multiple certifications from HubSpot and Google, and is an active member and former board member of Together Digital. Nadine has been featured as an expert on both the NBC affiliate WKYC the CBS affiliate WOIO.

In today’s podcast, we’ll talk about how to get your business found on Google, the three most important things to know to help your business be found on Google, and some of the common misconceptions that may be out there that small business owners should be aware of in an area that can be really confusing to them. I know we do a lot of– we try to do a lot of webinars and topics on that in the SBDC. And it feels like every time I listen to somebody else talking about it, I’m still learning new things or reminding myself of things.

So Nadine, welcome to the show. We’re so glad to have you here today.

Thanks, Cathy. Thanks, Gretchen. It’s great to be here. I’m excited to dive in with you all. And as you mentioned, it’s something that’s changing all the time. So it’s not that– yes, you’re learning new things every day about it. But it’s more so that the system is just evolving. The internet is a living, breathing thing. And we all have to adapt. So I’m excited to dive in today, talk about some tips, and help get some of these listeners on the right path towards success. Because yes, it can be achieved.

And while you can pay for it and get some immediate results, this is definitely a longer game. And it takes commitment and a strong strategy. But it’s absolutely possible. So looking forward to sharing that with everyone today.

And some of the problems that small business owners face when it comes to being found online, one of those is brand awareness. Can you talk a little bit about why brand awareness is important and how a small business can become more visible when they’re not the caliber of a Tesla, or a Nike?

Absolutely. So brand awareness, when we talk about it online, it’s sometimes easier to talk about it in the real world. So let’s talk about having a business. And if you think about your brand awareness, if you have a big budget, and you are ready to have your storefront on Main Street, you can pay for that brand awareness. So in the digital space, it’s sort of the same thing. If you have a big budget, you can pay to ensure that you are at the top of the search engine results. That’s your Main Street. You have a great storefront with a big, beautiful banner and some outside landscaping. It’s quite enticing.

And it tells everybody, come on in. This is what we do. This is who we do it for. And we welcome you with open arms. In the digital world, it’s the same thing. Where’s your storefront? And how are you attracting your audience? So that’s really what we mean when we talk about brand awareness. And you don’t just want traffic to your website. That shouldn’t be the goal, unless the goal of your business is to sell ad revenue. So if you have a website and you are selling ad revenue on your website, your goal is to just say, get my traffic numbers up as high as they can go.

Because people are paying for that visibility on my own website. Oftentimes, that’s not the space that I’m working in. We primarily work with manufacturing companies, transportation companies. These are people that sell goods and services, primarily services, to other businesses. So it’s not about what we consider the vanity metric of just driving as much traffic to your website as possible. It’s about driving the right traffic. So how do you do that if you can’t afford the storefront? And my air quote, the storefront.

So what you have to do here is really hone in on who you’re trying to attract to your website. And then put yourself in those buyer’s shoes or in your current customer’s shoes and say, what are the things that they’re searching for online? What are the problems that they’re trying to solve? And then those are the things that you’re going to want to build your website content around. So when we talk about visibility in the search engines, we’re really talking about content and how to ensure that you’re showing up for the things that people are looking for.

The search engines really want two things. They want a website that’s healthy and technically sound. Google does not ever want to encourage someone to visit a website that has malware or that is insecure or unsecured. It’s not in their best interest to drive traffic somewhere that’s going to potentially hurt you or me if we click on that link and then give our computer a virus, or give us a bad experience, or have something shown to us that we’re not actively looking to see.

So they want first to drive a website that’s technically sound. So we can talk about, what does it mean to be technically sound? But then after that, they want to say, not only do I want to deliver a safe experience to this searcher, but I want to make sure that I’m giving them what they’re looking for. So I’m going to read, the Google robots, are going to read, crawl your content, and say, is this the content that’s going to best answer the question or serve the need that they’re trying to search or find for?

So those are really our two components of brand awareness, technical health, and then content.

So obviously, keywords are really critical, right? And that plays into the content. So let’s say you come up with, hey, 10 main keywords. And I know there could be a lot more. But let’s play with the number 10. Do you think it’s a best practice on having those keywords on each of the pages in your website? So let’s say, you have six or seven main pages or five pages. Should you be embedding those keywords in each of those?

That’s a great follow up question. So thank you for asking it. And I actually love that you said 10 keywords because sometimes, we talk to clients who come to us and say, here is the CVS receipt, the mile long list of things that I’m looking to be found for online. Rank me for these 150 keywords. I want to make sure that I’m taking an approach where I’m just scattershot and I can be found. Because I want a really big net. The bigger the net, the more fish fall into the net.

Oftentimes, that’s actually not going to help you drive the results that you’re looking for. So it is a great recommendation to start with 10 keywords. What are the things that we do? What are the things that we do well? If you’re a business owner, what are the products or services that make you most profitable? You should really look at it from a strategic standpoint of, if I only have 10, what are the most important 10? And then let’s figure it out.

So I know that wasn’t part of your question, but I think it’s an important thing to first address because it just can feel so large and overwhelming sometimes. So hopefully, that helps give people some direction to start small, to be focused, and to really think about, what are those 10 if you only get 10? So then now to answer your question of what do you do with it, you can almost think of your website like a pyramid, an upside down pyramid. Your home page is going to be the biggest real estate asset on your digital presence.

So again, this is the whole footprint of your store, not just the front door. It’s the front door and the whole footprint. So here you’re going to want to talk about those 10 keywords. You’re giving the overview. It should feel natural because you’re talking about what you do, why you do it well, who you do it for, why you do it better than your competition. This is your opportunity to be really broad with those 10 keywords. Then you should think about your website structure and say, now, as I hone in, and get to that tip of the pyramid on the bottom, since it’s an upside-down pyramid, how do I then create potentially a services page where now, I’m only talking about my services?

So now, instead of talking about the 10 things, I’m maybe talking about five. And then, I’m going to create individual service pages where I only talk about the one keyword per service on each of those pages. So it starts broad and then should become much more focused as you hone in on your page structure. So we’ve all been to websites, you click on a menu, you’re on your home page, you see these overviews, services, products, about us, learning center. Those are then your next tree down. And then you hover over and the rest of the menu displays.

And you see service one, service two, service three. Hover over products, product one, product two, product three. As you get down and distill to those individual pages, that’s where you should then align keywords. Really one to one. One to two just to keep it really tight. Because you also want it to read naturally. If you’re trying to fill each sentence with a keyword because you’re trying to hit that 10 keyword mark, it feels like it’s written for the robots, and you’re now no longer developing trust with your buyer and they’re going to leave.

So you might catch them, but then they’re not going to do anything with it. They’re like, is this website real? Is this a real company? Are these people real? This doesn’t make sense to me. And it feels kind of phony. And you really want to avoid that too.

I want to turn our eye towards lead generation now. We drive traffic to the website. But then the traffic, i.e. the visitors, don’t buy, engage, or basically don’t do anything. Clients have great traffic on websites, but aren’t getting leads. How can the business owner work to turn websites into lead generation machines? What are some tips that you have for those listening today?

Perfect. Great question, Gretchen. To really explain why this is important, we have clients come to us all the time and say, I just need you to make me rank on the search engines. I want to be number one on the search engines. And you have to look at that and say to yourself, well, why? And the answer should be, so that when they click that link in that number one spot, they come to my website, and then they do something. So oftentimes, people will come and say to us, no, no, no. Digital marketing does not work for me. I’ve done it. I’ve tried.

And oftentimes, what we discover when we lift the hood up is that you’ve done piecemeal digital marketing. So maybe you did that SEO piece, that search engine optimization piece of driving traffic to your website, building that brand awareness. Maybe you’ve done that really well. And your traffic numbers have increased month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year. But then you haven’t addressed how to turn your website into a lead generation machine. So nothing happens after that. They’re knocking on the door and no one’s answering.

Or they’re looking in the window but they’re never even trying to open the door because they don’t like what they see or they just don’t care. So driving traffic is that first portion of this. You need to have eyes on your website to generate leads. It’s crucial, it’s a foundation builder. But then once they get there, you need to talk about lead generation. And you need to talk about, how do we entice them to knock, to open a door, to give us their information? That’s really what we’re talking about here.

So it starts with your messaging. We’ve talked about messaging as it relates to brand awareness. So the messaging and the content serves both masters. It’s going to help drive traffic to your website. But then once they get there, it helps them build trust, read the content that’s on the site, and say, this place is for me. We have three to five seconds when somebody clicks a link. They scan, they want the page to load quickly, and they need to see something that says, ah, yes. I’m in the right place. And that something is going to be header, content, body copy, imagery to say, OK, I’m looking for a gear wheel.

There are pictures of gear wheels, there’s a description of product years, what do I do now? And they’re going to say, great. I’m in the right place. I’m going to explore further. And exploring further means, again, telling people what you do, why you do it better than your competition, who you do it for, and really crafting that value proposition, and then asking them to do something.

So oftentimes, I go to websites that have great content. You can tell they’re working really hard. They’re building their resource centers. They have blogs. They have case studies, which are proof points to say, this is why you should work with us. This is why you should hire us, trust us, give us your money, give us your contract. And then there’s nothing for them to do. So each page of your website should have one very specific call to action. You need to ask. You need to say to people, OK. You’re here, you’ve read, you’ve spent time. Now this is exactly what I want you to do.

So what are the things that you might want them to do? Download this case study. Contact us. It can be as simple as just contact us with a form. Schedule a consultation. Request a quote. Watch or schedule a demo. These are all things that can be very helpful to your end user. And you just simply have to ask for it. You have to ask for it in a way that’s enticing, what we call a call to action button. So that’s to also be very clear that this is different than the rest of the copy on your website.

This ask is typically in a button shape. When you hover over it, sometimes the colors will change, again, to really draw the eye there, keep the focus there. And it then brings you to a landing page where you should ask for information. First name, last name, email address, phone number. So that way, you can then do something with them. And you can follow up with them and help serve them, answer their questions, and really take that online conversation offline and now turn it into a real relationship and a real sales experience.

I’m just going to kind of move to the next step after you’ve got that lead generation. I want to talk a little bit about shorter sales cycles. Can you help our audience understand why shorter sales cycles are important and possibly how SyncShow has helped clients shorten their sales cycle?

So when you think about a sales cycle and you’re a salesperson, you have a pipeline. And however long it takes you to close that deal is however long it then takes for your business to start making money. And the longer that takes, the slower you are to see revenue. The slower you are to see growth. So we have to look at things and say, how can we make you more money? And how can we do it for you faster? And that’s why we take the approach to shortening a sales cycle. Now I work with some clients that have 12 to 18 month sales cycles.

So you have to be really thoughtful in your marketing to say, whatever I do right now, I have to do it well. Because I’m not even going to find out whether or not it worked for a year or a year and a half. But also, if I’m doing it wrong, I need to be able to make adjustments and I need to pivot. Otherwise, I’m going to be in a world of hurt in a year and a half. And then we have other clients that their sales cycles are 30 days. So we can be pretty nimble and pretty agile to say, OK, this is working, this isn’t, let’s test something.

So when you shorten your sales cycles, it unlocks a lot of flexibility for your sales and marketing team, for your company to think about growth with cash flow. So how do we do that online? And I’m going to sound like a broken record because I’m going to say, well, it’s your content. And it’s how you’re speaking to your prospects and your customers.

And this is actually where Google starts that process for us. There’s only four ways people can find you online. Organic search, paid search, which we’re talking about how can we not pay for it, direct visits, people who already know you and go to your URL, they have your business card, they know you in real life, they meet you on an airplane and you tell them about your business, and then last but not least, social media.

So if there’s only four ways people can get to your website, you want organic search to really be the biggest foundation there. It’s where we can get a lot of bang for our buck. And you can feel that from a really sustainable standpoint. So the first part is getting aligned with Google through your content, through your technical health, making sure that you’re regularly feeding that beast to continue to pull those people in, and then generating those leads on your website, and focusing on them to say, now what? We’ve got them. How do we shorten that sales cycle?

And the beauty of the internet is that 98% of buyers are more than halfway through their sales journey, their research process, before they even talk to a salesperson. You can really use that to your benefit if you’re doing things right. And that means giving them the content, not keeping secrets, empowering them as the person who’s in the driver’s seat. Because if you’re a salesperson or a company whose culture is to gate keep information, they will just go find it somewhere else. They want to make things really easy.

So give them what they want. And then use a marketing automation tool, an email tool, to follow up with them. So you’ve captured the lead, now regularly follow up with them to say, here’s another piece of content to show you why you should work with us. Here’s another proof point. Here’s an example of a project we did for someone just like you to keep them engaged. And then because you’ve given them all of this information and you’re not trying to ask them to dance to the beat of your drum, they typically are going to make decisions faster. And therefore, it’s going to shorten your sales cycle.

Because by time they find you, they’re already 98% of the way through things. And you can just simply close the deal. Makes it sound very easy. But it does take a lot of upfront work. And again, it’s through that content and through that messaging strategy to ensure that you’re just being transparent, that you’re being clear. It’s business to business. But I would say it’s people to people. Think about how you want a relationship to transact and you just want it to be easy, you want it to be friendly, you want it to be informative, and you want to feel like you’re making the right choice.

Yeah, and I think a lot of this goes back to something we try to instill in the clients that we work with that you really do need to know who your target audience is because if you don’t know who your target audience is, like you said, you’re just throwing stuff out there and you’re wasting a lot of effort on possibly people who are asking for information, but they’re not good prospects. So if that one year sales cycle is in place, wow, you could waste a lot of manpower and effort on something that’s never going to go anywhere because you’re attracting the wrong audience.

But I do want to ask you, a lot of our clients are doing business overseas, or with other countries. Is there any difference in how you would go about doing any of the things we’ve talked about so far for an international client or for a client who maybe English isn’t their first language? And is there a difference in how you do that?

Yes. Yes. So oftentimes, you have to approach international search in a different way. So if you think about it, sometimes you go to people’s websites and you’ll see a display of flags for different countries, regions that you can then click, and the website will translate for you into whatever that language is. There’s a German flag, you click the flag, the content translates to German. Now that is typically being done through a translation service, which there are pros and cons to in the search engines. But oftentimes, again, if we go back to how we started today’s conversation, Google wants to serve people the best output, the best experience.

So often, that experience is going to be native translation. If Google says, OK, well this website is technically sound and has a translation service, and this website isn’t technically sound but is in native tongue, they might pick the translation service. But if your competition is doing everything to elevate things appropriately, you’re going to want to make sure that you then take it to that next level as well. But if no one else is playing in the space and you’re looking to expand overseas, you might say, all right. Let’s crawl before we walk. And let’s add a translation service through Google and start there.

Let’s buy a URL extension, because that’s also going to be really important. But we look at things and say, what is the foldering structure? Should we create this entire website in a foreign language? Or should we use a translation service? And oftentimes, it’s a conversation with clients about their needs, their goals, the competition, their budget. There are so many things to consider with international search, the way people are searching for things, the search engines that they’re using. Google isn’t always the most powerful search engine.

In China, it’s not used or allowed at all. So you have a search engine called Baidu that is really crucial that you need to ensure that you’re meeting their technical health standards. So it is absolutely a different beast and something that you have to pay attention to the nuances on. We talked a little bit about content. And we talked about what that content looks like on your website. But it’s also for the imagery. Certain colors mean certain things in different countries culturally. So how are you being sensitive to that and adjusting for that appropriately?

Because again, it’s not just about getting the click. It’s what they do after that. So my advice would be, if you’re going to dive deep into international search, dive all the way in and make sure that it’s done correctly. Because it is. It’s expensive. It’s time consuming. And you want to make sure that you’re doing it right.

For final topic today, we have a few minutes left, Nadine. Could you share with us a few misconceptions about getting found on Google?

Absolutely. I touched on this a little bit. But oftentimes, clients will say, it just doesn’t work for us. We do our business traditionally. We’ve tried the internet thing. And it just doesn’t work. And what I hate to say, because I know people are trying hard, they’re investing time, they’re investing dollars, but the reality is you probably just didn’t do it correctly. And it should provide results for you. What have we seen over the last two years in this pandemic, especially? Business is digital. And you need to take the time and make the investments in the tools, in the people, in the solutions to get you there.

Because it absolutely works. Clients also say to us whether it’s Google, or another tactic, oh that just doesn’t work for us. We’ve tried it. And oftentimes, the reality is when you do whack-a-mole style marketing, I’m going to try this over here for two months, I’m going to try that over there for four months, you work really hard to see a whole lot of nothing, which is frustrating. It’s draining. And it makes you say, all right. I’m just going to go and do something else. But the reality is in order to be successful, to be found through Google, to build your business digitally, you really need to approach this with an overarching strategy of, what are my business goals? What am I looking for my website to do?

How can my website support me in my overall business growth? You shouldn’t be looking at it in a vacuum and just saying, I need to rank number one on Google. You really should look at this and say, this is my business plan for the next three to five years. And this is what I need to do this year on my website to help me achieve those goals and have those things mirror each other. And then create a comprehensive strategy that touches any area where your prospect is spending time online and build that appropriately to market to them to be found where they’re spending their time.

So that way, you can then see certain aspects of it will work better for you than others. But it’s not that, oh it just doesn’t work entirely. That’s really the most common misconception. People are trying things in very siloed approaches and saying, oh, well none of it works. But the reality is, you need to push and pull those levers in harmony to see success from it.

Nadine, thanks so much for being with us today. We greatly appreciate you sharing your marketing knowledge with our listeners. And we have on hand your freebie e-book which is titled, Nine Reasons Your Online Marketing Is Not Driving Leads. So we greatly appreciate you sharing that with us. And we’re going to make sure that we put that in our show notes at bizchatohio.com.

Before we log off today, are there any other resources that you’d like to mention to our listeners who again are small businesses that you think would be helpful to them as they try to stay up to speed on marketing and the latest and greatest?

Absolutely. First, I just wanted to say thank you so much for having me, Cathy and Gretchen. It was really fun. It was a pleasure chatting with you. So thanks so much. And as for resources, I will plug HubSpot for you guys. We are a platinum partner of the organization. But they are more than a marketing resource. So they have great resources, fantastic videos, blogs, white papers that really help you unpack sales and marketing, operations, all digitally. We are certified as an agency in many of their courses. If you have an internal sales and marketing team, they also offer that coursework for your teams.

I really encourage anyone to take it because you’ll find that it’s just really valuable if you’re toeing in or if you’re more of an expert. I mean, they have a varying level of coursework. And it’s free. So definitely encourage it. Just go to hubspot.com and check it out.

Thanks. We’ll make sure that all those resources are shared in our show notes. And again, Nadine, thank you for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening. Look for BizChat Ohio on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify. And subscribe to receive our latest episode and business blogs at bizchatohio.com. If you would like to learn more about the Ohio Small Business Development Center at Lakeland, please visit our website at www.lakelandcc.edu/sbdc.