Latest / The Confident Entrepreneur With Jennifer Ann Johnson / Mastering Online Visibility: A Deep Dive into Google Ads and SEO Strategy
Transcript
- 0:36Jennifer Johnson: Visibility is the lifeblood of business success.
- 0:39Jennifer Johnson: Whether you're a scrappy startup or an established brand, your ability to found online can make or break your venture.
- 0:46Jennifer Johnson: And when it comes to online visibility, two titans stand tall Google ads and SEO.
- 0:53Jennifer Johnson: But let's be honest keeping up with Google's ever-shifting algorithms and ad policies can feel like chasing a mirage.
- 1:00Jennifer Johnson: Ever-shifting algorithms and ad policies can feel like chasing a mirage, and what worked last quarter is probably not going to work today, and today's winning strategy could be tomorrow's outdated tactic.
- 1:09Jennifer Johnson: So that's why we're rolling up our sleeves today and diving deep into the world of Google ads and SEO with Vi Wickam.
- 1:15Jennifer Johnson: He is a self-proclaimed Uber geek.
- 1:18Jennifer Johnson: That's in his own word not mine and an award-winning musician.
- 1:23Jennifer Johnson: He's the guy you want on your side in any digital duel.
- 1:27Jennifer Johnson: For over 20 years, vi has helped businesses with Google AdWords, management, marketing, banner ads and YouTube ads.
- 1:33Jennifer Johnson: He's also well-versed in web development, microsoft ads, facebook and business strategy.
- 1:39Jennifer Johnson: He's crazy about dark chocolate.
- 1:41Jennifer Johnson: Microsoft ads Facebook and business strategy.
- 1:43Jennifer Johnson: He's crazy about dark chocolate I love that and will work on a smile-inducing song played on his great-grandfather's violin I've actually heard this and he is nerdy about the machine inside Google that makes business successful.
- 1:54Jennifer Johnson: He holds a solemn vow to make sure your website and data are firmly within your control, which is a rare promise in this digital world, and that's why today we're slicing through the technobabble bursting, busting myths and unveiling strategies that can propel your business and boost your search in your rankings online and help you spend more of your hard-earned money more efficiently.
- 2:19Jennifer Johnson: So let's go ahead and dive on in.
- 2:22Jennifer Johnson: Welcome, vi, thank you, Jennifer.
- 2:24Vi Wickam: I'm so happy to be here with you today.
- 2:27Jennifer Johnson: I am so excited.
- 2:27Jennifer Johnson: I have to tell you firsthand that when I say that you will be the dueling partner to help somebody in any digital issue, I actually had a digital issue on my website that I didn't even know anything about.
- 2:41Vi Wickam: Oh man, and it was a mess, huh.
- 2:43Jennifer Johnson: It was a mess and you guys unearthed it for me.
- 2:46Jennifer Johnson: You're like did you know?
- 2:47Jennifer Johnson: And I'm like oh my gosh what are we going to do?
- 2:50Jennifer Johnson: And we worked through it, we figured it out and poof, it's gone.
- 2:54Jennifer Johnson: So there we are.
- 2:56Vi Wickam: It is.
- 2:56Vi Wickam: There are some nefarious people out there that are looking to make money off of your back.
- 3:07Jennifer Johnson: Yeah, and you know what?
- 3:08Jennifer Johnson: That's something we're going to.
- 3:09Jennifer Johnson: We're actually going to have you on again and we're going to talk about the craziness that that ensues today.
- 3:12Jennifer Johnson: We're going to focus on Google, google, um, advertising.
- 3:16Jennifer Johnson: We're going to go, uh, go back to search engine optimization, seo, and talk about what that can do for our business, and a lot of people don't necessarily know, when they hear the word SEO, what does that mean?
- 3:30Jennifer Johnson: And let's explain SEO first, okay, and then talk about Google, kind of in tandem.
- 3:38Vi Wickam: All right.
- 3:38Vi Wickam: So SEO stands for search engine optimization, and what most people think of it as meaning is getting to be number one on Google, and it generally does mean that.
- 3:54Vi Wickam: What it means is we want to make your website or, better yet, your entire online presence.
- 4:00Vi Wickam: So this includes things like other directories and your Apple Maps listing and your Google business profile and all of those things that go around your website.
- 4:11Vi Wickam: We want those showing up too.
- 4:14Vi Wickam: So we want, when somebody searches for you, we want your YouTube channel to show up and we want your Google business profile to show up.
- 4:23Vi Wickam: And if you have shopping, if you have products, we want your products to show up and we want, if you're a service business, we want your local service ads to show up and we want Google ads and we want you to own that first page of Google whenever you can, and ultimately, the goal is to make sales and to create customers and to connect with them, which means that good website usability and conversion optimization so turning those visitors to your website into customers is really where it's at, because good usability is SEO when it really comes down to it.
- 5:03Jennifer Johnson: Right.
- 5:03Jennifer Johnson: And you know the interesting thing as a business owner and as a business coach working with other small businesses, I think a lot of small businesses think they put their website up, people will just come and they'll just show up in all the search engines or all the-.
- 5:19Vi Wickam: If you build it, they will come right.
- 5:22Jennifer Johnson: And it doesn't work that way.
- 5:24Vi Wickam: Nope, does not work that way.
- 5:25Jennifer Johnson: You're usually paying for that You're using.
- 5:28Jennifer Johnson: You know sometimes you know there's other ways, as we'll talk about, but a lot of times you've got to pay.
- 5:34Jennifer Johnson: Pay to play right.
- 5:36Vi Wickam: Yeah, a good example of this was I had a client this was like 15 years ago, but it's a great example of this he had a condo down in the Bahamas and he bought the condo and he worked out in a relationship with a travel agency.
- 5:51Vi Wickam: So they do the bookings for him and the bookings in this kind of condo complex they were like 50% booked through the people who owned the condos or owned the complex.
- 6:04Vi Wickam: And he wanted to be booked all the time and so I made him a website.
- 6:08Vi Wickam: And I told him I made you a website, but unless you market it, it's just going to be out there and it's not going to do anything.
- 6:16Vi Wickam: And he said yeah, yeah, yeah, just build me a website and then we can talk about it later.
- 6:21Vi Wickam: So I built him the website.
- 6:22Vi Wickam: He said oh, this website's great and why isn't anybody coming to it?
- 6:27Vi Wickam: And I said you remember our conversation when I said you got to market it.
- 6:32Vi Wickam: So then we spent the next few months marketing it and, shockingly, he booked out 100% of the time in his condo.
- 6:42Vi Wickam: And not only did he book out 100% of his condo, he ended up buying another condo and booking that all out, and then the other condo owners in that complex got mad because he was booked all the time and they weren't.
- 6:58Jennifer Johnson: What's your secret?
- 6:59Vi Wickam: Yes, yeah, exactly.
- 7:01Vi Wickam: So he decided to just sell both of those condos and build, and he sold both those condos using that same website, built a new duplex and sold that using that same website.
- 7:15Vi Wickam: But none of that would have happened if he had just built a website and let it sit there.
- 7:20Jennifer Johnson: Right, and that's the power of SEO.
- 7:23Jennifer Johnson: And how?
- 7:23Jennifer Johnson: Now?
- 7:24Jennifer Johnson: How does Google ads play into that?
- 7:27Jennifer Johnson: Is it?
- 7:27Jennifer Johnson: Do you piggyback it with it?
- 7:29Jennifer Johnson: Is it all part of the recipe per se?
- 7:32Vi Wickam: Yeah, it's all part of the big strategy.
- 7:34Vi Wickam: So you know you can't just do one of these things and expect that you're going to succeed, because the truth is right now, if you want to be on the front page of Google, even being number one on the organic search results often won't have you on the first page.
- 7:52Jennifer Johnson: So explain to our listeners what that means if you're organically.
- 7:56Vi Wickam: Yeah, so organically is SEO generally speaking.
- 8:00Vi Wickam: So organically means my website shows up naturally in the search results.
- 8:06Vi Wickam: So even if I'm number one on most screen sizes today for the natural results, I won't be showing up in the first page of what somebody sees or the first screen.
- 8:20Vi Wickam: So Google has their first page which you have to like scroll through three screens of stuff to get to the bottom of that page and really like, if you're not on the first page organically, you're not anywhere, you know.
- 8:36Vi Wickam: So like there's a joke among us nerds that says what you know, if you want to go into witness protection, what's the best place to hide?
- 8:46Vi Wickam: And the best place to hide is the second page of the Google search results.
- 8:51Vi Wickam: I love it, that's funny, but when it comes down to it, the first thing that shows up is local service ads and product ads.
- 9:02Vi Wickam: So if you're trying to sell a product, google Ads shows up first for the product and then you'll have one to three spots taken up by regular Google Ads.
- 9:17Vi Wickam: So those are the normal Google Ads.
- 9:19Vi Wickam: Yeah, those are the text ads and those might have expanded results.
- 9:25Vi Wickam: So you might have the title and then three or four of the pages underneath it and a description, and you know.
- 9:33Vi Wickam: So those can take up a good amount of real estate, and then you might have a Google business page showing up, or you might have the whole maps pack, which can be three or four search results, and the top one of the maps is actually also an ad most of the time.
- 9:52Vi Wickam: So you know, by the time you get to the first naturally occurring search result, you've already seen three or four different sections of ads, which each might contain three to five different ads.
- 10:08Vi Wickam: So Google's selling ads.
- 10:11Vi Wickam: That's their business, that's their business model.
- 10:13Vi Wickam: They provide search results so that they can sell ads.
- 10:18Jennifer Johnson: I'm curious, now that we're saying that, like I'm assuming, there's probably statistics out there about this, but the percentage of people that will only look at the first three people on there which could be sponsored ads.
- 10:32Jennifer Johnson: Right, they're not somebody's paying for them, most likely.
- 10:35Jennifer Johnson: But you know I wonder what the stat is on how many people actually go past like the top three.
- 10:41Vi Wickam: Yeah, well, it does change, you know, like, depending on what type of search it is, and you know whether it's a local search or it's a product search.
- 10:50Vi Wickam: But you know the and this data is a little old, but the last time I looked at that data, the first organic search result and the first ad results are the two things that get clicked on the most and you know between those two they get about half the clicks.
- 11:10Vi Wickam: So you know the second and third ad results get the next most clicks and by the time you're getting to your second search results you're down to probably 10%, and by the time you're at the bottom of the page you're at 1% of the clicks.
- 11:26Vi Wickam: So really, everything beyond page one is less than 5% of the possible clicks.
- 11:35Jennifer Johnson: Wow, so you really have to aim to be on page one.
- 11:39Vi Wickam: Right, and when you're looking at something like SEO and you're looking for opportunity, you know what you're looking for is.
- 11:47Vi Wickam: You know, there's also a saying among us nerds that says the top five is the new top 10.
- 11:55Vi Wickam: So if you're not in the top five, you know, like the top five also represents, like you know, 85 or 90% of the clicks.
- 12:04Jennifer Johnson: So you know, like we're.
- 12:06Vi Wickam: We're looking at, you know, being moving into the top 10, moving into the top five moving into the top three.
- 12:16Vi Wickam: So you're looking for those keywords that have a good connection, because if the keyword doesn't have a good connection, because if the keyword doesn't have a good connection to selling, it doesn't matter that you rank on it, which, just a word of advice, is when somebody's showing you reports on keywords you've got to think about is this a keyword that my client would be searching and what's the volume?
- 12:41Vi Wickam: How many people are searching for this keyword that could be my client?
- 12:45Vi Wickam: One of the tricks of SEO companies is that they will give you a report that shows look, you improved on these 10 keywords.
- 12:57Vi Wickam: You've improved all these places.
- 12:59Vi Wickam: But the truth is is, you know, these are keywords that don't get searched very often and or they're keywords that don't really move the needle, as far as these aren't zero moment of truth type keywords.
- 13:14Vi Wickam: These aren't keywords that somebody's searching when they're ready to buy.
- 13:18Vi Wickam: These are keywords that somebody's searching early in the process, when they're researching things.
- 13:25Jennifer Johnson: So I have a question about that, and back at the day they used to do, I just remember it vividly.
- 13:32Jennifer Johnson: I don't remember what it was called, but basically and I know Google is frowns upon this I assume still we're in the I know right.
- 13:43Vi Wickam: Probably.
- 13:45Jennifer Johnson: You couldn't see it.
- 13:46Jennifer Johnson: It's not something.
- 13:47Vi Wickam: Oh yeah, the hidden keywords.
- 13:48Jennifer Johnson: Yes, like you'd, you'd stuff your website.
- 13:52Vi Wickam: Yeah, keyword stuffing.
- 13:54Jennifer Johnson: Time, the date, the weather, like things that people don't normally look at.
- 13:57Jennifer Johnson: I'm assuming that's no.
- 13:59Vi Wickam: Oh, that's been, you know, for 20 years or so.
- 14:02Vi Wickam: That's been a bad plan.
- 14:03Vi Wickam: It was really a bad plan from the get go.
- 14:05Vi Wickam: I can admit that in the late 90s I did that on one site and I really didn't feel good about it, because you're not giving Google what Google wants.
- 14:16Vi Wickam: You're not giving the customer what the customer wants.
- 14:19Vi Wickam: You're trying to trick Google.
- 14:21Vi Wickam: You're not giving the customer what the?
- 14:22Vi Wickam: customer wants.
- 14:22Vi Wickam: You're trying to trick Google and I like to say that you don't want to play chicken with someone who's buying their server by the tons.
- 14:29Vi Wickam: You know like they have the best engineers, and when you try to game Google, you try to do things that are tricking Google into ranking you better.
- 14:39Vi Wickam: You never win in the long run.
- 14:41Vi Wickam: You might get ahead for a week or a month, or maybe even three to six months, but I promise you this at some point in the not so distant future, google will figure out the tactic that you're using to try to game it and you will get banished to the back pages of Google and you will never be seen again.
- 15:05Jennifer Johnson: Right, so what are some strategies for picking keywords that are really going to resonate?
- 15:12Jennifer Johnson: And then what do you do with those keywords.
- 15:15Vi Wickam: So one of my favorite things to do is to look at the questions people are asking to Google so you can look for keywords and there's a lot of keyword suggestion databases online where you can say, like, what are the top 50 keywords that somebody searches for around this keyword?
- 15:34Vi Wickam: So say, we wanted to look for keywords around fishing poles, you know, and we could find, you know the top 50 keywords around fishing poles.
- 15:48Vi Wickam: Or we could, you know, pick a brand.
- 15:51Vi Wickam: We could say, you know, around Louis Vuitton, what are the top 50 keywords around that?
- 15:58Vi Wickam: But it might be more useful to say what are the top 50 questions people ask about this brand or this type of product, and then that's a great opportunity to look at how can are these questions that my customer is asking and then how can I use those and some of the ways you could use those?
- 16:23Vi Wickam: You could use those as a frequently asked questions page so you can take those questions, you can answer those questions and that provides content that is search engine useful content.
- 16:38Vi Wickam: You're answering the questions that real people want.
- 16:40Vi Wickam: The answer to that they're going to Google and typing in and when you have those answers on your site, google sees you as a more authority, type, person, brand.
- 16:52Vi Wickam: So other things you can do with those questions.
- 16:57Vi Wickam: You can write blog posts that answer those questions.
- 17:00Vi Wickam: So if you have a paragraph answer, that's a great thing to put in a frequently asked questions.
- 17:06Vi Wickam: But if you have 500 or a thousand words, you could write about this.
- 17:11Vi Wickam: You could write that as a blog post.
- 17:14Vi Wickam: You could then add that to your frequently asked questions and link to the blog post for more details.
- 17:20Jennifer Johnson: Oh, that's a great idea, you know.
- 17:22Jennifer Johnson: But the and I can tell you firsthand.
- 17:25Jennifer Johnson: So I blog for one business, I don't blog for the other anymore.
- 17:29Jennifer Johnson: The reason why and I you know, maybe there's a rhyme or reason to this Does it take a long time for Google I don't know if you still call them Google bots for them to to latch onto that information and then start feeding it to people.
- 17:44Jennifer Johnson: Because that was my frustration, like, oh my gosh, I feel like I've been blogging forever and this just takes too much time and it's not going anywhere.
- 17:53Vi Wickam: So there are a lot of elements when it comes to SEO.
- 17:57Vi Wickam: When it comes to, I mean, you can tie Google ads in here, but this is really more of an SEO question.
- 18:04Vi Wickam: So, depending on the authority and the frequency that you add content to a site, google chooses its spider frequency of your website or its bot visiting frequency.
- 18:16Vi Wickam: So if you're putting out four articles a day and you have lots of people coming to visit your articles and they're staying to read more articles when they get there and they're sharing those articles on the social platforms, google gets all these signals that you have authority and it decides I'm going to go to their site every day, or maybe I'm going to go visit their homepage four times a day and then you know I'm going to visit these other pages, you know, once a day, once a week, but generally, one of the things when you set up a site map on on your Web site, you should set up a Google site map that says how frequently these pages change, which can be daily or weekly or monthly.
- 19:04Vi Wickam: And generally speaking, if you say it's going to change daily, that gives Google a signal that it's going to change more frequently.
- 19:12Vi Wickam: But the word of caution is if you say it's going to change daily and Google visits it every day for a month and it never changes, google's likely to say, yeah, this really isn't that important, I'll visit it again in a month.
- 19:28Vi Wickam: So you know you're sending a signal, but you're also sending another signal by how you actually edit that content.
- 19:36Jennifer Johnson: And so it sounds like it's also tied to the engagement that happens on those blogs.
- 19:40Jennifer Johnson: So if you're pumping out this stuff every day, five days a week, that nobody's engaging with it, then Google's going to be like eh, you're not that interesting.
- 19:49Vi Wickam: Right, and Google also looks at those trends, you know.
- 19:54Vi Wickam: So if it's a brand new site and it has no followers but you start getting traffic and you get engagement, google might give you a boost in the rankings.
- 20:03Vi Wickam: So one of the ranking factors in SEO and this came from the leak that Google had in May where there was an algorithm leak that didn't say how these ranking factors played in, but it said these are ranking factors that exist and so when that leak happened, there were a lot of things that Google said oh no, no, we don't do that.
- 20:32Vi Wickam: That showed up and one of those things was that click-through rate and engagement are factors for ranking.
- 20:41Vi Wickam: So an example of this and this has been common knowledge among Google Ads, but was said by Google to not be a factor on organic ranking.
- 20:54Vi Wickam: So in Google Ads I can get cheaper ad clicks than because I get a better click-through rate.
- 21:04Vi Wickam: So Google will increase my ranking for the same bid if my ad is better written and more engaging and also if the page experience when somebody lands on my site is better.
- 21:19Vi Wickam: So those both play into this ranking game and so I know that Google, on organic, also has a quality score type number, just like it has in Google ads.
- 21:34Vi Wickam: That is like the tide that raises all ships.
- 21:38Vi Wickam: So you have a quality score for the page but also for the domain.
- 21:44Vi Wickam: So Google has multiple ranking factors for your site and so if it says this is a reputable domain, then all of the pages on that domain get a little boost.
- 21:56Vi Wickam: And if Google says these guys are spammy, all of the pages on your site get decreased rankings.
- 22:04Vi Wickam: Right, and that goes with engagement as well.
- 22:10Jennifer Johnson: This is why you hire someone to do all of this, because my mind is just going well, what if this, and what if this, and what if this Wow?
- 22:17Jennifer Johnson: I mean, there's so much to dig through in the weeds.
- 22:22Vi Wickam: Well and that's the key is knowing which things actually matter, which things are really going to move the needle and make a difference for you, and which things are distractions.
- 22:32Vi Wickam: Because, like you said, the tactics change all the time, but the principles have remained generally the same from the get-go.
- 22:42Vi Wickam: If you create a great website that answers the questions humans are asking, that sells something that people care about, which could be attention like you could be selling entertainment but you're providing something that people actually want and you're doing so in a way that satisfies Google, which is always more authority and better content, then you will win the game.
- 23:11Vi Wickam: But it's a long game.
- 23:12Vi Wickam: It is not a game that you can just like.
- 23:17Vi Wickam: I mean.
- 23:18Vi Wickam: An example recently is AI generated content, and I think AI can be a great tool for assisting you in creating blog posts or assisting you in writing descriptions for products, but you don't want to just spit the crap out of AI and post it.
- 23:39Vi Wickam: And what was happening as soon as ChatGPT got in the hands of some programmers who were less than scrupulous, is you got websites coming online that would have 50,000 pages overnight, that were AI generated and were just a bunch of junk that nobody cared about of ads.
- 24:00Vi Wickam: So they were using AdSense or the DoubleClick network or one of the ad selling networks, and you know we're flooding Google's rankings with junk content that you know Google hadn't yet figured out how to stop this and it took them a few weeks to figure out how to handle all of this giant amounts of junk that was being spewed onto the internet.
- 24:28Vi Wickam: And after I don't know, maybe it was a couple months they got things lined up.
- 24:34Vi Wickam: They ran some tests, they figured out how to penalize those sites without penalizing most of the normal sites.
- 24:41Vi Wickam: You know, there's always people that get caught in the crosshairs you know, always collateral damage, but usually collateral damage happens when somebody's skirt.
- 24:51Vi Wickam: you know they're trying to ride the line instead of trying to be very clearly good quality content that answers people's questions.
- 25:01Jennifer Johnson: So you kind of answered the question that I was going to ask you about, which was you know effective strategies that someone can use to optimize their website?
- 25:09Jennifer Johnson: We already kind of yeah.
- 25:13Vi Wickam: So you've got the strategy, which is do what humans want.
- 25:17Vi Wickam: Do what Google wants, speak to the human in their own language and use the structures that help Google understand your site better.
- 25:27Vi Wickam: So it's not about tricking Google.
- 25:30Vi Wickam: It's about helping Google have a clearer picture of what you're trying to present, and what you're trying to do is be of service to humans.
- 25:38Vi Wickam: So, tactically, there are things like having proper heading tags, which both people who are hard of you know have sight problems, and Google use that descriptor to understand what's in that image and that becomes a ranking factor.
- 26:17Vi Wickam: And you know, having a title that's clear and a description that's clear, because those will improve your click through rate.
- 26:26Vi Wickam: If you have a good title and a good description and that is another thing that came from the Google leak was that having a good description is a ranking factor in as much as it drives more clicks, but having a good title, which Google said, titles don't matter anymore.
- 29:11Vi Wickam: Don't worry about the titles, titles still matter you know both, because they'll improve your click-through rate and they help Google understand what this page is actually about.
- 29:21Vi Wickam: So when Google says titles don't matter, I think what they really mean is titles don't matter if they try to.
- 29:28Vi Wickam: You know, like if they're trying to confuse people or they're trying to trick Google.
- 29:33Vi Wickam: You know, don't try to trick Google.
- 29:35Vi Wickam: That's the bottom line.
- 29:36Vi Wickam: Don't try to trick Google.
- 29:38Vi Wickam: It doesn't work.
- 29:39Vi Wickam: The end, the end.
- 29:42Jennifer Johnson: You know, going into the future.
- 29:43Jennifer Johnson: What do you see as emerging things in this space?
- 29:54Vi Wickam: things in this space.
- 29:55Vi Wickam: Wow, there's tons of things changing.
- 29:56Vi Wickam: So I will say that maps search is only growing in importance.
- 29:58Vi Wickam: So people are using more and more mobile.
- 30:00Vi Wickam: So mobile usability is more and more important.
- 30:03Vi Wickam: Accessibility is also more and more important.
- 30:07Vi Wickam: So there you know and this started six or seven years ago that there was law.
- 30:13Vi Wickam: There were lawsuits that started happening because, well, target was the big one, but there were a number of big, high profile companies who had websites that were hard to use if you had motor impairment or visual impairment, and they like.
- 30:33Vi Wickam: There were some lawsuits where big money was paid out by big companies, but then, a couple of years after that, smaller lawyers started coming trying to shake down small businesses, you know, and it's totally a racket.
- 30:50Vi Wickam: It's terrible, but the other side of it is it has put more focus on making sure that your website is accessible to as many people as possible.
- 31:01Vi Wickam: So we always, when I build a website, make a goal of getting an accessibility score of at least 90%, which we run.
- 31:10Vi Wickam: Those.
- 31:10Vi Wickam: We run those tests, and it includes things like how is the contrast of your text with the background?
- 31:17Vi Wickam: So a lot of times, designers are all about well, I just want this to be beautiful, and so I'm putting gray text on a gray background and you know, like you can't read it, or I put the text over the top of this image and you can't read it.
- 31:34Vi Wickam: So those kinds of things have become like they've always been best practices for usability, but those usability practices have become more mainstream because of the accessibility movement.
- 31:49Vi Wickam: And then, of course, ai.
- 31:50Vi Wickam: You know which AI is everywhere.
- 31:56Vi Wickam: Everybody's trying it out, some things it's amazing at and some things it's terrible at.
- 32:01Vi Wickam: So one of my clients just last week uses a call center to answer their phones, uses a call center to answer their phones and the call center switched to using an AI answering machine platform instead of humans.
- 32:18Vi Wickam: And this company's call like conversion rate from you know calls to leads to bookings fell through the floor and you know I was on my call with them last week and I'm like we got a problem here.
- 32:32Vi Wickam: I'm not sure what it is, but your conversion rates on the website, you know, for your service calls just fell through the floor.
- 32:39Vi Wickam: They went from like 70, 80% close rate to like 40.
- 32:44Vi Wickam: It cut in half.
- 32:46Vi Wickam: And what we figured out when we went and listened to a couple of calls is they had this AI answering machine, that it took 15 seconds for the AI to give you its spiel, and then the people were trying to say something to the AI and it would get confused, and it was just a terrible user experience.
- 33:10Vi Wickam: And so I, you know, I talked to another client yesterday who was using that same company and they fired them as a result.
- 33:18Vi Wickam: You know, they're like I can't deal with that.
- 33:21Jennifer Johnson: It's good for some things, but it needs the human interaction as well.
- 33:25Vi Wickam: And the same thing goes for using it to write blogs.
- 33:28Vi Wickam: You know, it's great to give it a prompt and give it a bunch of description of here's what I think this answer should be.
- 33:36Vi Wickam: And then you know, if you just ask it, what's the answer to this question?
- 33:41Vi Wickam: It's going to give you a bunch of generic stuff, Right, and it's going to have no personality at all.
- 33:47Vi Wickam: It'll have a very generic personality because that's what it's designed for.
- 33:52Vi Wickam: But if you want to use AI, you have to be thoughtful about it and you have to edit it so you can create a custom GPT by feeding it the things you've written already, so you can feed it, read these 500 articles that I already wrote and use that as the style guide for what you're going to write.
- 34:14Vi Wickam: And when you write a prompt for it, you can say here's the question I want you to answer, and I want you to answer it in 700 words and I want you to use this type of formatting and I want you to use paragraphs that are this length and I want you to prefer the active voice.
- 34:29Vi Wickam: And you know like the more complex the prompt you give it, the better the answer it's going to give you and the less likely it's going to just sound like AI generated drivel.
- 34:40Jennifer Johnson: Right?
- 34:40Jennifer Johnson: Well, you have given us a completely packed podcast, for you know, google, advertising and SEO.
- 34:49Jennifer Johnson: Love, love, love the content, and I know the listeners will as well.
- 34:53Jennifer Johnson: Vi, if our listeners would like to get in touch with you, how can they do so?
- 34:57Vi Wickam: You can find me on wizardofadsonlinecom.
- 35:01Vi Wickam: That's my business website.
- 35:04Vi Wickam: Or if you want to find my fiddling, you can go to vythefiddlercom.
- 35:10Jennifer Johnson: I love it.
- 35:11Jennifer Johnson: That is so awesome.
- 35:13Jennifer Johnson: Thank you so much for being on with us today.
- 35:16Vi Wickam: Thank you for having me, jennifer, it was my pleasure.
- 35:18Jennifer Johnson: And thank you everyone.
- 35:20Jennifer Johnson: We will see you again and have a fabulous day.
- 35:22Jennifer Johnson: Bye, okay, we're on to our next one.
- 35:28Jennifer Johnson: All right, this next one.
- 35:28Jennifer Johnson: We're going to our next one.
- 35:29Jennifer Johnson: All right, this next one.
- 35:30Jennifer Johnson: We're going to talk about securing digital assets and again, I'll just do the quick intro and then I'm just going to welcome you back into the studio, because you've already been in, they've already heard my intro to you.
- 35:45Jennifer Johnson: Just go, just go.
- 36:00Jennifer Johnson: Okay, in an era where data is often called the new oil, securing your digital assets isn't just important, it's mission critical.
- 36:03Jennifer Johnson: From customer information to proprietary algorithms, your digital assets are the lifeblood of your business.
- 36:08Jennifer Johnson: But with cyber threats evolving at lightning speed, how can you ensure that your digital crown jewels stay protected?
- 36:15Jennifer Johnson: That's exactly what we're diving into today.
- 36:17Jennifer Johnson: We'll be peeling back the layers of digital security, exploring everything from cloud storage vulnerabilities to the power of multi-factor authentication, which, wah-wah, wah-wah, wah-wah-wah.
- 36:30Jennifer Johnson: We'll tackle the human elements to discussing how employee training can be your first line of defense against cyber attacks.
- 36:37Jennifer Johnson: Our guest today is Vi Wickam of Wizard of Ads, and he's been on before, and we've talked about Google and we've talked about SEO, but today we're talking all about securing your digital assets and whether you're a tech savvy startup founder or a seasoned business owner feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of cybersecurity, this is going to be the episode for you, because it's going to be packed with actionable insights to help you fortify your digital fortress.
- 37:04Jennifer Johnson: So welcome back, envi.
- 37:06Vi Wickam: Thank you, Jennifer.
- 37:07Vi Wickam: It's a pleasure to be here.
- 37:08Jennifer Johnson: So you know, on the last podcast I briefly mentioned, you know I had a little foray into this.
- 37:14Jennifer Johnson: It wasn't a huge deal and it didn't involve anybody's information or anything like that, but you guys stepped in, helped me fix it and all of that.
- 37:23Jennifer Johnson: But we're seeing a lot of this lately and what are you seeing as the most common vulnerabilities that people have with their digital assets today?
- 37:34Vi Wickam: Well, I would say the most common vulnerability I see is people who reuse passwords, which is like that's a common old old thing.
- 37:45Jennifer Johnson: Where's my want want button?
- 37:50Vi Wickam: I can't tell you how many times I have a client give me a password and then I ask for a password for a different asset that we need to help them with, and they're like oh, it's the same.
- 38:02Jennifer Johnson: I'm like oh no, don't do that we all do it.
- 38:06Jennifer Johnson: All of us.
- 38:08Vi Wickam: Well, the real trouble is, when you do that, you're putting your password in the hands of a website and if that website gets hacked, your password got compromised.
- 38:20Vi Wickam: And there are a lot of big companies whose data has been compromised in that way, including Twitter and Adobe.
- 38:30Vi Wickam: Actually, check me on Twitter, I don't I'm not 100% sure on that, but Adobe and like there's been a ton of big, big name companies who've had big compromises in the data.
- 38:45Vi Wickam: The US government has.
- 38:46Vi Wickam: The Veterans and Foreign Affairs, like the Veterans database was completely compromised, and this was years ago.
- 38:55Vi Wickam: But tons of people's data is out there, which sometimes it's just your name and your email address, but sometimes it's your password too, and if you're reusing your password, they get your password on one site and they've got your password everywhere.
- 39:12Vi Wickam: So it really is critical that you use passwords that are different across sites.
- 39:20Jennifer Johnson: That's so hard.
- 39:20Jennifer Johnson: How do you remember them all?
- 39:22Vi Wickam: Well, I use LastPass.
- 39:25Jennifer Johnson: And.
- 39:26Vi Wickam: LastPass is one of a handful of good password safes out there, lastpass is one of a handful of good password safes out there.
- 39:33Vi Wickam: Okay, there's no perfect answer, but LastPass allows me to store my passwords in an encrypted format and it allows me to share passwords with specific permissions to different groups of people.
- 39:47Vi Wickam: So there's the personal version of LastPass where you can import your passwords from Chrome or Firefox or Safari, whichever password safe you're currently using.
- 39:59Vi Wickam: So browser storage of passwords is kind of like that's level one of you know pretty okay.
- 40:09Vi Wickam: Okay of you know pretty okay, okay, no, it's not great, but you know Apple also has the Apple password key safe.
- 40:17Vi Wickam: Um, that is useful and it's useful across wherever you're using that browser.
- 40:24Vi Wickam: So if you're using a Google Google phone and a Google browser, you know it'll transfer between those two.
- 40:32Vi Wickam: Same thing with Apple.
- 40:33Vi Wickam: If you're using iPhone and Safari and you're using an Apple computer, those will transfer.
- 40:39Vi Wickam: You know, get your passwords personally across those two places so you can share passwords with yourself but we're talking about business here as well passwords with yourself, but we're talking about business here as well.
- 40:54Vi Wickam: And when it comes to business, something like LastPass has the ability that I can create folders that are then shared with my employees and I can create an administration folder and I can create a client's folder and then I can create separate subfolders for the different clients and then I can share those appropriately to my employees and I can say these you know like this folder is shared to this employee but it's read only, so this employee can edit the passwords.
- 41:24Vi Wickam: This one can only read them and this employee can't see the passwords.
- 41:30Vi Wickam: They can only use the passwords and then, if an employee is terminated, I can just terminate their access from LastPass and they'll never see those passwords again.
- 41:40Jennifer Johnson: And said that's also helpful if you're working with a third party who's doing advertising or who's doing you know whatever for you.
- 41:47Vi Wickam: Yes, absolutely.
- 41:48Vi Wickam: Anything that they're doing online for you, you can share, or you can share via folder if you're using the business version of it.
- 41:57Vi Wickam: So, and it's reasonably inexpensive, it's like, I think, $35 a year for the personal version and I think it's like $3 per employee per month for the business version $3 per employee per month for the business version, so relatively inexpensive and you know you don't need the business version, really until you've got like five employees or so.
- 42:20Jennifer Johnson: You know the thing that I worry about with all of the stuff that is online.
- 42:22Jennifer Johnson: You know I've been using Dropbox a lot.
- 42:25Jennifer Johnson: I I'm the person that puts all my stuff on my desktop.
- 42:30Jennifer Johnson: Don't want to look at my desktop, but I've been trying to be more.
- 42:35Jennifer Johnson: I have incalcitrations here, but my husband's gotten on me about it, so finally he switched me to a Mac, which I'm telling you is going to be the death of me.
- 42:47Jennifer Johnson: I'm going to figure it out.
- 42:48Jennifer Johnson: It's going to be OK, because I'm a PC girl through and through.
- 42:51Jennifer Johnson: Yeah.
- 42:52Vi Wickam: I understand.
- 42:54Jennifer Johnson: I figured out how to use Dropbox, I'm putting everything in there and all of a sudden, you know I'll wake up at three in the morning and go oh my gosh, what if all my stuff is gone?
- 43:03Jennifer Johnson: What if all my stuff has gone from?
- 43:16Vi Wickam: So, generally speaking, like there could be a data breach at Google Drive or at Microsoft OneDrive or at Dropbox, like it is a data center or a series of data centers around the world where that stuff's stored in.
- 43:31Vi Wickam: But the reality is, no matter what you've got, that data is out there in the world, you know, and anybody can get hacked, right?
- 43:42Vi Wickam: You know you try to put your trust in people that are less likely to get hacked.
- 43:46Vi Wickam: So you know, I do have a Dropbox account where I store some stuff.
- 43:50Vi Wickam: I also have a Google drive account, which is where I store my business stuff and some of my personal stuff, and I use a tool called Backblaze Backblaze.
- 44:04Jennifer Johnson: Okay.
- 44:05Vi Wickam: And it's like Carbonite.
- 44:07Vi Wickam: Carbonite is another cloud backup solution, but I back up everything on my hard drive, plus everything that's in Dropbox and Google Drive on my personal drives to Backblaze Okay, so I wouldn't live without it and, additionally, everything that's on my first hard drive gets backed up to a second hard drive, so does this, automatically do this I have mine set up to do it, so Backblaze totally runs automatically and I have an overnight backup job that I set up to do so backblaze totally runs automatically and I have an overnight backup job that I set up for myself.
- 44:43Vi Wickam: I am a little obsessive about backups because I ran an it company for 15 years and when you see what happens when people don't- run backups.
- 44:53Jennifer Johnson: You don't want to don't?
- 44:54Jennifer Johnson: I can't hear it because I have you just you have to run backups.
- 44:59Vi Wickam: So my wife uses a Mac, I'm a PC guy and we both use Backblaze, so we both have Backblaze running everything.
- 45:07Vi Wickam: She also has the Macintosh, the Apple backup thing, which I can't think of the name of right now, but she has that running to an external hard drive that she runs, I think, once a week or something like that to back everything up to that as well.
- 45:25Vi Wickam: So I think that having multiple backup redundancies at least two is a good idea.
- 45:32Vi Wickam: So having some sort of physical backup to a different physical medium and then having a cloud backup is a good idea.
- 45:42Vi Wickam: The good thing about something like Google Drive for business is there's some retention built into it where, if somebody deletes something from your company drive, there's a window of time where you can restore that, and so I've had this employee leaves and decides to delete everything.
- 46:02Vi Wickam: Okay, you'll be able to recover that, and so I've.
- 46:06Vi Wickam: I had this prior to Google drive being a thing with one of my clients where their office manager got fired and she, just like, selected their server shared hard drive and hit delete.
- 46:22Vi Wickam: And you know we had a backup from the night before, but you know they still had to hire us to come out and restore that drive.
- 46:31Vi Wickam: So you know you don't want to be having to deal with that either, and you know this is outside the scope of what I thought we were going to talk about, but this is important stuff too.
- 46:43Jennifer Johnson: This is what happens when you're on a podcast with me.
- 46:45Jennifer Johnson: You start unearthing things and then I'm like oh well, let's dig into this.
- 46:50Vi Wickam: Well, what about this?
- 46:51Vi Wickam: And what about this?
- 46:53Jennifer Johnson: That's right, multi-factor authentication.
- 46:56Jennifer Johnson: Yeah, this used to drive me crazy because I'm like really, why do I have to do this?
- 47:01Jennifer Johnson: I would get flustered, I would get upset.
- 47:04Jennifer Johnson: What's the importance?
- 47:14Vi Wickam: Well, the importance is if somebody has taken your password and you have multi-factor authentication turned on, they can use that password but not be able to get in.
- 47:20Vi Wickam: So they'll get to the point where they try to log in and it says you know, please enter your six-digit code, and you have your cell phone, or you have the authenticator app on your cell phone and they're SOL because they don't have the authenticator app.
- 47:39Vi Wickam: So I will be vulnerable here and let you know that there's one or two social media platforms that I never use that I have an old password on that I probably haven't reset.
- 47:51Vi Wickam: I don't actually even know if I've reset it in the last five years, but I have two-factor authentication turned on and I know that it's going to text my cell phone every time I try to log in.
- 48:05Vi Wickam: So if somebody tried to hack into it, I know that I've got that as my validation.
- 48:12Jennifer Johnson: Sure, so we should have that set up on everything we possibly can have.
- 48:15Vi Wickam: Every online account that you can set up 2FA on, you should absolutely set up two-factor authentication.
- 48:23Jennifer Johnson: Awesome.
- 48:23Jennifer Johnson: So in the realm of we're talking about security, how often or how do we?
- 48:31Jennifer Johnson: First of all, how do we?
- 48:32Jennifer Johnson: And then how often should we be doing an assessment of our digital assets to see where there's a loophole or where something needs to be shored up a little bit more?
- 48:45Vi Wickam: So the truth is, most people have never done it, and that's where the real problem is.
- 48:51Vi Wickam: So if you've never done it, you absolutely should do it right away.
- 48:55Vi Wickam: Absolutely should do it right away.
- 49:02Vi Wickam: This is a critical thing to do, to determine what your risks are, to put patches in place.
- 49:04Vi Wickam: You know those risks could include things like well, I don't have automatic updates turned on on my computers.
- 49:11Vi Wickam: Or you know, like are we have a publicly available computer that doesn't have a password on it at all.
- 49:18Vi Wickam: To we've shared these passwords with seven people and two of those people are no longer around, but we haven't changed the password.
- 49:28Vi Wickam: Or our domain name is registered with the guy that made our website seven years ago and he's still doing the renewals, and we don't have any access to that domain name.
- 49:41Vi Wickam: So if you've never done that, you need to do it today.
- 49:44Vi Wickam: And we have a tool up on wizard of ads onlinecom slash weasels that you can weasels.
- 49:52Vi Wickam: Yeah.
- 49:53Vi Wickam: So the the reason there is like we've got a joke name for digital people who don't have the client's best interests at hand, and we call them digital weasels because there are classes on how to take people for a thousand bucks a month.
- 50:15Vi Wickam: You know how to make a quarter of a million dollars a year without working.
- 50:19Vi Wickam: Oh my gosh, thousand bucks a month you know how to make a quarter of a million dollars a year without working and how to sell people on a thousand dollar a month SEO plan where, basically, what you do is you.
- 50:28Vi Wickam: You know you set up a report that emails them once a month and then you don't do anything and by the time they're upset, you know you found somebody else to fill it up.
- 50:41Vi Wickam: You know and you know it's a terrible, terrible scam.
- 50:44Vi Wickam: But there are a lot of digital people who are unethical.
- 50:48Vi Wickam: There are even more that are just lazy, and you know.
- 50:53Vi Wickam: So you've got to protect yourself when you're buying digital services, whether that's SEO services or ads management services or web development services or data management services Any of these things.
- 51:10Vi Wickam: You need to make sure that your assets are secured, which includes things like LastPass.
- 51:16Vi Wickam: You need something that's going to manage your passwords.
- 51:19Vi Wickam: You need to make sure that you own your domain and that you control your domain.
- 51:27Vi Wickam: You need to make sure that all of your employees are using emails that are at your domain.
- 51:31Vi Wickam: So I can't tell you how many times I've had clients who, well, yeah, all our technicians are using Gmail addresses because we didn't want to pay for Google Workspace.
- 51:44Vi Wickam: I'm like, ok, so you're saving $70 a month and the potential cost to you is that employee has all of these communications with customers, right, and now they can.
- 51:58Vi Wickam: You know you part ways with them and they're like I'm going to just email all those customers and tell them hey, I'm on my own now and I'm going to do the work for half the price that that they're going to do it, and you know people forget that, like I, I am the same way with cell phones.
- 52:16Jennifer Johnson: Like, don't get a customer cell phone on somebody's personal phone, it needs to be on a business phone.
- 52:22Vi Wickam: Right, and so one of the options there is some is a service like RingCentral where you have a company line that forwards to their cell phones because landlines are pretty much gone away, you know like what's that?
- 52:37Vi Wickam: Yeah, but you do want to have that control and that oversight of those communications.
- 52:45Vi Wickam: So if you use a service like RingCentral or 10 others that are similar I say RingCentral because that's what we signed up for, but it's not like that's the only one or that it's magic but you can say each of you get these numbers and it rings on their phone in an app and you have a virtual phone system where you've got your main office number tree.
- 53:14Vi Wickam: Basically that splits up who gets what calls.
- 53:17Vi Wickam: If they press one for sales, it goes rings to this person, then this person, and you know cause you don't really want employees making phone calls to customers on personal lines as a rule of thumb.
- 53:31Jennifer Johnson: Right, Absolutely.
- 53:32Jennifer Johnson: It's a.
- 53:32Jennifer Johnson: It's a good rule of thumb to have in your business.
- 53:34Jennifer Johnson: So, worst case scenario, some breach happens in your business.
- 53:41Jennifer Johnson: What do you do Like what?
- 53:44Jennifer Johnson: What should I be doing?
- 53:45Jennifer Johnson: What should my step be?
- 53:48Vi Wickam: Well, you got to figure out first whether it's a real breach or it's a spoofing.
- 53:54Jennifer Johnson: So what, what you had?
- 53:56Vi Wickam: was a spoofing where somebody had scraped the content off your website and presented themselves as if they were you.
- 54:05Vi Wickam: Right, which I've seen, like most of the time on Facebook, when people say your Facebook was hacked, that's what's happened is, somebody scraped your photo and they scraped your last three posts and then they posted that on a new profile and gave it the same name as yours and they're impersonating you at it.
- 54:25Vi Wickam: And you know they're impersonating you to try and take advantage of your friends or take advantage of your reputation as a business and, you know, using all of the content that you've created and all the goodwill that you've created, and so obviously you've got to nip those in the bud.
- 54:44Vi Wickam: But it's an entirely different process to do that than it is to undo a hack.
- 54:51Vi Wickam: So an example of a hack is somebody compromised your website and put malicious code on your website, so now when somebody visits your website, it's trying to download that malicious code on everybody's computers.
- 55:07Jennifer Johnson: I see, versus a spoofing.
- 55:08Jennifer Johnson: They just take a like nobody can do a transaction on that page, it's just well, maybe they could, but it's not going to be with you.
- 55:16Vi Wickam: So that's like that's very often, when somebody steals website content and spoofs you, what they're really trying to do is steal credit cards from people who so and potentially also steal money.
- 55:32Vi Wickam: So if they have an actual account tied to it, you know somebody, you'll check out on that site.
- 55:37Vi Wickam: They'll get the money and they will, you know, take that money and never deliver anything.
- 55:45Vi Wickam: And the person will call you and say, hey, I bought something from you and I never received it.
- 55:52Vi Wickam: And you're like well, nobody played, I've got no record of you in my customer database.
- 55:58Vi Wickam: You don't like I've, I've got no reason to believe this.
- 56:02Vi Wickam: And they're like well, let me forward you the email confirmation I got and you see that it's at a different website when they forwarded to you.
- 56:09Vi Wickam: And you're like well, this wasn't us.
- 56:11Vi Wickam: And then you've got to figure out who it was so that you can get them removed and get them taken down, which is a huge hassle, as you know.
- 56:22Vi Wickam: But if you know, like, in my 27 years of doing web stuff, I've had a couple of times where somebody I hosted got hacked.
- 56:34Vi Wickam: Mostly, though, what I've done is I've had clients come on because they've gotten hacked on somebody else's hosting and I've had to clean up the mess.
- 56:45Vi Wickam: And I believe so strongly in my hosting that I have a guarantee that if somebody gets hacked and I'm maintaining the site that they won't pay me any extra to clean it up, because I make sure that WordPress is up to date and the plugins are up to date.
- 57:03Vi Wickam: So when you talk about security, very often when you're talking about something like WordPress, the problem is they've got out-of-date plugins that had a security vulnerability and because the plugin's so far out of date, you know it might be three years or five years out of date and you know there's things in the web that have changed.
- 57:26Vi Wickam: The rules are always in flux.
- 57:28Vi Wickam: If that vulnerability is found and they haven't updated to patch it, you're a sitting duck.
- 57:38Vi Wickam: You're just waiting to get hacked.
- 57:39Vi Wickam: So our goal is to make sure that doesn't happen.
- 57:43Vi Wickam: But when it does, you have to root it out on the server and find all the traces of it, because very often those people that do that will leave back doors and leave code in places you wouldn't expect it so that they can get back in later.
- 57:59Jennifer Johnson: That's just crazy.
- 58:01Vi Wickam: It's a crazy world.
- 58:07Jennifer Johnson: I mean, I know we could talk about this for hours and hours, but I appreciate everything that you've shared with our listeners today, because this is great information and I'm sure we'll have you on again to really go in depth.
- 58:15Jennifer Johnson: But if our listeners would like to get ahold of you, how can they do so?
- 58:18Vi Wickam: So you can find me on my business website at wizardofadsonlinecom, and if you're looking for my music, you can find that at vythefiddlercom.
- 58:32Jennifer Johnson: I love it.
- 58:33Jennifer Johnson: I love it.
- 58:33Jennifer Johnson: Thank you so much, vi again, for being on and sharing with all of our listeners.
- 58:37Vi Wickam: Oh, my pleasure, Jennifer.
- 58:39Vi Wickam: Always a pleasure to get to hang out with you.