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January 19, 2024
Learn how to dominate Google for your local meal delivery business.
Will Schreiber: Hey, it's Will, co-founder and CEO of Bottle.com. Welcome to the second episode of Bottle Coffee Chats. These are live chats where we actually do want to buy you coffee to celebrate you for feeding your community and working so hard to feed people better food.
This month, we have Ben Lund on, who is an SEO and Google expert, who teaches us how we can get better at Google, show up higher in rankings, and let people in our community find us way more easily. You do not have to be a Bottle customer or use our software to benefit from this talk at all. We try to keep it completely neutral and just share tactics of how you can better succeed and show up higher in rankings.
Think about ads and everything like that. You also do not need to be a Bottle customer for us to get you coffee. We just want to celebrate the meal delivery world. Next month for the February chat, which will be on February 6th, we would love to buy you coffee. Just go to bottle.com/coffee, send us your email and we'll buy you a ten dollar cup of coffee from Starbucks, and you can tune in if you'd like to the next chat.
Anyway, we hope you enjoy this conversation. Please get in touch if you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Thanks everyone for joining. This is our second coffee chat, our January coffee chat. This month we have Ben Lund who runs Rise Marketing. Welcome Ben.
Ben Lund: Thanks for having me, Will.
Will Schreiber: I hope everyone got their Starbucks gift card this morning. But let's dive in. With the coffee we're drinking, I'm drinking drip coffee from a co-working space. Ben, what kind of coffee do you have?
Ben Lund: Yeah, I just do standard drip. I do some fancy organic coffee, but I can be an early riser. So on the East Coast, it's 10 o'clock in the morning. I was out the door at like 5:40 to go to the gym, but I set my coffee the night before because that is my motivation. When I wake up and smell the coffee, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I can do this. I can go to the gym, drink that cup of coffee on my ride, and then I'm good to go."
Will Schreiber: Yeah, that's what gets me to the office. It's a 20-minute walk, but there's coffee at the end.
Ben Lund: Exactly. You got to have some motivation.
Will Schreiber: Well, how did you get to the marketing world and tell us a little bit about Rise Marketing.
Ben Lund: Yeah, it's been a fun ride. I graduated from UMass Amherst's business school in 2004. I was a marketing major because I loved those classes, and the internet was becoming a pretty big thing. I knew I wanted to do marketing and I knew I wanted to be somewhere in the internet. So I stumbled across some awesome opportunities. I worked at Monster.com around 2005, just selling job board spaces. Then I got an awesome break and got to work for Yahoo in the mid 2000s, doing all SEM—search engine marketing—for clients and selling homepage advertisements. This was back when people went to Yahoo before they went to Google.
After that, I was at an ad agency for a while, then I worked at Google in Cambridge because we're in the Boston area, for a couple of years. Then about five years ago, I leaped into entrepreneurship and started Rise Marketing Group. We're a performance marketing agency specializing in all types of ads, whether it be Google Ads, Microsoft, LinkedIn, social, and we also specialize in search engine optimization. Our website is RiseMKG.com.
Will Schreiber: For everyone listening in, we're going to cover mostly Google and the world of a Google Business Profile, what that means, low hanging fruit you can do to get more noticed on Google, then touch on SEO and some SEO principles as well, and then also talk briefly about Google Ads for beginners—what are the basics, what's the terminology, how can we get a little bit better at Google Ads. So that's the quick breakdown of what we'll be covering here in this talk. Let's start with the low hanging fruit: what is a Google Business Profile?
Ben Lund: Yeah, so hopefully anyone listening who has their own business does have a Google Business Profile set up. Think of it as Google's social aspect for businesses. You can claim your profile, similar to claiming a Facebook business page, but this is specifically for Google. You can upload all your information, description, pictures, get reviews. But the biggest benefit of Google Business Profile—which a lot of people overlook—is that it will be your fastest trajectory to organic ranking on Google.
When you do a search for any type of service, whether it be meal delivery, meal prep, or any other services like a handyman or locksmith, Google is going to prioritize these local listings because it understands that you're doing a local search. It's going to flag any of these local businesses that it thinks is relevant. I tell any client that's a business looking for local traffic: focus on Google Business first. That will be your fastest way to get traffic on Google and truly the easiest.
Will Schreiber: What are the basic steps for optimizing that Google Business Profile?
Ben Lund: You just want to give Google as much information as possible. It's one thing to create a profile and put in two sentences of what your business is and two pictures. But Google's not going to prioritize it. If Google sees that you're not prioritizing this piece of real estate, why is Google going to show you higher up?
I always think about it this way: what's best for the user is what Google's North Star is. Google won't show a business if it's not relevant or if it's not a truly complete profile, because Google ultimately wants users to use their engine and wants to provide an excellent experience.
So here's what you should be doing: if you haven't created a profile, definitely create it. For those who have it, review the profile sometime this week and just upload as much information as possible. Make sure you have a robust description, make sure your services are checked in terms of industry, your service location. Reviews are critical because Google wants to show users legitimate businesses. If you don't have any reviews, that's not going to help you.
I'll stick on this for a moment with reviews. I know sometimes companies might be a little nervous about asking for reviews. Ask for reviews. If a customer has had a positive experience, they'd be more than happy to give out a review. Frame it by saying: "Google Business is so helpful for the business, and if you had a positive experience, would you mind taking five minutes to write a review?" Within the profile, you can copy and paste the link and just send that off.
Some businesses and clients of ours will even take it a step further and say, "For 10 minutes of your time, we'll give you a Starbucks gift card to complete this." When you do searches for any type of business, it's not a coincidence that the ones that rank higher have the most reviews.
Will Schreiber: Is it fair that reviews is the biggest impact way to get boosted?
Ben Lund: Yeah, I would say so. This is assuming you already have a decent profile built out where you talk about all the aspects of your businesses and services and you have pictures. But yeah, then reviews is definitely number one. And I'll even dive in a little bit further. Any positive review is great. If you're looking to promote a certain aspect of the business, you can even ask a client to put a review of that particular part of it. So if you want to rank higher for, let's say, food delivery, you can even just say, "I wrote a quick blurb. Would you mind posting this if you enjoyed it?" Because then they even include some of those keywords that you're looking to rank for.
You don't have to go that crazy, but get the reviews. It works. If you ever get a subpar review—and listen, you can have the best service in the world and you're just going to find that one customer who was going to post something negative regardless—I wouldn't fret about it. But I do want to talk about it because this happens with every business.
Don't fret about it because sometimes if you see a business that has too many five-star reviews, it's like, "Are these even real?" It's very common to see a business that's 4.5, 4.8 stars. If someone ever did leave a negative or critical comment, just respond to it. Just respond to it as a real human. And of course, if it was just like someone who never interacted and did business with you, then you could file a complaint to Google. But I do want to cover that because a lot of people, at least in the past that I've talked to, they're almost afraid of soliciting reviews because of, "Oh, what if I get a bad review?" You're going to get bad reviews. I'm sure you're going to get great ones. And if someone ever does do a subpar review, that's fine. Just respond to it with your point of view.
Will Schreiber: That was going to be my follow-up question: how negative of an impact does a negative review have? And how does that factor into Google's algorithm? Is it as simple as I have one one-star and one five-star so now I have a two and a half rating? Or do they weight quality of reviews differently in a way that encourages you to get more reviews?
Ben Lund: Yeah, I think they do weight it. I also think they look at the reviewer history. Are they just bashing every business out there? Then they're not going to place a lot of weight on it. So I do believe that they weight there's some type of rating scale there. But reviews are excellent, and it's also just great user experience. When you're looking at several businesses, you're going to go to the ones that have the most five-star reviews. But then as I do for Rise, I mean, thankfully we have a really solid and happy client base, but even just to hedge ourselves from even a four-star review or a three-star review, I always preface the ask: "Hey, if you've been really happy with our service, would you mind taking five minutes?" That way, it gives them the out of, if they're not happy for whatever reason, "Well, let's talk through it." Thankfully that really hasn't happened.
Will Schreiber: I weight number of reviews the most when I'm evaluating a business. I'm looking for the one with the highest number of reviews, really, because I'm like, that's the most legitimate, the most trustworthy.
Will Schreiber: What is the role of Google Maps on the Business Profile?
Ben Lund: Yeah, it's so incredibly important. Within the Business Profile, you're going to have your address and Google's going to prioritize that. But for Google Business listings, Google factors in heavily your proximity to the user's location. So if you're looking for us and you're outside of Massachusetts, and you just do searches for "advertising agency," we're not going to come up. But if you're in the Boston area, we're going to come up because that proximity is so important to Google. The majority of business type searches are locally based.
There's a couple of things you can do. Number one, you're automatically going to have your address populated in there. Number two, on the backend side of it, you can list your service areas. I would be very honest with yourself about your service area. If you're thinking, "Oh yeah, I guess I could ship to anyone in the state or all these states," but truly the majority of your business comes from within a 20-mile radius, just be honest and just put those individual locations in, and that's what's going to help you rank higher on Google.
Outside of the general search engine results page, if someone is searching in Google Maps for your service, you also have an opportunity to appear there. Also, if there are businesses with multiple locations, even if they're office locations, you can open up several Business Profiles. Now there are pros and cons with that. The pros are then you're going to be visible for local searches in two different areas, which is really good. The downside is that will be splitting up your reviews. So when you ask for reviews, which profile do you send them to? Is it better to consolidate or to separate and have two different geo-targets and just split the reviews? But I have seen that work pretty well for businesses that truly do have two different offices.
Will Schreiber: A lot of people who run meal delivery will ship and do local delivery. From a Google perspective, it sounds like it's better to be hyper-local and say, "This is our core area," so that someone in your local delivery range searches for you and you definitely show up. You worry less about winning the SEO for nationwide shipping.
Ben Lund: Exactly. I would focus just more on where you're getting most of your business. Use the 80/20 rule where you get in most of your business. And this can tee up into a conversation we'll probably have about SEO on your website. What can you do if you do want to enter a new market? And that's very heavily focused on site content, which we can talk about that in a bit. But for Google Business, I would just focus on truly where 80 percent of your business comes from. Focus on those areas. And if they really are split up and you have different offices, great. Create a couple of different profiles for the same company, and you can manage them all together.
Will Schreiber: This is an interesting question that came in. Someone who operates out of a cloud kitchen and just does online pre-orders. There's not really a business location beyond the rented space. What's the recommendation on what to set the location as for the Business Profile?
Ben Lund: Yeah, you can still put in the space, or you can hide your address. And then on the backend, you can just put in your service area and then just put in the towns or zip codes. Last time I checked, you can hide your address if it's out of a home and you just don't feel comfortable putting your home address, because people might get confused and think, "Oh, I'm going to drive and pick up some dinner for tonight." So yeah, that would be something that I would consider. Don't look at that as a barrier to entry. Still create that profile and you should be able to suppress the real address, but still put in the service area within Google.
Will Schreiber: All right, let's jump to SEO. We have a question about how you debate organic versus ads. Let's start with SEO: what are the key structural elements to being found on Google with SEO?
Ben Lund: Yeah, there's so much out there, and if you do your research, you can get lost pretty quickly because you can go down crazy rabbit holes with people saying conflicting points of view. But really it comes down to three different things.
Number one, your website needs to have all the SEO fundamentals from a technical perspective. What does that mean at a high level? You have a good looking website because if you don't have a good looking website with good UX, people are just going to bounce right away. Google is going to pick that up. It's secure, so HTTPS. If it's not secure, Google is going to ding you a bit for that. And then you just have all the basics. You have a meta description for every page. That's where you tell Google what to put on the search engine results page. It's almost like your ad copy, but for SEO.
You're using headers throughout your website, which goes above different paragraphs and is very much targeted for specific keywords. Use image alt text, which means behind every image on your website, you tell Google what that image is all about. Google is really smart, but if it sees a picture of a certain type of meal, it won't totally understand it. So you want to give some backend signals to what that is.
It's really all about just making sure your website from a technical perspective is super clean and you make it easy for Google to understand what your website's all about.
Then it gets into two different categories. Content. Without content, you'll never rank on Google. If you come to us and say, "Why isn't my website ranking?" and your website's literally just a long landing page with not a lot of content, then there's really not a lot there. You need to have robust content. But before you just start writing content for the sake of content, think of the type of searches you want to be present for or even questions people are asking. That way you can write content to rank for that. That's number two, high level.
And then number three, which has always been a strong ranking signal for Google—although the weight on this has been diminished over the years but still strong—is getting other websites to link to you. When Google started as a search engine back in the late 90s, one of their key criteria for ranking was, "Are other websites talking about you and linking to you?" Because if other websites are linking to you, that's a voucher of accreditation. You must provide a good product or service. Google used these voices as accreditation and then ranked you higher because of that.
That's not the top ranking signal anymore. Google shared last summer that it's not in the top three ranking signals, but it is still really important. Even within Google Search Console—which is a separate platform, it's free, and truly every business should sign up for it—it will still indicate what sites are linking to you. So that in itself shows that Google does still value it. Think about how other websites can link to you. Every business has connections to other businesses. Maybe you're in a networking group, like a business networking group or a chamber of commerce. A lot of them have directories where they can link to you. Or maybe you got some good PR and asked for a backlink from there, or any other referral partners that could be really good. Just start to build up some momentum of getting some backlinks to you. That helps out.
High level, it's really: make sure your site is technically sound and has a good user experience, because again, if it's a bad user experience and people are just bouncing and leaving right away, Google is going to pick up on that. Then from there, I'll really prioritize content. And then of course, as there are linking opportunities that come about, I would definitely take advantage of that. But really focus on content.
Will Schreiber: When you say content, what's something that comes to mind? If I operated South Fork and delivered lunches each day to a business center, what is the kind of content we should be posting to our website?
Ben Lund: Yeah, definitely. I would stress local-focused content. You could even have a location delivery page which shares all the towns and communities that you service. You could do something like "Meal Delivery in [Town], [State]." Within that page, talk about all the areas that you deliver and then you could even include maybe different centers that you routinely deliver. That way, when people do a search for city plus food delivery, that page has a higher opportunity to rank. And if you serve multiple cities or geos, those even could be separate pages that you build out to rank higher on Google.
But yeah, that could be content. It could even be types of meal delivery that you do. So maybe it is more corporate. Make sure you have a page that's very much focused on corporate meal delivery. And if it's focused on a city or region, include that as well. Talk about how you focus on corporate, maybe sample clients. If you're focused on residential, you can do that as well. So it really depends on, first and foremost, who you're trying to target, and then think of what they may be searching and then create content for that.
It could be the examples I just shared were much more landing page based, but you can also just have a blog. The blog could just be general information, the pros and cons of meal deliveries and things like that. So yeah, there's different content types.
Will Schreiber: So these are blog posts in your mind, or is it more of a landing page? Just well-formatted and written text?
Ben Lund: Yeah, I would say there's a couple of things. Make sure the content is written to add value. Anyone can go to ChatGPT or Google Bard and say, "Give me a 500-word blog post on this." I haven't seen that type of content rank too well. Google has written a little bit of a line here because they are an AI-based company. So on one side of the mouth, they don't really value it too much. But on the other end, they are an AI company. So it's interesting to see where this is going to go. But what I've seen is that generally speaking, AI content is just a regurgitation of existing content. Google pretty much says, more or less, that to rank on Google, you have to provide some type of content that provides superior value. And if you're just using an AI tool to give you the average about what's out there, expect average results at best.
But if you really focus in on real value-driven content that may answer questions that your potential customers may ask, then that's really good. I would say focus on quality content. Make sure maybe 750 to 900 words at a minimum is great. If you just have a blog post that's one or two paragraphs, it's not going to rank because there's just not a lot of meat there. Use headers, include images, and even videos.
Will Schreiber: Is this part of how Google determines really that it's value-add versus not? Is it just that there's a measure of how long people spend on the page—a real human on the page—as a measure of, "Oh, this is valuable" or "this is not?"
Ben Lund: Exactly. No one knows truly how Google does it, but what I've gathered over the years is: when you produce a new page of content, Google is going to test it out based off of what its algorithm thinks it's going to perform. It's going to show it based off of maybe the age of the website, how many other people are linking to the website, and even the quality of content in terms of grammatical errors, relevant keywords, and whether it really thinks it's going to answer that question. If so, Google's going to push it out in the search engine results page on specific questions. But then it comes down to user experience. If people are just confused, "I don't get it," and then leave right away, Google's going to pick up on that and your rankings are going to go down. Or if they actually really engage with that content, then Google's going to reward you on that. So that's pretty much the consensus of how I've seen it play out: Google will estimate how well this is going to do and put it out there, and then ultimately it's going to be the user that determines how well it is.
So really, focus on writing for a real human because ultimately they are going to be the end judge of it. Even better is if that user not only spends a lot of time on your site, but then says, "Wow, this is a really interesting article. I'm going to link to it from my site." That's a huge bunch of accreditation. But again, start off with just quality content.
When you think of a content cadence—how frequently you should post—just do something that's realistic. So you're not just doing a rush job. That could just be one piece of content per month that's well done, or maybe some people have more time and it could be one every other week. But just pick a cadence that you believe that you could stick to and go with that.
Will Schreiber: Are there any SEO tools or lightweight tools that you recommend that business owners should be aware of?
Ben Lund: Yeah, the one that we use for all of our clients is SEMrush. I'm definitely a huge fan of it. It can give you just your overall assessment of your website, how many links that you're getting, what positions that you're ranking for with specific keywords and how that's fluctuating. But most importantly, why I like it is their keyword research tool is really good. If you are looking to rank for a specific audience, you can type in specific keywords and it will tell you what types of questions that they're typing in, what's that search volume, and how difficult it will be to rank for that given keyword. So that way, again, you're writing not just blindly, but you're writing to target a specific audience. Yeah, SEMrush is a tool that I generally like. There's a lot of great ones out there. Ahrefs is another good one. I personally don't use it, but I've heard a lot of good things. But it is important to have some data points before you just write a bunch of content.
Will Schreiber: If I were operating South Fork, which delivered lunches each day to a business center, how would I find keywords that are even worth ranking for? How do I brainstorm those? How do I evaluate if it's worth trying to write content to rank for a specific search?
Ben Lund: Yeah, there is, and let me try to do a live example real quick because it might be valuable.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, that would be great.
Ben Lund: Yeah, and if this doesn't work, I will just talk through it. So this is SEMrush. We go to keyword magic tool, and this is just like how it all began. So you could do a search for "meal delivery," start off with that. And then there's different types of match types that you can. I would start off with a broad theme like this, like "meal delivery" and broad matches pretty much any variation of the seed keyword. So it gives you a good idea of what people are searching. Now, like "meal delivery services," this is all U.S.-based traffic. 40,000 people search it on Google every month. But look at this—it's telling you it's very hard to rank for this, just probably because there's a ton of competition out there. So to rank nationwide for that would take a ton of work.
But what you can do is just go down and find pockets of what people are searching for. So like "dairy free meal delivery." Maybe some of your Bottle users focus on dairy free and maybe that's an area that they've been thinking about really opening up. That is one where actually a lot of people are searching for that and the keyword difficulty isn't too hard. And then obviously you have "keto," you have "near me." But generally speaking, if I scroll and keep on going down here, we're going to start to see cities pop up. So let's take Atlanta, for example. And so what you're going to see is local-based searches. Search volume isn't as strong every month, but the keyword difficulty, they're all possible versus impossible. So when you go out, if you are locally based, build out local pages. And then you can even see like once you add in other modifiers like "keto meal delivery Atlanta," it's telling you it's easy to rank for. Or "healthy." So don't just think of meal delivery. Definitely meal delivery plus Atlanta. But this is the type of tool where you can just find out what people are searching: "vegetarian," "clean," and then that can be an offshoot of pages that you could build out to try to capture that traffic.
But these insights come from a tool like SEMrush. Just so that way, again, you have some type of data points before you just start writing a bunch of content.
Will Schreiber: Let's pivot over to ads. What is the high-level basic ad strategy that a local business should be thinking about for Google Ads?
Ben Lund: Yeah, so Google Ads—let me share my screen one more time. So "meal delivery" for me. So all of these sponsored results—Blue Apron, HelloFresh—these are all paid ads. And then down here, these are organic results. It's interesting to me that I noticed "pre-made meals" was a little bit easier of a keyword than "meal delivery." And Blue Apron seems to be using "pre-made meals" in their copy. Yeah, they probably have a beast of a marketing team behind them and for whatever reason they really liked this copy.
So within the ad space, these are all ads and then down below you get the organic listings which we were just talking about. And then of course you have the map and then the Google Business listings. Not much opportunity where I am. So if anyone's in the Boston area, maybe they should claim some space because there's zero reviews, two-star review, nothing there. So that's where the Google Business Profile really comes in very handy and you're pulled into this map view in the Google search.
Definitely. And you can see there's like zero results here. So people, at least in the Boston area or south of Boston in a town called Dedham, there's not much here. So ads are all of these positions right here. Now, pros and cons with that. The pros with ads is you're going to get traffic pretty much immediately. But on the flip side, you're paying for the traffic. You pay Google for every click that goes to your website. So before you start embarking out like, "Okay, I want to flip the light and get some ads," make sure your site is in a really good spot because you're paying for this traffic. You want to make sure that it's a positive Google experience.
What I would say is compare your site against some of your competitors. And you could even compare it against Blue Apron and HelloFresh. Yes, it's not going to be to that level, but they've made it this far. Maybe there's a couple nuggets that you could take from their landing page experience that you may want to integrate. But generally speaking, include all the information that you should. Make it easy to engage as possible. Don't make it where they have to go to all these different pages to interact. So yeah, the pros are immediate traffic. The downside is you will be paying Google for it.
Will Schreiber: How does Google Ads work structurally?
Ben Lund: When you do Google Ads, you curate a group of keywords that you want to go after. So in this case, it could be "meal delivery," "pre-made meals." And I'm sure there's other keywords that you can go after. What I would recommend is keep it as specific as possible, at least to start, because you don't want to cast too wide of a net. And I would use a match type called either exact or phrase match, which tells Google I only want to serve to these keywords or related keywords like this. If you're at a broad match, which tells Google, "Yeah, I want to rank for meal delivery," Google can map that out to "meal recipes" and that type of traffic. But the intent isn't there. It probably isn't going to convert very well once they get to your website. So what I say to any client is start off with being as specific as possible. Focus on a collection of keywords with a similar intent, exact or phrase match. And then also geo-target. Again, if most of your business comes locally, focus locally. Because otherwise, if you're nationwide, people have options of just Blue Apron or HelloFresh, and it might be a little bit harder to convert on that. But focus on locally and you'll probably do better on that because people can see that you're a local business. It's not made in some factory somewhere and shipped, and you don't know when the meal was actually created. It could have been a week ago and then shipped. Every food has some shelf life to it. So I would say it's just be as specific as possible.
Will Schreiber: Someone asked whether you should focus on SEO or Google Ads. How should we think about that?
Ben Lund: Both can be great strategies. Google Ads—I would say if you have immediate goals of growing, so maybe you raised some money or you really want to get this off the ground, Google Ads is going to be a great launch point for you. If you're focused on long-term growth, SEO. And oftentimes a lot of our clients end up doing both because SEO takes longer to earn Google's trust and rank higher long-term. It's probably going to be your most efficient channel because it is free traffic. But free, nothing's free, because you still have to do work to earn that traffic. But again, it really depends on your goals. If you're looking for more customers this quarter, next quarter, focus on Google Ads as long as your site's in a good spot. If you want to focus on long-term and you're like, "You're busy right now, but you want to hire down the road," continue to focus on SEO because that will probably be your most efficient revenue channel.
Will Schreiber: What's the kind of industry standard or best way to know that Google Ads are working or not? How do you set it up so that you can measure "This amount of ad spend is driving this much business to me" and "It's actually profitable or not?"
Ben Lund: Yep, yeah, definitely. So all the tools that you really need to get started are within Google Ads. Within Google Ads, you can create conversion events, which is just a little bit of code that you tell Google, "This event happened." And if your website setup is just an email form or contact us, and then you maybe take it over the phone or whatever, then that could be a conversion event. Or if it's very much transaction-based, you can set up conversion events where you can tell Google, "Yes, transaction happened and how much that transaction amount was." That will be reported within the Google dashboard.
So over time, what you really should see is: "Oh, I invested $500 last month and I got $1,000 of sales. That's really good." And then also I'm sure there's a lifetime value associated, especially with meal delivery, where maybe you're okay with even breaking even on that month of advertising, knowing that each client may be with you for two and a half, three, four months plus.
But what's really important is to stress—and I don't say this just because I'm an agency or lead an agency—you do need a good amount of expertise to set up Google Ads correctly. If you just lean on self-guided tutorials, you really need to study it to set it up correctly. So unless if you really want to dedicate the time to it, I would consider outsourcing. It doesn't have to be to us. It could even just be someone locally in your town that does Google Ads or marketing. Even if they just set it up for success and set up the measurement and the original campaigns and then let you take it over from there. But just setting up the fundamentals is really important.
Will Schreiber: Should you pay for ads with Google or even Yelp? We'd love your opinion on that. Are we really focused on growing organically?
Ben Lund: Yeah, Google and Yelp—I did Yelp ads for a little bit, saw some level of success on it. I would say with anything that you do, as long as you have appropriate measurement set up and some type of mechanism to share how well that platform is doing, you're going to be fine. So even let's say you spend $500 in Yelp, but you set up appropriate conversion tracking and you can see how many calls that you got. Even if you only got one or two calls, you didn't really fail because you got those data points. But if you didn't set up appropriate measurement, you're really no better off as to if it worked or not.
But yeah, I would try it out. Try all platforms. Also know that whenever you launch a platform, generally speaking, it gets better and better every month because you get more signals and data points of the copy that works well, the landing page that works well, the keywords that work well.
And with SEO, I mean, ideal world, every business should probably do both. But again, it really comes down to your goals. If you're looking for customers this quarter and next quarter, focus on Google Ads. If you're focused on, "Hey, I want to really blow up my business later on in the year," SEO is going to be really good because it's a harder ship to turn, but it's like a snowball and you get incremental gains month over month. Then you consistently do that. Give yourself 12 months. I know that's a lot of time, but then you're going to start to see some really sizable traffic come through and requests. And when you pick up the phone or you get that email, you can ask and they'll just say, "Oh, we Googled you." So an ideal world, I would do both, but it really depends on what your goals are.
Will Schreiber: On Yelp specifically, I've noticed that Yelp comes up as a frustration for a lot of business owners. Do you ever think about whether you should ask a customer for a review on Yelp versus Google? Do you typically see returns on playing the Yelp game to rank high on Yelp versus ranking high on Google?
Ben Lund: It doesn't come up a lot for our clients. But for whatever reason, Yelp just brings the worst out of everyone. I don't know why. The businesses I talk to are like, "Oh yeah, our Yelp reviews are awful, but Google, they're fine. I don't understand." It's interesting. Sometimes I hear that. But yeah, I would just say just focus on where your customers are. Chat with them. If they are finding you on Yelp or they're doing these searches, then yeah, give Yelp some love. It doesn't have to be as robust as Google. I believe probably you're going to have more success on Google just because that's like the entry point to the internet. But just chat with your customers, ask if they use Yelp. And if you get a couple signals that, yes, they do, and that would be a good spot for you, create a Yelp profile, build it out. You can copy and paste what you put on Google. Get, let's say, five reviews just so you have something there. And then go from there. And then if you start to get a customer or two, then Yelp does have an advertising product that you can consider adding a little fuel to that. But again, think about or ask your clients like what platforms that they use and again, give them a gift card or whatever it is for their time and just do a little survey. Just so that way you have some data points before you embark on a new strategy.
Will Schreiber: I think my take on Yelp is that it feels like they make you pay to remove negative reviews or upgrade your product. "We can help you filter those out and reply to them." But I like your advice to follow where your customers are. And it feels like most customers are on Google. So really focus there.
Ben Lund: And I don't want to overlook other search engines out there. Maybe people use Bing. Bing's actually making some headlines because of ChatGPT. Microsoft has Business Profiles that you can fill out as well. Again, do just do a copy and paste job. I'd say focus on Google, assuming that's where a majority of your customers start their customer journey. And then for any of these other listings and directories, build it out, do a copy and paste job. Don't burden yourself with putting too much effort into it. But again, it all hinges on where your customers are.
Will Schreiber: We see about 90 percent of Bottle merchants maintain a separate website. And for today, obviously we really recommend that for everything Ben has said around SEO, building a blog, posting content. There are great tools out there that would do a much better job than we can of making sure that you rank for certain keywords and are able to publish content on a blog, have an about me page, and then redirect to Bottle for the actual customer ordering experience. Now we are working on website features that will help you post content and have links and stuff like that. But even as we roll those out, we will recommend people maintain a website.
Ben, are there any website builders or CMS companies in particular that you recommend or think have great usability?
Ben Lund: Yeah, I feel like most are pretty good. I feel like we're out of the realm of platforms that are just not good for SEO. WordPress is pretty standard. Generally, any website that we build, we are WordPress first, but it doesn't mean that's the way to go. I mean, Wix has done a lot of good stuff over the years and made themselves much more SEO friendly. What I would say is go with a platform that's pretty popular. You can look at what your competitors are doing. The one thing I would flag against is maybe going totally custom and maybe hiring someone just to do a totally custom site, not on a platform, because what happens is then when you need to make updates, it's a totally custom build that you have to do. So I'm a big fan of WordPress. Generally it's done pretty well with SEO, but there's a lot of other good platforms out there. Just do your research and just pick one of the top three and you should be in a really good spot.
Will Schreiber: And the main ones being you want to set your metadata, you want to make sure that the content on the page is there and that it's easy to post.
Ben Lund: Yeah, definitely. And a lot of them have SEO built into those components. And also there's a lot of great resources online. Like if you're on a WordPress site, how do I update my description on WordPress? I'm sure you're going to see like 30 videos on just how to do that.
Will Schreiber: With a few minutes left, I'd be curious about predictions. Obviously, a lot is changing around user-generated content being posted to TikTok and Instagram. Do followings or content on TikTok and Instagram impact your Google or SEO ranking at all? And as a follow-up, where do you see SEO and Google searches going in the next five to ten years with chatbots and how other people might be finding businesses?
Ben Lund: Yeah, great question. So SEO is definitely changing as it has always been changing. I feel like Google makes probably at least four to five big updates every year, and then in between, they pretty much make updates almost daily. But a lot of those aren't publicized because they're just minor tweaks.
Having engagement on channels outside of Google, I believe absolutely helps out. I know I believe that Google can see all of those signals. So Google is moving a little bit away from just a hard link from, let's say, Bottle to Rise. And of course, it's going to still add value to it. But if Google sees that we have a YouTube channel or we're active on LinkedIn and Facebook and people are liking it, Google's going to pick up on that. And that shows signals that we are providing some type of service or content of value. So I would say it's an indirect signal, but I do believe it is helpful.
As for the future of SEO, I can't say I came up with all these thoughts, but it's pretty much putting together other thoughts that I've read from prominent SEO folks and putting it in my own perspective. But one of the things Rand Fishkin—who's been a huge SEO guy and founded Moz years ago—said is that any type of brand mention of your company, even if it's not a hard link, is going to help out your SEO. And that's a stance that he had years ago, where it's moving less from a hard link. So really, that just puts it in context that anytime your business is mentioned, whether it's on social, whether it's other websites mentioning you, or press releases or things like that, that's going to help you out just because it's building up your brand equity and authority.
Also, where the industry is going, there's just going to be a ton of new content that's pushed out in masses—in absolute masses. I'm sure Google saw this coming for a long time because they are an AI-based company and investing heavily in AI. So what Google's responsibility is making sure that the quality of content does not suffer because anyone can now put together mediocre content at massive scale. So I think what's going to happen is Google's probably going to rely more and more on user signals and data to rank well. Because everyone can have the same playing field where they can write 500-word blog posts, but make it really engaging and answering their questions, maybe embedding some video or things like that. So I do believe that Google is going to rely more and more on user-based signals on a website when determining ranking versus keyword stuffing and hard backlinks and things like that.
Will Schreiber: I think that's a fascinating prediction. I've been wondering if you can generate these articles on ChatGPT and put them on your site, how is Google going to parse the noise? But that makes a lot of sense that they'll use user signals—you're sharing this page, you're bookmarking it, you're on it a long time—probably signals like that to know what's good content and what isn't.
Ben Lund: And I don't want to condone or condemn AI. I think AI is great. There's a lot of awesome capabilities out of it. And even if you don't use it for verbatim copy and paste content—which I would try to avoid—you can still use it for great research. "Hey, what are the top searches for meal delivery, meal prep? Do all the list of types of keywords that people are searching for?" Or common questions that you can then build content for, let's say, an FAQ page that you may have. Or even work on like promotional copy: "This is my business. How do I consolidate this into one line?" And that's not going to be the final answer, but it's going to help you. So I don't want to just like say, "Oh, AI is the worst." No, I think there are use cases. But even at Rise as an agency, our most recent point of view is it's a great tool, but it's not a replacement for humans sharing a message.
Will Schreiber: Right, that makes sense. All right, well, I'll end the chat with an open call to anyone who wants a website audit or tips—a basic kind of teardown. Ben, I think you have a product like that?
Ben Lund: Yeah, definitely. If anyone wants to chat on any aspect of marketing, whether it be SEO, website design, development, or ads, yeah, visit us at RiseMKG.com. You can send us an email and we're happy to schedule a consult to see how we might be able to support.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, and obviously get in touch with any of us on the Bottle team, myself or whatever, and we'll put you right in touch with Ben. Ben, thank you so much. There was a lot here that I learned. Really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us and teach us a little bit about Google.
Ben Lund: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much. Pleasure to be here.
Will Schreiber: Yeah, absolutely. Hope everyone has an awesome rest of January. Hope it's been a great start to the year for everyone. Hope everyone enjoys their coffee today.
Ben Lund: Take care.
Will Schreiber: See ya.