Jake Van Buschbach 0:00
Hello everybody hope you're having a great day My name is Jake from umbrella IT services and today we're going to be talking with my good friend Andrew Jackson from Northshore digital about search engine optimization and digital marketing. If you could please leave a like on this video it really helps Andrew and I out and if you want to see more videos like this then please subscribe to the channel. If you have a suggestion for a future video or a guest please leave a comment down below or email us at Tech Tips at umbrella IT services dossier. So now we've got that out of the way. Andrew is an SEO and digital marketing professional who's got over 10 years of experience in the biz. He teaches courses such as digital marketing, SEO, sem fundamentals and Google Analytics at brain station and he wrote three digital marketing online courses for the University of British Columbia. Today we're gonna be talking about the definition of SEO and why it's important for businesses, nonprofits and entrepreneurs COVID-19 and SEO, the future of SEO and Northshore Digital's approach to SEO. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on. Today, how's your day going? It's going
Andrew Jackson 1:03
great. Thanks for having me. This is awesome.
Jake Van Buschbach 1:05
No worries. I'm very excited to talk to you today. I have a lot of questions for you.
Andrew Jackson 1:09
Sounds good.
Jake Van Buschbach 1:11
Can you tell us a little about yourself just to get started?
Andrew Jackson 1:15
You might know it's a funny accent, although I'll say that you've all got funny accents. I'm originally from England. been living in Canada since 2008, with my lovely wife and family on the North Shore. And, yeah, we met in Japan. And now I've been working in digital marketing for about 10 years. And in 2018, me and a couple of friends founded national digital, and we do website marketing. So we build, promote and maintain websites. And we're specialists in SEO on Google ads.
Jake Van Buschbach 1:51
That's awesome. So you're an international man of mystery. Yeah.
What's been your favorite part about digital marketing so far? Like What got you into it?
Andrew Jackson 2:02
Um, so the story began really with a good friend of mine who's also a client now, Nicholas badminton. He's a future speaker. He used to travel the world and doing keynotes, before COVID arrived now he's trying to get into virtual keynotes. And he's a guy that I met DJing at a party in the year 2000 in London, and we happen to move to Vancouver In the same month. And he is, you know, he's been working in the digital world. And he was teaching a course at UBC in social media, and he needed help getting it online, and UBC were trans transferring lots of their in person content to online formats. And they needed a researcher writer and I ended up being a researcher and writer for UBC for two years and develops three digital marketing courses for them. And that was really the start of my journey before that. I just You know, like as a hobbyist been into social media, having Facebook and things like that, and that was really the start of the journey, I got immersed in the strategy of digital. And then after that I because I UBC on my resume, I started getting offered different digital media specialist roles. And really I took it on from that and it was interesting the journey began with social media really. And back then social media was like this big promise land. Yeah, it was like gonna solve all the world's problems and it was gonna solve all business problems. We're all going to have a voice it was the democratization of technology. And since then, I've moved from social media to website strategy to SEO. And that's really where I'm at now. It's, it's more I shy away from the social side. So YouTube, things like this are bit alien to me. I'm not really big on social media anymore. Although, you know, I go on LinkedIn. Quite often, as my friend describes LinkedIn, it's Facebook for people going places. And so some, sometimes sometimes I'm on there just checking out what what's going on in careers land. But more and more. I'm just working on website stuff. And really, that's the tail of my journey.
Jake Van Buschbach 4:21
Very cool. I'm finally finding myself doing the same thing getting away from social media, focusing on the craft itself a lot more. LinkedIn is the only thing that I'm really checking as well just makes more sense. A lot more data of stuff going on there. So I know that you mentioned you have a co founder here. Can you tell us a little bit about your co founder as well?
Andrew Jackson 4:40
Yeah, so he'd be an awesome person to get on talking about online ads, especially Google ads. I've done Google Ads since 2014. Around that time, and my business partner IRA Thompson, he's a UBC graduate. He grew up on Texas. Your Island. He's a local PC guy. And he's just awesome at Google ads. He's really good at analyzing campaigns and getting really into, like getting the CPC down the cost per click for businesses, and really working on conversions. So like, whatever your business is after whether it's leads, whether it's sales, we have most of our clients that we do Google ads for its lead generation. So they're trying to get more and more inquiries for their business, through their website or through calls or through email. And what we do is we track when that when that happens, and our aim is to get the cost per lead or the cost per conversion down. And so we, you know, one of our tag lines is making data makes sense. And I think that's where we really focus we focus on the analytics and trying to show that what we do on digital what we do with online ads, what we do with SEO All, it really relates to your business metrics. That's what you want to be focused on. So that's what we focus on to. So we try and make whatever is happening with your website makes sense with your business objectives.
Jake Van Buschbach 6:14
Yeah, I've spoken with both of you guys before, and you guys are quite the potent combo. I do really like your guys's data driven approach to things. And I think that's a really big advantage to SEO, is that you guys are actually able to look at the analytics, look at the data. And you're able to actually see how people are progressing with this kind of stuff, day to day, month to month season, the season.
Andrew Jackson 6:36
When the pregnant, we've Sorry to interrupt you at that point. The problem of Google Analytics and a lot of these platforms now is they're getting more and more sophisticated and more and more overwhelming. Like back in the day, Google Analytics was a bit more stripped down a bit more simpler. And it now it seems like you need a degree to navigate it and often, like I don't really use that Google Analytics for major reporting, I try and use visualization software for that. However, it's good. It's good just to go in there and dig around when you've got an answer to a certain question that you're looking for. But you can get lost in Google Analytics. So what we want to do for clients is really have a one or two page report that really shows focuses on their business objectives. And then, you know, how that translates to what we're doing online. So, you know, the traffic, the engagement, the inquiries, where the inquiries come from, and giving them important information that actually matters to the business.
Jake Van Buschbach 7:37
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today so badly is because there's so many questions that I have with all of this kind of stuff. It's very overwhelming nowadays. There's there's the problem of the the flood of information like 10 years ago, it was like you said the Wild West, it was an endless realm of opportunity. And then now today just seems like we're just drowning in options, drowning in information. It's just a neverending flood. And it's really nice to be able to have experts like yourself. We had another interview with with a gal Gabby Decker. She runs another company that does a very good job, Gd commerce, they focus more on online marketing, this kind of stuff, online stores. But how do people like yourself to ask questions for is fantastic. So can you break down? What exactly is Seo? I know it stands for search engine optimization. But what does it mean? Exactly?
Andrew Jackson 8:30
I mean, what it boils down to is just trying to get
Yeah, so trying to get found on Google, but not paying for it organically. It means like, you know, rather than going through an ad, it's, it's an organic ranking. So it's a natural ranking that Google is analyzing over 200 different factors. And then it's based on the keyword and based on your location, it's then spitting out results that it thinks it's almost like a wreck. recommendation of what, where Google thinks that you want to go in terms of a website. And really, it's so competitive now it's getting more and more competitive. Like, do you know how many websites there are in the world?
Jake Van Buschbach 9:14
I do not believe.
Andrew Jackson 9:20
Yeah, you billions it's so last year it was. I think that started last year when I checked, it was around 1.8 billion. It's already up to 2 billion. So it's expanding, expanding, more and more websites coming out there. So more and more competition to rank. And on top of that, you know, you've got other factors. So what percentage of clicks take place on page one of Google? You know,
Jake Van Buschbach 9:47
99 95% Like I said, I got questions. I don't have answers. I would say 95% happen on the
Andrew Jackson 9:56
first page of Google. That's, that's Yeah, it's close to that. Like 92.5, last time I checked, that makes it so it's you're either on page one or you're nowhere. You know, and it's tough to get on page two for some competitive keywords. So it's really finding sweet spots of like, where you can rank and what your keywords are in terms of accuracy for your business, and then accuracy in terms of what your target audience is searching for. So it's like matching all those things together and coming up with keyword strategy, and then creating content that ranks for that. So what I've delved into more than nuts and bolts of SEO, as well as giving you an overview, but I think it's important as I've gone over that,
Jake Van Buschbach 10:42
yeah. So you've mentioned now keyword quite a few times. What is a keyword? And can you give me an example of what a small business would kind of look for when they're talking when you've mentioned optimizing your SEO as well? So what is a keyword? How can I use those to optimize my businesses Seo?
Andrew Jackson 10:58
Yeah, so I guess keywords, I could say query or the you know, when you're using the search box to type in a query are more and more people are using voice search. That's something we should chat about as
Jake Van Buschbach 11:10
well. Really interesting. Yeah.
Andrew Jackson 11:12
So like, over 50% of users are now using voice search, which brings its own challenges for SEO because it's more the queries are more like questions and more natural is more natural language. So it's like things like where to order pizza from tonight that kind of thing? Or like, what is managed IT services you know, rather than rather than someone just typing in Shaw, like a sharp keyword like 80 services so that that would be an example of a keyword for your industry so like managed IT services managed service provider, but around that you'd be looking at Okay, what are they all the services that we do so cybersecurity? Is it void visit all sorts of different things. And so what you want to work on as a business is what are the key words I want to rank for? And where do I want them to rank? So coming up with that strategy is, is almost the starting point when we work with people.
Jake Van Buschbach 12:18
So when you mentioned ranking, is that just me having my keyword on my website a lot? Is that something where I might have a picture uploaded where I've got that keyword in it? How would I improve my ranking for this kind of stuff?
Andrew Jackson 12:32
Okay, so let's go back to SEO and a bit of a more of an overview. I always talk. Like when I'm in my class at brain station, I always talk about the holy trinity of SEO. And so the there's three big things that if you get right, you're going to do well for your ranking. Okay. So the first one is content. So content is king. It's, it's it's really the thing that you want to make amazing on your website, you want to have it very informative, you want it to be unique. Rand Fishkin from Moz talks about 10 times content or 10 x content, where you're trying to make it 10 times better by making it really well researched, really well thought out, and just making it engaging so that people stay on your website. So there's that aspect. So making sure you've got great content. The second thing is user experience. So you want to make sure that the user experience on your website is super slick. It's fast, it's responsive, so it works on all devices. When we do web design. Now, one thing we can do is look at all the different viewports and make sure that it looks great. It performs great on all the different devices. So that that's something you want to make sure happens. And it's more and more important now over 50% of visits happen on mobile now for most websites, most industry is actually your industry. It's interested in most of your keywords. It's like 70 to 80% desktop visits in Greater Vancouver area. But it just depends on your industry. So you want to look into that. But generally, mobile is really important. Google does this thing now called priority mobile indexing. So this means I'm jumping around a little bit here, but Google does essentially three things. Okay. So it crawls. So it looks for websites, it indexes, so it categorizes websites, and then it ranks them. So these are the three things that Google does. And think of it like a library. So Google has to find the books, it then puts them on shelves and categories. And then it acts like a librarian. He actually advises people what to read. So that's the power of Google. And if you think of it like that, the indexing part the category In what happens is it's actually the Google smartphone bot that crawls your website and index it the mobile version First, it doesn't look at your desktop version. So how you perform on mobile is getting more and more important. And it's actually now starting to affect your rankings. So that user experience the second thing is super important and making sure that you work well on mobile devices. The third thing is links. So there's three different types of links. There's External links, there's backlinks, and there's internal links. backlinks are links from other websites that link to you. And it's almost like they're voting for you. They're saying, this is a good website. And it used to be that you could game the system and that's this is where the you got all these spam links, appearing on all these different websites. And what happened then back then it was it was it's called PageRank Google's algorithm that started off Why why Google became the best SEO search engines is because of their algorithm called PageRank. And back then you could game the system, you could just get tons and tons of links from all these spammy places, and Google would put you near the top. Now, they've countered that there's 200, different ranking factors and a lot of other things that come into it. So what you want to focus on is quality links, not quantity. So get get backlinks from sites that are relevant to your industry into your location.
And then you also want to use External links, you want to link out to other relevant sites. So it's kind of weird. When you design a website, you want to keep them on your website. So often, you're thinking I don't want to link to other sites because then they might get distracted. They might go somewhere. But research has shown sites that have a lot more External links to relevant sites, not spam sites. They have much better SEO because Google sees them into locked as part of the system and sees how you connect with the wider world. And you're not just all about yourself. So it's kind of a nice message. And then the third one is internal links or making sure that the, the internal linking structure of your website, all your main pages on your site, have links to them from blog articles and making, it's all to do the user experience making sure everything's relevant and nicely laid out for them. So they have a great experience on your website.
Jake Van Buschbach 17:35
Yeah, that makes sense. That's so interesting.
No, no, that's that. Absolutely fantastic. To be honest with you. That's so much information. And I'm going to be rewatching this and taking notes for sure. That's so interesting that you say that because I do notice that it's usually if I'm Google searching for something technical. Or if I'm just google googling for some Daily News stuff. I do tend to notice it's usually the same websites. Coming up nowadays, and I've noticed that these people all linked to each other, like, for example, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. It's just always interlocked. And it's always always you can see we got our source material here. And it just goes to Washington Post if you're in New York Times and vice versa. So that the link thing is very, very interesting to me. And you mentioned, there's 200 different ways that it does ranking. That's incredible. So how does how does a normal person kind of manage all that stuff? And it seems like, again, it's kind of a situation with my company where it's now a necessity for you and I do exist, because for someone who owns a hair salon, or someone who owns an accounting firm, trying to keep track of these 200 ways to rank that doesn't seem to work very well. I think a better example, honestly, would be a plumber, or an electrician. Because when people are trying to find those services, it's very immediate, and it's just, I'm going to I got a pipe burst. I'm going to go on Google. I'm going to search for Pipe repair, plumbing, Vancouver, whatever, like you said, my pipe is bursting Siri helped me out. And being able to rank number one there could make a break in business. So it's really interesting to me how how much this has changed. Because when I was looking at SEO stuff, it was right, a spammy blog that use the same word over and over again, link to your own website in the header or something like that. And make sure that you've got a fast website. So Google ranks you high. So again, really, really appreciate the information. That's a ton of good stuff. So what specific benefits do you think most businesses can really expect if they managed to nail their Seo? Is it just coming up on the first page of Google? Have you noticed any other benefits from from having good SEO? Do clients actually comment and say, you've got a really nice website? I found the blogs really valuable, or do most people kind of sidestep that stuff? What's your experience
Andrew Jackson 19:59
so SEO is a part of sem, which is search engine marketing. So it's like a branch of the tree. And really sem is all about trying to get more more clicks and more impressions within Google search. And I talked about Google, because that's the search engine that most people use in, in North America. But it really matters. You know, if you're in South Korea, it would be Naver if you were in Russia be Yandex. So you have to first think about who you're trying to reach. And then then you optimize for that search engine. So if you think of SEO as part of your sem strategy, then it's just really about trying to boost the authority and reputation of your own company so that you come up in search, so that when people are searching for queries that are relevant to your business and to your products, your services that you appear, and for some places like it might be Be the first time they come across you. So you have to make sure that your SEO title and your SEO description, the things that Google show in the search results are really well thought out. They're really well written, they have your keywords in there. And really you're trying to get people to click through to your website, so they have to have some kind of enticing description, they have to, they have to make people want to click a little bit so so there's, there's all that you've got to consider. And also within sem, you've got other things so you've got you've got advertising, so it's not always about like, okay, some some companies shouldn't go full into SEO. Like if you're a plumber or painter, you know, you might not want to spend hours and hours writing blogs. Typically the way you rank. What you might want to do is get a nice site together that's like simple like maybe eight pages that is everything you need, and you SEO optimize those as well as possible. But then you have a Google ad campaign where you know that if you can get a qualified lead to maybe book a consultation with you, if you can get that for $50, you can work out, okay, this is this is really good. I can just keep going with Google ads, because there's a lot of margin in that if I can get a qualified lead for $50. You know, a job that I do is that, you know, thousands of dollars, maybe $10,000. It's a really good margin. So you just keep pouring more and more money into Google ads. And you can survive off doing that you don't have to go full in on SEO, you have to weigh up what what's the right mix of Google Ads versus SEO. The other thing is, there's other things like Google My Business, so for local SEO, you know, you want to fully optimize your Google My Business profile, you want to put in all your services, all your keywords, you put in your service areas. So you This is telling Google exactly what is relevant for you. So you're more likely to show up for your website. In the search rankings when you combine it with all these, they're called local SEO signals. So that you're, you're integrating everything together. And so there's a there's a huge mix here. But ultimately, the benefit of SEO is this. I mean, this is what it sold us. It's free clicks. You know, once you once you're ranking for SEO, you, you're really getting that traffic for free. And so it's like the holy grail of search engine marketing, because you're not having to pay for those clicks. I would argue that you are paying for those clicks, because you have to invest in content strategy, you have to develop great content, you have to have a really good website. And it's, it's not really something that you just set and forget. It's like you have to keep going back to these articles and updating them, making them better. And so you have to decide what's the right mix for your company? Is it? Is it to go full in SEO? is it to have a mix of Google ads and Seo? Or is it more to lean on on Google ads? And the other the other factor there is with a new website, it typically takes like nine months for you to start ranking. So is that something? If you bought a new domain? Is that something that you can afford to do just sit around and wait for it to start ranking in nine months time? I mean, it depends on the keyword and the competitiveness and where you are. But generally, we we always say, to get to light the fire to get the fire started. You need Google ads, that's like the kindling. And then you want to build up your SEO in the background so that you start ranking for the keywords that you're bidding on with Google ads. And so it's this mix. It's like a recipe that you want to put together. That's not the same for every company. But you want to work out exactly how much Google Ads how much SEO And how that changes over time.
Jake Van Buschbach 25:03
That makes a ton of sense. So you've answered about half of my questions
Andrew Jackson 25:10
about this. Probably So, so into it, but no, I love this stuff. It's just really, one of our taglines is helping awesome people succeed online. And that's really what motivates us. Like, we, if we don't really like the person we're working with, or, you know, we're not really into what we what they're doing. It's not quite the same for us. So, you know, we really want to invest in people and help businesses do well like businesses that are doing awesome stuff. We work with a couple of peacocks and and just just to just to help help them succeed online. It's it's very fulfilling, actually. And
Jake Van Buschbach 25:49
so that that's,
Andrew Jackson 25:50
that's a real motivation and why I get quite excited about this sort of techie stuff.
Jake Van Buschbach 25:55
Yeah. Now I'm on the same page as here we take the same approach and again, I have a tendency to rant a little bit people know me for that. So no worries, man. Again, this is super, super valuable information, really appreciate it. So you did mention that sem is kind of the tree. And then you have branches of this tree like SEO, Google ads, Google My Business, what are what are some of the other branches on this tree?
Andrew Jackson 26:21
So I would say the 800 pound gorilla in the room is with
his Wikipedia. And so
Jake Van Buschbach 26:29
really, if,
Andrew Jackson 26:31
yeah, so one, one of the best pieces of information I've been given about SEO is to Wikipedia fire your page, as much as possible. And now you've got to balance things up. Yeah, like Wikipedia is long and it's kind of it could seem drab to a lot of websites like in terms of like having to have this certain structure. You have your anchor links at the top that go to all these different parts of your your article. But the key thing is why rank so well for SEO? Apart from getting a lot of links from other websites, because it's got such good authority. But the key thing is long form content about one one main keyword or one main thing. And that's why it has the ability to rank so well. And so for your business you for some, some of my clients, they're professional speakers. They appeared in the media, they have lots of TV stuff that they've done. Yeah, they can actually write Wikipedia pages. And this gives you this gives you an enhanced authority. And it also shows up number one for sure. When people are googling you are googling your company. So I would ask a company, can you get a Wikipedia page. And what that means is Google Wikipedia has very strict rules about the criteria that you can appear If you're a living person, it's actually easy to get on there. If you're a dead person. Like the the you have to be very notable lucky, whenever you write something to Wikipedia, they, they say, Oh, this person is not notable enough yet, so you have to look through their criteria and see, is it possible to get someone on there who's done some great thing, maybe an inventor for your company? Or maybe your company has invented some unique stuff, then I would look or is it possible to get on there? So Wikipedia is something I would shine a light on and say, look at that.
Jake Van Buschbach 28:36
You recommend that we pretend and we fake our death to boost our SEO? That's gonna boost the numbers. And
Andrew Jackson 28:45
yeah, if you want to take it that way, no, not exactly. But uh, yeah, I prefer living people.
Jake Van Buschbach 28:51
Okay, gotcha.
So you didn't mention as well, that you want to look for somebody who's going to do your best SEO and your sem? Who's gonna build your Wikipedia page, see if they can do that. What are some other signs of a good digital marketer, a good sem marketer.
Andrew Jackson 29:11
And before I move on to that I must qualify that you can't actually get paid for doing someone's Wikipedia page according to Wikipedia rules. So you have to be bit careful around that. Yeah, it maybe you just you can charge a fee for writing an article type thing. If you're an agency or if you're doing that for someone, a consultant. There are Yeah, there are creative ways around it, but just be careful around that. Wikipedia is trying to be like this, you know, community of, you know, editors the doing it for the love of information. Yeah. And the spread of proper information.
Unknown Speaker 29:52
Yeah. So, yeah,
Andrew Jackson 29:54
so just be just be aware of that. In terms of a good digital marketer. There's a few things I would mention like one you want to, you want to gel with a person that you're gonna work with. So make sure you have some kind of connection on a human level. And I would say that about any business here. Yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to work with people that you don't gel with. That doesn't make anything fun. I think business should be fun. You know, you know, they should be challenges, but it should be you should have a good time doing it. That's the first thing. The second thing is like, make sure they're transparent. And also work out you know, your how you're going to measure success for anything you do online. Don't let them Don't let someone you're working with an agency or consultant. Don't let them dictate what success would be like. So you've got to tell them, this is what I'm looking for. These are the goals. So ultimately, I want more revenues. I want more leads. I want more engagement on my website. I want more inquiries, I want more traffic and So what you can do then is you can set up what we do is we set up a dashboard of website goals, that then every month, we can actually look at, and record it down and see, okay, we're going up, we're progressing. And ultimately, you want to have that dashboard that tells you it, are you is it successful what you're doing? You don't want to always be guessing, is it working? You actually want it to translate to real numbers. And that goes back to the analytics and making data makes sense that we talked about that national digital.
Jake Van Buschbach 31:31
Yeah, no, that that makes a lot of sense as well. And, again, one of the reasons why I like your industry so much. And what I'm trying to kind of do with my company is is get into that metrics. Because if we do that already, I've been doing that for years and years and years now with my clients where we sit down quarterly, we review everything we've been doing, and there's statistics and there's numbers, and it's boring, and a lot of people don't like it, but it's very easy for them to see okay, the number of automations has quadrupled and the number of downtime. has gone down 90% or 95%. And all of our productivity is going through the roof. But I can see people are collaborating, and I can see people are doing more with less. And there's so many benefits to being able to work with a company that says, here's a and and transparently say, this is where you were when we started, here's where you are now. And here's where we're going to get you. And having that steady progress that you can show off by using tools like Google Analytics, or other I'm sure we're going to get into some other tools that you recommend shortly. Being able to look at these tools and say, when you hired us, you were getting 1000 views a month, now you're getting 100,000 views a month, you know, and yeah, your conversion rate went from 5% to 20%. But our goal is to get you up to 25%, you know, or whatever a reasonable number would be. So I do really, really like working with people like you said, you got to gel with them. They've got to be transparent. They've got to be honest. And personally, I don't really like working with vendors unless they're crazy like you and I are Where it's just eat dreams, sleep, whatever it is that we're doing because, again, you go to a party and people like, Hey, man, what's going on? How are you is like, Oh, good man, you know, just reading a Cisco manual again and it's Like what? Like, did you did you watch Game of Thrones? No, no, no, there's a seminar on this new firewall technology that came out or this data loss prevention, email service and just invigorating man, people are just like, okay, am I gonna talk to you for the rest of the night? But I do, I do really like those prerequisites that you mentioned before you work with someone so segwaying over to the tools that you would recommend the tools that you kind of use to track this stuff. What do you recommend folks use while they're trying to develop their sem strategy?
Andrew Jackson 33:43
I'm sorry to keep doing this here. But before we move on to the next,
Jake Van Buschbach 33:45
please do.
Please do.
Andrew Jackson 33:50
There's a couple of things here like so one is we be careful with digital marketing because it is the Wild West there's no good reason an industry standard or certification. And so you want if you're if you're going to work with an agency, ask them for like some past case studies or like how what they've done in the past relates to what they're going to do for your industry or for your company. And check their Google reviews, you know, are they are they authentic? Are they real? Are they Is there a lot of them, you know, check what people are saying about the company. Because anyone who's doing a really good job, is probably going to ask, you know, their best clients to write them a nice review. So just just go and check that out. Yeah. That's one thing. The other thing is, be careful with what you're setting up as a metric because measure what matters and be be aware that you become what you measure. Because if you set the parameters around like inquiries from a form of phone calls, and you say, Oh, I want to boost phone calls, By 100%, then all of a sudden, that is what the campaign will look like, you will start to do actions that try to increase that. So make sure you set the metrics and you work out. This is actually the things that we need. So often, it's like when we're dealing with a client, it's trying to get to know them and understand their business and what it is their objectives are. And then so we can only be as good as that, that engagement is our that information is so make sure you're clear in what you're trying to do and, and communicate your business and exactly what your objectives are your marketing strategy. And then what we can do is we can run with that we can translate that onto online onto website marketing. And so just be careful to set the right metrics and, but also remember, it's iterative. So like, campaigns change over time. And if you decide, okay, phone calls, you know, I increased Phone calls by 100%. But you know, half of them were just time wasters, then all of a sudden, you might go a different direction. So it's a constantly evolving dialogue between the consultant, the agency, the digital marketer, and the business owner, the marketing officer, whatever. And so yeah, just be aware of that.
Jake Van Buschbach 36:20
That makes a lot of sense. Again, it's the same thing in it, you got to make sure that what you're doing you're have a whole lot of very high touch relationship. It's really important to touch base at least once a month, at least once a month. And you need to make sure that, like you said, the metrics that you're measuring matter. Because if you're like you said, you have 100 phone calls, you go up to 1000 phone calls, your conversion goes from 10% to 1%. That's not an improvement, like you haven't improved anything. So what other steps do you recommend people make before they get started with SEO, so obviously define your metrics. Make sure you match with the person. Make sure that the person is happy. To make sure that the person has a good strategy and does business the way that you'd like them to where they're being held accountable, they're being transparent. Is there anything else that you can recommend to SEO specifically, that people should look out for or that people should keep in mind while they're picking a service provider?
Andrew Jackson 37:19
Yeah, so a national digital for our monthly SEO clients, we have like an eight step SEO process that involves is the last step you know, like, an hour consultation by used to be in person sometimes. But now it's more like on on zoom or Google me and, and also monthly content, so like working on actual new content, and that's kind of like the final step once we get to that. But the one of the crucial first steps is actually setting up an analytics system. So a lot of people might have set up Google Analytics for that. business, but they've just kind of, you know, put the code on their website. And then they've started gathering data. Some, many clients haven't even got to that stage, by the way. So just be aware when when when you start with Google Analytics, that becomes Year Zero. Google can't show you analytics for your website before you've actually set up Google Analytics. So that becomes like Year Zero, you start recording from then. And so, you know, setting up the analytics, the parameters within which you will judge the campaign is a crucial step. But before that, you've all you've got to go through a brief like a campaign brief, you've got to work out. Okay, what are your business goals? What are your website goals? What are the key things to measure? And it goes back to something we use at UBC in a course. It's a framework called go Sam GOS a m, and you can use this as a framework to map out Any campaign or any any project you're working on, not necessarily digital, it could be your life. But the goal Sam stands for goals, objectives, strategies, activities and metrics. And it's a cascading waterfall of dependence. So your goals, determine your objectives, your objectives, determine strategies, your activities, your metrics, and really, you can use that as a framework to map out Okay, my business goals are this, my objectives of this which you know, like SMART objectives, as you know, they have to be specific, they have to be measurable, achievable, realistic, timeframe, all that stuff, all goes back to like business one on one and stuff like that, Mm hmm. But you want you want to work on this framework or have an idea of this. And then you can then where the digital marketer will come in, is really the strategies the activities to be done for your website or online for SEO for Google ads, and then then the metrics will be determined based on your goals and objectives. And really, you want to be able to see that on a monthly basis, like, like I mentioned as a dashboard. So you can see whether things are getting better or not. So, and the more clearly you can communicate your business goals, the better the digital marketing will become.
Jake Van Buschbach 40:28
That makes a lot of sighs
Okay, so, back to the tools that we were discussing earlier. Do you have anything else you want to go before we dive into that?
Andrew Jackson 40:40
No, no. Okay.
Jake Van Buschbach 40:44
Okay, cool. So looking at the tools that people are using nowadays, you mentioned Google Analytics more than a few times I would even call it go Sam, a tool technically, like we we do something as well as a service industry thing. It's called PP di O. So it's prepared Plan, design, implement, operate and optimize. It just makes sure that what you're doing, you've listened to the client, you've prepared everything that you need, you've planned out what it is you're going to be doing. you design it in a way that makes sense and and checks all the boxes for the clients. you implement it based off of your plan. And then you operate it for a little while you review what you've done, and then you optimize it. So it's very similar. Again, I'm sure that your business could adapt that I do like the NGO Sam method as well. But I would consider both of those to be tools just as much as Google Analytics, or something like hot jar where you're able to track where people's mouse's are going to see what it is that they're interested in on a website. Do you have a list of tools that you prefer to work with or that you recommend people use if they're just getting started with this stuff?
Andrew Jackson 41:53
And there are so many that we teach.
Jake Van Buschbach 41:57
score the top three or top five
Andrew Jackson 42:00
Yeah, I mean,
I would start with a Google suite. You know, if you want to rank on Google search engine, you've got to go straight to the horse's mouth, you know, for all your data. So, go, you know, learn how to use Google Analytics, learn how to use Google Search Console. So and then also Google My Business, I would start with these, these are the most important for SEO. And then I use Google Data Studio, which is a visualization tool so that you can put the you can put Google Analytics into all these different widgets and make it focus on things that you want to focus on and add these different filters for things. So it's it you can create really cool looking easy to digest reports, rather than just, you know, like Google Analytics, plowing through all those. They've got dashboards in Google Analytics, but they're not very good. They they you can you can setting them up and experiment with them. But generally, they're not not that useful compared to, you know, Google Data Studio and being able to really visualize things. So I'm, and I'm talking there for the business owner and say, the C level suite within a company because it sure you've got loads of data analysts who want to really get into the the data and the back end of everything in the website. But generally, you want to be able to communicate things that are higher, more meaningful level. And so that's what we use Data Studio for. Google Analytics really is about what's happening on your website. So it's like tracking, you know, where did they come from? What are they doing on your website? And then that's what really that tools about. Google Search Console is really the step before. It's like, how are you performing within Google search? It's all linked to a website. So it's all seen through a parameter of your website. And so you can see on Google Search Console, like how how many keywords you showed up for in search in the last month? And yeah, and so you can see, okay, I got 1000 impressions for i don't know i IT services Vancouver, but I only got 20 clicks. So you know, why is my click through rate only, you know, that that level, and and you look at, you look at where you're getting lots of impressions, and maybe not as many clicks. This means you got to go back and work on your SEO titles and descriptions that are showing up in Google because people are seeing them and not clicking. So maybe you just need to improve the language that you're using. But be be aware also that it's important, what keywords you put in there because this is the low hanging fruit of SEO, and that is to fix your SEO titles and descriptions. So that they have the keyword for each page that you want to rank in the SEO title and the description that makes. Yeah, but you, you don't want to spam it, you don't want to make it look like a bot is created, it needs to feel human. And it needs to also feel like you want to click through. And so there's all sorts of stuff you can get there and Google Search Console about your impressions clicks, based on a keyword based on the location, it'll show you. It'll show you, you know where the person is. That's, that seemed the impression. So an impression is just when you show up in the search. Yeah, yeah, but but not necessarily that they click, they just saw you but for a keyword. It'll also show your average position. So your average ranking, but it's, it's done nationally, so it's not that meaningful, unless you're a nationwide company.
But there's the other thing is about Google Search Console is it's it's, it used to be called Google Webmaster Tools. And that means it's like the ability of someone who's looking after a website to go and communicate directly with Google about what's happening with your website. So for example, say you do a bunch of updates and what you look at in Google search, it's not quite showing the right thing. You can go into search console and ask it to recrawl your website. So they updates, spit, generally, Google will crawl your website lots of times a day, but you want to you can monitor that you can actually see how you're being indexed. Is it the smartphone bar, or is it the desktop bar? And My bet is, if you're any kind of website now, with any traffic, it will be mobile. It's all it's all indexed for mobile and the mobile but yeah, but you can also see, I mean, this is getting into more technical SEO stuff like what structured data or what rich results you're preparing for. So there's all this other thing now, you know, I mentioned the Holy Trinity SEO, but as well as that is like, you know, a myriad of all of the different options of things you can optimize. And one thing I would tell your listeners, your watchers, your viewers to look up, if they haven't got into that, and they really want to dig deeper into SEO, there's a few things and one of them is schema or structured data. And that's like when you search a recipe. It's like it's the data that shows up in the backend of a website that actually has like the picture. It has, like the time it takes to cook a recipe, the calories, all this information that you can add as as meta data at the top of a web page so that Google can show your page better than two to two people in search. And and Google Search Console will show you what what kind of rich results you're preparing for. And so I'd suggest you know, your your viewers to have a look at that. And there's all sorts of tools around that like, now I, we typically use WordPress and I can go on, I could speak for hours about the best plugins for WordPress for SEO. But one of them there is called structured data schema for WordPress. And that's, that's an amazing plugin that can help you with getting these rich results. There's also a MP accelerated mobile pages. So it's more important this for like media sites. And you mentioned things like New York Times, they're all using accelerated mobile pages. It's all the stuff like if you've got an Android phone and you swipe left, you'll notice a lightning symbol and that means it's the ANP version of a page. Okay? it Yeah, it's Google's stripped down version of your web page. So it's got very rigorous, like rules about what can appear. And it's just like HTML and everything else is stripped out of it. And, like for WordPress, there's an a&p plugin that can generate this version of your, of your blog pages, and even your normal pages that can as well. But then it's almost like it's creating a new version of your website to be served fast on mobile. And that's where Google developed this. It doesn't Google doesn't want people to be hanging around on mobile waiting for things to load, especially if you're on like, you know, a 3g network, 4g network, whatever. And you're trying to download things. So this is the way that they force web designers and websites to serve ultra fast content for for mobile. And so there's always new developments like this that you have to keep, you know, keep in touch with SEO. And the new one that they're coming out with now is called Google stories and it's like in 10 slides You can like show the information of a blog post and you've got to develop like this whole, it's like a little reel that you develop. And so there's, you know, there are there's always new stuff to try and keep up to date with. So the best thing you can do is like follow search engine blogs. There's a few like real good industry leaders, Neil Patel, you know, Brian Dean. There's a guy called Alex Chris. So Neil Patel has an amazing keyword tool called Uber suggests. And he actually bought this and then like, put it onto his website and through it grew his business and amazing amount and got all these extra visitors and think he paid like a million dollars for something like that. Don't quote me on some of these facts.
Jake Van Buschbach 50:45
Yeah, I actually I, I was doing a little bit of research and SEO before the show about a week ago before we had you on and now my Instagram, my LinkedIn, my Facebook, it's all theirs. Neil Patel guy All, like all my ads are like this one secret from Neil Patel will blow your mind and this tool kit from Neil Patel, you've never seen anything like it. So I'm not familiar with him. You also mentioned low hanging fruit of SEO. So really quickly. How do you feel about clickbait? Is it useless with SEO? Is it is it useful as another branch of the tree of sem? For example, I just post this video is Andrew Jackson, SEO digital marketing strategies, and then I'll put it up on YouTube and just make a comment about what we're talking about. But I have a friend of mine who runs another business that helps with international tourism, international students, this kind of stuff. And he's always posting the clickbait stuff where it's like, you won't believe what this house in Vancouver has to offer. And then he'll put like a picture of something crazy in the house or whatever, you know, like have you noticed a benefit to using the clickbait strategies?
Andrew Jackson 51:57
Yeah, so one, so we've got a checklist and that's it. Do checklists when you're developing, and I'm one of them is to try and use that a little bit, but only in as much as is appropriate for your brand.
Jake Van Buschbach 52:09
Yeah. Don't want to be a cheeseball. Yeah, yeah,
Andrew Jackson 52:14
it definitely works for YouTube. And I think, you know, your strategy with these videos could be you have a long, far more in depth piece of content. It's almost like the Joe Rogan model of podcasts in our YouTube. And it's like, you have the long form thing. And then you have like little short videos where it's like, then you could get into more of the clickbait titles for that. And it just, it just depends and then, but he definitely helps with click through rates when there's certain words that can be used, that really get people like Oh, go to click on that. And so you know, when you're on some kind of dodgy website, and you see those things that appear at the bottom and you're like, you're like, you know, you won't believe how this celebrity looks when they were 12 years old. You know, Peppa Pig Just seven is amazing. Yeah, exactly. Three outro gets a picture seven. Yeah, it's just but it's horrible. Yeah. Like, you've got to think, you know, okay, you might be able to get people to your site, but does it match with the messaging when they're there? And like, what's the whole purpose? I would say focus on the people that matter rather than everyone Yeah, you're trying to get everyone to your site just try and get the the people who are actually going to convert are the people you're trying to do business with? Or the people you're trying to relate to whatever it's like, I just I don't know I i think we were missing human qualities more and more. I agree in everything we do. And often with digital it's like how can we gain the system just be real just do it properly. You know, like, yeah, try and be good human being
you know, my hi Oscar, but
Jake Van Buschbach 53:52
we had a Kevin MacLeod on he's the CEO of words AI security and the CEO of yardsticks services, also on the are short. And he's a very good guy for WordPress as well. You mentioned that but another cabin that we were talking to I don't know why to start from Kevin Kevin, but another Kevin that we had on the show as well. He actually I think he called marketers locusts or something like that. He was saying that this new fad of just figure out what the key word is figure out what the buzzwords are, jump into a sector. Totally just spam the hell out of it, lose all of the humanity, just figure out the formula that works and hit it and then jump to the next sector when you start to kill it. Like he said, email marketing 1015 years ago, amazing, golden, perfect. And then marketers got into it. And now no one reads email anymore. And then five years ago, Facebook, everyone and their dog was on Facebook and it was really cool. And now it's gotten to the point where if I get a Facebook ad, I think it's creepy. And I don't even like to look at them anymore. Again, this Neil Patel guy I was like, Okay, this guy's a scammer. But now that someone as professional as yourself is recommended, and I'm actually going to click on these ads and look at what he's talking about. But it just it's very funny to me how you said you want to bring the humanity back to it. And that's another one of the reasons why I think that you've done so well is because you're trying to focus on the reality of the situation. And the people behind the service not getting lost and technicalities and the formulas of trying to create as many people and which is why I kind of asked about the clickbait stuff. So, you mentioned the Neil Patel thing as well. So do you have any other people that you recommend people follow any market leaders, any people that I can follow on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. learn a little bit more about this stuff as I'm doing the Daily News scrolling.
Andrew Jackson 55:45
I mean, yeah, Brian, Dean of backlinko is amazing as well, you know, backlinko.com he's, he's really the dawn of SEO. I think Neil Patel has like risen above him recently because partly because of Uber suggests this keyword tool but This Search Engine Journal search engine lon but a lot of these things they're like, you know, it goes in so much detail. And it's really just for SEO people. Like, I like business business, people who are really trying to learn about SEO, you can, you know, there's constant articles every day about the smallest thing like the latest algorithm released by Google and what it means for different industries. You know, eat at the start stores that appear in my like Android, where I get my Google stories and, you know, I skim through a few every day, but just to try and keep up with everything is like, it's almost like a full time profession. Yeah. So I would dive into things a little bit. But yeah, if Neil Patel is really good at like, business strategy and how to do it well online, so he's a good one to start with. But, you know, we've got a blog as well, national, digital, you know, everything's a work in progress. We We're finding we you know, we're at the start of our journey we we currently work and look after about 42 websites. And the one that always seems to get neglected is our own. So yeah, I mean we do. It's, it's like the mechanic that doesn't look after his car
Unknown Speaker 57:16
Exactly.
Jake Van Buschbach 57:19
me come, you come home, my cable management is a mess. As you can see with the TV by me, I just don't care. I don't want to deal with it. I deal with it all day every day. And when I get home, I don't care. So I totally get where you're coming from.
Andrew Jackson 57:34
But we do have some good blog articles. So like this one is called the fundamentals, search engine marketing fundamentals. And it was written as like a response to all the stuff that I teach at various station and it's very in depth. It was almost trying to do a Wikipedia article about search engine marketing. So maybe I could share that link with with with your viewers as well in the in the comments. And then yeah, I've actually got like, a private page on my site for my students brain station for like all the resources I use for search engine marketing. And it's password protected, but I could share that as well with with your viewers and put that in there so they can skim through it. And within there, there's all sorts of resources like the top 10 plugins for SEO for WordPress and things like that. So it's a treasure trove of stuff that I'm always updating. So I can share that as well so that you can look look at different tools. One tool I will mention just as a nice little thing to check out is one call you viewers might know of it, but it's called built with calm. And so it's like, you know, what is the website built with so say you've got someone a competitor, or you've got a website that you've found and you're like, this is killer. This is great. What what the How did they make this Saw, what are they doing behind the scenes on this website, all you have to do is go to build web.com put in the website, and it will tell you like what it's built with the CMS, it'll tell you all the marketing tools they use in. And that is that is really good for research, like when you're checking out websites and trying to check out you know, how people are doing something cool. So yeah, I would recommend using that. But there's all sorts of stuff like that, that I put in my resources in this in this page for my students or brain station.
Jake Van Buschbach 59:33
Yeah, we'll throw all those links and description for sure. One thing I was going to say is I'm going to start using that tool because a lot of the time we end up doing is something other who is search. I'm sure you're familiar with that. Because when we're taking over control of some of these companies, a lot of them don't know who the webmaster is. A lot of them don't know what the old IT guy managing this what's the deal, blah, blah, blah. And we have to try to figure out okay, how do we break into this domain But being able to actually figure out, okay, your website was built on WordPress,
Unknown Speaker 1:00:04
right?
Jake Van Buschbach 1:00:06
Like a lot of folks, a lot of lawyers, a lot of financial people, there's a lot of professionals out there that just don't maintain their site. And they just assume that we're going to be able to get into it right away. So I'm definitely gonna check out that, that website there and start using that with my clients and just say, okay, you have a WordPress site, who is the who is the credentials for this WordPress site? And do you know how much you're paying for this plug in every month? Because it says, Here's 2995 or 15 bucks a month, whatever. And there's a free version or there's an updated version, whatever. But it's really good to know I'll make sure to link to all that stuff. That's awesome. Man. I do have to ask you about the the zombie apocalypse stuff, the COVID stuff. So regarding that, I'm assuming that you're probably in the same boat as us and you've noticed an increase of services and you've noticed an increase in the benefit for your clients of using SEO But I won't assume here what what's been your experience with the whole COVID situation? so far? Are people benefiting from doing digital marketing? Are they still kind of struggling and shrinking?
what it was what's been your experience?
Andrew Jackson 1:01:15
Well, I have to put that all through the lens of our company. And that is the, you know, we, although we've been going for about two years, it was really just me freelancing for a couple years, until late last year when we incorporated in November. So we're pretty, you know, we're a baby really. And my business partner only joined full time, April 1, and then I have another colleague who works on this with me, so there's three of us. And then we have a development team that helps us with our website projects. So that's where we're at. We were still like growing and then COVID came along and we were like, Oh my god, how's this gonna affect like everything we do and like my business partner left his full time job in order to you know, jump ship and devote himself to this. And what happened at first, it was interested in like, Google ads, probably, you know, maybe 40% of our clients go in touch with us and said, I think we're just going to pause our ads and see what goes on, you know, in terms of COVID, and, and like the lockdown and like just being able to work through business costs and revenues. And then what happened is they all came back within two weeks because they realized that they couldn't meet people and do business as usual. So their leads were drying up. So actually, they came back. And in many cases, they increased budgets, because they wanted to do more on digital that everyone was at home. Everyone's using the internet. Yeah. Research by zoom itself is just an incredible story. And they went from 10 million daily users to over 300 million users daily in advance. So like, if you know, think of what COVID did. And for us, it was a similar sort of catalyst. So we were able to double I think, Google Ads clients within the sort of two months of lockdown. And that I think, is because my business partner was working on things full time again. Yeah. For the first time with us. And so that certainly helped. So I had him but it also had, you know, definitely interesting people, you know, changing where they spend money rather than, you know, maybe using mailouts using like cold call and using meeting people in person. It was more, okay, the website has got to be more important and getting people to the website. So SEO, and especially Google ads. It's just kind of with anything where COVID was really good for Google ads, because it's kind of like within a specific timeframe. And you want things to happen instantly. So with Google ads, you can, you know, put a video You've got to work out a strategy behind the campaign. But you can get things going within days and start getting clicks. And you can start changing all your messaging to meet COVID. And so one thing we did is we put out a blog article, like five tips for websites for COVID.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:18
Okay, and
Andrew Jackson 1:04:19
yeah, and so it was like, a lot of it was showing, you know, like, how to build a COVID page, how to keep your, your community in the loop about how it's affecting your business. But so one of them is about Google ads. And we saw like, at first, the competition, the competition was going down, the cost per click was going down, and we saw conversions going up, you know, just just as a general rule, so we were like, Okay, this is a good time for you to actually do more Google ads.
Jake Van Buschbach 1:04:46
So your clients are actually directly benefiting and getting more conversions since COVID.
Andrew Jackson 1:04:53
I mean, I would say as a general rule, yeah. Like so we work typically with three sort of verticals. As you know, I mean industries, one of them is property or home related. And so now within that we've got realtors that, you know, COVID really messed the obviously how you how you did property deal, you know, like open houses, things like that, you know, everything changed. So it's hard to make one rule that specific across like that, you know, all our clients, but say within trades, like we work with some painters we work with a home inspector, and they typically were getting better value from the Google Ads campaigns. They were getting, you know, more inquiries, because yeah, the the old method of getting clients was dying and harder to do. Yeah, so that's one of the verticals so I've liked the home property related. The other one is financial advisors. So more and more like people want meeting in person. So virtual financial advisors are like digital financial advisors, this kind of key word became more important. And then another one is IT services and like yourself, I'm sure you would just everything became intensified as everyone started to work from home, you're having to deal with virtual private networks and setting all that up and having to do more work. So
Jake Van Buschbach 1:06:20
that thankfully we were prepared for for most of that stuff. Thankfully, we we were ahead of the curve on that. There was a couple of crazy weeks there where we add some backlog but yeah, for the most part, we were ahead of the curve with that very, very, very thankfully, we've already had everything set up and configured. The big challenge for us was getting into people's computers, getting them actually connected to the VPN on their home machines, which of course, we don't manage. It's a personal device. But and then some clients had to purchase dozens and dozens of laptops to be able to be used at home and in the office. But thankfully, again, we did have most of our clients transition over to law tops before this happened I was being laughed at in probably early January because I was like, Hey guys, I think this is going to be a problem pretty soon. We should probably start moving over because I saw these videos with people in China and Iran just dropping. And I was like this seems kind of crazy. He was walking around town wearing my full respirator and goggles in the middle of January my staffs like you crazy. Do we work for a crazy person?
But yeah, things have been intense as you said sorry.
Andrew Jackson 1:07:29
Yeah, yeah. What are the challenges have you had free call but
Jake Van Buschbach 1:07:33
um, that's that's really it. Man. To be honest with you. We've had to expand a little bit more because again, there is more demand now that people are working from home. There's some unique challenges there. Like we're not we're not working on managed networks anymore. Like you said they have to be using VPNs that are secure and now to be using remote desktop or other solutions that we provide for them that are very secure and simple. But for the most part, it's been really smooth sailing it was just that initial two weeks, I think in February, where we had thousand people just say, hey, our personal machines need to set up, we need to make sure that everything is steady. And we need to make sure that we're able to access our work stuff from our personal machines. That was the biggest deal was trying to navigate that water of what's acceptable use for personal devices, etc. But it's been a really good blessing to be honest with you. I always try to position it with my clients that way, it's a very good opportunity to restructure, you're going to be able to look at your organization from the top down and say, Okay, now is a very good time to develop all of the policies that we haven't been developing. It's a very good time to organize all of our systems in a way where we have people laid out by organizational units, those organizational units are composed into groups of people, and we're able to get all of that stuff kind of broken up for them, and when they come back from COVID in a couple of months, I hope They're going to come back in a much more organized fashion with a lot more policies being a lot more efficient, and people will kind of be used to this transition of, Okay, you know what 20% of the workforce is now going to work from home. And we've got all of these collaborative tools. We've got all of these unique ways of communicating now that we weren't leveraging before. We've got an interview with with an accounting firm coming up gray and associates with Brian gray, and I was talking to him, and I kind of got him and his team set up on Microsoft Teams about two weeks ago, I think he'd been kind of pushing it off, and he didn't want to do it. And he finally tried it out after we set it up for a month ago. And he was saying, This is amazing. Like my staff working from home, we're working on the same document at the same time. We're talking with each other, we're sharing things, hey, look at this. I've got a beach background, you know, so he's all excited about stuff like that. And it really is, in my opinion, again, a very good way to kind of exhibit started using this technology because I'm a big fan of automations. I'm a big fan of again, the same sort of approach you are looking at what a business is doing, what is the 80%? What's the 80% of value being generated by their 20% of actions, looking at what workflows make up those actions, and then using the technology to automate away a lot of the mundane nonsense, and looking at the statistics and the analytics, to make sure that that stuff is going to be able to be improved upon. So for example, again, if you have somebody whose job is data entry, perhaps you can set up an automation where that data entry gets automatically finished, and that person can now analyze the data four hours a day, instead of inputting four hours a day. They're gonna get a tremendous amount of value from looking at that sort of information. If you look at things like email collection, there's so many different ways to kind of leverage the technology now, but the biggest improvement has definitely been collaboration, communication and flexibility. I think those are the biggest benefits that come out of this. Yeah, I think it's a really good opportunity for people to restructure and start using services like yours. Because again, a lot of people like myself, I've never done digital marketing, I've never done sales, it's been at the back burner for me my entire life. I've always been a referral guy. But now that I have all of this time, and there's all of this opportunity in the digital space, I really wanted to reach out to someone like yourself and kind of learn what is out there, and how my business can start leveraging it. And I'm sure there's a lot of other people in the space that are going to have similar questions. So I do really appreciate you coming on today, Andrew.
Andrew Jackson 1:11:38
Now, it's been great. Thanks for having me.
Jake Van Buschbach 1:11:40
No worries. Do you have anything that you'd like to promote before we wrap up here?
Andrew Jackson 1:11:46
Um, I mean, like I mentioned, we have social media, but we're not totally active on it. It's more like placeholders where we do get our act together. Really our website Northshore dot digital But if you want to speak to me, you know, call me my phone numbers on the website or email me, you know, I like human contact human connection. I'm pretty busy at the moment. So do bear with me if you reach out and I'm a little bit slow and getting back to you, but I do check my emails pretty regular at the moment and like into things like deep work and actually getting things done and focusing on tasks, but there's, just check out the links, you know, we're gonna put some links in, in the YouTube video. So check out the links, and hopefully there's some useful stuff there for you. You know, I'm all about being an open book. You know, the sort of abundant mindset is what I'm all about, you know, sharing and learning from each other. So hopefully, there's some utility there. And if you have questions, just
let me or you know,
Jake Van Buschbach 1:12:54
yeah, Jake, that's fantastic job. I'll make sure to throw all your stuff in the podcast description in the YouTube description. And all that stuff. And I think we'll link to your brain station as well for folks. And then we're going to link your email, your LinkedIn, all that good stuff. And then I hope to have your partner on soon. And we can probably talk to him about some Google Ad strategies and, and get some more info there. But yeah, this has been absolutely fantastic. Andrew, really appreciate you dropping this knowledge for us. I learned a lot. I hope the listeners learned a lot today. And yeah, thank you so much. And I think that about does it for the interview. Is there anything else that you would want to cover before we wrap up?
Andrew Jackson 1:13:31
No, just good luck with the future of this, you know, podcasts, whatever you want to call it a YouTube video channel. I think it's an awesome idea to like, you know, talk about stuff to do with the community and then how it relates to it. And I think it's an awesome initiative you're doing so I'll be supporting you in the background and trying to Yeah, look, look at what's coming up next.
Jake Van Buschbach 1:13:55
Thank you very much, Andrew. It's made possible because of awesome people like yourself, so Really excited to learn more from from other business owners in the community like you mentioned, so All righty. I got to do this but if you could please leave a like on the video really helps us out. If you want to see more videos like this then please subscribe. And if you have a suggestion for a future video, please leave a comment down below or email us at Tech Tips at umbrella it services.ca please make sure to check out the links in the description. Andrew is gonna give us a ton of knowledge. I hope you have a great day and we will see you all soon. Bye