3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Company Ranking with Darcy Sullivan

In this episode, host Eric Dickmann interviews Darcy Sullivan. Darcy's true passion is educating and training small businesses and entrepreneurs on improving their brand’s online presence.

She is a public speaker and educator on topics related to marketing, content marketing, SEO, and social media. In this episode, she shares valuable insights on things businesses can do to improve their online rankings.

 
 Eric Dickmann can be found on Twitter @EDickmann and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/edickmann and my website https://ericdickmann.com

Darcy Sullivan can be found on Twitter @propelnow

Episode Summary: The episode summary can be found at https://fiveechelon.com/3-simple-steps-improve-your-company-ranking-s3ep2/

If you'd like to contact us with feedback or guest inquiries, please visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/podcast

For more information about Virtual CMO strategic marketing consulting services, visit The Five Echelon Group at https://fiveechelon.com
 
Episode #33

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Transcript

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Carla: [00:00:00]  The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group. If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit Five Echelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.  

Eric Dickmann: [00:00:24] Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. 

 This week, I'm excited to welcome Darcy Sullivan to the show. Darcey is the founder of Propel Marketing and Design. Propel is a full-service marketing agency located in South Florida that works with companies of all sizes. One facet of organization and what of Darcy's true passions is educating and training, small businesses and entrepreneurs on improving their brand's online presence and website rankings. She is a recognized public speaker and educator on topics related to traditional marketing content marketing, SEO, social media, WordPress PR, and other digital marketing strategies. I'm excited to welcome Darcy to the show.  Darcy welcome to the virtual CMO podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:01:27] Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Eric Dickmann: [00:01:29] Yeah, I'm excited for this conversation too. I love talking about digital marketing and that's where I'd like to get started. I'd like to hear a little bit about your background. How did you get involved in digital marketing? 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:01:40] I went to school for what was called at the time, computer graphic technology. it started around when websites were becoming a thing. And I was into graphic design, which rolled into marketing. And then it rolled into obviously needing to be found online. And I Fell in love with the niche of SEO, which is search engine optimization and helping people get found online with their ideal target audience. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:02:11] it's such a booming field right now because so many businesses really need help in building out their online presence and being discovered. And there are so many digital marketing channels  I know you focus on several different areas in terms of being ranked and being found. And so I'd kinda like to dive into each with a little bit more detail, so let's start out with the basic your website. So that's your placeholder right on the internet. That's how so many businesses get found? What do you think businesses just right from the start are doing wrong. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:02:44] Ooh. first off with your website, you have to have your tech and check. And what I mean by that is your website has to be mobile friendly. It has to load quickly. It has to, you have to have an SSL certificate on it and  as soon as somebody lands on your website, they've got to know what you do. 

And how to navigate through your website to be successful. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:03:10] Do you think business focuses too much on having a big website, lots of pages, lots of content, or for a lot of the clients that you work with do you see just the opposite? There's just not enough there. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:03:22] So usually at the beginning, there just isn't enough there, because if you are in a very competitive arena, let's just say you're a florist. Or if you're something common, you're going to have a lot of competition. So you need to have a build out where you can really focus. On some of your core keywords, keyword phrases that you want to rank for in Google and by just having only a few pages, it really limits your ability to do that. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:03:53] So let's dive into that a little bit more with your example of a florist. What were be some of the key things that you think a small business like that should have on their website for it to be successful? 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:04:04] absolutely testimonials. in addition to that, what is it they offer, if they're doing weddings, if they're doing specific events, they should really have specific pages catering to those items. So that way they can go into more detail. So when I Google florist, if I'm looking for flowers for an event. For example, I know that I'm going to connect with you better or that florists better because they specifically offer that it's not just a general. Only one time mentioned on the site somewhere where I have to search to find it, that you do events. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:04:39] I just released a podcast episode today and I was interviewing. A guy by the name of Alan Curren's, who has a band. So he's, developed, a business where he actually has a couple of bands that go around and play events and whatnot. But one of the things that I thought was so interesting is the website that he had developed for his company really expressed a lot of emotion. It made you feel like you were part of a performance, it generated excitement. 

And don't you think that's the same with, let's take this flower shop again. It's not just about a product it's about how that product might fit into your world or make you feel. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:05:16] Absolutely. It's like you probably, I don't know if you've ever heard the example of a pizza parlor. They're not selling really a slice of pizza. They're selling the envisioning of having your family around the table and everybody's sharing that experience of eating the pizza. So really you do want to hone in on.

You know your website. I think  10, 15 years ago, it was just like a little brochure online and now it really is that virtual connection. So you've got to adding those special elements really sets you apart from your competition. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:05:49] So you've got your basic search engine optimization. You've got to get the technical pieces, right? Like you said, your SSL certificate, you've got to get your pages to load quickly. Talk then a little bit about the importance of having a blog and having regular content things that are updated frequently.

Darcy Sullivan: [00:06:06] Okay. So the way I like to word it is somebody comes to your core website. Because they want to learn more about you and your brand, what you offer. They usually end up on your blog because they want to know more about that topic. Positioning yourself as a topic authority leader. You can do that easily through your blog. So if you've got a blog on a specific topic, and as you've got the blog laid out, you can include an internal link. That's going to link them back to a product or service that's related to the content. 

On the blog, but you've got two different users, right? two different visitors, two different, completely different mindsets. And you want to be able to position yourself in a way to connect with. Both of those types of people that are coming to your website. In addition to the fact of our friend of content marketing and social media, you want to be able to have new, fresh content. So you've got reasons to reach out and connect with people and share your information. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:07:08] One of the things that I've seen. And I'm sure you've seen this with businesses too, is that they go down this process of writing blog content and sometimes they're actually successful. And that blog content ranks. But it's content that's sort of irrelevant to their products or services. It doesn't really help their business. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:07:27] You've got to reel back on that. Yes. I see that. And then I feel like it's that the newsletter where all they do is once a month, they put their newsletter on the blog. no. Let's move back and let's say, what are the top three to five questions that you get asked all the time? If you start building out content based on questions, people are asking you regarding, and as they relate to the products and services that you offer, it's going to give you a lot more of ideas about what to write. That's actually gonna be useful content that people are going to want to consume.

Eric Dickmann: [00:08:02] I love that, take the information that you're already getting from your customers, from your prospects and put that out into content to Answer their questions before they even ask them. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:08:12] Yeah. So let's go back to that florist example. Like you could do a blog post on how to keep your flowers living longer, right? let's just say you get an arrangement from a florist. And so the blog post could be like five tips to keep your flowers lasting longer. one again, it's going to position you as ;  Hey, we know we're here to  help you, but also if you get our flowers and you call these directions, they're gonna last longer. So you're going to think we're better. it's got a couple different value adds there. And then, when you, maybe you talk about specifically about roses and it links back to the page on your website where you've got an order form for roses, or,  Whatever. honestly, I haven't worked with any Florida, so I'm just kinda throwing it  you get the gist of what I'm saying?

Eric Dickmann: [00:08:58] Yeah. And what do you think about ways on the website then for people to contact you? Do you advocate for all of your customers to have a contact form? Would you rather somebody call you in on the phone? what do you suggest that people do there? 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:09:13] So it depends on how they want to connect with their audience. chat forums have become huge. Just having that little icon in the bottom, whether you have somebody Manning it or not, it gives you that almost instant gratification to the person visiting your website where Oh, I got my, maybe didn't really connect with somebody. Maybe it's about that. 

Pushes you in the right direction. So that's nice. of course there's always chat forums, depending on the business, some people love to be people that close over the phone, so they would much prefer for people to call in. other people prefer to have  information gathered about the potential prospect, before they get on the phone with them. So that it's a better use of everybody's time. So it really depends. What's best for you. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:10:00] Okay. So now we've got our website optimized. We've created some great blog content. Now we need to push it out there. SEO takes time. You can't just write a blog and expect that people are magically going to show up the next day and start reading it. So you've got a prime, the engine a bit. You've got to get it out there. So now you've got all these social media channels that you have to pick from. 

How do you help businesses decide where they should focus their efforts? Because ideally you can say, do it on all of them, right? Maximize your exposure. But that's a lot of time. Each one is slightly different. They require different size images, articles. You can't tag people consistently in one over the other. it's difficult. So talk a little bit about how you help people rank on social media. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:10:44] Okay, so social is a different animal, right? And first off we talk about findability. So as we've seen new platforms come up and they come up and they come up. What we suggest to people is whether you plan on owning a social media platform or not. Go ahead, Andy. Grab on to that URL, Just go ahead and Facebook, boom. Make sure that somebody can find you on Facebook. 

Twitter, even if you say we're not active on here, but here's our contact information. Or join us on our social site, where we constantly push  push out information, but go ahead and clean the spots before your competition does, in regards to that, let's just say. There's two companies called read books. Go ahead and grab the facebook.com read books, grab it before somebody else says, even if you're just using it as a placeholder for findability. 

Then  and plus, especially as new platforms begin to merge because they will. You want to just grab onto it if you're not going to use it or if it fizzles out it's okay. But you'd rather have it before somebody else. It's like your website, you have a URL that you wanted to get for your website. And it could have been that you had really great one in mind, but it was already taken. So findability grabbed them all then. 

 go back to what we call your buyer persona. Your ideal customer avatar, it goes by a couple different names. you should clearly have identified who your target audience is, and that will tell you where they are online through social media. And that should become your hub. Typically you'll find that, maybe it's Facebook and Instagram are your hotspots, but it's still good to, include content on LinkedIn, depending on again. Are you B2B? Are you B2C who you're trying to target? 

And then what we suggest is using a platform buffer HootSweet something to schedule things out so that you don't feel like all of a sudden, What am I going to do? I feel like there's so many different platforms. There's so many different sizes. you've also got tools like Canva, which helped you to make graphics. And they'll also do the resize and redistribute and they know what sizes work best for each of the platforms. So I think there's a way to systematically do it. 

I also liked the idea of at the time that you create the blog. Go ahead and create those other assets. Go ahead and do your little blurb of how you would share it through the social media sites that you think. Our most ideal for your target audience and say that whether it's in a Google doc or word doc or forever, 

And then as they're on rotation, because you don't want to just post a social media once it's not a one and done. Maybe a month later or a couple of weeks later, you want to post it a different time. You just copy and paste what you have from your original.  when your blog was fresh in your mind. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:13:47] I think that's good because there are so many great free tools out there. Buffer has a free option. Canva gives away a tremendous amount of functionality at no cost. And it's great. and there are challenges to, sometimes you can just post directly from your blog, right? You can have a social share button there just push a button and you can share directly to the social media channels if you've got everything configured correctly so that it shows what you want to show, because ultimately the goal is to be driving. 

People back to your website, right? It's to be driving people to where they can make a purchase or find you not just to build audiences on these channels. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:14:26] And I think that's sometimes where people get distracted because they look at let's just take Instagram where you can't do a link necessarily directly in your posts. People get so hung up on, we'll look at this brand. They're just killing it on Instagram, but is that directly correlating with their sales? So you've got to go back to that. And one thing that you should definitely keep an eye on is your analytics. 

You can use Google analytics, you can use clicky analytics, which has also has a free option. And there's other analytic options that what they do is they not only show you where your traffic's coming from. But also what people are doing once they get to your website. And I think you got to think back to that good old 80 20 rule where it's, it kinda comes down to it and business, and the same goes for your SEO. 

And your social media efforts when it comes to what you're pushing out, you're going to notice that there's probably 20% of your website or your blog. That's really going to generate 80% of the traffic. And when you can hone in and what is it and why is it that those pages are so successful? You can focus your efforts to recreate those. 

In a different way, obviously you're not just going to copy and paste and do the same thing, but it'll help direct you into being more successful. In a quicker fashion. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:15:48] Yeah, analytics is so important because I think people look at likes and reshares and try to base their success off those metrics. But especially for more advertising type content. Not a pure ad, but things that are designed to be like ads, you're not going to get a lot of engagement that way. You're not going to get a lot of likes, but if people are viewing it or people are seeing it, if you're leaving that brand impression with them, you are successful. And I think the other thing that I would add to what you said is, I know, for example, we used to use a tool called Ad Espresso for doing Facebook ads and it would have you could, I think do 16 permutations of the same ad, which would be changing, the graphics, changing the headline, changing the call to action, and then it would pick a winner after running those 16 variations of it. But it just tells you that if you are running sort of one or two social media posts a week, you are not really developing enough understanding of what's working and what's not working. You need a lot of variety to see what works with your audience. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:16:51] Absolutely. That's a really good point. using social media, using even using ads, you do get that ability to test. Okay. what terminology did I use that led to more click through rates? what words? What words, what images, what colors. Lead towards more people landing on my website because that's huge. You want to drive them to your website and using that information can really help. 

  Eric Dickmann: [00:17:16] Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. 

To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast.   

I think now there's a push for a lot more video content for things that are animated, instead of just still images. People's attention is harder and harder to get. So there's more, you have to put into your post to really capture their attention. Don't you see that as well? 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:18:21] Yes. Now when it comes to blog posts, when it comes to on your blog, one thing that we suggest is if you're revisiting old blog posts, let's just say that blanked. Okay. But, they could be better and you go in and you're. Updating them. One great thing to add is video content, because if somebody is on your blog, they push play on that video. They're staying longer on your website, which is a good indicator to Google. Hey, thumbs up. This site is awesome. People like to stay on it. 

Now where people get hung up is they're like, ah, I gotta go out. And I got to create this video. Not necessarily. there are so many videos that are already out there as long as you're not taking videos that are your. From your direct competitors. You can go out and find great videos that, you're giving credit to them because it's right there. 

That you can include in your content strategy so that you don't feel like you have to do at all. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:19:20] That's a really important point that you're making too, because I think sometimes people post a really good blog article and then they let it sit on their blog for years without doing anything to it. Google rewards you for constantly going and updating content, making it richer, adding more elements to it. You don't need to rewrite the whole thing. You can just constantly be adding to it and making it better. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:19:44] Yeah. And one of the nice things about that. Say, just drop me here. But one of the nice things about that is let's say you take a post and remember how you had made that comment earlier about having that social share function. So let's say you had that social share function on a specific blog posts. And so you already had a hundred shares on Facebook and 200 shares on LinkedIn. And  you go and update that blog and, change, Revit, build it out, more drop in a couple of videos. Maybe add some more graphics, update the content. Update the date on it. When somebody goes to it's already got all that social proof. So here, the date might say it's from yesterday because yesterday was the day updated it. So I updated the date on it. 

The boom it's already automatically got the social proof. If I end up on a blog post, that is from yesterday, that's already had 2000 shares. I'm going to be more intrigued to continue to read on through it. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:20:46] And I think what you said is so important too. You're not taking down the old post and posting a brand new article. You're simply updating the date along with the new content. So you don't lose all that authority that you've gained over time. Because if you get rid of the old one, you're starting from scratch.

Darcy Sullivan: [00:21:02] Exactly. Now what I have seen that works well for other people too, is, If you take content and maybe it's four or five years old where people thought, Oh, just having more pages was a better idea, which it wasn't. But some people thought that. So instead of doing. A full lengthy, beefy piece of content to beefy blog post. What they would do is do it in four or five parts. what you can do is really merge those together into a really cohesive, detailed. 

Ultimate guide to whatever it is. And then obviously you have to redirect the URLs that you're no longer using. Maybe part two part three part four part five, but instead of. Those four or five blog posts competing with each other. They stand out on their own, it's all together in, and it's got more of the detailed information. It's a stronger post it's going to do better online. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:22:02] Yeah, we haven't really talked about it a lot, but really underlying all that is the key words that you're going after. Right? So you don't want blog posts competing against each other for the same keyword. If you've got content that's going after a keyword or a very similar keyword think of combining those into one mega post, if you will, that's got a lot more value because Google will reward that. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:22:25] Yes. And I know we've been using or in the realm of SEO, they've been using the word keyword for such a long time. And people that are coming that are new into this. They're like, is that just one word? It doesn't mean it's one word. It could be. It's almost like you could say a topic or a searchable term. It's what you're going to type into Google, but here's the thing. 

Is the more that you have. So we have that, let's talk, go back to that mega page. You're going to have a couple of variations are a couple of sections on one specific topic on that page. So if it's on bike repair, I don't know why I pick that, but bike repair, and you're going through, you're answering in your subtopics within that one mega piece could also be searchable keyword phrases that people are typing in. 

So again, you don't want to have, I just did a blog post on bike repair. now I'm going to do another exact. Blog post on bike repair, maybe it's bike maintenance, so they can be bike or bicycle can be a keyword for both, but we're getting more topical. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:23:38] Yeah, I think that's so important and it's a simple strategy to really increase the value of your content. 

The third area that I wanted to drill into with you a little bit more. So we've talked about your website, we've talked about social media. But there are also some unique ways of getting ranked. When you are a local business, a flower shop, a bike shop. 

Then you're talking about things like Google My Business reviews, Yelp. Talk to me a little bit about things that you need to do. If you are a local business to be found. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:24:09] Okay. So whether you're a local business or not, you need a Google my business listing. I was just putting together a couple of days ago. a talk that I'm about to give at a conference and it's all about how to dominate, terminate and dominate. Their first page of Google and my dominate, I need to have two or three spots on page one of Google, which is like everybody's dream. 

And you really cannot do that. As a local business, if you do not have a fully optimized Google my business profile. If you're not collecting those rave reviews. And if your citations, which I'll tell you what those aren't in a second. Don't all line up and citations. You've maybe heard of them called nap, name, address, and phone number. 

It's a direct indicator to Google that you are a real legitimate business when all throughout online. Your name, your phone number and your address all match. So you want to make sure that you go in and look and see, Oh, this one said, unit number one, instead of sweet one, or this one has our old address that we're no longer. 

At, or our name here. Isn't really what our name is. You want to go in and make sure that everywhere online, you have a unified presence along with, on your website. Where again, it's an indicator to Google and of the world, right? That you are a legitimate business. So key for local businesses. You've got to do that. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:25:45] And just by way of clarification, because this was interesting to me as I figured it out for my own company, but if you're a bike shop or a flower shop or a dentist, a doctor, whatever, and you have a physical location. Google My Business is great. If you are an accountant that works in a, we work not so great, It, because it does require some physical presence. Do I have that right? 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:26:08] You  need the profile, no matter what you can say, what areas you service. But you, whether even if you're not functioning locally, You should have a Google my business profile. It's just one of those elements of Google and listen, setting it up. Takes minutes. So it's really why not? Why not indeed. The findability deep factor. we talked about findability when it comes to social media. 

In my opinion, Google my business profile is like the easiest social media profile. There is. Cause it's not, you're not posting to it continually you can make announcements, you can do things. But one, just claim that spot. Just take the couple minutes that it takes. It's well worth it. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:26:54] You know, one of the benefits of writing great blog content is you potentially can be featured as a snippet, That top listening. So you could actually have two or three different things listed on that front page if you do it. And I think as a local business, obviously, if you're one of those three or four businesses that is in the featured block on the Google search result, how many people do you think are going to click on one of those three businesses more so than the guy who's on page three?

Darcy Sullivan: [00:27:21] Absolutely. Absolutely. That's a really good point as well. Yes, When you make sure that you're answering the questions that people are asking. It helps you get into that section. So when we were talking about. it was bicycle repair, what questions are people asking about fixing their bicycle? Is that if your blog post is answering those specific questions, it's going to help you. it used to be that years ago, if somebody were to go to Facebook, they would type in CEO of Facebook. If they were looking to find out who the CEO of Facebook was. But since  voice search has changed things. It's completely changed how we search, not even if we're just picking up our phone to talk into it, to search, but people are more apt to actually type out questions. So answering those questions again, gives you that ability to grab some of those top spots. 

But it also helps you climb the rankings, Google, because you're answering the questions that people are looking for. And it's again, positioning you as an authority figure because you're answering their questions. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:28:32] Which is again, a service like Quora. It was just made for that To answer people's questions and also gives you the ability to drive a little bit of traffic back to your website. It's complicated stuff, but there is a formula. And if you follow the formula, it works, they don't make it secret. It's just, it takes some time to put it together. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:28:50] Absolutely. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:28:52] So Darcy I'd love for you to share with the audience, some of the programs that you offer your clients to be able to help them, rank and be discovered. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:28:59] Absolutely. So we have a DIY program called ready set rank that walks you through the process of how to increase your presence online and tackle all the SEO stuff. It's got a tech library. It's got a step by step, process, just outlined to help you. Get some quick wins and long term planning in order. In addition to that on our website, we've got free resources, free trainings, free guides. And if you're interested in propel doing the work for you. 

You can always book a call, directly on the website to talk to us about that as well.

Eric Dickmann: [00:29:40] So give us that website link and your social media links as well, so that people can find you online.

Darcy Sullivan: [00:29:46] Sure. propelyourcompany.com is the website and you can just search for a Propel Your Company, and you will find us. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:29:55] Excellent. And I will have all of that linked up in the show notes so that people can find you in there as well. Darcy, this has been a fascinating discussion. I love talking about digital marketing and the things that businesses can do to be found in ranked because that's really the goal, right? We want to help businesses grow. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:30:10] Absolutely look. when you start a business, you have a passion, you've got something that just, it needs to get out there. So you don't want to be non page four. So thank you today. A lot of fun. I appreciate it. 

Eric Dickmann: [00:30:23] Hey. Great. I appreciate your time. Thank you again. 

Darcy Sullivan: [00:30:26] Okay.  

 Eric Dickmann: [00:30:29] Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.