Chaster Johnson, with Stock Team Up and Stock Boss Up, shares his experiences improving their SEO and gives some simple tips that you can use to use to improve your small business SEO.
Here is the transcript from the presentation:
Ryan: All right. So, everybody, I’d like to introduce to you our speaker today, Chaster Johnson, who he and I met several years ago when we were doing in person networking events and I, I was, I was intrigued because he built a social media network around teaching people how to make smart investment choices without losing their butt in the market.
Ryan: And what I read by that is, it gives you an opportunity to practice, to learn from people who are proven to actually get results and not just all of the advice coming at you at once. And so, it was interesting to connect and learn more about his business and one of the conversations that we had in our, in our, one of the last times we got together was about SEO and how optimizing his community led to a huge boom in traffic, both in signups and, and people coming to the website to read the content that’s there.
Ryan: So, it is a pleasure today to introduce Chaster Johnson, from, uh, Stock Team Up and Stock Boss Up, to talk to us on how each of us, as small business owners, can make our SEO exactly what it needs to be and prove that it is not this intimidating thing that only expensive marketing services can provide.
Ryan: So, everyone, please give Chaster a hand.
Chaster: Thank you. I am so excited.
Chaster: I will admit to you, I’ve done, I do like, I, I do these presentations for, for Ryan probably once a year and this is like the first time where I’m like man, I think everyone here is going to enjoy what I show. It’s going to be helpful to everybody.
Chaster: So, I’m excited.
Chaster: Uhm, if you want to improve your body, by the way, I just want to say I play a sport called Ultimate Frisbee. I always promote Ultimate Frisbee, if you want something that’s going to really tax your body, I’m, I’m still sore from my tournament on, on Saturday.
Chaster: So, and then finally I, Ryan, I will get you a shirt. We’ll talk offline about that.
Chaster: So, I’m really excited. I’m going to share my screen and then we can walk through this.
Chaster: Uhm. So, the first question I thought I’d start off at the very beginning is, what the heck is SEO?
Chaster: SEO is search engine optimization. It’s the process of improving ranking of a website or a web page and a non-paid, organic search engine results.
Chaster: So, basically when you type something into Google, what comes up, you want it to be your own content with the intent of starting the sales funnel.
Chaster: So, you can generate more leads and get them to, to become a customer. Uh, in terms of what that takes, there’s a whole bunch of stuff around it.
Chaster: The, the, the way of achieving it has, has evolved since Google first started it back in, I mean, Google didn’t start it, but Google took it over pretty much back in the early 2000s.
Chaster: But it’s basically about building content that is going to be what pops up when people search around something that you’re the topical authority around.
Chaster: So, this process, you know, there, it seems like voodoo, but what we’ve done, is we’ve really just kind of made it a process.
Chaster: And, and we’ve seen just very, very amazing returns. There’s nothing too magical about it.
Chaster: It really is, at the most basic level, answering a query question.
Chaster: Well, the question is, what do people actually ask about that’s around your topic, that has kind of surprised me in in the recent weeks.
Chaster: So, about my, my actual company, we’re a social media platform. We, we are trying to transform the way financial media works.
Chaster: We use algorithms to promote stock ideas that have proven to be much more consistent and healthier for beginner investors. So we really are, we’re actually to the point now where it’s super easy for someone to get on, they come to our platform, they follow a bunch of people and then they start getting stock ideas.
Chaster: And these stock ideas are going to be boring. Stocks, like dividend stocks, value stocks.
Chaster: Any of the meme stocks, or anything that’s trying to, to really just take people money. Those naturally fall out of our algorithm, because we, we don’t intentionally filter them out, but it naturally happens because we measure something called volatility.
Chaster: And so, the volatility of those stocks and certain users’ portfolios are just so high and they, they get removed.
Chaster: So, a lot of this stuff has happened since I’ve met Ryan. Actually, we’ve come a long way with this technology to really help, you know, our goal is to help millions, if not billions of people get into the stock market.
Chaster: I’ll say one last thing about it. With the way the world is now, even if someone works at McDonald’s at minimum wage, they can invest. Investing you can do as little as $1.00, uhm, per, per stock, you can buy buy fractional shares. It’s basically free.
Chaster: There’s no reason why everyone isn’t investing right now. It’s, it’s really this is the perfect time for people to take these ideas and then just roll with it.
Chaster: So, so in terms of SEO, this is our SEO. These are our results.
Chaster: We’ve been steadily growing quarter after quarter, around the beginning of the year.
Chaster: I kind of had this, a moment of Zen with my technology team and we’re like, hey, our JavaScript based, uh, platform. We need to make sure that Google can crawl it because at the end of the day, search is still how people are going to find us and the moment. We did that, we started to do this basically quarter over quarter jump.
Chaster: We’ve been, we’ve been tripling our SEO results quarter after quarter. First because I think Google just, like, absorbed all our stuff.
Chaster: And then second, because now we’re, we’re building processes to continue it.
Chaster: We’re also a social media platform, so, we get content naturally from our user base. So, we’ve continued to grow even the data for Q3, which is this current quarter, I’m pretty confident we’re going to triple again. We’ve already seen a significant, and I pulled this data last week and already it’s, it’s like going nuts again.
Chaster: And I think the theory we have is Google has intentionally stifled us, because we’ll see us kind of zip up and then it controls us because the algorithm doesn’t, you know, is still waiting to make sure that we are an authority.
Chaster: Uhm, you know, that’s kind of, it’s interesting to discuss, but it’s the reason why we believe this is that we’ve tripled almost to the T. It’s, it’s almost too perfect.
Chaster: So, my theory is that Google is intentionally stifling us as we, as we grow.
Chaster: So, we, you know, our goal now is to triple our, our impressions and clicks every, every quarter and we’ve been consistently doing that.
Chaster: So, we’ve had 40,000 impressions in 2022. We had 1000 visitors in 2022 from organic search.
Chaster: We have in the last seven days, 449 different unique queries. So, people are just like putting something into Google search and then they find us and then they make a decision to click there or not.
Chaster: Uhm, just yes. Today, I checked one last time, we just got indexed. We have 1003 pages indexed now. So, Google has just absorbed our platform and is now dishing out these ideas sometimes.
Chaster: Like, almost, I think more than a dozen of our articles are actually the snippet answer to a lot of these queries. So, if you put in something, instead of giving you a whole bunch of search results, it gives us as the answer.
Chaster: So, we’re becoming more and more authoritative in Google.
Chaster: And then basically our queries of interest that we’ve had, you know, we have these are ones that we are always in the top 10.
Chaster: We’re always, we are sometimes even the snippet, you know, anywhere from money management for beginners to do you buy stocks when they are red or green, which I love that one. That was like one of the first articles I ever wrote, it’s super popular because people think you should buy stocks based on if they’re red or green.
Chaster: And our articles, article I wrote, was like, no, don’t, that’s a horrible idea. Don’t, don’t do that.
Chaster: So, we really, you know we’ve really taken over a lot of these queries of interest. So yeah.
Chaster: So where does SEO fit in? Well, it gives you the leads.
Chaster: Is someone going to ask, hey I need I need an XYZ service in Indianapolis, where do I go?
Chaster: They’re going to put into Google or ask friend. That’s, that’s basically the two ways they’re going to do it, either if someone knows somebody or they’re going to just Google search it.
Chaster: So, this is a direct way of getting that, that, that funnel started for your leads.: 00:09:39: So how do you go from, basically you build a website which everyone here has one. While we were talking and I checked everyone’s website.
Chaster: Uhm, they, uh, you need to make sure you have good health. Everyone website I think has good health with the exception of 1 or 2 maybe, but I think, they all have good health in, in general, you have to make sure that Google can actually crawl your site.
Chaster: We had a very advanced problem, that our, we have advanced website that uses a JavaScript and it’s you know it’s it’s, it’s made algorithmically, and there was problems with that. It didn’t like it, but we fixed it, but most of it’s pretty simple. It should be a fast site. It should have pages that are structured.
Chaster: You shouldn’t have any viruses. It’s pretty straightforward. If you want to start to do, if you want to be in Google search, you just, two ways, you write articles, you make videos. It’s searching for those two things. If you have images in your articles, now you’re in image search, search.
Chaster: Uh, when you’re doing that, the key way I found the, the best way for professionals to, to really do this is to build topical authority.
Chaster: So, you’re building your set of articles and your, your content around specific concepts and topics that you’re an authority on, which is pretty straightforward if you have a business.
Chaster: That’s, you know, it’s really, if you’re in taxes, you, you write about taxes. There’s nothing more. Uhm, you really don’t go off of that now.
Chaster: The details of that is a little interesting because what people are actually searching for when it comes to that topic might be different from what you want to talk about, which is pretty bizarre, but you know, it gets bizarre on what people actually are looking for, and I’ll show some examples of that.
Chaster: So, to figure out what people want to write up or want to read about, it’s pretty straightforward. There’s nothing that complicated about this.
Chaster: This process is free to do, we do it all the time. We use some plugins to do this, but those are free as well and you can do more advanced tools to get more in depth. But this is a good starting point for someone that wants to just get going here.
Chaster: So, we have a few clients now in that we’re helping their SEO in the financial world. And this one is, in particular does retirement planning.
Chaster: So, we just went through it. We said OK, what the heck are people looking for?
Chaster: Well, when it comes to retirement planning, people want either a sheet to start the planning. They want some kind of software. They want to, I don’t have it on here, but they, but I did another search for him and it was like 2.
Chaster: If you’re in estate planner, people are not searching out for estate planners, they’re searching for estate planner lawyers, that’s what they’re really interested in.
Chaster: So, it’s always a little nuanced from what you expect, in terms of the questions asked, which you can find on Google, there again it’s, it’s open, Google wants you to answer these questions.
Chaster: Some of the surprising ones that we’re discussing writing topics about are, OK, what should you do X months away from retirement? What should you do X years before retirement? People are really curious about this plan as they get closer to retirement. They want to just know, at this milestone, what should I have done already?
Chaster: People want to know what the 4% rule in retirement planning is. I don’t know what that is. You know, we could write about it.
Chaster: And then what’s interesting is, when you look at the answer that Google thinks to it is to it, you’ll find that, like for a lot of these questions, they’re, they’re just wrong. They’re the wrong answer, and you can write something and become the right answer.
Chaster: Some of our own articles was like that. We just wrote the correct answer because it wasn’t that the people that wrote the article just gave the wrong answer. They just didn’t answer the question that people are actually asking.
Chaster: So, Google doesn’t have an answer yet, so we just answer for them. And then Google likes us, and we get more, we get more, we get more search authority.
Chaster: Uh, so yeah, this is just more of them. What should I do one year before retirement? Uh, one other funny one with retirement that you’d be surprised about is, people really want to know how do I tell my boss I’m about to retire?
Chaster: That’s not something that you would think about when you’re talking about retirement planning, but people really are nervous about telling their boss they’re about to retire, so having tips and ideas around that people are really searching for around that topic.
Chaster: How do I retire from friends gracefully at work? That’s hilarious. So how do you, how do you gracefully retire from work? People just want to know that, that, that awkwardness is something people really want to help. They need help removing that tension, so they need answers to that.
Chaster: So, I was hoping we could try this, if, if someone wants to try this, anyone but Jamie. Because believe it or not, I looked at everyone, so, I think Jamie actually has pretty good SEO. I think he works on it.
Chaster: But if someone else would love to try this, I’m happy to, to try it with you and we can just see what, what happens. I mean, this is good. Would you like, would taxes be something of interest?
Tom: Our website is actually handled by a firm that specializes in CPA websites, and they posted daily for us on Face- on, on LinkedIn. That we can share on other things out, so we don’t really take care of it of ourselves.
Chaster: Yeah, yeah, I would, I would say what’s interesting is and we can talk more about it. Except for Jamie.
Chaster: Everyone’s SEO could be helped. Jamie actually has a legitimately good SCO.
Chaster: I, I just there was, I don’t think there’s anything. I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s, it’s, it looks good.
Chaster: And, and there’s free services that can show that.
Tom: Uhm, but we, we still look pretty good if you type in CPA in Broad Ripple.
Chaster: Yeah, yeah, so, what’s interesting is, uhm, what’s probably happening is, and I’m only guessing here, so just bear with me. And I’m not, I just said taxes because there was 2 tax people on here.
Chaster: I don’t. There’s, there’s nothing else more really the reason why.
Chaster: But there’s, there’s organic, there’s organic search results and then there’s, there’s paid search results. Uhm, so yeah, I, I know I can’t speak for the rest. I don’t know why, why the domain authority is lower than that, but for Jamie, he, I don’t know what he’s doing, but he’s, he’s, he has really good domain authority. Uhm, what that means is that people are linking to your site that are legitimate.
Chaster: Legitimate media companies, we have good domain authority because, you know, we’ve been showcased in different media organizations and we have a lot of content that’s shared out there by other people. Not really social media; social media, you won’t get as much from it, but you know there’s a lot of, there really is a lot more with linking to other webpages instead of social.
Chaster: So, if I go to, let’s just say INSPIREsmall.biz, is something that is pretty, uh, you know, pretty good here, in terms of a generic one, you can do, you know, small business, Indianapolis, right, and you can see what pops up here and then, what’s interesting, is personally I’m surprised there’s a lot of competition for that. That’s very interesting.
Chaster: But you know, you can really see what people are asking here around, around that. It’s not, you know, there’s nothing more difficult than that to do.
Chaster: And so, once you start opening these up, you really sort of see what people are actually asking about, so that you can you can start to write content around that and that will gain you authority.
Chaster: So, you know, in Ryan’s case, what is the best business for women to start? He has no idea, but that’s a topic that, that someone, you know, people are typing into Google as of interest, you know, is Indianapolis a good place to start a biz? I didn’t know people were interested in knowing that, but that’s something that people are interested around it, so it’s really not that complicated to do SEO.
Chaster: Unfortunately, a lot of people, a lot of businesses get told that it should be a lot of money and it should be all this. And it’s it’s really not.
Chaster: It’s about just focusing on certain topics if you want organic search traffic. Now if you want to just get to the top of small business, Indiana, Indianapolis, it’s $10.51 per I think 1000 impressions. Boom. You can pay for it that way.
Chaster: The problem with that is, then it’s not as efficient to do and you don’t have a, you know, an, uh, organic movement from, from reading some content to actually going into it. You’re, you’re hoping that that’s what people are putting in to get to your business when you know these particular questions might be what actually gets you the lead to where you needed to go.
Chaster: So yeah, if you want more ideas of what, like what to write about in terms of content, you just keep on, you know, opening these up. And each time you open one up, they’ll give you more questions and you can just keep on learning about what people are really asking about around those topics.
Payge : And Serfer is the program that you have on your Google and that’s how you can see like, the 100 and 70 and like the money and stuff, that’s all through that?
Chaster: Yeah, yeah. It’s called SEO surfer. It’s a free, it’s a free tool. Everyone in the world uses it.
Chaster: I now use that, it’s fine, it’s not perfect you know, but for the most part you know it depends on where, like for these top, high volume ones, you know, my, my site Jesse’s site, we could, we could, we could probably compete for, for these but for-
Chaster: For like a new site that’s starting off, you want to go a little lower in terms of, of your volume and just start to, you know, small business for, small business insurance, Indianapolis, you know, that kind of stuff, is where you would want to start growing your topical authority and then go from there. Uhm, yeah.
Chaster: And then the beautiful thing is, if you just want to, like, if you just want the content to win organically, you just press this button, generate article outline, and it’ll give you all the subjects you should be writing about or at least touch upon to win it.
Chaster: So, it’s a little clunky, so I’m not going to do it here. We might be wasting everyone’s time. But you can just press this button, then boom, there’s the article outline you should be writing, so it’s really straightforward, and if you love your topic, it’s actually pretty easy to just get there and start getting your domain authority up.
Chaster: So, when you write articles, you really just have to make sure that you have you have meta tags, so you should have a title, description, H2 keywords, nothing, nothing complicated.
Chaster: You should be building topical authority, so you should really be writing around your subject matter, but with a focus on what people are interested about your subject, with the intent of getting them through the funnel.
Chaster: You should silo your pages. They should be interlinked. That helps Google find your pages.
Chaster: You might be surprised you have all this content and then, so this happens to us. It’s funny.
Chaster: We have all this great content, like, oh, we’re so good. We know what we’re doing. And then we look in and Google’s never found them. And it’s because we don’t have things interlinked.
Chaster: So, we, we interlink them and then Google is like, oh, I found it, no, no problem, it’s, everything’s OK.
Chaster: So just be careful. You write content but Google might not find it because Google only knows about it, or Bing only knows about it, because it found it from another website that linked to it.
Chaster: So, the easy way to solve that problem is to have all your stuff linked on your own website. It’s, it’s pretty straightforward to do, but we screwed it up, so it’s not that, it is kind of hard, I guess.
Chaster: When you write, you should write it at a 7th grade level. Google is really about, you know, the majority of people, so you want to keep things simple. For them, a 7th grade level is probably efficient. There’s an app called the Hemingway app. It’s not an app, it’s just the website the hemingwayapp.com, I think.
Chaster: If you look it up, it’ll tell you how you can simplify your wording. I actually love it. It actually makes my writing a lot simpler for people, and it just really makes you think about how you should write to other people.
Chaster: You know, it’s more than just the 7th grade level, it’s, you’re making things too complicated for people anyways, when they, they shouldn’t have a hard time reading what you’re what you’re writing.
Chaster: Meet the search need. I think I made it clear with the questions and stuff, you know. Google’s asked these dark questions around your topics. Focusing around those topics will help at least give you an idea of what people are interested in.
Chaster: And you should always make it compelling. I, I know, like in the past, Jeannette’s, right, written very interesting articles that I remember, I took note of that, they were just interesting around taxes.
Chaster: They should always be compelling. You should always have compelling, uhm, articles.
Chaster: And then, and then also make it make it linkable.
Chaster: So, we use something called Help A Reporter Out that gets us more links to our articles. A reporter needs some kind of, you know, something, and then we’ll give them an article that will help them answer whatever they’re looking, looking to write an article around themselves. And then reference us.
Chaster: So, in, in terms of us, we, we do this, we actually are focused around helping African American, uhm, financial professionals, if anyone knows any of them that are interested, we’ve helped quite a few of them, with them we’ve, you know, we are much, much, much more affordable than normal SEO.
Chaster: Let’s see. Oh, Oh my goodness.
Chaster: And so, if you have anyone, that’s interested, that might have an interest in this, please let, let, let me know, and then if you guys have any questions about SEO, I’d be happy to answer any of them.
Chaster: I have this unnecessary amount of knowledge now about, about SEO, I used to have an unnecessary amount of knowledge about cryptocurrency. And now I’m like, I’ve shoved it all to the side and now I have the right knowledge, which is SEO.
Chaster: I don’t know if any of you guys know this, but I used to be a hedge fund for two years. I used to manage, you know, millions of dollars of money, and they decided to do it all in crypto currencies, it was, it was a mess, but that’s a different story.
Chaster: So yeah.
Payge: I think, I think the hardest thing for me to understand is, if Google can read it. Knowing like, what is encrypted, what’s not encrypted, sometimes I just use like Wix or Squarespace, stuff like that. And so, it, is it already readable by Google because I’m going through those things?
Chaster: Yeah, so, I was speaking kind of jargon there. So, long story short, my, our website is dynamically generated so we use JavaScript and we had to make that nice for Google because Google is really dumb.
Chaster: But for Wix and all those normal ones, they should automatically crawl it. But you need to double check.
Chaster: So, go to, type into search, Google Search Console, and then then log in. And then as long as you have access to your DNS, you can connect to your WIX account and you can see, you can see all the Google search results and then if there’s something wrong, you can just talk to Chaster for 5 minutes.
Chaster: We’ll be like, oh you don’t have a robot, a robots.TXT file. Just, just fix that. It’s really, something really dumb when it comes to Wix or something like that. It shouldn’t be that complicated.
Payge: Thank you.
Jamie: Anyone else have any questions for Chaster they’d like to ask?
Ryan: Chaster, so, how do you discover new keywords that might parallel or overlap with your expertise that you may not have thought of yet?
Chaster: Yeah, so I was thinking of being adventurous and actually showing you my Google Search Account or Google search console, but I went against that.
Chaster: But in there, there is like, you know, every day we have we have like hundreds and hundreds of keywords. Now I can see all of them and the, the most famous one, that was the most bizarre one. It wasn’t as interesting in terms of impressions, but we were, we were the number one search term for “Elon Musk buying Roblox?”.
Chaster: That was like a big search term. And Google literally didn’t have the answer. So, we took our article about Roblox and took that as the answer. And I was like, holy crap, we didn’t answer that question. I said nothing about Elon Musk.
Chaster: So, in the article, we edited it and just said, hey, Elon Musk right now isn’t looking to buy Roblox, he’s looking to buy Twitter and, and left it at that. And that gave us, you know, the snippet, you know, so you, that’s the most extreme bizarre example of this, but for the most part I can, you can look in your own, once you get enough keywords, you’ve done this enough.
Chaster: We have so many keywords, we can just pull them all out and we can find new ones based on people searching for something. And we don’t really have the right answer and we can just, we can just answer it or write about that topic.
Payge: You’re using Surfer for that?
Chaster: No, Google Search Console itself will give you, will give you your own keywords. So, you know, we have a, I have a statistic here. I forgot what it was.
Chaster: Yes, in the last seven days we had, we’ve had we had 449 unique queries, so those are all keyword searches. So, instead of looking for new ones, we can just go in there and see what people are currently finding our content, and if we’re not answering those questions properly, we can just fix that and answer it.
Payge: That’s probably why I got rid of my, my personal account or website. Google didn’t know where to find it.
Chaster: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, if you wanted this like here, I’ll give you my contact. You can, it’ll take us like 15 minutes and you’ll get set up. I have no problem helping anyone, just like, make that all magically happen.
Chaster: We’re really niched in, in, in really, you know, financial professionals from the African American community. So that’s kind of our niche right now.
Chaster: So, anyone else I’ll just, I’ll just help. We can just make it happen.
Jamie: Well, cool, man. Thanks so much for being here. That’s some fantastic information that everybody needs to hear. Let’s give Chaster a round of applause.
