A Simple Solution to SEO with David Kaminski, CEO of Collaborate Pros

In this episode of Exploring Growth, host Lee Murray sits down with David Kaminsky, CEO of Collaborate Pros, to dive into the dynamic world of SEO and the impact of AI. They highlight the necessity of crafting discoverable and relevant content, emphasizing strategic linking and harnessing AI for content creation. David also reveals practical strategies to boost online visibility and drive growth for businesses.

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David Kaminski 00:00:00 Now before people hear SEO and cover their ears and go running, you preface this entire conversation that I'm going to open your eyes and your ears, that it's actually pretty easy. So, oh wow, I can't it's not difficult. Most people hear those that acronym and just want to go running, go bury their head in the sand.

Lee Murray 00:00:18 It's so true. Welcome back to Exploring Growth. I scheduled this interview probably, I don't know, five, six weeks ago, and I've been super excited about doing ever since. I mean, literally, it's coming to my mind probably ten times since then in the normal course of just doing business, because today's business landscape is changing rapidly with the onset of AI. I've been talking to a lot of my guests as it relates to their domain. You know how they're utilizing AI. AI is changing things. And I don't want this to become an AI podcast, but the sort of, sort of the nature of what we're doing in business.

David Kaminski 00:00:55 You're going to be replaced soon.

David Kaminski 00:00:57 Watch out.

Lee Murray 00:00:57 Yes, yes. So. hopefully I can be replaced and I'll go on a beach somewhere and enjoy myself. But it just, you know, right now I just as a marketer, especially the topic of SEO. I mean, I'm not an SEO expert, but we have one here today. you know, it's right. I feel like it's right at the heart of the change that's happening because it's content. Really. That's what we're talking about. So I think creating content that gets found and drives people to your business, was tricky before, but now it seems that that whole roadmap is changing or has changed dramatically. And I'm hoping to understand some more, of how to build SEO, so that we can drive brand and drive leads. So, to satisfy all my questions about where SEO is going, I have the pleasure of bringing on David Kaminsky, CEO of Collaborate Pros. Welcome, David.

David Kaminski 00:01:50 Thanks, Lee. It is, really fun to be here now before people hear SEO and, like, cover their ears and go running.

David Kaminski 00:01:57 You preface this entire conversation that I'm going to open your eyes and your ears, that it's actually pretty easy, so. Oh wow, I can't it's not difficult. Most people hear those that acronym and just want to go running, go bury their head in the sand.

Lee Murray 00:02:11 It's so true. I do too. As a marketer like I, I love the the impact that we have had and can have with SEO, but I just don't want anything to do with it really, you know? I mean, I.

David Kaminski 00:02:22 Like a political landscape, right? Yes. Everybody wants to make it confusing. And Google throws this like 800 page book of all their rules. Yes. Like it's not that hard. So we'll make it easy for everybody.

Lee Murray 00:02:33 That is a delight to my ears. Before we jump into the the topic, tell everybody about, you know, your background, who you are, what's Collaborate Pro is all about. Yeah, sure.

David Kaminski 00:02:42 So I actually started in the window cleaning industry in Arizona, 25 years ago today or this last month was our 25th year anniversary.

David Kaminski 00:02:51 So I've made it in business 25 years. There's a lot of things I did wrong these things right. Of course. The things I did right. we are the largest company in Arizona and Colorado, so that's kind of cool. We're multi-state multi cities. the best part is I own those businesses still, but I don't run them. So, done a really good job of hiring the right people, paying them well and then exiting the business, while still owning it. So. But my passion really turned in, and I grew the business 100% without spending money on advertising. Now, I don't recommend that, because that's a really good way to fail at your business. But what I did was I dove in and tried to figure out what I need to do on my website to get it to show up in different cities, different search terms, and I call them transactional search terms, like a near me if somebody's searching, in my case, a window cleaner near me, like that's what I wanted to show up for.

David Kaminski 00:03:45 And I figured if I could get in the maps and if I get in the organic listings, then I wouldn't have to pay Google. And that's pretty much what I did. So, I started collaborating pros. And collaborating means working together. So I love other business owners, and I just simply love to help other business owners.

Lee Murray 00:04:03 Yeah. That's awesome. I mean, I have worked with and been, you know, intrinsically part of a lot of commercial, commercial, type of professional service businesses like that. So I know, you know, that you this is a natural progression from, you know, if anyone if anyone's wondering window cleaning to, you know, SEO or content, it's a natural progression because you have to spend a lot of time on the inbound side for that business to.

David Kaminski 00:04:30 Yeah, if I would have been smart, I would have started like a pool cleaning business. Okay. Because if you think about a pool cleaning business, you just need like 50 customers in your set because you show up every week.

David Kaminski 00:04:41 Yeah, the window cleaning industry, like, man, I need ten, 20, 30, 50, 100 calls a day. Like, yeah, to keep feeding the beast and the machine because, you know, people really get their windows cleaned once, twice a year. You know, once you're lucky and you find those good customers. But yeah. So yeah, that's that's kind of what drove my fuel and my passion behind it.

Lee Murray 00:05:00 Yeah. Okay. So let's let's jump into this. My opening question is, has all the hard work that we've done in the past building online authority, you know, backlinks and, you know, page authority. All this. Has it gone out the window? yes.

David Kaminski 00:05:17 Yes and no. So there's yeah, there's some that don't matter anymore, like page authority, domain authority. It honestly stopped mattering about 3 or 4 years ago. Okay. I had a friend in Florida who had a pressure washing company, and he's like, I have 50,000 backlinks, and my domain authority is 60.

David Kaminski 00:05:37 he was showing up for like 13 keywords, and they were all related to his brand. Yeah. So and that was maybe four years ago, 3 or 4 years ago. So that long ago authority wasn't really mattering. So he had a whole bunch of bad backlinks. Now, links that do matter or citations, right? Yelp. Nobody likes Yelp, but you really need a listing on Yelp. it's because it shows up if you're if like, if you're a accident attorney or if you're a doctor and you search something and like Zach doc shows up. That's considered a citation, a business listing. So something that's showing up in the results, you want your business listed in there. So those absolutely matter. all the other garbage. Not so much. Now, however, if you are, let's say you're a dentist. We work with a lot of dentists. If you're a dentist and you have a link from another dentist, Google's like, wow, these guys are in the same industry. They're they they must be important.

David Kaminski 00:06:34 So like my window cleaning, if I surround my window cleaning website with a whole bunch of other window cleaners, those are valuable links. But all the other stuff is just garbage.

Lee Murray 00:06:46 Right. Gotcha. So? So. okay, citations makes sense. And another example of that would be what Google my business or whatever they call these business.

David Kaminski 00:06:54 Yeah. Yahoo pages. Yeah. Better Business Bureau and Chamber of Commerce or some of the best ones, Better Business Bureau. Like every single business I have, I get listed there because that's a really powerful, and.

Lee Murray 00:07:06 This is primarily like local rankings. You're talking about, for service based businesses. okay. So now that I think the bigger piece of this is the content, like blog writing, you know, videos, everything you have on your website, off your website. How hard is it going to be to get your content seen and made part of now the I answer that a user's getting when they search.

David Kaminski 00:07:34 All right. I love that question. I will give you the exact formula to show up for whatever search term you want.

Lee Murray 00:07:41 All right, let's do it. Yeah.

David Kaminski 00:07:42 You want to hear that? So I do it starts with a blog post. I was amazed I was on a call yesterday with a music teacher in Brooklyn, New York, and, he's a really smart guy. He's really good at teaching music. but he was showing me all of his amazing blog posts, and, one of the blog posts is like, you know, top ten things you want to your student to learn when they're learning the piano. Yeah. I said to him, when you're searching for a piano instructor, do you type in Google top ten things I want to my student to learn? Or do you search piano teacher near me? Yeah. Yeah. Right. So right. Guess what? You're going to title your blog Piano Teacher Near me.

Lee Murray 00:08:28 Yeah. Right. Well, okay. Practically, yeah.

David Kaminski 00:08:30 Most people are like, Holy cow. Like, I didn't even realize that. So you want your blog post to be the exact search term?

Lee Murray 00:08:37 Pretty simple.

Lee Murray 00:08:38 All right.

David Kaminski 00:08:38 So now and a blog post is breaking news. So now I'm titling the blog post Piano Teacher Near Me or music school near me. Okay. And it sounds weird, but that's what you title it sounds like. Yeah. Within the blog you want to geotag images. This guy is in Brooklyn, New York. So within Brooklyn, you want to talk about the city of Brooklyn, the town of Brooklyn a little bit. Right? And it's got to be content that's, you know, that's going to get somebody interested. It's going to educate. So Google wants to show the best results possible. If you're going to educate them. You want it to be like a thousand words or more. Right. so that's part one. Part two is on the home page of your website. You and you're talking about content here. You want to write content that's going to again educate your customer. So how much do piano lessons cost. Right. That's a question people ask. So why not put that question on the home page of your website now? Why not an FAQ section somewhere else in your website? The home page has the most power and authority on your website, so if you have a link on your home page, go into an inner page or an inner blog post that I just told you.

David Kaminski 00:09:46 It just is throwing gas on a fire. So you're going to put like if you go to Google and search, how much do piano lessons cost? It's a people ask question. It's a little box. You click on it more come down more come down. So okay bed really good questions for your industry. You know if you're a dentist how much you know do implants cost whatever the root canal blah blah blah. Yeah. In this case how much is piano lessons? and, so you put a little article just a couple paragraphs. Sometimes you can cite a YouTube video in there, and you put it in there and you link it to your blog post. So now and the link that you put from your home page is Piano Lessons Near Me. It sounds weird. That's the search term you want to show it for. So you link piano lessons near me to the blog post that says Piano Lessons near Me. Now guess what? Your website's going to start showing up for piano lessons near me. It's pretty easy, right?

Lee Murray 00:10:35 Yeah.

Lee Murray 00:10:35 That that that. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So then would you now reverse engineer that and say start looking for questions that people are asking. And so then that gives you your to kind of to do list of content to create.

David Kaminski 00:10:49 Yeah, absolutely. So if you go into Google and search, you know, how much are dental implants or how much are piano lessons. You're going to see a people ask. And when you click on one like three more and you click on one like three more com and you keep clicking on it and kind of related. Yeah, yeah. Or you can go to a tool called semrush.com. Yeah. Right. And just type it in there and it'll tell you questions people ask in your industry okay.

Lee Murray 00:11:12 So so that's kind of getting back to keywords right. So you're mining keywords and trying to figure out which ones can we rank for. And then you're creating content on your site. You mentioned blog articles being sort of a breaking news type of approach. And then service pages you're going to talk more about services.

Lee Murray 00:11:32 do you need to I mean, you mentioned talking about Brooklyn, the local area as part of the blog blog post. I guess that's in relation to it being near them. So you're so it all does make sense. Okay, okay, so then what do they go?

David Kaminski 00:11:46 Let me go into this a little further.

Lee Murray 00:11:47 So let's do it.

David Kaminski 00:11:48 Let's think you're getting close to what I'm thinking okay. If you want to show up in Brooklyn for piano lessons near me, the first thing is, if you don't have that content on your website, it's difficult for Google to say, hey, I want to show this business. So now you did the blog post that says piano Lessons Near me. So now you have the content on your website and obviously your Google Business listing is connected to your website, so now it's more apt to show up for that. Now, how do you get it to really show up in Brooklyn? So let's say your store is, Lee's Lee's music com. Right. So you're going to go Lee's music com slash Brooklyn.

David Kaminski 00:12:25 And then from Brooklyn you're going to have subdomains, piano lessons, guitar lessons, music lessons, all the search terms you want your Google Maps to show up for. Okay. Now you're putting the content in a in a, organized fashion under the city Brooklyn. So you can do New York. You can do other cities. I don't know, Queens. Whatever. Right. Sure. So now you do the city.

Lee Murray 00:12:48 Pages, you do the.

David Kaminski 00:12:49 City and then slash and then the service or the search term you want to show up for in your Google Maps.

Lee Murray 00:12:54 Okay. Okay. Cool. So yeah, that that makes sense.

David Kaminski 00:12:58 Really like what I just told you. That's 99% of SEO. So okay, so SEO is not difficult. There you go.

Lee Murray 00:13:05 If I start and we're again, we're just still talking localized, primarily service oriented businesses. just to kind of keep the same train of thought. if I wanted to start a cleaning company tomorrow and getting all my stuff together, build my website out, and I have all this knowledge, I'm going to build all this out, you know, to spec.

David Kaminski 00:13:26 What.

Lee Murray 00:13:26 Timeline am I looking at, trying to compete with everyone else that's doing these things, assuming there's other people in the market doing the right thing?

David Kaminski 00:13:34 Yeah. Google does give you, authority based on your domain age. Okay. And your Google Maps age. So if your Google Maps been around for one year, but mine's been around for 25, Google's gonna like me a lot more. So there is some authority there. And I'm kind of glad they do that because, like, now, you know, 25 years later, I've been a big dog. I don't want some young 19 year old kid to come in and take all my business. Right. So I kind of like how they do that. and then same with your website. Like your website, you know, you you can get websites moving pretty good that are less than a year if you structure it the right way. So years ago it used to be a ton of ton of backlinks. Now it's more content and better content.

David Kaminski 00:14:20 So there are a lot of like my favorite AI writing tool is called AI blogging.com or it's blogging.

Lee Murray 00:14:29 Okay.

David Kaminski 00:14:29 Yeah, it's AI blogging.com. It's pretty cool. So what you go, you put in your content and it writes amazing articles. It literally goes out and finds the top ranking articles for that search term and the whole United States. And then it creates a, a little content based, outline for it, and then it writes it and it's amazing. And guess what? You just push a couple buttons, paid a couple dollars and there you go. So yeah, the key is to get a lot of content on your website. Now, you don't also want to keyword cannibalize yourself. So if you're talking about piano lessons near me then you don't want to do piano lessons. Brooklyn near me write lessons, piano lessons, piano lessons. You don't want to do it over and over and over. So there's a point where you can you can cannibalize yourself. Also, if you're doing blog posts that aren't that great and they're not written that well, we've seen even like our team on some of our our customers websites.

David Kaminski 00:15:22 We put some content up and it ranks page one right away. And we're like, sweet. Yes. And then like two weeks later it was gone. Like it didn't show up. it literally their chart goes up and then down. Yeah. And then so we're like, okay, let's change the content, let's put it back on and it goes back up and then it goes back down. So Google's telling us like right away like yeah, you're close. We liked it for a minute. But that's not that great. So so what do you do. You interlink all your pages. You interlink your blog post to your pages. and I think Google's realized with AI content, like it's easier and faster to put content on your website, Google wants your content to be updated pretty often. So new content. If you keep coming back to the website, it's the same day after day after day. Google's like, yeah, kind of boring, right? Sure.

Lee Murray 00:16:09 So what happens then? I mean, you're talking about using tools to create content with AI.

Lee Murray 00:16:14 And you know, you extrapolate that out and you have automated content that's automatically made and posted. I mean, this is, you know, this is we're red blooded Americans. We're going to try to, you know, turn things up as high as they go, you know, as possible, as quick as possible. Yeah. You know, so I think getting away from the the nature of producing sort of bespoke, resource driven, user centric content is going to happen immediately. If it's not, you know, it's not already happening. And so what do we do about this where, you know, this sort of like new world of didn't we already have enough content and now we have exponentially more content. That's all I created, you know, how does that help or hurt our chances of ranking?

David Kaminski 00:17:04 So they want to be you want to organize them in a couple different fashions. You want to do tips okay. Like right. Like tips on, you know, playing the piano. So again we're going back to educating.

David Kaminski 00:17:16 We're not just saying hey, piano lessons near me. So we want to have tips and tricks. you know encouraging motivational stuff. So you, you want to educate and you want to like do the DIY stuff for pretty much any industry. So the more people are educating themselves in Google measures how long they're on your website. So if you're just trying to sell them all the time, either they're going to buy right away or they're going to be like, I'm out of here. So your time on site is going to be really short. So you want to put YouTube videos. Obviously Google owns YouTube, right? Put those within your website, your your blog posts and educate. Just simply educate the heck out of your audience. And if you have that mindset, you're not going to go wrong. Like you're really okay. You're really not going to go wrong. Because then when you're educating, people are like, wow, these this guy gets it. He's giving me some great information. And usually most people are like, wow, that's a lot of work.

David Kaminski 00:18:08 I'll just pay someone to do it. And that's that's the perfect customer, right?

Lee Murray 00:18:11 Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Oh, that was the next question I was going to have for you is about video. How does that help or hurt or is it, you know, does it help any more than just written when it's when you're just talking SEO.

David Kaminski 00:18:25 Yeah. As long as you're embedding YouTube videos, like, a lot of times I'll link a blog post on how to do something within the blog post, just straight out to a YouTube video that describes how to do it. I won't even embed the YouTube video. and I do it both ways. Like I'll embed the YouTube videos right in the middle of blog posts. But yeah, you like YouTube is so solid. Like people don't even get it and they don't even realize. yeah, they definitely measure how much you use their YouTube channel.

Lee Murray 00:18:54 Yeah. Okay. so what it sounds like is, from a user standpoint is I show up to search for something and, Google's going to give me back its best answer now with AI searching and, and kind of, you know, pulling together an actual answer versus just links.

Lee Murray 00:19:17 what so what happens with and it makes sense to the inner workings of how you would connect everything. Think resource think education. you know, more content is better, especially around particular pain points. Or actually, when you're talking made me think about the buyer's journey. You know, if someone starts at the top, or if they're coming in at the bottom, you know, having educational or resource driven content for every part of that journey, that's probably the best way to, as a framework, maybe, to think about content that needs to be created. Yep, yep. Wouldn't you say?

David Kaminski 00:19:52 Yeah, absolutely. And you can even go to ChatGPT. We do it all the time and say, can you write me, you know, 50 topics on, you know, how to play the piano like ChatGPT. I'll split it out real quick and then you're like, okay, can I have, you know, five different subtopics or blog post article titles on these 50 topics? And GPT spits it out pretty quick.

David Kaminski 00:20:15 but like you were, you were right to like, Google's algorithm has changed. I mean, like, I've been doing this for like 15 years, I think, maybe 13 years, a long time. but like recently, in the last 3 to 4 years, I've never seen Google's algorithm change that much. And everybody's always, like, set it for the years. I'm like, yeah, it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. But like now it's actually really changed. A lot of people get hung up on SEO like PageSpeed and you know, this optimization and that optimization, you don't really need to worry so much about that unless you're in a super competitive industry. But if you have the right content and you do it well, you're going to get the traffic. Now, a lot of times I've noticed in the last few years, like you used to search window cleaning or window cleaner and Google will list all sorts of local businesses. Now, Google lists Amazon products like window cleaning products, and I'm like, yes, sucks like that really made me mad.

David Kaminski 00:21:11 So I had to, you know, work a little harder at optimizing. Now there's there's a lot more over optimization now than there used to be. So is.

Lee Murray 00:21:20 There. Yeah. So is there a you know, how, like, I'd say traditional, historically. So there's always been a, kind of a trick or a game to it. And you, once you figure out the game, then you sort of play the game and then the algorithm changes and you got to play a little bit different game, different rules. Right. is there it seems like there is a new, completely new game. You know what you're saying? A lot of it is standing to be true. But, what's the game now to be to show up in the answer. Right. Yeah. Where I is coming back with an answer now and then, links to because we haven't gotten.

David Kaminski 00:21:56 A lot of answers, are coming back on Quora answers and Reddit threads. So you'll see a lot of Quora and Reddit.

David Kaminski 00:22:03 Yeah. because those are very heavy on just providing answers. So if you can get a post on Quora or a post on Reddit and then, you know, link it to your website, that's huge. That's really big. Now saying a minute ago about over optimization. So for easy Purposes. If I had a, you know, if you had Lea's music store. Com or Lee's music. Com that's a great URL because now you can put piano lessons, you know, guitar drum whatever, singing voice, whatever. But if it was Lee's piano, teaching school. Com you say Lee's piano teacher or Lee's piano teaching or Lee's piano school or whatever. Now you can't do services piano lessons because you have Lee's piano lessons. Com okay. And if you do slash piano lessons or best piano lessons, now you have piano lessons twice in your URL. Okay. So Google's really changed a little. They've always liked brands, but now it's even more so. So if you're a business like let's say window cleaning, like if I have a URL called Professional Window Cleaning.

David Kaminski 00:23:13 Com I don't want to say one of my services is window cleaning Or residential window cleaning or commercial window cleaning because now I have it in my URL twice, so it's gonna be a window cleaning com slash residential. That's it. Okay. Or commercial or highrise. So now like there was a lot of over optimizations because you kind of had to do that in the URL all the time. And I've seen sites that are set up like that just take so the brand, if you have the brand, then you put the, the the service behind it. That kind of makes sense.

Lee Murray 00:23:46 Yeah. That's kind of getting to a little bit of what I'm, I'm concerned about because if, if a company has, has all their URL structured properly and then they've built all these backlinks to those URLs, and now it's tanking because they were under the old regime. Yeah. You know, they're going to have to change to, to to move ahead forward. So they kind of lose a lot of the work they did in the past.

Lee Murray 00:24:10 Yeah.

David Kaminski 00:24:10 The good news is I mean there's goods and bads of that. The bad is it's a lot of work, right. yeah. News is your websites don't have to be as heavy and as big anymore. Like I used to say many years ago. Like if your website had 200 pages and blog posts talking about your product and I only had 20, Google's going to like you more. And still, there's a lot of truth to that. However, Google's really made it a lot easier, so you don't have to build as big of a website to actually get results. So, okay, a guy who's put all the work and stuff in, that's good and all, but it leaves a lot of opportunity. Like I was saying at the beginning of this, SEO has gotten actually easier in my opinion.

Lee Murray 00:24:54 Okay, so it can be a smaller site, not as many pages, it's just more how it's tailored to the actual user and what they're looking.

David Kaminski 00:25:02 For and how it's structured. Absolutely.

Lee Murray 00:25:05 Okay. So, you know, that's that's sort of what I'm seeing from my side is, is about user intent, right? It's the user shows up to Google and they we all our users were all searching and saying, you know, what is it? We're saying something, we want something back. And that's the kind of brilliance of AI and that it can do a quick search and parse an answer, an actual answer. Now of course, it's going to give us multiple options, and it's still going to give us links to do continue to do our own research, which I think is good. but so what I did was and not to, you know, not include AI in this conversation, I went to ChatGPT and said, okay, here's my question. What role does I play in understanding user intent and improving content relevance? All right. I'll tell you some of the things that said. And I want to get your feedback. So first first one it says user intent analysis algorithms can analyze search queries to discern the underlying intent behind them.

Lee Murray 00:26:04 It involves categorizing queries into informational, navigational, transactional and commercial investigation intents. Okay. Understanding user intent helps in creating content that directly addresses what users are looking for and improving relevance and user satisfaction. And then so that's user intent analysis and then contextual understanding. So understand the context allowed to interpret ambiguous queries and provide accurate results. and it goes on about how they do that. Semantic search enables semantic search which focus on the meaning behind words rather than just matching keywords. behavioral data analysis, it analyzes user behavior data such as click through rates, dwell time, bounce rates. This is where I think it gets a little wild. Yeah. Right. Yeah I mean if it can go out over the web and pull back in, you know, seconds, this data, analyze it all the way through to what they are predicting that this user is going to do on a certain site. Yeah. It's like kind of blowing my mind a little bit, on, you know, both like to my initial question of like, how does this kind of change everything we've been working on? And, you know, getting rid of some things in a negative way, but also to the positive for those businesses, to your point, that are out there doing the right things and making you know, the right content, being a resource, educating and doing all this, it seems like if us as brands on the user side of like you look at the whole user experience, sort of from search or ad through to, to purchase, if they hit the website and we were we're giving them that what they need.

Lee Murray 00:27:49 And we're thinking about Google in the process of that, but not Google first, then we potentially are going to win, because AI is sort of becoming the brain that's thinking, trying to think like, yeah, the business and the user. Yeah. I mean, it's it's crazy.

David Kaminski 00:28:12 I like how in the response it said users tent. so I focus on that a lot. Like I always tell people think of the transactional. And it even said in their transactional transactional searches. So you want to literally code your website for transactional and your Google Maps. So if someone's searching, you know, a roofer near me, right? Dentist near me, that near me is a qualifier beyond like like that is the kind of the holy grail of local SEO and local search is. yeah, sure. And it's funny because like I said, I'm in Arizona and I own a bunch of equipment in my business. And if you search certain, equipment rentals near me in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Orlando, Nashville, my Arizona business shows up number one above Sunbelt Rentals.

David Kaminski 00:29:03 United rentals shows up number one. And I'm nowhere near. Well, I'm kind of near Las Vegas. I'm kind of near Los Angeles because I'm in Phoenix, but I'm nowhere near Orlando, Florida. But I show up number one and is hilarious. Like the Orlando airport called us one day like, hey, we have this equipment. And I'm like, yeah, it's a little far to truck it. The only reason I show up in Orlando, because I was doing a trade show there, and I was kind of showing off, and I just wanted to show people like, look, pull out your phone and search near me and like, I'm number one, even though I'm in Arizona. So but that near me is a huge qualifier. And you can literally like what I said earlier in this podcast, you can literally code your website to show up for the near me search term in any city you want. You don't have to be near that city. It's amazing. It's just a search term.

Lee Murray 00:29:50 Yeah, yeah, that's a great, you know, pulling just out that one, that one. One point. Thanks for that. I think that this whole thing is, you know, one side is sort of blowing my mind as to what AI is going to be capable of doing with search and bringing us back good information as the user and then for the brand. You know, looking at all of what it's telling me here. It goes on to say about improving user experience, content gap identification tools that can identify content gaps by analyzing competitors contents and using query and user queries that are not adequately addressed. I mean, behavioral, data, semantic, contextual intent, all of this, it's all very much centered around the user, giving the user more specifically what they came for. And I think you were, you know, spot on. pulling out the, let's see, what does it say, the, categorizing queries into informational, navigational, transactional and commercial investigation. So that's a really big clue for brands, not just service companies and local, but I mean, those are categories.

Lee Murray 00:31:03 you can build content around.

David Kaminski 00:31:06 yeah, I was gonna give you give everybody like, use the tool SEMrush. Com SEMrush now. I love, love that tool. It's my favorite tool because like, if you typed in their dentist near me and just hundreds of search terms come out and they all say transactional, transactional, transactional, transactional, I'm like winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner. And then it gives a keyword difficulty. Did you know the search term emergency dentist near me has a keyword difficulty of like a 19? It's easy. Oh wow. Most people don't know that.

Lee Murray 00:31:41 And well, is it because no one's searching it, or is there a low volume?

David Kaminski 00:31:45 Or the best part? There's like 90,000 searches a month for it. 90. And it's easy. And I show it to Dennis all the time. I'm like, you don't even realize, like, we can get your website to show up for the search term pretty easy. They're like, what? Yeah, they're so focused on their brand that they're ignoring all the transactional search terms.

David Kaminski 00:32:02 I'll look at dentist websites all the time and it'll be, you know, lease lease dental lease dental, lease dental. And that's all the searches coming to their website. They're not bringing in the searches that are transactional, that have 20 or 30, even 100,000 searches behind it. Those are the ones you want to pay attention to because people, if they don't know your brand. And it blows my mind because most companies will spend so much money marketing their brand, which is good. But if they spent half that money and attack transactional search terms, they're going to be so much further ahead of the game. Their brand is going to blow up on its own because everybody actually knows about them. So yeah. And another thing is, if you put your website into SEMrush. Com a lot of times people think that their competitors are doing so much better than them and they'll realize, you know what? My competition is not that far off. Like, or they're doing better. I had one customer in the Orange County area and they're like, this guy, this guy, I see him everywhere, that guy, that guy.

David Kaminski 00:32:58 And I pulled up his stats and I pulled up that guy and he was doing three times better. I'm like, dude, you're doing way better. What? Quit worrying about that guy. Just focus on your business. And, so some people don't even realize that.

Lee Murray 00:33:10 So it was perception. Yeah, the perception in that case, Got him. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is this drives me back to. And this is what we preach on our signal media side is it's all about buyer's journey. if you really use that as the backbone of your content creation, it allows you to hit a lot of the marks that they're saying here. because informational is going to really play to the top and middle of the funnel. navigational. I'm not really navigational.

David Kaminski 00:33:40 If they're searching Lee's, Lee's dentist, they they know you're okay.

Lee Murray 00:33:45 So like a.

David Kaminski 00:33:45 Local, they know.

Lee Murray 00:33:46 Gotcha. But the transactional, to your point is the bottom of the funnel, typically, they're ready. They're in market, right? They're ready to make some kind of purchase.

David Kaminski 00:33:54 Get some money in the hand, move to, like, emergency dental. That is so transactional. Oh my gosh, mouth is killing me. I gotta go find a dentist or I lock the keys out of my, like, the keys out of my car. Like, man, I need to find a papillon. Right? Locksmith? Yeah, yeah.

Lee Murray 00:34:09 You know, so if it sounds like if I could take maybe sort of, make some advice for you. It's like what I think you're saying is start with the transactional, because those are the ones that will turn into sales, which kind of gives you immediate, more immediate ROI allows you to reinvest up the funnel, to these other types of content.

David Kaminski 00:34:34 Okay. And it's not as hard as people think. Like I just said at the beginning of this, it's not that hard. Yeah, it's really not.

Lee Murray 00:34:41 Wow. Okay. Okay. So, let me give you a sort of scenario of something I'm involved in, and I want you to tell me this is sort of just my personal, you know, I'm going to get some of your expert advice real quick here on air.

Lee Murray 00:34:56 so I'm a part of a YouTube show called expandable, and it's, a partner with a bank client of mine, and, it's a show that he and I get together and we record episodes, talking to about small business growth. Right. All the things you should be thinking about operational efficiency, financing, all the different things. And so the primary goal for the show is for his brand and his, his bank, to use it for SEO because I thought, right, we'll make these long form, podcasts. We'll put them out on YouTube, we'll link them back to service pages, and we'll embed them on the website, which we're doing. is it so I really like this idea of long form podcasts or, or YouTube shows or whatever for partial use of SEO, because there's lots of other other uses, meaning their internal sales teams can utilize the content to, you know, for business development. it helps for the educational process for people that are actually not using search, but using other ways.

Lee Murray 00:36:02 through the buyer's journey. So there's lots of ways. But for the SEO side of it, how should we be thinking about, really maximizing SEO with a show like that?

David Kaminski 00:36:12 So you have a website connected to it all, correct? Okay. Yes. Yeah. The I mean, I always say hands down, blogging is just it's gold. So every time you do a show, do a blog about it in bed to embed the YouTube video in the blog, other things like you can search out. And this is something that I do all the time, and I don't really tell too many people about it. But if you search other people in your same industry on YouTube, put a little link to your your YouTube podcast or your YouTube stuff or your website. Put the links in the comments of other people's YouTubes in the comments that are related to business or whatever you're doing. Right? yeah. And that builds tons of authority. It also helps index stuff like so I would do blog posts and I would put some links on YouTube and that's, that's a fantastic way to build a little bit of steam and a foundation.

David Kaminski 00:37:07 But if you think about it, if you do a blog a day doesn't sound like a lot, but a year from now you have 365 blogs, like it's a lot of content. And, blogs are breaking news, like Google's like what's going on. The other benefit to a blog post, and I didn't mention this earlier, are the tags. So again, if you want to be a piano teacher, Brooklyn like you do that blog post, you tag it. So the tags tell Google what search terms that blog should show up for. So you're literally telling Google I want to show for this search term, that search term and that search term. So, yeah, I'm a huge fan.

Lee Murray 00:37:45 Just you're talking about the metadata behind this behind the back end of the blog post.

David Kaminski 00:37:50 Yep.

Lee Murray 00:37:50 Yeah.

David Kaminski 00:37:51 Yeah. If you if you have a WordPress website, it asks you what tags. most website builders will ask you what to tag a blog post with. and if it's a YouTube video, then it's, it's the hashtag and it asks you for tags too.

David Kaminski 00:38:04 So.

Lee Murray 00:38:06 Sure. Okay, so if a brand new company started like I was talking about, I'll start a pull service or, or any, any other kind of company. in it's in a noisy space where there's already competitors that have a 25 year old domain. What strategies should they deploy to get found quicker, build solid. And I'm talking about, primarily lead gen.

David Kaminski 00:38:31 Well, I mean, without paid ads, you're talking. Right. Like, sometimes like, that's the point where you're going to pay for ads and and get the ball rolling. But,

Lee Murray 00:38:39 Yeah, there needs to be a multi-level or multi-tier approach.

David Kaminski 00:38:43 So Google Maps is usually the fastest way to get up there. so what I was talking about before doing your URL. Slash the city, slash your service. get reviews on your Google Maps for sure. and I would do auto blogging. I that's the website. I think I said it wrong before auto blogging. I, I would use the heck out of that now. my business is called the Collaborate Pros because a little secret to our source that a lot of people don't know or, or a lot of people don't realize is if you're starting a pool company, go join a Facebook group with a ton of other pool cleaning companies across the whole US.

David Kaminski 00:39:25 Okay. And then you make friends with them, and then you ask them this, hey, man, I'm going to put a blog on my website, and I'll put a link to your website in my blog. Can you do that for me? So if you start connecting your pool cleaning company to ten, 15, 20 other pool cleaners around the United States, you're going to start showing up on page one because Google's like, why do all these pool cleaners love Lee's pool cleaning service? He's doing something right. Yeah, and that's not hard to do. I guess you have to be friendly. Most people are friendly. So get on Facebook, find a group and start chatting it up. I say be friends with all your competitors, man. That's like, yeah, that I think is so much more powerful than anybody in this world realize.

Lee Murray 00:40:06 That sounds like a great, a great strategy. And along the way, you meet a bunch of people that you learn from and they learn from you.

Lee Murray 00:40:12 And I mean, that's it's like you're backing into human nature. Human nature is to be in community. And I'm big. I'm a big proponent of the future, as I'm sort of saying now, the future is human, you know, but we're utilizing AI to make us to make us better. but community people always are going to want community. They're always going to want what we're doing right here, even if it's virtual. so, so I think, you know, it's like what I, what I'm taking from this again is just coming back to those that same philosophy. It's like, how do we as humans operate? What do we naturally want? And then, you know, serve those things. Yeah.

David Kaminski 00:40:54 Yeah. So that that tip I just told you about surrounding yourself with other pool companies, I'll give a little deeper dive to that tip. Remember I told you about those people ask questions on your homepage. So you want to put a link within their on your homepage to somebody else in the pool company industry? The homepage.

David Kaminski 00:41:16 What did I say has the most authority, the most power. Yeah. So if you have a link on your home page, go into another pool cleaner. Even if it's going out, not coming in, you're going to associate yourself with other pool cleaners. I have a guy in Atlanta, Georgia, huge city, right? I literally got on his website and I did three pieces of content on the home page, and I linked to other people in his same ministry. I'm not lying. In six days he had like seven search terms jump all the way up to the first page of Google.

Lee Murray 00:41:48 Oh wow.

David Kaminski 00:41:49 Just because I put links out to other people in his industry and those weren't even links coming in. Most people are like, oh, I don't want to link out because my link juice and my authority. When you link out to other people in your industry, you're associating yourself with that industry and other people who are in authority. So that's a huge nugget. I don't usually share that one.

Lee Murray 00:42:11 So yeah, that's a that is huge I appreciate that. We'll take that one.

David Kaminski 00:42:16 Yeah that one's huge haha.

Lee Murray 00:42:18 So so how do you, you know as a, as an expert in what you do, how do you stay in front of all the changes. How do you follow. Like who do you follow and who do you look to for advice on?

David Kaminski 00:42:30 Well, I follow Jesus. Hey, who do I look at? I like that. So, you know, I've had some mentors along the way. I love just, you know, I a little bit of a shiny object guy. Like, I love scrolling through Facebook and like, ooh, I'm gonna check that out. Oh, I'm gonna check it out, you know? Yeah. a lot of times I'll check stuff out and sometimes they're legit. Sometimes it's like, yeah, you know, but I have a group of guys, like, so when I, when I got out of my window cleaning business, like, I, I paid my education in the SEO world, I went and joined a group and I collaborated with a bunch of other SEO guys.

David Kaminski 00:43:06 These guys were doing SEO for insurance, like big, big stuff, right? Affiliate marketing. and I would go to Nashville a couple times a year. I'm still friends with those guys. So, you know, we chatted up every now and then. but yeah, I'm just like, I'm.

Lee Murray 00:43:20 So you have sort of an inner circle.

David Kaminski 00:43:22 Yeah, I've got a circle of of dudes. and yeah, I'm a sucker for knowledge. I'm always reading stuff. I'm always watching YouTube videos. You know, I'm always looking at what other people are doing, you know? yeah. So that's how I stay up to date. That's kind of how I evolve. But, you know, like, I came up with a system about four years ago now it was during Covid. Is Covid that long ago? Four years ago? Yeah, it was 2020. Yeah, it seems like in that. But yeah, when Covid came, my wife and I moved up to our cabin in the mountains and I'm like, you know what? Starting this marketing business, because that's what I've always wanted to do.

David Kaminski 00:43:57 And I had this little system that I'm like, you know what? I think if I did like these four things, I think it's just going to work amazing. And, still to this day, I don't know other SEO guys that do the little method that I do. And I did some case studies. I'm like, hey, I'll try it out for ten businesses for free. And all ten of them shot up to page one. And they were different industries. And I was like, yeah, this is cool. That's awesome. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, it's fun man. It's fun seeing other people's success. It's fun, you know, helping other business owners.

Lee Murray 00:44:29 Yeah. For sure. Okay. Well, hey, thanks so much for all your advice and taking us down this rabbit hole. I've. This has been an itch that we can keep.

David Kaminski 00:44:38 Going, man. This is fun.

Lee Murray 00:44:40 Yeah. You know, and I and I definitely want to keep going. I want to I want to come back.

Lee Murray 00:44:45 and and dig more, you know, deeply into this because there are we just scratched the surface because we start talking about all the things that I was telling me, you know, even just user experience by sharing those things.

David Kaminski 00:44:58 Remember the political world, how confusing it is. It's not confusing.

Lee Murray 00:45:03 No it's not. No.

David Kaminski 00:45:05 You know, all the stuff I say. And Google's got all these books. It's it's really not that confusing.

Lee Murray 00:45:10 Yeah, nothing is as confusing as the word. Yeah. but, Yeah, but thanks. And, we'll have to have you back. if I want to send people your way. Where do I.

David Kaminski 00:45:21 Send collaborate pros. Com pretty easy, right? Awesome. Yeah.

Lee Murray 00:45:26 Yeah. And are you on LinkedIn?

David Kaminski 00:45:28 It's it's all our handles are collaborate process. So you should be able to find us. Yep. Hey it was wonderful. Had a great time. Have a wonderful day. God bless.