Transcript Angel: hello everyone before we get started don't forget to subscribe click on that notification bell share like dislike comment let us know what you're thinking you could also follow us and leave a review on spotify apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast and if you want to leave a donation to the angel awards podcast via cash app it is a-o-w-e-n-t now today on the angel of words podcast we have seo manager for circa interactive mr ray martinez on deck on the angel of words podcast [Music] hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the angel of words podcast i am your host angel of words and my guest today is seo manager for circa interactive all the way from san diego california mr ray martinez mr martinez how are you today joining us today on the podcast brother it's a pleasure to have you Ray: Angel i am humbled and honored to be here thank you for having me as a guest man it's lovely to be here i love your show and what you've been doing um but yeah man it's great being on here you know just as an seo manager every day i you know work with larger businesses right now help them get found on search my big thing is you know i i help people market the people and find the right target audience and make sure a message matches the people that we're trying to meet you know i want to make sure i'm meeting people where they are and not doing too much Angel: well i'm glad that you already broke into it because that was you know that was going to be my first question like could you break down what you do in layman's terms man for the untechy savvy human being Ray:so i have this thing that i do anytime i interview someone for an seo job i i answer one question i ask this question all the time what is seo yeah and to me seo is making sure that you are found on search in organic search results so when you pull up a google search what you'll see is you'll see ads at the top of the page and then right there below you'll see that first organic result and that to me is gravy and there's a whole magic sauce there's a whole bunch of different things that you can do in terms of tweaking on page there's a whole bunch of things that you do by building backlinks there's a whole bunch of things that you do by structuring your content and having your content written a certain way to really and it's you really need a combination of all those things to earn that number one step um so it's you know it's like a puzzle so every site needs something different every page needs something different every topic needs something different um so it's all about all about analyzing all those pieces and putting it together so that i can get the most eyeballs on my client's website or web prop Angel: ray that's a lot of work man i'm going to be completely honest with you you know i i've done obviously you know because i'm posting stuff online all the time and i'm like bro like how do you even go about optimizing website you know websites social media content you know uh digital content like you know how like what thought what goes through your head man because you know it's a lot of different variations Ray: honestly you know you want it's funny because like so as you know i i studied advertising in public relations so i came from like a very traditional background i didn't i didn't ever intend to be an seo Angel:at full disclosure guys ray and i went to college together we got our bachelor's degrees together over there city college of new york shout out to them and you're right man like it was old school like it was very old yeah it's very traditional Ray:and um so i actually was working for a club i was working as an intern um you know the owner of the club she brought me downstairs said hey here's my website try to make it rank try to get it found because we want to bring people in you know i want to make sure so she had me optimize a listing on yelp she had me go through the website i did a whole bunch of what we call now black hat so i went on these websites found out little hacks and tricks that now google would penalize your site and remove you from the index um and did all these yeah i did all these you know back in the day you could do that though because google wasn't looking for it and now as it's evolved over the last decade really it's when you see penn and penguin come in so basically penguin was a link so basically they were looking for sami link and it was looking for the quality of your site to make sure that you're actually putting out quality um and it cut a lot of bad practices down like back in the day i could just take a bunch of text put it in white or whatever the color the background is and stuff a bunch of keywords in that text make it invisible so that you can't see it so i keyword stuff on the page and i rank really well can't do that anymore who understands context um so you know i took that and i really got interested in like ranking and kind of just worked my way into it and when i got here to california after getting a master's from the new school in new york um i i started working at this seo agency and i really started from the bottom up like i started doing all the little execution stuff like actually link building going to directories submitting links so basically you know the big thing with seo is and this for the longest time it's been this is the more links you can earn for page the stronger that page is going to ring and there's there are certain things that you need from those links you need relevancy you need it you need those links to be trustworthy you need them to be and what i mean relevant they need to be relevant to your content they need to have anchor text that matches your content they need to come from credible sources on unique interesting content so you know there's a whole bunch that goes into this link building but back in the day uh what you could really do is you could just i could just you know find a way to hack or add like a link into a plugin and get a million people to download this plugin put it on their website and i got a million links yeah and then all of a sudden wasn't like back then i was like exactly so would you like i'll talk to some of these old heads in the game right now and they you know these guys own like and they will never tell you how many websites they have like you know 50 to 100 websites and they're driving traffic because you can monetize all that you know we make money on that traffic yeah that's you make money that's where the money's at everybody wants that traffic and you know and your job so people know is to make sure that you optimize that traffic correct so it's basically i'm qualifying the traffic when we say optimization what i'm doing is you know there's multiple things so like me i specialize in three three main areas for my industry and i deal specifically in higher education right now my clients are you know large universities um tier one schools that you know by name um for example you know one of the big clients i work with is lsu online they're my they're my favorite client um but you know i've really watched their site go from having 1000 visitors in january to you know x amount now and it's like a huge amount of growth you know in in a short period of time um because we did it the right way you know and we worked as a team to make sure that their pages are structured in a way that their users get the most information and it's not about you know nowadays it's not about like trying to please google it's about making sure the user gets what they need um and yeah i mean just seo practices right now you know i kind of lost my train stock Angel:no no it's all good man that's so good but you know what do you think is the most important thing that people need to know about Ray: managing website content managing okay so so managing website content getting back to on page optimization i mean you want to make sure you meet google best practices i mean there are best practices out there like making sure that your url like you know if you have uh if you're using a content management system and your url structure is incorrect like you have like numbers or file numbers associated with your url from a from a php query string so i'm getting deep into it right now Angel: no no go ahead man because you know this is this valuable information man so basically if you have that query string attached right anything in a query string on a url if it's not properly being tagged or tagged or canonicalized is not indexed because what google is saying is oh you're searching for a file but i'm not going to index that independent file rather i'm associating this with the url so everything that comes up on this url minus whatever you're searching and so basically you're creating duplicate pages in this site and google and google looks at that and they rate the quality of your site and they lower the quality of your site they're saying oh you have all these different pages serving the same exact title offering no benefits to users my phone is talking to me because i mentioned google um [Laughter] Angel: well now we know exactly what phone very carries on them you know exactly you didn't know now you know guys Ray: yeah it's pretty funny um but yeah i mean basically when you want to manage website content you have to think of content in a silo um really from a topical structure i think you know so there's a one of the thought leaders in seo is ahrefs it's a tool that seos use to understand links understand content um it's a great tool to really just diagnose a lot of issues with your site um that particular tool they have a they basically have a really good guide on content strategy and developing content around content silos and they they have this particular model they talk about a page let's say we have a page an area of your site that's focused on fruits and vegetables you're a grocer and you want fruits and vegetables so then you get down into individual individual fruit pages individual vegetable pages right and then you from there you get into the individual fruit itself or whatever variant so you have like i go you know fruits and vegetables folder i'd go into fruits and i'd have an orange so i'd have a fruit page i'd have an orange paste each with headings so you know fruits and a variety of you know variety of fruits you know that'd be my head my what is a fruit is my next h2 that's my next section and from so on and so on i build out topics to really just talk about all the angles and aspects of the fruit and the reason i do this is because i'm showing my authoritativeness i'm showing my understanding of this concept of what a fruit is so then i'd get in into the individual page and do the same thing with similar headings and you basically and what you're doing by creating and adding all these headings is you're pulling in organic keywords that you rank for and the more variations of organic keywords i liken them to doorways they're entry points to your site the more entry points you can rank for the more traffic you're gonna get but it has to be relevant it can't be something that is not relevant to to to a site exactly well not so much google is going to pick up on it it's that if you're trying to monetize this right say you want to generate leads right let's say that angels and words want people to sign up for the monthly a monthly newsletter all right and you want to drive signups if i'm driving traffic about fruits and vegetables to your signup page they're going to land and say what the hell is this [Laughter] and so what are you going to do if you you get faked out like that you're going to leave immediately i'm not going to this is spam this is a very that's a that's what we call a black hat practice actually google calls it you know there's a certain type of cloaking where i can send you from one url to another that has nothing to do with it google actually basically like a click bait type of situation because it's basically you're you're you're faking something somebody out and you're showing you're showing one thing but you're actually bringing them to another property that has nothing to do with it gosh it's it's you know it's very much in line with like fishing practices so it's like you have to think about this and so we want to make sure that when you know you're building out a content strategy or building out something around your site um it's relevant to you it's relevant to your industry it's relevant to your your mission it's relevant to the services the offerings that you provide um because then you have you get what's called qualified traffic and we say it's qualified traffic because we have tools like google analytics which i will say is a must for every small business owner if you don't use google analytics you should be it's a free analytics tool it's a javascript snippet that you actually put on your site it's called a ua code a universal analytics code that google's created um it's a trigger so it basically is triggered when a user lands on your site registers a visit it tracks their visit um all this data is anonymized by the way so you can't see who the user is but you understand where users are landing you understand where they're navigating to your site um and i like to use that tool to really understand what my what users to my site value what's the content that resonates with them um and you know google analytics is a really great tool to really diagnose that and there's also these engagement metrics so one thing that google provides you with there's something called downstream bounce rate is essentially the percentage of users that land on your site and took no action and leaving me generally you want a bounce rate under 60 that's what would be considered an industry norm an average bounce rate anything above that it's showing that your content is not quite relevant to the target audience if we did that fruits and vegetables page to angels of words you'd probably see like a 98 bounce rate and then you'd see you'd get leads you'd probably get sign ups but it'd all be spent got you got you now when they talk about you know because Angel: they talk a lot about building and nurturing an online community right you know how do you go about that and what exactly does that mean Ray: i think it's just engagement i think it's so there's a couple things that you got to do like if and it depends on the platform so you know with facebook when you have a page you know you really want to drive up the users external from your friends and family you want your friends and family to like the page but you want more people than your friends with them and you know the real reality is you're gonna pay you got to pay you know x amount of dollars a couple hundred bucks to do what i'd call a life campaign and especially so that works doing those campaigns on facebook does add value to whatever brand you're trying to market yes but i i would i would also couple that with it needs to match your audience Angel: gotcha Ray: so you need to really understand the interest of your audience so you can target the audience you want or if you have a mailing list you can create what's called a look-alike list and look alike lists in facebook essentially you upload this list and they look for profiles of similar behavioral interests um and then they'll give you this list of users to advertise to um it's very intuitive i think you know especially with with more media based and creative based facebook's an interesting platform to advertise to because you can do a lot more um i think with like a longer sales cycle style like product so like because i market um i market higher education degrees specifically you know my you know my company's bread and butter is master's online master's degree it's you know it's a harder proposition and we have to we have to use creative in a different way to re-engage and personalize and that's matched across like email marketing so it's like it's a full inbound campaign across multi-channels as where you're a small business i can almost do all of my brand in one social media platform Angel: that's that's crazy man now what what triggers should you like you know should you use for your website when you're monitored you know when you're monitoring you know user analysis what triggers should you look for like what what what insight is really the most important or is it just goes depending on what you're trying to market Ray: i mean the data's going to tell you a story so i think i think i think the main thing is looking at the story so like for example i've seen you know i've seen sites that have seen a one-day spike in traffic right and then i go back and be like man what's i couldn't correlate what's with this one day spiking traffic and i speak to the client i'm like hey you know i saw this one oh they're like oh yeah we had this big event so it's like the data is going to tell you a story yeah right there's real world events that are happening that are going to translate into people coming to your site and actually interacting with the site so if i see my users growing month over month but i see a bounce rate at 90 percent i know that my traffic's too big i know it's fake yeah it's no good exactly in new york exactly [Laughter] you mean it's all fake yeah so like you know one thing that you can really look at to understand the quality of your traffic also is time um is the average session like how long a user stays on site um really you want that over a minute at least you want a user to give you you can't get them to give you a minute there's something wrong because you know what like a minute to two minutes is just enough time for a user to just enter their email address or sign up for something that they might find interesting you know that's just enough time but anything under that are they taking any value from my content so i have to think about that how many pages are they going to on the site so if it's over one page average session i know that they're clicking to another page and you can actually see the user path and say hey you know 30 of the time users go who land on this page go to this page so you know that these pages should have better interlinking maybe you should call out the page that they're linking to directly on the page Angel: nah that makes sense i mean now what about keyword research like do is like should you research like keywords before you even start doing anything of that like because i always tell people like i mean before you even because i mean i feel like i i felt like i did enough research before i even launched angel awards podcast but i could have done more and one of those things that i could have done more is keyword research so when i'm you know doing these things i can actually try to drive traffic to where i'm going and i wasn't too hip to the game on that how do you feel about researching keywords before you even get anything started but is it something that you can adapt to Ray:keyword research is everything in life gotcha it's everything that i do now Angel: is there a site ray you can go to like you know how do you know that you're getting value you know valuable information so i think there's there are a bunch of different tools out there so in google ads you can use the keyword planner if you have an active campaign running um you also have buzzsumo i'm sorry uh what's it called spyfu so they have a key keyword uh research tool you have sem rush you have ahrefs um there's a bunch of different tools out there um that you can actually use for keyword research also there's this really cool uh browser plugin um for google chrome that's called uh it's keywords everywhere so essentially anytime you google search anything um you'll get a sidebar on your google search it'll give you related keywords it'll give you their calls per click um so quick research and their difficulty um it's like 10 bucks and you get 100 000 searches Angel: or that's valuable that's valuable Though Ray: it's worth investing in okay so and it's also giving you related keywords and it's giving you maybe it's giving you what they call long tail variance so the thing with keywords are you know the big part of research is not just finding a keyword that matches your intent but finding one especially for small business owners finding one that's not competitive that you know your site because the big thing is you know sites need what's called authority google looks at how old your site is how many links and citations are pointing to your site how many unlinked brand mentions there are of your site for example like i've seen larger brands like an lsu brand they benefit they'll see a huge spike in rankings around a national championship win they're the online school and they're receiving it from the football team's brand and they see this and they just benefit because lsu is being mentioned everywhere facts so you so if you are in a competitive space and you have larger players in the game you damn well better believe that they're investing in seo and not only are they investing in seo they're investing in valuable links but here's the thing you could look at these top players in the game you can see the keywords that they they are ranking for you can see what they're not ranking for and you've that's where you find your opportunity you call their gap analysis pull all their keywords look look at where your keywords are looking for opportunities that they're not ranking for that you can actually get in and you're grabbing all this information via via google analytics is this this information is there so this is i mean it's a variety of sources so like when you do the keyword research basically you're getting with certain tools you're getting how many searches you average searches there are a month how many average clicks there are a month what if you were to bid on from a cost per click perspective what the cost per click would be um and basically the more expensive a keyword is the more competitive the the higher the cost per click it's telling me that it's driving qualified traffic which is why the bid is so high so i look for things like that and i take that information on the organic side and i said okay who's ranking for this so we look at the organic results and we look at we do what's called a link gap analysis we look at their backlinks how many backlinks are pointed to this page and not only how many backlinks are pointed at this page how many internally how many internal pages do they have on their own site pointing to this page that have their own backlink so it's it's a pretty layered yeah y'all you know Angel: i love it i feel like you're reading my mind like you know the questions i'm about to ask you because i was like i'm like this mysterious backlink i didn't know what the heck that was to like you know i was preparing for this podcast and now i'm like yo backlinks that sounds interesting that could you elaborate a little bit a little bit more on what that is and how valuable it is Ray: so we call a backlink any any site that says hey i find let's say somebody reviews you let's say the new yorker reviews games in the board's podcast and they link back to your website that's a backwards and that's like the highest quality backlink because it's the new yorker magazine and they're a high authority well well reputed brand linking back to your site so not only is it just like a really great brand mention links actually pass equity from a so the more authoritative site by actually giving you this link back to your site is actually passing you equity from their site to you [Music] and that equity lifts up your pages in the rankings because to google they're saying this authority figure says that this piece is relevant enough to be mentioned on their site which is a vote of confidence i i liken it to like a citation it's like all these citations if people are citing you as a reference it's a powerful indicator that you have a lot of knowledge around this topic got you so it's like Angel: if drink dream champs for example had a had a website and then they mentioned me and their website and now they're clicking on me and they're like oh Ray: boost your rankings up because it's like oh this we're valuable we're we're the influencers and now boom this is like you know Angel: the i guess the underlings or the people on the rise or the people that are joining us i would also say i would also Ray: say what's also interesting about that though the power of a brand like a drink chance right so like if norway said you know shout out nre you know and then he goes angel the words podcast shout out that's my man right just him saying that right alone would generate so much traffic for you just just that alone would be uh that it's called an unlinked brand mention yeah would be a valuable extension of driving traffic well i won't hold my breath for that you know [Laughter] Angel:i love jerk said i love you gloria i feel like having a shot for nori but hey man me too brother you know i'm gonna have to continue this grind i don't mind it's fun i enjoy it but yeah no but okay but that makes perfect sense that what how bank links are implemented now you know how important is coding languages like do you have to be hip to html Ray: javascript css is that something that you also have to do as an seo manager you have to be aware of or have some knowledge base in so as a as an seo manager my responsibility in technical seo um i have no quote um i'm not a coder like i will not go out there and build the code i just unders i could go into your site i could understand elements i could read i could say okay this is what this is doing um for example you know i i looked at my own site which is built in wordpress and i was like you know there's we had a whole bunch of uh jquery on site and we were only using it for this animation that we could use to get the same effect using css right so we had a whole library loading it was slowing down our site just for an animation that we could do with something else that we're already using and we use more of so we have this unnecessary library that it's just and it's it's called it's what we call render block gotcha so you like and you develop those things like i i didn't go to school for that you know i mean i i was a writer and i ended up learning about html because i had to structure the page and i had to tag headings and i was actually doing the execution and reviewing to make sure that the on-page optimizations were done i had to look for the title tag i had to learn oh is the page canonicalized okay i have to learn what a canonical tag is i have to so you basically learn these i think the best part about being an seo is you can self teach yourself i think the main thing is diving into a site and not being scared to look at the code and if you're not certain of what something is um look it up you know a couple months ago i had seen um and then it's called an inherited library system tag or a inherit uh inherited paragraph system attack essentially no i like i i had known there was ways to like basically associate something and bring it on a page dynamically but i'd never seen the actual tag i was like what the heck is this you know um and i was like oh so i googled it i'm like oh okay yeah and i think that's the but it's also it's important to note that these languages are always updated like there's always new uh variations of bootstrap new sorts of markup um and there's that's the thing you know with seo you always have to keep learning you know you're gonna get overwhelmed Angel: Ray you know because this some this sounds like something you're learning on a daily basis like this is changing like second to second situation everybody talks about busting algorithms open and i'm like man i would love to bust an algorithm open but like how am i gonna go about that they change constantly and your job is to stay on abreast of that man like how overwhelming must that be sometimes Ray: i think it's going back to the story yeah don't get lost from story so google analytics is a story the users that are converting and that are engaging and interacting with your content that's the story so if i know that there's an algorithm update and my wave decreases i need to understand what what happened with that algorithm update so then i start going to the blogs and gloves speculate a bit but you can you can get a semblance of what's going on there you can also look at google they're not transparent so it's like that's like watching cnn fox and msnbc and trying to decide what the truth is exactly it's it's you know it's speaking every day all day and it's waiting through all that to understand but i mean i think it's looking at the data is going to tell you Angel: right the data's going to tell you if i see Ray: exactly if i see my traffic's decreasing right the volume of my traffic the number of users going down but i see more users are converting more users are engaging and they're staying on longer i'm not as worried of course i want to increase the volume again but i see that my traffic's qualified so now i'm saying okay there's qual how do i track more of this traffic how do i turn the knob up on and that's where you have to use content strategy to really identify the areas and it's it's mapping your users understanding the personas the people because there's different types of users that engage with the site you can get that demographic information from your facebook from your google analytics it's right there on your page and i think understanding and speaking to those users and speaking to you know this is a practice called news jacket perfect example you know the election using using that type of content to engage people but not to divide but to start a conversation yeah that's volume gotcha like i i had a client that's a nursing school they're a small nursing school based in the southeast they ranked number one for a bachelor of science in nursing because we capitalized and we had a lot of content around pandemic prep and this is before the pandemic on just cold prevention all that and because of the generated interest the natural interest and uh increased interest because of cobit the school just naturally saw a huge gain impression and they're at all-time highs in traffic Angel: wow Ray: just because they were relevant it was timeless Angel: that's crazy man now now ray like these websites well these places that make websites for you such as squarespace wix wordpress like are are they valid places to go to start or should you start a website from scratch what do you think like is it is that even worth starting a website from scratch anymore Ray: i think it depends i mean um depends on the nature of your business it depends on how much traffic you expect to receive it depends on how you want to monetize traffic depends on the technology you want to run behind that site so i think you know there's a couple of things that will really determine that i think for small businesses if you know you're going to generate revenue and you're serious about your business and you want to put invest in yourself i would say wordpress.com um because there's a lot of plug-ins and there's a lot of functionality and you can hire developers with experience on wordpress for relatively affordable pricing if you go on like an upward or like a freelancer.com type deal you can find resources Angel: yeah yeah yeah basically you can find resources because it's php is a very common language and that's what uh wordpress.com is built in so yeah i mean i would recommend that um i have enterprise-level clients you know clients with thousands of pages using wordpress i think when you get over a million and a million visits a day to your site that's when you need to kind of like maybe outgrow like a wordpress or you have to do like a custom build with them or do a static like build for your website i would say it's really pricey to build your website build a static website and then it's also a lot of work because you need a developer to go into the files manually update files because it's not a cms doing the updating of all the plugins and all the languages for you it's your developer having to go do that and then you have to pay for dev time and then it's about and because it's because it's a server side you generally end up might end up playing like for a back-end developer which is a little more expensive than a front-end developer the back-end developer does the server-side stuff um because you need them to set up uh ssh so you need them to like set up uh i'm sorry uh what's it called ftp you need them to say that too many acronyms in my life but uh that's all right does that mean ftp so you need to it's a file transfer protocol um so that like somebody like me if you have a static site i can go into that folder and add the necessary files or go into the files and update them from those folders so without going into the server doing it remotely and just accessing it through remotely that makes sense now now ray how do you use social media do you think it's you know do you think that because a lot of people seem to think it's like the most important thing but how do you feel about it like if you're if you're trying to brand yourself like is it something that is you should use you know that should be 30 of your brand 40 of your brand and it's marketing tactics like how do you feel about social media and the usage of it to to you know bring your brand to the forefront i don't think you can survive if you're a brand without being on social media that's just me um that's my personal feelings about it i think you need to get in where you fit in and you need to be there where your users are and your users are on social media Angel: yeah it's a captured audience it's right Ray: there tools are at your disposal um let's say you write a blog post and you post it on your facebook for 20 you could boost that to like 20 000 people it's i mean it's just it's so simple it's it's a relatively easy tool that and it's intimidating so it's like it seems like a really high barrier but you can go in there and you just play around and you play around with the targeting tools the interests and you can build audiences all you want i mean they have data points on everyone i don't know if you've like ever watched like cambridge analytica it's crazy they were no i mean you know i've been you know i've i've i've messed around with google analytics i look at the analytics on my spot on my anchor you know what i mean i look at my google uh my analytics on my lips and like i read like i i know what my demographic is my age and gender you know so i have a good gauge on what's happening but it's reaching out to them that is always the hardest part finding you know and breaking that algorithm you know what i'm saying that i always say that's like part of my life it's looking at your audience and setting the targeting at the right age matching that demographic and matching the interest i think it's taking the insights from facebook and throwing it in there but i also think like you have these larger players in the game like like cambridge analytica that has like they basically did um all the digital marketing for trump in 2016. and what they were able to do for years they were stealing data from facebook like Angel: oh yeah they got into a lot of trouble over that yeah yeah yeah yeah and everything that was yeah exactly yeah so so that that Ray: that yes that game right they were basically reading your mind man it was Angel: crazy Ray: you know because they had they had nodes so this is the type of information that facebook has so when you're using their targeting in their tools you're using that level and that depth of information so targeting my interest is very powerful you know i i i've you know seen people just target my age and by geo and that's not enough you need to get the right type of user because what happens is if you're paying per impressions and then you get a whole bunch of you know invalid or unqualified impressions what does that matter you just paid for a whole bunch of wasted ads so i think it's just it's that personalization that matters i'll say it's you know for me i go from search engine optimization and i really want to take it to search experience optimization so that brand covers all these organic spaces yeah i think i want to get to a point yeah no go ahead sorry i i think another thing that like businesses need to use because of my business if you are a physical business or you have an office as an online business and you have a local geographic region that you want to hit you need to use that tool you need to be there just to be in the map you need to claim your space you need to claim your business because if not somebody else is going to claim your business and uh make money off and you see this with what's called what are called ghost kitchens i'm not sure yeah i've heard of that and then you know i i i also heard that actually you know posting your business and and getting like your friends and family to write reviews for google is a good way to go because nobody's doing that nobody want you know let's say you have a where you're working from home or the or you know you're working from home you you you have your studio or whatever there a lot of people don't want to post their their business from their home location but that helps you you know get get people to to come to come to your to your brand because maybe a lot of people in your area aren't doing it and it might help drive consumers your way i would i would put a disclaimer there though because you know depending on where you live you know what there is like if you live in an hoa and they say you can't have a business from your house and then you put up a visit oh man oh man that's just bad news i would say but yeah i mean if you have like a brick and mortar like if you want to use your home office as a location you want to say this is my headquarters why not you can set a service area say hey you know i do i only work with people in east coast time zones because it matches my time so i would use just google my business as a tool because not only that it's you're inputting your brand information and it's something that google can use to populate a knowledge graph about your brand so when you use google my business you actually get a full knowledge graph with whole panels you can add pictures and not only can you add pictures if you add images that are relevant to the services you provide you can actually drive qualified traffic with those pictures now ray there's a lot of people out here that you know they give all this false information on marketing on youtube and and whatnot like you know what platform or person do you think is a credible source of information for strategies of this nature like if you're gonna go online and try to do you know try to do your research because you know i'm lucky i got you to come on the podcast but a lot of people don't have that you know what i'm saying so i yeah i would say i would i would say like you gotta look at the industry thought leaders and that and those are like you know legacy for seo would be like a mod you have ahrefs which is um they're really good with understanding content links all things seo um backlinko which is really good understanding what we call off page seo which is that backlink building um yeah so i mean you have neil patel who's another great resource he has a boy he has his own agency but he also has a blog resource which really gets into the nuts and bolts of seo um there's search engine journal search engine land um sc round table i i can get you know uh traffic think tank those guys are really great um and it's like an innovative group of seos um i actually have a colleague who's a member of traffic big thing um and they it's they're nationwide and they basically get together and put their heads together and talk about things that are driving traffic and how they you know what the the trends that they're seeing in terms of the industry and where they're going and the things that they're using data for and how they're putting content together so those guys are really interesting yeah i mean there's tons of resources out there i'd say hubspot another great resource for businesses hubspot is a marketing technology company uh they really understand tracking help people implement forms um and help with automation so really cool stuff there yeah i mean i now really like where do you think a small business right should should invest their money when you're when you're starting off in terms of like money so i would say okay i would say if you have a local area you want to do local seo so there's three letters that you as a business this is the acronym you need to know it's nap name nap nap nah okay name address phone number got you and the reason you need to know that is it needs to be consistent across all your citations and there are you know this is a service that i actually do on the side is i'll do cleanup for small businesses because it's you know you you're talking about a volume of websites you know you got to go through the yellow pages through so you have tons of sites like yellow pages that actually index and list your site and you need those to all be consistent with all the matching information and and all having the same website and google sees this as a trust fact if you have inconsistent information ranking locally is going to be really hard now ray i got to be honest i'm really impressed with the depth of information that you're providing today it really makes me proud that we come from the same alma mater you know what i'm saying and i you know um i i preface that to say this you know there's 16 percent of latino americans in the workforce you know six percent of them six percent of latinos overall are in stem you know there's 18 million you know high-paying jobs in stem you know what what do you think why do you think that there's less of us in this situa you know in stem and these kind of you know tech in this tech space and you know we seem to be all in hospitality or service industry or you know things that aren't sustainable because as you can see the pandemic has wiped that out you know a lot of people are unemployment and a lot of latinos aren't unemployment you know so it's funny man not really funny but it's it's interesting that you bring this up because it's like that that last part really is close to home because i got a homie that just you just brought it who's in new york who's really affected and i know i mean ray you know i used to you know i worked in the service industry when you met me bro you know i was bartended when you met me they're like yeah so it's like i think it's i think it's fresh i think i mean when i go back to like so i was in an honors courses like i grew up part of my childhood in puerto rico right and i came from puerto rico back to new york to public school in brooklyn in a predominantly white neighborhood and i wasn't put in the highest honors class which i should have been i was putting the one right below it right in high school i got a 75 in an honors math class i wasn't put into a regular math class i was put into a remedial math class that set me back like i didn't do pre-calculus so i went in my college path i had never even done calculus i took the easiest math i could possibly take and i regret that because now i'm going back and i'm doing data statistics and analysis of data and now you're working with numbers all day yeah i i actually i do forecasting i i use decay formulas so like i use a fair bit of statistics and statistical analysis every day um i think it's an oppression thing i think especially when you're a new york city public school student you know if you're going to be labeled you know they label kids and when you label kids and when you when you ship kids off to the bad class like i remember this particular school in brooklyn you know they had the it was the special class which is the honors class which was separated from all the other kids and then you had the you know 6-1 6-2 6-3 and these classes were all separated by varying degrees of behavior oh man that's horrible so it's you're basically segregating kids [Music] by social and behavioral issues so i say i directly relate this back to stem and i think what i do see though um and i see this nationwide is a pushing of the stem and theme movement to a lot of communities of color and i would recommend yeah i recommend parents letting your kids get getting your kids into science and math um at a young age and trying to find resources around like after school programs for math you know getting them you know workbooks around science and math and having little experiments and encouraging that sort of behavior because i think in the long run when you look at the engineering space and when you look at a lot of these higher paying job spaces it's where we can really make our mark and move and actually change infrastructure and change and affect people's lives and i agree i mean i agree with you because i mean those spaces right now which really is going to drive the economy moving forward and if we don't get that type of education man we're going to be lacking you know we're going to be slacking behind everybody else and it's not going to be good for the development you know you know we can't be doing the same things with the benefit of everyone but we can't be doing the same things our parents were doing 20 30 years ago you know like i noticed my little niece is learning the same way i was 30 years ago and it's disconcerting i mean i think i think there's i think there's a definite disconnect in the way that especially like in public schools the way kids are taught and like i can tell you like so when i went to school in puerto rico you know my father worked for the federal government i went to a private school on a military base um on fort buchanan and puerto rico tilly's elementary school and i had two classes i had two teachers in the classroom for 15 kids teaching me bilingual so i have one teacher speaking english one teacher speaking spanish and all the resources and attention you could possibly imagine and i remember going from that environment to going to brooklyn and there's 40 kids in the class with one teacher and you know it's it's natural for this teacher to be overwhelmed and not want to deal with all these kids i mean like that that's and it's crazy because these teachers care because like i'm i'm friends with that sixth grade teacher on facebook hey yeah yeah teachers cut to the max you know this guy no you know what she's let me tell you though like she's friends with all my classmates like she has like people without professors bro what's up you know what like i'm friend i'm friends with uh i'm friends with applebaum and then professor guy jackson in contact with miss applebaum honestly man i gotta thank her man a lot of the things that she taught me still ring in my head till this day i'll be completely honest with you honestly when i started the role as seo manager uh she reached out to me she goes oh seo manager i see i see mr martinez so i mean it's great to have that connection and i think look your education is what you make of it and i think you know it's a two-way street so i think as a parent you got to be invested in your kids education you got to show your kid that it's a value because if you show them it's a chore like i think one thing that i've seen a lot of just in my own family and this is me speaking anecdotally is i've seen you know education uses a punishment like you do do your homework or you know it's like reprimanded to do your homework or to do something or to learn or punish yourself to make you read now that's that type of behavior should be encouraged that should be a reward you know like for you know i was blessed with parents that said hey you know you have this homework but you know the moment you do your homework your free time is yours to do whatever you want so when i was a kid i would do my homework in class so while my friends were like either talking or taking notes i was doing the homework already because i knew that if i could show my mom that my homework was done my free time was mine um and so like i had i had i was blessed with parents that like set that value of saying hey education matters um wow i hope a lot of people are listening to this because what you said was just so profound right now because it makes perfect sense man if you breed it like that if you you know if that's the culture then that's what you're gonna that's what you're gonna create you know that's the type of person you're going to create wow that's deep you know i i i i see it all the time i think it's hard now especially to balance as a parent your kids want for things you know they want to screen they want a device and you want to be the parent to give them that but devices are bad we have to understand that a lot of the social media a lot of the tools that we're using we may think that they're free they are not free we are being experimented on with behavioral things and that it's it can be as simple as a button color change they're trying to right we're being told we're being told when people don't even know that we're being told what we like what we don't like we're thinking that we're making these decisions no they're making those decisions behind the scenes or the tech people behind the algorithms and everything yeah they're you know they're suggesting things for you to purchase it's all about commerce yeah um you know like i i i get into arguments with my own parents because i'm like yo step away from the television because it's captured you're trying their their job is not to inform you their job is to make money for their bosses their job is to keep you engaged as long as possible to say hey look at what my engagement rate was so i can charge x amount of dollars for an ad placement that's what their job is that's what that's this is there is no difference between an msnbc a cnn and a fox news they're all they're all doing the same thing and they all switch positions and varying and they all rotate because and you know the people who all the people who work at those agencies they're not bad people they're just people making a check yeah it's like me and you just working man exactly they're just people making a check and i think we say oh big media and overlords no it's not about that it's about 15 it's about that extra 15 per second i can charge for an ad space because if i can do that to scale that's a couple million dollars that i added in a month as a company right we can have a whole conversation about that man yeah anyway so crazy it really is man people really need to pay attention to what they're consuming why they're consuming it and be conscious of it you know what i'm saying because like at the end of the day you are a dollar they're they're buying your attention i mean they're they're using your attention to make money you know i mean but it that it is what it is you know um just consume what you feel you're gonna need to better your life that being said we've reached the point in the podcast mr martinez where it's time to play five words with angel [Music] all right all right mr martinez on five words with angel i'm gonna give you a word you're gonna give me the first word or phrase that comes to your head are you ready yeah let's do it here we go the first word is social media chaos [Laughter] second word is google opportunity the third word is websites lead generation the fourth word is s oh the all-powerful and now there's the curveball uh obviously it's the fifth word that's what i like to do the fifth word is the city college of new york baby cuny best times of my life oh man you ain't lying you ain't lying man oh my god now mr martinez um you know before we end the podcast please let us know what you think makes a good seo manager and where to find you man if people have questions about what we just spoke about today on the angel awards podcast yeah i mean so i think what makes it really great seo manager's attention is detail um uh curiosity and um wanting to learn more and understanding how things work and liking to put together puzzle pieces i think really that aspect and understanding just writing if you like english if you like literature you like writing topics for actually writing pages or writing doing any sort of content seo is pretty interesting and would be right up your alley um and in terms of reaching out to me um if you're a small business reach me at raymond.martinez.com and once again that's raymond.martinez.com um with any inquiries uh yeah i'd love to hear from you guys i you know my specialty you know where i really cut in and started with this business was with small businesses so now one more thing ray could you give a message out to the kids out there man that might want to get into what you're doing right now yeah i mean it's just keep at it work i mean i i think your path is never defined um you'll find your way into whatever you're gonna do and and if you're gonna get into digital marketing i would say just run with it i would say own every space and don't be scared to ask questions ask a lot of questions and you know learn from experience get your hands dirty don't be scared to do the hands-on work and learn the execution because where you actually grow is through the execution through the execution you learn the strategy and from strategy you can understand where the money's at well mr martinez thank you for joining us today on the age of awards podcast my good friend is it really good to see you man great to see that you're busting it down out there in san diego and you know we will be in touch moving forward man for sure awesome that's a pleasure it's a pleasure brother i'm i'm honored to be on the podcast man it was great sharing this time with you um and thank you to all the viewers out there what's up y'all i hope you enjoyed my interview today with seo manager for circa interactive mr ray martinez dropping that knowledge about how to get your stuff popping via google via anything that has to do with anything media now you know where to find us on uh youtube at angelo wordsent follow us on spotify apple podcast and wherever you get your podcast leave a donation if you want to at aow ent on cash app and if you want to know what i'm up to on my social media catch me at angel of words ent all one word thank you for tuning in everyone we'll talk to you later [Music] you