The Confident Entrepreneur With Jennifer Ann Johnson

Mastering Online Visibility: A Deep Dive into Google Ads and SEO Strategy

• Jennifer Ann Johnson • Season 3 • Episode 12

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In this episode, digital marketing expert Vi Wickam shares insights from over 20 years of experience to help entrepreneurs navigate the ever-changing world of SEO and Google Ads. Vi explains why ranking #1 organically might not guarantee visibility and how ads now dominate Google’s first page. He discusses how integrating both SEO and paid ads can drive real results, and why focusing on creating valuable content is key. Vi also dives into engagement metrics, mobile usability, and leveraging AI while maintaining authenticity. Tune in for actionable strategies that will help you stop chasing algorithms and make Google work for your business.

Visit us at jenniferannjohnson.com and learn how Jennifer can help you build the life you dream of with her online academy, blog, one-on-one coaching, and a variety of other resources!

Jennifer Johnson:

Visibility is the lifeblood of business success. Whether you're a scrappy startup or an established brand, your ability to found online can make or break your venture. And when it comes to online visibility, two titans stand tall Google ads and SEO. But let's be honest keeping up with Google's ever-shifting algorithms and ad policies can feel like chasing a mirage. Ever-shifting algorithms and ad policies can feel like chasing a mirage, and what worked last quarter is probably not going to work today, and today's winning strategy could be tomorrow's outdated tactic. So that's why we're rolling up our sleeves today and diving deep into the world of Google ads and SEO with Vi Wickam. He is a self-proclaimed Uber geek.

Jennifer Johnson:

That's in his own word not mine and an award-winning musician. He's the guy you want on your side in any digital duel. For over 20 years, vi has helped businesses with Google AdWords, management, marketing, banner ads and YouTube ads. He's also well-versed in web development, microsoft ads, facebook and business strategy. He's crazy about dark chocolate. Microsoft ads Facebook and business strategy.

Jennifer Johnson:

He's crazy about dark chocolate I love that and will work on a smile-inducing song played on his great-grandfather's violin I've actually heard this and he is nerdy about the machine inside Google that makes business successful. He holds a solemn vow to make sure your website and data are firmly within your control, which is a rare promise in this digital world, and that's why today we're slicing through the technobabble bursting, busting myths and unveiling strategies that can propel your business and boost your search in your rankings online and help you spend more of your hard-earned money more efficiently. So let's go ahead and dive on in. Welcome, vi, thank you, Jennifer.

Vi Wickam:

I'm so happy to be here with you today.

Jennifer Johnson:

I am so excited. I have to tell you firsthand that when I say that you will be the dueling partner to help somebody in any digital issue, I actually had a digital issue on my website that I didn't even know anything about.

Vi Wickam:

Oh man, and it was a mess, huh.

Jennifer Johnson:

It was a mess and you guys unearthed it for me. You're like did you know? And I'm like oh my gosh what are we going to do? And we worked through it, we figured it out and poof, it's gone. So there we are.

Vi Wickam:

It is. There are some nefarious people out there that are looking to make money off of your back.

Jennifer Johnson:

Yeah, and you know what? That's something we're going to. We're actually going to have you on again and we're going to talk about the craziness that that ensues today. We're going to focus on Google, google, um, advertising. We're going to go, uh, go back to search engine optimization, seo, and talk about what that can do for our business, and a lot of people don't necessarily know, when they hear the word SEO, what does that mean? And let's explain SEO first, okay, and then talk about Google, kind of in tandem.

Vi Wickam:

All right.

Vi Wickam:

So SEO stands for search engine optimization, and what most people think of it as meaning is getting to be number one on Google, and it generally does mean that.

Vi Wickam:

What it means is we want to make your website or, better yet, your entire online presence. So this includes things like other directories and your Apple Maps listing and your Google business profile and all of those things that go around your website. We want those showing up too. So we want, when somebody searches for you, we want your YouTube channel to show up and we want your Google business profile to show up. And if you have shopping, if you have products, we want your products to show up and we want, if you're a service business, we want your local service ads to show up and we want Google ads and we want you to own that first page of Google whenever you can, and ultimately, the goal is to make sales and to create customers and to connect with them, which means that good website usability and conversion optimization so turning those visitors to your website into customers is really where it's at, because good usability is SEO when it really comes down to it.

Jennifer Johnson:

Right. And you know the interesting thing as a business owner and as a business coach working with other small businesses, I think a lot of small businesses think they put their website up, people will just come and they'll just show up in all the search engines or all the-.

Vi Wickam:

If you build it, they will come right.

Jennifer Johnson:

And it doesn't work that way.

Vi Wickam:

Nope, does not work that way.

Jennifer Johnson:

You're usually paying for that You're using. You know sometimes you know there's other ways, as we'll talk about, but a lot of times you've got to pay. Pay to play right.

Vi Wickam:

Yeah, a good example of this was I had a client this was like 15 years ago, but it's a great example of this he had a condo down in the Bahamas and he bought the condo and he worked out in a relationship with a travel agency. So they do the bookings for him and the bookings in this kind of condo complex they were like 50% booked through the people who owned the condos or owned the complex. And he wanted to be booked all the time and so I made him a website. And I told him I made you a website, but unless you market it, it's just going to be out there and it's not going to do anything. And he said yeah, yeah, yeah, just build me a website and then we can talk about it later.

Vi Wickam:

So I built him the website. He said oh, this website's great and why isn't anybody coming to it? And I said you remember our conversation when I said you got to market it. So then we spent the next few months marketing it and, shockingly, he booked out 100% of the time in his condo. And not only did he book out 100% of his condo, he ended up buying another condo and booking that all out, and then the other condo owners in that complex got mad because he was booked all the time and they weren't.

Jennifer Johnson:

What's your secret?

Vi Wickam:

Yes, yeah, exactly. So he decided to just sell both of those condos and build, and he sold both those condos using that same website, built a new duplex and sold that using that same website. But none of that would have happened if he had just built a website and let it sit there.

Jennifer Johnson:

Right, and that's the power of SEO. And how? Now? How does Google ads play into that? Is it? Do you piggyback it with it? Is it all part of the recipe per se?

Vi Wickam:

Yeah, it's all part of the big strategy. So you know you can't just do one of these things and expect that you're going to succeed, because the truth is right now, if you want to be on the front page of Google, even being number one on the organic search results often won't have you on the first page.

Jennifer Johnson:

So explain to our listeners what that means if you're organically.

Vi Wickam:

Yeah, so organically is SEO generally speaking. So organically means my website shows up naturally in the search results. So even if I'm number one on most screen sizes today for the natural results, I won't be showing up in the first page of what somebody sees or the first screen. So Google has their first page which you have to like scroll through three screens of stuff to get to the bottom of that page and really like, if you're not on the first page organically, you're not anywhere, you know. So like there's a joke among us nerds that says what you know, if you want to go into witness protection, what's the best place to hide? And the best place to hide is the second page of the Google search results.

Vi Wickam:

I love it, that's funny, but when it comes down to it, the first thing that shows up is local service ads and product ads.

Vi Wickam:

So if you're trying to sell a product, google Ads shows up first for the product and then you'll have one to three spots taken up by regular Google Ads. So those are the normal Google Ads. Yeah, those are the text ads and those might have expanded results. So you might have the title and then three or four of the pages underneath it and a description, and you know. So those can take up a good amount of real estate, and then you might have a Google business page showing up, or you might have the whole maps pack, which can be three or four search results, and the top one of the maps is actually also an ad most of the time. So you know, by the time you get to the first naturally occurring search result, you've already seen three or four different sections of ads, which each might contain three to five different ads. So Google's selling ads. That's their business, that's their business model. They provide search results so that they can sell ads.

Jennifer Johnson:

I'm curious, now that we're saying that, like I'm assuming, there's probably statistics out there about this, but the percentage of people that will only look at the first three people on there which could be sponsored ads. Right, they're not somebody's paying for them, most likely. But you know I wonder what the stat is on how many people actually go past like the top three.

Vi Wickam:

Yeah, well, it does change, you know, like, depending on what type of search it is, and you know whether it's a local search or it's a product search. But you know the and this data is a little old, but the last time I looked at that data, the first organic search result and the first ad results are the two things that get clicked on the most and you know between those two they get about half the clicks. So you know the second and third ad results get the next most clicks and by the time you're getting to your second search results you're down to probably 10%, and by the time you're at the bottom of the page you're at 1% of the clicks. So really, everything beyond page one is less than 5% of the possible clicks.

Jennifer Johnson:

Wow, so you really have to aim to be on page one.

Vi Wickam:

Right, and when you're looking at something like SEO and you're looking for opportunity, you know what you're looking for is. You know, there's also a saying among us nerds that says the top five is the new top 10. So if you're not in the top five, you know, like the top five also represents, like you know, 85 or 90% of the clicks.

Jennifer Johnson:

So you know, like we're.

Vi Wickam:

We're looking at, you know, being moving into the top 10, moving into the top five moving into the top three.

Vi Wickam:

So you're looking for those keywords that have a good connection, because if the keyword doesn't have a good connection, because if the keyword doesn't have a good connection to selling, it doesn't matter that you rank on it, which, just a word of advice, is when somebody's showing you reports on keywords you've got to think about is this a keyword that my client would be searching and what's the volume? How many people are searching for this keyword that could be my client? One of the tricks of SEO companies is that they will give you a report that shows look, you improved on these 10 keywords. You've improved all these places. But the truth is is, you know, these are keywords that don't get searched very often and or they're keywords that don't really move the needle, as far as these aren't zero moment of truth type keywords. These aren't keywords that somebody's searching when they're ready to buy. These are keywords that somebody's searching early in the process, when they're researching things.

Jennifer Johnson:

So I have a question about that, and back at the day they used to do, I just remember it vividly. I don't remember what it was called, but basically and I know Google is frowns upon this I assume still we're in the I know right.

Vi Wickam:

Probably.

Jennifer Johnson:

You couldn't see it. It's not something.

Vi Wickam:

Oh yeah, the hidden keywords.

Jennifer Johnson:

Yes, like you'd, you'd stuff your website.

Vi Wickam:

Yeah, keyword stuffing.

Jennifer Johnson:

Time, the date, the weather, like things that people don't normally look at. I'm assuming that's no.

Vi Wickam:

Oh, that's been, you know, for 20 years or so. That's been a bad plan. It was really a bad plan from the get go. I can admit that in the late 90s I did that on one site and I really didn't feel good about it, because you're not giving Google what Google wants. You're not giving the customer what the customer wants. You're trying to trick Google. You're not giving the customer what the?

Vi Wickam:

customer wants. You're trying to trick Google and I like to say that you don't want to play chicken with someone who's buying their server by the tons. You know like they have the best engineers, and when you try to game Google, you try to do things that are tricking Google into ranking you better. You never win in the long run. You might get ahead for a week or a month, or maybe even three to six months, but I promise you this at some point in the not so distant future, google will figure out the tactic that you're using to try to game it and you will get banished to the back pages of Google and you will never be seen again.

Jennifer Johnson:

Right, so what are some strategies for picking keywords that are really going to resonate? And then what do you do with those keywords.

Vi Wickam:

So one of my favorite things to do is to look at the questions people are asking to Google so you can look for keywords and there's a lot of keyword suggestion databases online where you can say, like, what are the top 50 keywords that somebody searches for around this keyword? So say, we wanted to look for keywords around fishing poles, you know, and we could find, you know the top 50 keywords around fishing poles. Or we could, you know, pick a brand. We could say, you know, around Louis Vuitton, what are the top 50 keywords around that? But it might be more useful to say what are the top 50 questions people ask about this brand or this type of product, and then that's a great opportunity to look at how can are these questions that my customer is asking and then how can I use those and some of the ways you could use those?

Vi Wickam:

You could use those as a frequently asked questions page so you can take those questions, you can answer those questions and that provides content that is search engine useful content. You're answering the questions that real people want. The answer to that they're going to Google and typing in and when you have those answers on your site, google sees you as a more authority, type, person, brand. So other things you can do with those questions. You can write blog posts that answer those questions. So if you have a paragraph answer, that's a great thing to put in a frequently asked questions. But if you have 500 or a thousand words, you could write about this. You could write that as a blog post. You could then add that to your frequently asked questions and link to the blog post for more details.

Jennifer Johnson:

Oh, that's a great idea, you know. But the and I can tell you firsthand. So I blog for one business, I don't blog for the other anymore. The reason why and I you know, maybe there's a rhyme or reason to this Does it take a long time for Google I don't know if you still call them Google bots for them to to latch onto that information and then start feeding it to people. Because that was my frustration, like, oh my gosh, I feel like I've been blogging forever and this just takes too much time and it's not going anywhere.

Vi Wickam:

So there are a lot of elements when it comes to SEO.

Vi Wickam:

When it comes to, I mean, you can tie Google ads in here, but this is really more of an SEO question.

Vi Wickam:

So, depending on the authority and the frequency that you add content to a site, google chooses its spider frequency of your website or its bot visiting frequency.

Vi Wickam:

So if you're putting out four articles a day and you have lots of people coming to visit your articles and they're staying to read more articles when they get there and they're sharing those articles on the social platforms, google gets all these signals that you have authority and it decides I'm going to go to their site every day, or maybe I'm going to go visit their homepage four times a day and then you know I'm going to visit these other pages, you know, once a day, once a week, but generally, one of the things when you set up a site map on on your Web site, you should set up a Google site map that says how frequently these pages change, which can be daily or weekly or monthly.

Vi Wickam:

And generally speaking, if you say it's going to change daily, that gives Google a signal that it's going to change more frequently. But the word of caution is if you say it's going to change daily and Google visits it every day for a month and it never changes, google's likely to say, yeah, this really isn't that important, I'll visit it again in a month. So you know you're sending a signal, but you're also sending another signal by how you actually edit that content.

Jennifer Johnson:

And so it sounds like it's also tied to the engagement that happens on those blogs. So if you're pumping out this stuff every day, five days a week, that nobody's engaging with it, then Google's going to be like eh, you're not that interesting.

Vi Wickam:

Right, and Google also looks at those trends, you know. So if it's a brand new site and it has no followers but you start getting traffic and you get engagement, google might give you a boost in the rankings. So one of the ranking factors in SEO and this came from the leak that Google had in May where there was an algorithm leak that didn't say how these ranking factors played in, but it said these are ranking factors that exist and so when that leak happened, there were a lot of things that Google said oh no, no, we don't do that. That showed up and one of those things was that click-through rate and engagement are factors for ranking. So an example of this and this has been common knowledge among Google Ads, but was said by Google to not be a factor on organic ranking.

Vi Wickam:

So in Google Ads I can get cheaper ad clicks than because I get a better click-through rate. So Google will increase my ranking for the same bid if my ad is better written and more engaging and also if the page experience when somebody lands on my site is better. So those both play into this ranking game and so I know that Google, on organic, also has a quality score type number, just like it has in Google ads. That is like the tide that raises all ships. So you have a quality score for the page but also for the domain. So Google has multiple ranking factors for your site and so if it says this is a reputable domain, then all of the pages on that domain get a little boost. And if Google says these guys are spammy, all of the pages on your site get decreased rankings. Right, and that goes with engagement as well.

Jennifer Johnson:

This is why you hire someone to do all of this, because my mind is just going well, what if this, and what if this, and what if this Wow? I mean, there's so much to dig through in the weeds.

Vi Wickam:

Well and that's the key is knowing which things actually matter, which things are really going to move the needle and make a difference for you, and which things are distractions. Because, like you said, the tactics change all the time, but the principles have remained generally the same from the get-go. If you create a great website that answers the questions humans are asking, that sells something that people care about, which could be attention like you could be selling entertainment but you're providing something that people actually want and you're doing so in a way that satisfies Google, which is always more authority and better content, then you will win the game. But it's a long game. It is not a game that you can just like. I mean. An example recently is AI generated content, and I think AI can be a great tool for assisting you in creating blog posts or assisting you in writing descriptions for products, but you don't want to just spit the crap out of AI and post it.

Vi Wickam:

And what was happening as soon as ChatGPT got in the hands of some programmers who were less than scrupulous, is you got websites coming online that would have 50,000 pages overnight, that were AI generated and were just a bunch of junk that nobody cared about of ads. So they were using AdSense or the DoubleClick network or one of the ad selling networks, and you know we're flooding Google's rankings with junk content that you know Google hadn't yet figured out how to stop this and it took them a few weeks to figure out how to handle all of this giant amounts of junk that was being spewed onto the internet. And after I don't know, maybe it was a couple months they got things lined up. They ran some tests, they figured out how to penalize those sites without penalizing most of the normal sites. You know, there's always people that get caught in the crosshairs you know, always collateral damage, but usually collateral damage happens when somebody's skirt.

Vi Wickam:

you know they're trying to ride the line instead of trying to be very clearly good quality content that answers people's questions.

Jennifer Johnson:

So you kind of answered the question that I was going to ask you about, which was you know effective strategies that someone can use to optimize their website? We already kind of yeah.

Vi Wickam:

So you've got the strategy, which is do what humans want. Do what Google wants, speak to the human in their own language and use the structures that help Google understand your site better. So it's not about tricking Google. It's about helping Google have a clearer picture of what you're trying to present, and what you're trying to do is be of service to humans. So, tactically, there are things like having proper heading tags, which both people who are hard of you know have sight problems, and Google use that descriptor to understand what's in that image and that becomes a ranking factor. And you know, having a title that's clear and a description that's clear, because those will improve your click through rate. If you have a good title and a good description and that is another thing that came from the Google leak was that having a good description is a ranking factor in as much as it drives more clicks, but having a good title, which Google said, titles don't matter anymore.

Vi Wickam:

Don't worry about the titles, titles still matter you know both, because they'll improve your click-through rate and they help Google understand what this page is actually about. So when Google says titles don't matter, I think what they really mean is titles don't matter if they try to. You know, like if they're trying to confuse people or they're trying to trick Google. You know, don't try to trick Google. That's the bottom line. Don't try to trick Google. It doesn't work. The end, the end.

Jennifer Johnson:

You know, going into the future. What do you see as emerging things in this space?

Vi Wickam:

things in this space. Wow, there's tons of things changing. So I will say that maps search is only growing in importance. So people are using more and more mobile. So mobile usability is more and more important. Accessibility is also more and more important.

Vi Wickam:

So there you know and this started six or seven years ago that there was law. There were lawsuits that started happening because, well, target was the big one, but there were a number of big, high profile companies who had websites that were hard to use if you had motor impairment or visual impairment, and they like. There were some lawsuits where big money was paid out by big companies, but then, a couple of years after that, smaller lawyers started coming trying to shake down small businesses, you know, and it's totally a racket. It's terrible, but the other side of it is it has put more focus on making sure that your website is accessible to as many people as possible. So we always, when I build a website, make a goal of getting an accessibility score of at least 90%, which we run. Those. We run those tests, and it includes things like how is the contrast of your text with the background? So a lot of times, designers are all about well, I just want this to be beautiful, and so I'm putting gray text on a gray background and you know, like you can't read it, or I put the text over the top of this image and you can't read it. So those kinds of things have become like they've always been best practices for usability, but those usability practices have become more mainstream because of the accessibility movement.

Vi Wickam:

And then, of course, ai. You know which AI is everywhere. Everybody's trying it out, some things it's amazing at and some things it's terrible at. So one of my clients just last week uses a call center to answer their phones, uses a call center to answer their phones and the call center switched to using an AI answering machine platform instead of humans. And this company's call like conversion rate from you know calls to leads to bookings fell through the floor and you know I was on my call with them last week and I'm like we got a problem here.

Vi Wickam:

I'm not sure what it is, but your conversion rates on the website, you know, for your service calls just fell through the floor. They went from like 70, 80% close rate to like 40. It cut in half. And what we figured out when we went and listened to a couple of calls is they had this AI answering machine, that it took 15 seconds for the AI to give you its spiel, and then the people were trying to say something to the AI and it would get confused, and it was just a terrible user experience. And so I, you know, I talked to another client yesterday who was using that same company and they fired them as a result. You know, they're like I can't deal with that.

Jennifer Johnson:

It's good for some things, but it needs the human interaction as well.

Vi Wickam:

And the same thing goes for using it to write blogs. You know, it's great to give it a prompt and give it a bunch of description of here's what I think this answer should be. And then you know, if you just ask it, what's the answer to this question? It's going to give you a bunch of generic stuff, Right, and it's going to have no personality at all. It'll have a very generic personality because that's what it's designed for.

Vi Wickam:

But if you want to use AI, you have to be thoughtful about it and you have to edit it so you can create a custom GPT by feeding it the things you've written already, so you can feed it, read these 500 articles that I already wrote and use that as the style guide for what you're going to write. And when you write a prompt for it, you can say here's the question I want you to answer, and I want you to answer it in 700 words and I want you to use this type of formatting and I want you to use paragraphs that are this length and I want you to prefer the active voice. And you know like the more complex the prompt you give it, the better the answer it's going to give you and the less likely it's going to just sound like AI generated drivel.

Jennifer Johnson:

Right? Well, you have given us a completely packed podcast, for you know, google, advertising and SEO. Love, love, love the content, and I know the listeners will as well. Vi, if our listeners would like to get in touch with you, how can they do so?

Vi Wickam:

You can find me on wizardofadsonlinecom. That's my business website. Or if you want to find my fiddling, you can go to vythefiddlercom.

Jennifer Johnson:

I love it. That is so awesome. Thank you so much for being on with us today.

Vi Wickam:

Thank you for having me, jennifer, it was my pleasure.

Jennifer Johnson:

And thank you everyone. We will see you again and have a fabulous day. Bye, okay, we're on to our next one. All right, this next one. We're going to our next one. All right, this next one. We're going to talk about securing digital assets and again, I'll just do the quick intro and then I'm just going to welcome you back into the studio, because you've already been in, they've already heard my intro to you. Just go, just go.

Jennifer Johnson:

Okay, in an era where data is often called the new oil, securing your digital assets isn't just important, it's mission critical. From customer information to proprietary algorithms, your digital assets are the lifeblood of your business. But with cyber threats evolving at lightning speed, how can you ensure that your digital crown jewels stay protected? That's exactly what we're diving into today. We'll be peeling back the layers of digital security, exploring everything from cloud storage vulnerabilities to the power of multi-factor authentication, which, wah-wah, wah-wah, wah-wah-wah. We'll tackle the human elements to discussing how employee training can be your first line of defense against cyber attacks. Our guest today is Vi Wickam of Wizard of Ads, and he's been on before, and we've talked about Google and we've talked about SEO, but today we're talking all about securing your digital assets and whether you're a tech savvy startup founder or a seasoned business owner feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of cybersecurity, this is going to be the episode for you, because it's going to be packed with actionable insights to help you fortify your digital fortress. So welcome back, envi.

Vi Wickam:

Thank you, Jennifer. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jennifer Johnson:

So you know, on the last podcast I briefly mentioned, you know I had a little foray into this. It wasn't a huge deal and it didn't involve anybody's information or anything like that, but you guys stepped in, helped me fix it and all of that. But we're seeing a lot of this lately and what are you seeing as the most common vulnerabilities that people have with their digital assets today?

Vi Wickam:

Well, I would say the most common vulnerability I see is people who reuse passwords, which is like that's a common old old thing.

Jennifer Johnson:

Where's my want want button?

Vi Wickam:

I can't tell you how many times I have a client give me a password and then I ask for a password for a different asset that we need to help them with, and they're like oh, it's the same.

Jennifer Johnson:

I'm like oh no, don't do that we all do it. All of us.

Vi Wickam:

Well, the real trouble is, when you do that, you're putting your password in the hands of a website and if that website gets hacked, your password got compromised. And there are a lot of big companies whose data has been compromised in that way, including Twitter and Adobe. Actually, check me on Twitter, I don't I'm not 100% sure on that, but Adobe and like there's been a ton of big, big name companies who've had big compromises in the data. The US government has. The Veterans and Foreign Affairs, like the Veterans database was completely compromised, and this was years ago. But tons of people's data is out there, which sometimes it's just your name and your email address, but sometimes it's your password too, and if you're reusing your password, they get your password on one site and they've got your password everywhere. So it really is critical that you use passwords that are different across sites.

Jennifer Johnson:

That's so hard. How do you remember them all?

Vi Wickam:

Well, I use LastPass.

Jennifer Johnson:

And.

Vi Wickam:

LastPass is one of a handful of good password safes out there, lastpass is one of a handful of good password safes out there. Okay, there's no perfect answer, but LastPass allows me to store my passwords in an encrypted format and it allows me to share passwords with specific permissions to different groups of people. So there's the personal version of LastPass where you can import your passwords from Chrome or Firefox or Safari, whichever password safe you're currently using. So browser storage of passwords is kind of like that's level one of you know pretty okay.

Vi Wickam:

Okay of you know pretty okay, okay, no, it's not great, but you know Apple also has the Apple password key safe. Um, that is useful and it's useful across wherever you're using that browser. So if you're using a Google Google phone and a Google browser, you know it'll transfer between those two. Same thing with Apple. If you're using iPhone and Safari and you're using an Apple computer, those will transfer. You know, get your passwords personally across those two places so you can share passwords with yourself but we're talking about business here as well passwords with yourself, but we're talking about business here as well.

Vi Wickam:

And when it comes to business, something like LastPass has the ability that I can create folders that are then shared with my employees and I can create an administration folder and I can create a client's folder and then I can create separate subfolders for the different clients and then I can share those appropriately to my employees and I can say these you know like this folder is shared to this employee but it's read only, so this employee can edit the passwords. This one can only read them and this employee can't see the passwords. They can only use the passwords and then, if an employee is terminated, I can just terminate their access from LastPass and they'll never see those passwords again.

Jennifer Johnson:

And said that's also helpful if you're working with a third party who's doing advertising or who's doing you know whatever for you.

Vi Wickam:

Yes, absolutely. Anything that they're doing online for you, you can share, or you can share via folder if you're using the business version of it. So, and it's reasonably inexpensive, it's like, I think, $35 a year for the personal version and I think it's like $3 per employee per month for the business version $3 per employee per month for the business version, so relatively inexpensive and you know you don't need the business version, really until you've got like five employees or so.

Jennifer Johnson:

You know the thing that I worry about with all of the stuff that is online. You know I've been using Dropbox a lot. I I'm the person that puts all my stuff on my desktop.

Jennifer Johnson:

Don't want to look at my desktop, but I've been trying to be more. I have incalcitrations here, but my husband's gotten on me about it, so finally he switched me to a Mac, which I'm telling you is going to be the death of me. I'm going to figure it out. It's going to be OK, because I'm a PC girl through and through. Yeah.

Vi Wickam:

I understand.

Jennifer Johnson:

I figured out how to use Dropbox, I'm putting everything in there and all of a sudden, you know I'll wake up at three in the morning and go oh my gosh, what if all my stuff is gone? What if all my stuff has gone from?

Vi Wickam:

So, generally speaking, like there could be a data breach at Google Drive or at Microsoft OneDrive or at Dropbox, like it is a data center or a series of data centers around the world where that stuff's stored in. But the reality is, no matter what you've got, that data is out there in the world, you know, and anybody can get hacked, right? You know you try to put your trust in people that are less likely to get hacked. So you know, I do have a Dropbox account where I store some stuff. I also have a Google drive account, which is where I store my business stuff and some of my personal stuff, and I use a tool called Backblaze Backblaze.

Jennifer Johnson:

Okay.

Vi Wickam:

And it's like Carbonite. Carbonite is another cloud backup solution, but I back up everything on my hard drive, plus everything that's in Dropbox and Google Drive on my personal drives to Backblaze Okay, so I wouldn't live without it and, additionally, everything that's on my first hard drive gets backed up to a second hard drive, so does this, automatically do this I have mine set up to do it, so Backblaze totally runs automatically and I have an overnight backup job that I set up to do so backblaze totally runs automatically and I have an overnight backup job that I set up for myself.

Vi Wickam:

I am a little obsessive about backups because I ran an it company for 15 years and when you see what happens when people don't- run backups.

Jennifer Johnson:

You don't want to don't? I can't hear it because I have you just you have to run backups.

Vi Wickam:

So my wife uses a Mac, I'm a PC guy and we both use Backblaze, so we both have Backblaze running everything.

Vi Wickam:

She also has the Macintosh, the Apple backup thing, which I can't think of the name of right now, but she has that running to an external hard drive that she runs, I think, once a week or something like that to back everything up to that as well. So I think that having multiple backup redundancies at least two is a good idea. So having some sort of physical backup to a different physical medium and then having a cloud backup is a good idea. The good thing about something like Google Drive for business is there's some retention built into it where, if somebody deletes something from your company drive, there's a window of time where you can restore that, and so I've had this employee leaves and decides to delete everything.

Vi Wickam:

Okay, you'll be able to recover that, and so I've. I had this prior to Google drive being a thing with one of my clients where their office manager got fired and she, just like, selected their server shared hard drive and hit delete. And you know we had a backup from the night before, but you know they still had to hire us to come out and restore that drive.

Vi Wickam:

So you know you don't want to be having to deal with that either, and you know this is outside the scope of what I thought we were going to talk about, but this is important stuff too.

Jennifer Johnson:

This is what happens when you're on a podcast with me. You start unearthing things and then I'm like oh well, let's dig into this.

Vi Wickam:

Well, what about this? And what about this?

Jennifer Johnson:

That's right, multi-factor authentication. Yeah, this used to drive me crazy because I'm like really, why do I have to do this? I would get flustered, I would get upset. What's the importance?

Vi Wickam:

Well, the importance is if somebody has taken your password and you have multi-factor authentication turned on, they can use that password but not be able to get in.

Vi Wickam:

So they'll get to the point where they try to log in and it says you know, please enter your six-digit code, and you have your cell phone, or you have the authenticator app on your cell phone and they're SOL because they don't have the authenticator app. So I will be vulnerable here and let you know that there's one or two social media platforms that I never use that I have an old password on that I probably haven't reset. I don't actually even know if I've reset it in the last five years, but I have two-factor authentication turned on and I know that it's going to text my cell phone every time I try to log in. So if somebody tried to hack into it, I know that I've got that as my validation.

Jennifer Johnson:

Sure, so we should have that set up on everything we possibly can have.

Vi Wickam:

Every online account that you can set up 2FA on, you should absolutely set up two-factor authentication.

Jennifer Johnson:

Awesome. So in the realm of we're talking about security, how often or how do we? First of all, how do we? And then how often should we be doing an assessment of our digital assets to see where there's a loophole or where something needs to be shored up a little bit more?

Vi Wickam:

So the truth is, most people have never done it, and that's where the real problem is. So if you've never done it, you absolutely should do it right away. Absolutely should do it right away. This is a critical thing to do, to determine what your risks are, to put patches in place. You know those risks could include things like well, I don't have automatic updates turned on on my computers.

Vi Wickam:

Or you know, like are we have a publicly available computer that doesn't have a password on it at all. To we've shared these passwords with seven people and two of those people are no longer around, but we haven't changed the password. Or our domain name is registered with the guy that made our website seven years ago and he's still doing the renewals, and we don't have any access to that domain name. So if you've never done that, you need to do it today. And we have a tool up on wizard of ads onlinecom slash weasels that you can weasels. Yeah. So the the reason there is like we've got a joke name for digital people who don't have the client's best interests at hand, and we call them digital weasels because there are classes on how to take people for a thousand bucks a month. You know how to make a quarter of a million dollars a year without working.

Vi Wickam:

Oh my gosh, thousand bucks a month you know how to make a quarter of a million dollars a year without working and how to sell people on a thousand dollar a month SEO plan where, basically, what you do is you.

Vi Wickam:

You know you set up a report that emails them once a month and then you don't do anything and by the time they're upset, you know you found somebody else to fill it up. You know and you know it's a terrible, terrible scam. But there are a lot of digital people who are unethical. There are even more that are just lazy, and you know. So you've got to protect yourself when you're buying digital services, whether that's SEO services or ads management services or web development services or data management services Any of these things.

Vi Wickam:

You need to make sure that your assets are secured, which includes things like LastPass. You need something that's going to manage your passwords. You need to make sure that you own your domain and that you control your domain. You need to make sure that all of your employees are using emails that are at your domain. So I can't tell you how many times I've had clients who, well, yeah, all our technicians are using Gmail addresses because we didn't want to pay for Google Workspace. I'm like, ok, so you're saving $70 a month and the potential cost to you is that employee has all of these communications with customers, right, and now they can. You know you part ways with them and they're like I'm going to just email all those customers and tell them hey, I'm on my own now and I'm going to do the work for half the price that that they're going to do it, and you know people forget that, like I, I am the same way with cell phones.

Jennifer Johnson:

Like, don't get a customer cell phone on somebody's personal phone, it needs to be on a business phone.

Vi Wickam:

Right, and so one of the options there is some is a service like RingCentral where you have a company line that forwards to their cell phones because landlines are pretty much gone away, you know like what's that? Yeah, but you do want to have that control and that oversight of those communications. So if you use a service like RingCentral or 10 others that are similar I say RingCentral because that's what we signed up for, but it's not like that's the only one or that it's magic but you can say each of you get these numbers and it rings on their phone in an app and you have a virtual phone system where you've got your main office number tree. Basically that splits up who gets what calls. If they press one for sales, it goes rings to this person, then this person, and you know cause you don't really want employees making phone calls to customers on personal lines as a rule of thumb.

Jennifer Johnson:

Right, Absolutely. It's a. It's a good rule of thumb to have in your business. So, worst case scenario, some breach happens in your business. What do you do Like what? What should I be doing? What should my step be?

Vi Wickam:

Well, you got to figure out first whether it's a real breach or it's a spoofing.

Jennifer Johnson:

So what, what you had?

Vi Wickam:

was a spoofing where somebody had scraped the content off your website and presented themselves as if they were you. Right, which I've seen, like most of the time on Facebook, when people say your Facebook was hacked, that's what's happened is, somebody scraped your photo and they scraped your last three posts and then they posted that on a new profile and gave it the same name as yours and they're impersonating you at it.

Vi Wickam:

And you know they're impersonating you to try and take advantage of your friends or take advantage of your reputation as a business and, you know, using all of the content that you've created and all the goodwill that you've created, and so obviously you've got to nip those in the bud. But it's an entirely different process to do that than it is to undo a hack. So an example of a hack is somebody compromised your website and put malicious code on your website, so now when somebody visits your website, it's trying to download that malicious code on everybody's computers.

Jennifer Johnson:

I see, versus a spoofing. They just take a like nobody can do a transaction on that page, it's just well, maybe they could, but it's not going to be with you.

Vi Wickam:

So that's like that's very often, when somebody steals website content and spoofs you, what they're really trying to do is steal credit cards from people who so and potentially also steal money.

Vi Wickam:

So if they have an actual account tied to it, you know somebody, you'll check out on that site. They'll get the money and they will, you know, take that money and never deliver anything. And the person will call you and say, hey, I bought something from you and I never received it. And you're like well, nobody played, I've got no record of you in my customer database. You don't like I've, I've got no reason to believe this. And they're like well, let me forward you the email confirmation I got and you see that it's at a different website when they forwarded to you. And you're like well, this wasn't us. And then you've got to figure out who it was so that you can get them removed and get them taken down, which is a huge hassle, as you know.

Vi Wickam:

But if you know, like, in my 27 years of doing web stuff, I've had a couple of times where somebody I hosted got hacked.

Vi Wickam:

Mostly, though, what I've done is I've had clients come on because they've gotten hacked on somebody else's hosting and I've had to clean up the mess.

Vi Wickam:

And I believe so strongly in my hosting that I have a guarantee that if somebody gets hacked and I'm maintaining the site that they won't pay me any extra to clean it up, because I make sure that WordPress is up to date and the plugins are up to date. So when you talk about security, very often when you're talking about something like WordPress, the problem is they've got out-of-date plugins that had a security vulnerability and because the plugin's so far out of date, you know it might be three years or five years out of date and you know there's things in the web that have changed. The rules are always in flux. If that vulnerability is found and they haven't updated to patch it, you're a sitting duck. You're just waiting to get hacked. So our goal is to make sure that doesn't happen. But when it does, you have to root it out on the server and find all the traces of it, because very often those people that do that will leave back doors and leave code in places you wouldn't expect it so that they can get back in later.

Jennifer Johnson:

That's just crazy.

Vi Wickam:

It's a crazy world.

Jennifer Johnson:

I mean, I know we could talk about this for hours and hours, but I appreciate everything that you've shared with our listeners today, because this is great information and I'm sure we'll have you on again to really go in depth. But if our listeners would like to get ahold of you, how can they do so?

Vi Wickam:

So you can find me on my business website at wizardofadsonlinecom, and if you're looking for my music, you can find that at vythefiddlercom.

Jennifer Johnson:

I love it. I love it. Thank you so much, vi again, for being on and sharing with all of our listeners.

Vi Wickam:

Oh, my pleasure, Jennifer. Always a pleasure to get to hang out with you.

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