SEO Marketing for Beginners (Feat. best-selling author and SEO Expert Matt Diamante)

Ever wondered how to get your business found on Google? It's all in your SEO Marketing, and in this episode, Jenna sits down with Canadian SEO expert Matt Diamante to break down exactly what SEO is, why it matters, and how even the least techy business owner can start getting found online today.

What You'll Hear:

• What SEO is, explained in a beginner-friendly way
• The #1 most underrated tool for getting found on Google and how to use it assap
• How one local service business went from $20K to $120K/month using SEO alone
• A pep talk around running your business long term
• How to use AnswerThePublic.com (a free tool) to find exactly what your customers are searching for on Google
• How to use ChatGPT to help you write an SEO blog post in under an hour

The best part about search engine optimization for small business is that it plays the long game, which means the sooner you start, the more your results will grow over time, sending more traffic to your business (aka more clients!)

Whether you're brand new to SEO marketing or you've been putting off your website like Jenna (no judgment), this episode will show you that getting found on Google is simpler than you think. Search engine optimization for small business owners doesn't require a tech background — just consistency, the right keywords, and a willingness to play the long game. If you want more eyes on your business without spending a dollar on ads, this one's for you.

🎥 Matt Diamante on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heytony.agency/

📚 Get Found by Matt Diamante — the #1 SEO book on Amazon

🎉 Get clients from Instagram inside Magic Marketing Machine! www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Watch a FREE masterclass called “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

🎉 Get clients from Instagram! Tap here to work with Jenna Harding  inside Magic Marketing Machine!

https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration/

Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/10-sales-calls-new

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Jenna Harding (00:00)
Don't tell anyone this, but I have always made my website literally the lowest on the chain of importance in my business. And I have been ridiculed about that from listeners. So if that's you, sweet listener, I still love you. But the reason why I always tell people like, you don't need a website is because I didn't really have a website. I definitely didn't have one that is good. Now, does that also mean that I probably left a lot of money and sales on the table?

Yeah, sure. But I did what I was able to do with the resources I had at the time that I had them and then also put it off for an additional couple of years. now that I have a site, I'm all up in the world of SEO, which is a term that me or an acronym that means search engine optimization. And to go super simple, before we get complex with our guest expert here.

That means using the words that your clients use and are searching for so that when they type them into a search engine, they find you. Our guest is going to tell us all about it because when I don't know how to do something, I bring you someone who's the best in the biz and absolutely does. So today we have Matt Diamante, who is an SEO expert and a best selling author. Good morning Matt.

Wow, good morning. ⁓ What an intro. I love that. ⁓ One thing that I just want to mention, like right off the bat, people are talking about SEO and you know, some people are like, what, is SEO search engine optimization? What the hell does that even mean? And I've had to painstakingly over years, try to explain to my parents what the hell it is that I do. And I came up with it's we help businesses get, or, my God, I can't even say it.

We help businesses show up higher on Google. Yeah, there you go. SEO is getting shown on Google. But your parents probably don't even know that the first couple results when they type something into Google are actually ads. And they're making it more difficult to discern if it's an ad or if it's an organic result, which is crazy. That shouldn't be allowed. No, not at all.

think that a lot of people listening, just so you know, Matt, our parents also don't know what we do. Do any parent know what their kid actually does? I lived with my aunt for like six months during COVID and she was like so enthusiastic about my business and so enthusiastic about sending me clients, but she could never figure out how to say it. Like she'll help you out. you've got a business. She'll do the, she'll Jenna tell them. Yeah.

She'd help you with your podcast and you're like, no, that's not what I do at all. So in the simplest terms, if somebody wanted to know how to get people finding their business through Google, they would type that into Google and find you. actually, ideally, ⁓ I should tell them, sorry, I will let you speak eventually, but I forgot Matt's name. I told you this. I forgot your name like a month and a half ago and I wrote ⁓ Canadian

SEO guy and literally found you through that. Whoa, that's Yeah. That's I'm going to after this podcast recording, I'm to go and search that and see why that's coming up and how that's sick. I've never optimized for that. somehow somewhere your page is optimized. So

Okay, tell us some more baby steps, all right? So say we're new to this, we have a website, we have an offer people can buy or book to talk to us through our website. What do we need to do? Okay, so SEO in the simplest form is helping your customers, right? Your customers or your clients or whatever you call them, patients, they have a problem and they're looking for solution. Now that solution could be information, right? My toilet's broken. I need help.

Right. They're going to Google and saying my toilet's leaking all over the floor. What do I do? Right. They're looking for information or I need an emergency plumber. They have a problem. The emergency plumber is a solution. that's at the core of it. That's what SEO is. You're helping your customers find solutions to their problems. And the first way that I introduce this all the time is

They have questions about things right? They might not know what you do. They might not know how much your service costs. They might not know. You know anything about how to solve their problem and you need to be that person. So what I always say is go to a site like answer the public.com it's free and just type in what you sell. That will show you hundreds of questions that people are asking about the thing that you sell right? If I type in SEO things come up like.

How much does SEO cost? Can I learn how to do SEO on my own? know, internal links, do they really matter? All stuff like that. And I know some of you listening might not know what any of that stuff means, but that's okay because you can go to Google and you could type that in if you're wondering and an article or piece of content, a blog post will come up answering that question. So that is the simplest way to do SEO is just answer your customers questions.

At first it can sound kind of complicated, right? You're like, internal links, what? I'm not a wizard. I'm not a computer developer. Like, we get scared, right? We're like, this is a new thing. But I spent a day with someone who designs websites and optimizes for SEO because I was doing a VIP day for her and her business. And just in that day, I learned so much. And it was like, ⁓ this journey is actually

pretty easy for, I think for, it sounds like a small business owner to just make some tweaks and make some changes and possibly get like big results from it. It's really crazy. let me tell you a story about a client that we have. started working with them. They're a local business by the way, like local, I guess service based business, And when we started working with them, they're getting maybe like 500 people to their site a month and they

had an SEO agency that they were working with for like two years and they were not getting results. And this business was probably making like 20 K a month, which is amazing. working with them for like a year, year and a half, they went from making 20 K a month to 120 K thousand, 120 thousand dollars a month, just from SEO. Like they aren't doing so like social media, they're not doing ads, they're not doing anything else, just purely from SEO. And

I was like, holy, that, imagine the impact that that could have on your life if you wrote blog posts to a week. I'm not even talking, like we weren't doing like a hundred, we were doing to a week over a year. By the end of that month, they would have entirely new problems. Yeah. Like all new, different like.

You know, how do we serve these people? We need more customer service revs. Our systems are breaking good problems that like up level you, but you'd be in a completely different world. Okay. So now we've dropped the B word, which is I didn't know until I did this girl's social media that blogs had anything to do with SEO. So how does that work? Blogs are like the gold mine of SEO. So there's so many benefits to having blog posts. The first one I'll tell you is

It just saves time. So I used to do Facebook ads for clients all the time and every single time we'd sign somebody on, they'd be like, okay, well, now what's the next step? How do I add you to my Meta business manager? And I'd be like, okay, well, let's schedule a call. Let's find a time. I'll spend 20 minutes to an hour walking you through while you share your screen showing you where to click. Right? So we wrote a blog post. That's how to add and remove users to your Meta business manager. And the whole purpose of that post

was to send to our clients. Hey, here's the next step. Go here and just follow the steps. Boom, saved me like an hour per client. So all of a sudden, I'm saving so much time that I don't have to get on a call and show them. And now we have the resource that they're going to. They're not going on Google. They're not looking it up. They're not going to a competitor. They're not going anywhere else. So problem, solution. So that's the first thing. ⁓ And then that started ranking.

So started getting traffic to our website because other people were looking about how to do that. know, they could have been competitors of ours. They could have been people from across the world. I don't really care. and it also kind of qualifies the lead because it's someone who already has an interest in SEO. Otherwise they wouldn't need to know how to do this. Yeah, 100%. So the other benefit is when we're talking about blog posts, it's again, people have problems and they're looking for the solution. And if you've ever had

any like what is the best, you know, ⁓ skin hydrating face cream, right? You go on Google, you see a piece of content that's like here are the five best ones, brand one, two, three, four, five. That's a blog post, right? People are looking for information. Like I have really sensitive skin. What's the best thing? And they're doing deeper research, right? So with that in mind, you're solving the problem. You're giving them the answer to their problem or the solution to their problem.

So that's two reasons why blogging is good. the third reason is when your site starts getting more traffic through blog posts, because people have questions, they're coming to your website, they're like, your skincare product, for example. You have a lot of content about skincare. All of a sudden that signals to Google, like, hey, these guys are getting now 10,

to 50 to 100 to 500 or 1,000 people to their site every single month for skincare related terms. Now Google's like, this website is about skincare. So it makes it easier for you to rank for the more difficult keywords, if that makes sense, the more competitive keywords. Right. And so if you were paying for ads and for those keywords, the more competitive ones would be more expensive. Yeah. Right? So you're saying this is an in to

get shown when people ask a specific question, you're not paying to have your blog pop up in front of them. Google just sees that it's a good blog that keeps answering people's questions. So then it gives them, it shows them your page. Yeah. So like, I'll give you an example, like a more difficult keyword would be something like, hydrating, ⁓ face lotion, let's say, right? Everybody's going to want to go after that keyword because that people want to buy, right? They're looking for that specific thing. Now,

If everybody's going after that keyword, think of it like a door. Everybody's trying to get in the front door. They're all getting jammed. Maybe one or two people get through and those are the people who are ranking and everybody else is like fighting to get in. Now, when we're writing blog posts, we're not even going to the front door. We're going to the back door and that door is wide open. We're just getting let in, right? We're ranking for these keywords because we're answering questions that people are asking and it's not direct moneymakers.

You know, it's not the money making keywords right away. We're kind of going around educating people, helping them solve their problems, building trust in that way. And as we build more trust, all of a sudden Google opens another front door and lets us in. I love that. That's such a good way to explain it. Or just for me and the visual learners, we need a metaphor. We need to see the house and the thing.

So if what if we don't want to blog, is there still options for us if we're like, ⁓ writing that's so much work. I'm scared. my God. We have AI, we have chat, GPT, we have Claude, we have all these things that'll do the writing for us. ⁓ and we, we do that. We've been doing that since chat, GPT came out for our clients is using it to write content. And I'm not saying we're, you know, saying, write me a blog post about this and then copy pasting what it puts out. We're doing a little bit more, but

one thing that people can do. And I'm completely ignoring your question, by the way, because you need to do blogs. I actually did. I just hired someone and I proofed the first four yesterday and they're so good. It sounds like me. Well, they took things I said. I was like, there's so much content out there of me just talking and they took what I said and wrote it into blogs and they're beautiful and they're good. So we will. I only ended up getting a website like this fall or something.

⁓ It's a long story, but JennaHarding.com, that's the new site. And you catch my blogs. They're all things that I've said written down by someone else, be fully honest, but they did such a great job. It sounds like me. was like, they even capture my humor. So I was excited about that because that was the thing I was like, I don't know if out of all of the places I could put my time, I didn't know if writing blogs was where that time should go.

Well, it's it's completely opposite to social media where you post something on Instagram or Facebook or Tik Tok or whatever and you get likes, you get comments, you get engagement like immediately with SEO. It might be three months before Google indexes that before you start ranking before anything happens. So it's very much like it's a long game of is this working? Should I keep doing this? And that that's actually a good thing for most businesses because

people will try it for a month or two, not see results, and then they'll stop doing it. And that leaves a giant hole for us to fill. Have you read the Infinite Game? No. My friend just made me read it. Yep, maybe. and cause I think because I live in social media land and your business initially blew up on social media as well. I know I, I'm like used to the instant gratification and the like, okay, let's sell this thing.

followers all bought it. Okay, now let's sell this thing. my followers all bought it. And so the infinite game is about looking at business in a much more long term way and not trying to like win. He's like, why are you trying to win? Stop trying to win. There's no win. Just like play a long game. And so I feel like I am kind of trying to make that shift into thinking about things longer term. I'm getting out of this like feast or famine, I guess, ⁓ mentality.

Yeah, and Yeah, so that is part of my transition into like having the site being like oh actually I'm keeping this business for many years. Yeah Yeah, and like I think that's all marketing and when I say marketing I mean like posting on social media is considered marketing that it's like that's a huge part a huge driver for my business at least But SEO is marketing ads or mark like all of its marketing

And if you look at marketing as like a long-term play, regardless of what platform and what you're doing, and you commit to, I'm to do this for a year or five years or whatever, you will see results because other people are going to drop off. You will start becoming the expert in your niche, right? You'll get more followers. You'll get more traffic. You'll make more sales, all this kind of stuff, but you need to keep doing it. It's a lot. It's like, I call it, I don't even call it the long game. I call it the long con, right? Like,

How long can I do this before I can convince people to think that I'm the expert, right? Or my client is the expert. Do you know what that is a direct parallel to? Because I was an actor before. And you know how many other blonde, thin, quirky 21-year-olds there were? So many. We took up most of the auditioning market is this exact archetype that I was.

And so for me and my friends, ⁓ like my agent would say, if you can just hold out till your 30s, everyone else will give up. Yeah. They'll have families, they'll get pregnant, they'll leave, they'll get a job or whatever. And then when I was the person that gave up and went and did entrepreneurship instead, I was like, there you go. There you go other little like blonde woman, you can have the job, you know? Yeah. But like that's like

I want everybody listening to be that blonde woman who didn't give up the actor, right? Like that's literally how long can you do this until all of your competitors drop off because they're not patient or they're not seeing the results yet. Right. That's interesting take. I love that. It's a, it's a cool grounded, interesting take. Definitely the opposite of hustle culture. It's, it's, I think it is.

But I feel like it's also hustle culture at the same time because you're just like, you're like, I'm going to do this for a long time. I'm to keep doing this. This is going to be me. Like, do you think it's an accident that I'm like, I'm the SEO guy now? I've just been doing it longer than a lot of people. And a lot of the other people have dropped off. Yeah, fair. Right? Yeah, I guess you know what? Because I'm about eight years in and I have experienced that as well, I suppose.

Yeah, other people don't they stopped Which was scary too because I was like does it get hard? You're like wait, is this broken now? Should I still be doing this? Yeah, it's but it's crazy because like i've seen people like even like years ago ⁓ I used to follow this woman who did Facebook ads And she taught people how to do Facebook ads and her course was like 2,500 bucks like three grand whatever it was And that was like my first big purchase and so I like took it

learned a ton about Facebook ads, all this kind of stuff. And then I don't know what happened. She dropped off and now nobody knows who she is. There's like a bunch of other people who filled that gap, who have been around longer, who are more relevant now. Like if you're listening to somebody from 10 years ago, or if they're starting to post again, you're like, well, are you really still relevant? This person has been posting for the last three years and their advice is really good and it's already helped me. So why am going to jump ship?

Interesting. ⁓ OK, shoot us with one more actionable SEO tip and then tell us because here's the thing. I feel like people work with you. do the thing. do. You know what I mean? They work with you. They do the thing. They get the result. Like it's kind of just like, let me show you how to do it here. Sore. That's my understanding. Would you say that's accurate? Kind of, yeah. To the point, like, I mean, as much as we can say.

you know, do the thing. I'll show you how to do the thing and then you can optimize your site and then you can play the long con too. Well, there's the yeah, it's it's accurate in the sense that yes, I do teach people how to do it themselves, but I also run an agency where we do it for people. So like that's that's the the two sides of it. OK, copy that. So shoot us with one more tip and then where to find you. OK, so if you are a small business owner, you have a side hustle, you have anything.

I want you to just commit to one hour per week to focus on SEO. Like it's not a lot of time and it doesn't all have to be in a row, but this is exactly what you're gonna do. Either write down questions that you hear your customers asking, whether it's on social media in person, anything like that, or go to AnswerThePublic.com, type in what you sell, find questions that you know the answers to. Then I want you to go to chat GPT and say,

I'm writing a blog post about pasting whatever the question is or type it out. Ask me 10 questions you'd need to know the answers to in order to create a truly helpful blog post that uses my expertise, experience, case studies, opinions, et cetera. And Chachi Patil will ask you 10 questions. You can answer them on voice mode, which is what I do, or you can type them out. And then once it has all that information, say, okay, now write me the blog post.

and it'll write you a blog post answering that question using all of your own information. And you can take that, edit it, like look through, make sure it's factually correct and paste that on your website. Like that is, that's SEO and nobody can write a piece of content as good as that ⁓ without like doing an interview with you, which is what you're doing with ChatGPT. Right? Like that's going to put out a really great piece of content that's actually helpful.

Right. It's actually solving a problem. So that is my biggest tip. Spend one hour a week. Do it for six months to a year and you'll get results. Beautiful. Beautiful. Thanks for simplifying that. And obviously if you guys want to go further with that, outsourcing it or learning how to do it yourself, you can find Matt on the end on Instagram for sure. Cause that's how we met. Just on the internet and in general, like I'm posting on Matt Canadian SEO guy.

Well, wait, can I like promo my book here for a sec? Yes. What a pretty cover. Yeah, it's a friend of mine designed it, but it's called Get Found. And like if you know nothing about SEO, this book is for you. Even if you know a little bit, like it goes through what all the elements are. Gives you rules, you know, you should be using the keyword here. What is a keyword? Why should we be blogging? It has all of that stuff. It gets into a little bit more.

I don't want to say advanced. I don't want it to sound scary, but it's all like, I wrote this so that my parents finally understand what I do, basically. Right. If they're reading this, they're like, ⁓ okay. Now, you know what? I get it. Like, yeah. So that's a, I heard that book's a best seller. Yeah. On Amazon, if you go to ⁓ SEO, it's the number one SEO book. Okay. So if you guys see it, it's blue and yellow. Yeah. Get Found by Matt Diamante.

Yeah, I will get that Amazing. It's also I did the audiobook as well myself. It took me five days to record this book. I originally booked three and ⁓ Yeah, apparently it's really difficult to read out loud and actually, you know do a good job in the first take. It's That's That's fun. I always picture the authors because you have because it's like in five days your voice change Okay, we have to stop else. I'll stop talking about it

I won't put that in, but I do have, and I find the whole thing fascinating. Okay, thank you so much for being here and sharing your knowledge with us, Matt. Have a beautiful day. Thank you, you too. Thank you for having me. My pleasure.