Code 002 – How to Get Traffic to Your Website with Evo Terra – 11 SEO Steps to Get Started
Listen to the Evo Terra Podcast below:
Note: Click here to get Evo’s Top 11 SEO Steps PDF to get More Traffic to Your Website.
Find the show: spotify | stitcher | overcast
How to get traffic to your website
Evo Terra shares some great tips for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to get traffic to your website. The first step to great SEO is to make great content. We talk about optimizing your blog post, black, grey, and white hat tactics and how to get started.
Tons of great information in this one including some killer tips on software to use and how to get your thing out to more people. I’m excited to share this one with you as the very first interview published on the Outdoors Online Marketing Podcast!
Show notes with Evo Terra
03:44 – Podcast for Dummies was one of the early books Evo published.
09:45 – The Tom Bihn travel brand story is a great example noted here about creating content that has a great story.
09:00 – Tom’s shoes has another remarkable story. Think about how you can create a remarkable story for your brand.
11:15 – We talk about Black, Grey and White hat SEO. Here are some background notes on black hat vs white hat.
16:15 – Otter.ai is one of the best resources for creating a transcript of your podcast.
20:15 – Here is a link to Evo’s podcast on his 11 SEO steps from medium.
23:25 – Search for headline analyzer on google for some good tools.
31:55 – Take a look at google search console to verify how your site looks.
36:45- Story chief will push out your content to medium and google my business automatically.
43:55 – We note Neil Patel and Moz who have massive resources and blog posts that can help you go even deeper.
45:10 – Hindenburg is the software I’ve been using this month and is one of the best for editing podcasts. Dave Jackson noted the benefit of Hindenburg as well in his podcast.
46:35 – Evo highlights izotope and waves. Auphonic may still be helpful if one track needs some help before sending it to hindenburg.
You can find Evo at podcast pontifications
11 Steps to get your content ranked
(Click here to read Evo’s full Medium Article)
- Topic – Decide on your topic
- Title
- You Need a Great Title that Catches attention
- Make sure there is a payoff after they click through to your blog post – No bait and switch
- Search for headline analyzer on google to test your title
- Angle
- What unique thing do you have to say?
- Example: Using customer testimonials to rank fly boxes
- Now Record and Produce
- Gather Pics, videos, etc.
- Do the interview, etc.
- If for a podcast – write it for someone who won’t press play so they can learn everything by reading.
- Get your website on Google Search Console
- Write at least 2000 words – Sit down and write without distractions
- Optimize those 2000 words
- Verify keyword use in the blog post
- Add variations of those keywords
- Pretty up with Pictures
- Use alt tags for photos
- Add charts, graphs, videos, etc
- Organize the Structure of the Page
- Use H2 tags
- Breakup the content
- No more than 5 sentences per paragraph
- Make it pleasant to consume
- Reword everything – Read out loud
- Now press publish
- Syndicate for Success
- Story Chief is a great resource to push out your content
- Google My business for local leads
Fly Fishing Box Example used in this episode
- Think about the benefits your product offers for your ideal customer.
- You could write a post that describes some of the best boxes and features.
- Talk about your company and the unique stories of how it is created.
- Tom Bihn is a great example of the story they tell.
- Tom’s Shoes is another brand with a remarkable story.
- Make remarkable content so people will remark about it.
Tools and Resources Noted
- Podcasting for Dummies
- Hindenburg Journalist Pro
- Izotope
- Waves
- Moz
- Neil Patel – Here’s a great resource from Neil Patel on getting your first 10,000 visitors
- Otter.ai
3 Simple Steps to Get Your First 10,000 Visitors from Google
Resources Noted in the Show
Hindenburg Pro a great resource for audio editing.
Podcast Pontifications with Evo Terra
Read the Full Transcript with Evo Terra:
Click here: Outdours Online with Evo Terra_otter.ai to get the Full PDF Transcript
or continue reading below……..
Evo 0:00
You can use story chief to not only publish to your own blog, but also push that content out to medium, which is a great place to repurpose your content out there. If you’re using blogger or Tumblr or other services like that you can push the content they’re also relevant to your audience. Dave is the Google My Business now the Google Local we used to call it now it’s called Google My Business. You can through story chief automatically publish your articles your posting on your company website, straight to your company’s business listing on Google. That was Evo Terra providing a killer tip on marketing within your local area. Welcome to today’s session of the marketing podcast. This is outdoorsonline.co the marketing podcast that helps you elevate your business through online marketing master sessions. Join Dave each week as he helps you grow your online influence via interviews with leading entrepreneurs from around the world. Here you go. Evo Terra sheds some light on what it takes to
Dave S 0:59
do SEO the right way. And actually, it’s pretty freakin simple. Wait, listen up and you’ll hear we hear about his 11 step process to SEO and your blog post. How to make a great headline and how to 5X your traffic today. This one was a super fun chat with one of the best out there so excited to share this one with you. Turn up the earbuds and enjoy today’s episode with Evo Terra.
How’s it going? Hey, Dave, I’m great. Great to have you on here. The the name on the on the URL pontifications. What does that mean? And why did you go with that name? Yeah, so pro tip. If you pick a name for your podcast, two things not to do. One don’t pick the first thing that pops into your head. And two, don’t pick something that very few people know how to spell. Just you know, just a pro tip.
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Evo 1:52
So podcast pontifciations came on the scene in the summer of 2018 because I was
Thinking about podcasting a lot, which is what I do. You know, I’ve been podcasting literally since the beginning since October 14 of 2004. But in the summer of 2018, I’d freshly moved back to America after a life living abroad. And getting deeper into the podcast space. I’d launched my podcast consultancy, and I was wanting to have these deeper thought topics around podcasting, not just the basic how to stuff but more of the why to and I started doing a live stream because I said, Well, you know, the people I want to talk to aren’t podcasting right now, I want to reach a wider audience. So I started doing a live stream. It’s what I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna pontificate about podcasting for a bit and that was the name that it sort of stuck. And now here we are some 300 episodes later, and I’m still pontificating about podcasting four days a week. That’s right, four days a week, and it’s so 2018 you started
The very first show that we that I launched back in 2004 was the 40th podcast ever of all crazy numbers about that. Yeah, we were actually doing a live radio show, or a syndicated radio show. And that’s what became the podcast. So I kind of had a head start on most of the people, which makes it a cheater thing. But after that, so getting started early was great. We launched a bunch of shows. After that I had the opportunity to write both podcasting for dummies as well as expert podcasting practices for dummies, which is arguably the worst book title ever. I launched a network of podcasts that were focused in on on independent authors are what I like to call under published authors. This was well before there was actually
As an Amazon Kindle back when ebooks were a joke and audio books cost $70. Or we found a way to encourage indie authors to make audio books, serialized audio books using podcasting, giving away their books for free to see if that would help the sales of some of the other books they had. And so that worked really well. We did that for quite a number of years, I think we had over 700 free audiobooks at the height of that, and we’re pushing out around 2 million or so episodes every single month, so a lot of free content developed there. And then along the way, I ended up the other day for a talk I gave at pod fest. And I’ve been the host or co host of 19 different podcasts since the beginning of time. Yeah, big number. That’s amazing. And now it sounds like you’re focusing on taking people to that next level. And I know I’ve seen some stuff out there you’ve been talking about SEO and search engine optimization and that’s a big struggle.
Dave S 5:00
Like I said at the top there for people that are listening, you know, our, our listeners here, can you just maybe start us off right off the bat here on, if you had to break down some tips, some steps, I don’t know if it’s eight steps or whatever it is, if somebody comes to me or comes to you and says, I just want to get brand awareness, I want my site to rank. What do you tell them?
Evo 5:21
Well, I tell him, those are two very different things brand awareness, getting their site to rank, but I’m parallel to my podcasting world. I’ve ran large scale marketing agencies. And part of that would be super smart teams of people who do SEO professionally for at the enterprise level. So not just quick tips here and there not just a bunch of keyword stuffing blackhat tactics, but actual things that enterprises can utilize to ensure that they’re getting the representation that they need when it comes to search engine.My advice to businesses who are especially small businesses who are thinking about getting into podcasting these days is pod
I said podcasting. I’m an SEO Excuse me. My advice for businesses getting into SEO, or really looking at their SEO is step one, you got to make great content.
Dave S 6:10
Yeah,
Evo 6:11
you have to make great content. If you’re not interested in making great content for the web, you’re never going to get the SEO rankings the SERP rankings that you think that your content deserves. So number one, you have to we willing to invest in making great content that has to be the first the first step of that one. And the second one is, you have to know who you’re making that great content for, what are they likely to be searching on, that you can make content for? That is compelling enough that they might like it and also good enough so that it might deserve that first page ranking. So you know, if you’re going after outdoors, best of luck to you, you have a fight, you know at the outdoor television network and every other out the rep area that’s too broad way, way, way too generic. So always start focused on what is it my business does? What are people searching for on the on search engines, and there are plenty of tools that will help you understand what searchers are searching for. And crafting content. Yeah, for that person and for that specific search. So that’s really what you have. What
Dave S 7:24
What if your product was, let’s say, somebody out there listening now their product is a, they’re in the fly fishing space. And they build a specific fly box that attaches to, to a cooler. So it’s a very specific thing. What would you tell them if that was their product?
Evo 7:42
Well, I would say let’s figure out what this thing actually is. Right? So no one is searching for this right? Maybe there are are there people that were already searching for that particular product? Yeah,
Dave S 7:50
people would be searching for safe fly boxes. You know, that’s a pretty common in the fly fishing flight. You know, it’s uh, yeah, that’s me. But this is more of a specific fly box. But yeah, they’d be searching for a fly box. A common term.
Evo 8:01
Yeah, so so fly boxes is a pretty common term as you’re, as you’re telling me, and then I’ll take your word for it. But But I would wonder, you know, are they looking just to buy? Because if so, then you’re going to have to compete with the places that are the other places that are selling this and, and also just other retailers, big retailers like one that starts with the word Amazon. Yeah, right. You’re not going to outrank those guys for a lot of stuff. So you have to compete inside. So rather than trying for that individual term, I would think more broadly about the benefits that your particular product offers. It’s very difficult to optimize a product page. What’s a lot easier to do is optimize when people are trying to make choices like what’s the best fly box yeah to be utilized. That’s, that’s something somebody might be looking for, as opposed to fly box. There’s going to list of all of them but I wonder the best ones, I don’t know fly boxes that work in this condition. I want to fly boxes in this particular area over here, create content, that’s that focused, not just one keyword, but actually More to the intent of the searchers. And how can you be helpful
Dave S 9:05
That’s great. That’s great. So basically, that’s hitting on the one example might be you put together a nice, big review of maybe some of the best fly boxes and in your picks sort of in and talk about each of those and describe, you know, give them a whole, a big piece of content that explains more than just, you know, this is the box you need to buy.
Evo 9:26
Yeah, and I think I’d also maybe go into some of the craft of what your company does making that fly box, you know, I’m thinking of a company one of my favorite. The company that I use that I buy from that makes all of the bags from my luggage to my laptop bag to the little satchel I carry around with me every day. It’s called Tom Behn. And the story of Tom Behn is an amazing story. So maybe if you’re an outfitter, maybe if you were in the outdoor space, and you’re making this kind of product, the story of how you make it and the craftsmanship that goes into it. That’s compelling content. So telling them why these quality ingredients are used and focusing on the individuals within your organization that helped make that or why you only source from here or photos and information from your users who have it out in the field that are using it. That’s really cool content that has an opportunity to get some recognition.
Dave S 10:18
Gotcha. Gotcha. And you mentioned Tom, or tom, ben, I, you know, Tom’s comes to mind to me, you know, that this shoe company, right, I’m not sure where they’re at. But that was a great example of that, where they said, I think they gave away a free pair of shoes to a needy country or something. Right for every sale. Right? That sort of thing.
Evo 10:38
Correct. Yeah, doing things that are remarkable. You know, I spent a lot of years almost 20 years inside of advertising and despised probably 80% of the time I spent in there. But you know, the things that I remember from that the things that are the lessons I took away is that advertising is a tax on the unremarkable if you really are doing remarkable things, making money products. And here’s the key part making remarkable content, then people will remark about it to other people. And you get that all powerful word of mouth, which gets you links, which gets you all the other SEO things. So you know, step one, make make amazing content people can’t live without. Perfect,
Dave S 11:18
perfect. That’s it. So that’s as simple as that. I mean, I love I love the simplicity there. So, so let’s say you make, you know, we’re on that product, they make this great piece of content, say it’s a blog post, and maybe there’s some other things that go along with it. But it’s just, it’s, it’s the thing, somebody’s gonna go there. And they’re gonna learn about fly boxes. They’re gonna learn about this fly box and all that. What are the any any other little steps to get that thing? I don’t want to go into blackhat. You know, stuff. I’m not talking about that. I’m just talking about how does somebody optimize that blog post and what they do to help it rank a little better?
Evo 11:50
Sure. Yeah. And so let’s talk about blackhat. Real quickly. Anything that you hear of blackhat techniques, chances are, by the time you’ve heard about it, they no longer Work. Google really does do a great job of staying on top of that and shutting all that stuff down. So ignore black and gray hat techniques because they’re gonna stop functioning worse. They’re going to get you blacklisted from Google.
Dave S 12:13
can you describe this for somebody who’s never even heard of black or gray hat? Oh,
Unknown Speaker 12:16
sure what black hat is? That’s a great idea. So yeah, so we mean that in the old spy versus spy comic right there, the white handed spy was the good guy. And the black hatted spy was the bad guy. And so that’s where the term comes from, from the spy versus spy comic strip, mad magazine from the 70s. Just a quick history lesson. Yeah. And so black hat means bad. Black Hat means purposely trying to manipulate or exploit a systems weaknesses. And there are lots of people out there who are trying to game the system with these black hat tactics. And then of course, the word grey hat is kind of in the middle things that you probably know were a bit sketchy, but we can still get away with for a while that may not get you totally back. So we want to do all white hat stuff white means doing very good and nice things that Google really, really wants you to do. Yeah. So you were asking about some specifics about that, that you could put together. So as I said at the beginning of this, Google likes it when you make good content, people don’t quite grasp that every change Google makes to their algorithms that power their search engines is 100%. Designed to get the the algorithms the Google brain working like a human. Hmm. Google employs thousands. That means more than 2 of people whose only job is to search for things so that they can test out what what the engineers have told the algorithm to do to what real humans actually do. Number one, number two, those people then search when they get a list back and they’re ranking, How good was the content? We put this in the first position? Did you feel that this information was trustworthy? Did you like that it was laid out Well, did you You know, what are the things you liked and disliked about it? That’s Can you imagine that as your job eight hours a day, yes, going in and searching for various things.
Dave S 14:07
I love Google to it, I, I would not like that job.
Evo 14:10
It is not a fun job. But what it does is it gets them closer to that parody we’re looking for between what the algorithm assumes we want and what we actually really do want, again, allowing for the fact that people’s wants and needs changes, you know, like, I don’t know, when you’re in the middle of a pandemic, for example, your search behavior might actually change it, but and so they’re making modifications. So I say that because if people oftentimes think about Google as water, all the little technical things I need to do, right, so that that the robots love me, the robot is trying to pretend it’s a human. So if you make stuff that humans like, you’ll be you’ll do a much better thing. And And by that, I mean, so let’s say that you you take my first bit of advice, which is when you’re writing content for your web page, more is always better. It used to be we would say right between five and 700 words today, we say 2000 You need to write around 2000 words of text, but you just can’t dump 2000 words of text on the screen that’s hard to read, you need to break it up with headings. So you put in a larger text in, you know, every couple hundred words or so general guidelines, break it up, put a heading in there, add some charts, add some graphs, add some pictures of people that are actually utilizing the service and thing that you’re actually talking about in their overall make it a pleasant experience for someone to consume on their phone on the browser where it makes sure it looks good everywhere. That’s really what it takes. It’s not. So oftentimes people say, Well, I wrote this blog post, or I have this product page. Can you SEO it for me? That’s exactly the opposite way. I mean, yes, there probably are things we can do to tweak that but a much better, but much better play is start making really great content that people want to read. If you make really great content. People want to read, I can promise you, you can probably forget about all the technical tricks. Yeah, just make that you will get the rewards you’re looking for.
Dave S 16:03
That’s awesome. As you’re talking there, I’m starting to think a little bit. Just looking at this yesterday, but you know, transcript This is more on the podcasting, right. So you’ve got like, otter otter.ai does a really good job of, you know, I mean, just plugging out and throwing out a transcript, you know, you got to go through an edit. But you got this transcript was, say it’s an interview, you know, in your interview, like, right now we’re interviewing, right, so it’s going to give us a transcript of this. How would you take this transcripts and turn that into or plug it into a show notes blog post and make it something better? Is that something you want to think about doing or would you write a blog post for episode differently?
Evo 16:39
Um, I would do everything you just said I would take the audio from this conversation. I would run it through a transcription service like otter like D script, like any number of them. I would then spend time rewriting every single word that came out of this, to create a nice long form blog post that is around 2000 words in it, we might, I might reorganize the content, I might group all things together slightly differently. But I would use the words that the transcription brain already put together, I will just rewrite them condense, expand where it needed to be, but use that as my base to create and craft that final wonderful article. And then when I was done with that, again, with with titles that are good with headings that break the text up with imagery with charts, all that stuff, I would do all that, then what I would do is I would also below all of that I put a link and say Click here to get the transcript. Yep. And I would include that advert, that exact transcript, the first transcript, maybe I cleaned it up if there are some matters inside of it. I’d like to do that. And I’d make that available. So now what you’ve got is a lot of content for Google to go through and read and turn through and really understand. And by the way, as I say This Dave, I’m not saying this as a suggestion of what you should do. No, I do this four days a week, every day, when I do my show, it’s a 10 minute long episode, the recording takes me 15 minutes start to finish 10 minutes of the good stuff inside. I then push that out to a transcript provider. And then I rewrite everything and make an article and include the information as a transcript below. It takes me roughly three hours, every single time I do an episode to post it available online 3 hours for 10 minutes worth of content, it’s about 1500 words, I don’t get the 2000 because my 10 minutes, so it’s okay. 2000 2000 is a guide. It’s not it’s not a requirement. But I at my rate of speech, it’s about 1500 words for my 10 minute long show. So that’s what my blog post gets to be. So yeah, that’s what it takes to make the sorts of web content that Google cares about.
Dave S 18:54
That’s it. What would you tell somebody if they love that idea, and they want to do that, but they’re Struggling with time just to get their podcasts episodes edited and get things going and just doing the basics is there? I mean is I don’t know, I guess outsourcing or what would you recommend if that was the problem?
Evo 19:12
Well, the time has to be spent. There’s no way to shorten the time without cutting corners and without doing some great thing. So whether you do it or somebody else does it, you have to spend the time I don’t want to spend three almost four hours these days doing this if I if I could find a way to not do this in three hours or four hours. I would not do it. It’s it’s not like it’s fun. I’m not getting paid at the end of that four hours. I you know, it’s not like I’ve got a $500 an hour clock. That’s right. And I who am I pay what I pay myself that money and it doesn’t make any sense, right? So it just takes time there’s a minimum level of time, energy and effort required. And if you don’t have the time to do that, you can absolutely outsource this and have other teams, other people who specialize in doing this. Do the work. But the time still has to be spent.
Dave S 20:02
Yep, yep. Okay, perfect. Well, I wonder, I’m trying to think, did you have a recent podcast that came out where you kind of went through? I want to say it was like the five or six or seven steps on SEO? Is that not something that was on?
Unknown Speaker 20:18
Yeah, no, I did. Yeah. So and what I did is I kind of broke down the process of what most people go through when they publish a podcast, which is, you know, they quickly record something they had an idea about, and they hastily write some show notes and they publish it. That’s it simple. Something right. And I broke down like the 11 steps that they really should go through. And the very first one of those is, what is this episode going to be about? Not, hey, I’ve got an idea. Let me grab the microphone. No going in doing keyword research to find out what are people actually searching for? So that I make sure that everything is angled towards that and then and an entire 11 step process that I go through when I’m one I’m actually finalizing the the content. That’s what I do for a podcast. And it’s, you could probably take all those tips that I gave on that episode, and translate them into any piece of content, you’re gonna create just, you know, skip the recording bits.
Dave S 21:13
Gotcha. Gotcha. And I’m looking at it now. Yeah, I sit here. It’s the the title. I’ll put a link in the show notes. podcast. SEO is hard. Is it worth the effort? Good. Good title. And I’m just looking at these. So yeah, topics one. agonize over your episode title. So that’s, that’s important, right? That’s the first thing locking your angle for an episode. Can you just can I read those? Or can you do? Yeah, so number three is locking your angle. And let’s just go through them really quickly. I think we have enough time here. Let’s Yes. So you talked a little bit. So number one is topics. And we talked a little bit about that. agonize over your episodes. So the title, let’s just start there. Any any quick tips on on the title? How do you know when you have a good title?
Unknown Speaker 21:58
Yeah, you probably don’t know when you have a good title. I want to be really honest with you, most people don’t good titles or what headline creators inside of magazines utilize newspapers. These are people that that are good at making headlines, which we would call them titles, because that’s what grabs your attention. You know, when you open up the paper back, when we used to have papers, you actually open up, people do read them, you know, you got to grab somebody’s attention. And that’s the job of the title is to grab someone’s attention. It has even additional meaning in the world of SEO for for digital content in that it’s got multiple jobs to do. But at the base of it really needs to elicit an emotional response in someone, you really need to say what’s in it for them and get them to stop. You’ve probably heard the term click baiting. And that’s what we’re doing. I mean, we write these things in a way to get someone to go, Oh, that’s neat. Click, I want to learn more. Now we want to make sure that it’s not a click bait and switch. You know, we want to lead them down a path. It’s one thing to go somewhere else. So if I’m going to say the question that I’m gonna make it A statement that says podcast SEO is hard. And it is, is it worth the effort? Question mark, I need to make sure that there’s a payoff inside. And I’ve done that. But as I said, you probably don’t know how to do that. So I recommend a tool. There are several tools out there, which will, you can go type in your headlines and it will give you a score. This robot is reading it, it’s looking at it for its emotional characteristic and power words and other things like that. There’s a lot of tools out there that will analyze your headline. So just search for headline analyzer and you’ll find one that works for you.
Dave S 23:27
Perfect. That’s a great, that’s a great tip. All right, so let’s just keep going. So number three lock in your angle for the episode. What are we talking about there?
Evo 23:35
So an angle is different than a topic and a title? You know, I know I’m gonna write about podcasts SEO. Great. That’s that’s the keyword I was going for. And so I wrote a really cool title for that. But what’s really my angle? What’s what is what unique thing Do I have to say about that? What journey do I want someone to go on with me when they read the content and my angle was all represented in there. Look, this is hard, and I’m going to detail out all of the steps is going to take to get this done. So that’s my approach as I’m going through the work. I’m not just writing about SEO, I’m writing about how hard it is.
Dave S 24:08
Gotcha. And in our angle, if we had to make something up for this, it might be, you know, we’re maybe the angle for this episode or at least this title is talking about that fly box, right? I could I could write something up or I should say, you know, whatever, how to get your fly fishing box ranked quickly or you know, whatever, come up with your angle to that. That makes sense.
Evo 24:28
Yeah, I think that’s a good topic. But I mean, I think the angle off of that is would be you know, getting back to the secret sauce about whatever your your product is, you know, is it hard is one thing you could do it you know, it could maybe using visuals to to get your pages to rank you know, using customer testimonials that that could be the angle that you’re looking for?
Dave S 24:45
Oh, right. Right. Right. That’s good. Yeah. Okay. Number four. Now you can record and produce so anything there on that one to know
Evo 24:54
Yeah, so this was okay, now that you know, you’re angling you’re topping your title now’s when you sit down and do all the hard work. Which is figuring out what you’re going to say and what order is going to be into you get a guest and all these various pieces, which is fine for a podcast, but even if you’re just writing your article well now as we go to the research, now’s when you go gather all the pictures if you decided to do a, a picture or picture tutorial of how to make a fly box or whatever, right, you go gather that you conduct your interviews, you pull up your specs, whatever you do, you gather all the content, and then you ultimately write out the text that you’re that you’re working with.
Dave S 25:27
Gotcha. And, and just as a side note, if we’re thinking of podcasting here on this, how does it you know, if you think about finding new, right, you’re trying to find new people, new listeners for your show. You’ve got all the apple stuff, everything going on there and search and that’s huge. How does Google you know how would you if you had just estimate percentage wise new traffic coming? If you did a good job of this versus say you don’t have a great blog post? Do you see that? Have you looked at the numbers there is it substantial,
Evo 25:54
drastic difference, huge difference? Doing a great job On site with your podcasts for SEO, we’ll bring in new listeners to your show because it’s going to bring in new readers to your content, who will eventually might decide to actually click play and listen to what you have to say. It won’t do much for you inside of Apple podcasts rankings or Spotify. So I guess that’s what we’re talking about. That’s a very, that’s a very different world. But we do SEO because we want people who are searching for content, not searching for podcasts, who are searching for content, who are searching for the things we’re searching, whatever their intent is, you want your content to come up in that consideration list. And my approach to that is, look, if you go click on any of my shows, episodes, any episodes of my shows, you will be able to read everything. You don’t have to click play. Yeah, it’s I wrote it that way so that it can be consumed by somebody who is searching for the answer to something as you said, or more information about a topic. I’m not going to force listening on them and I I can tell you in the I just switched my blog my website over and went this new route of doing things probably two months ago because I’ve known about it for the longest time I’ve just lazy too busy work and other people’s stuff since doing it I mean it’s five X’d my traffic really just in a matter of weeks. Yeah, because it wasn’t getting anything before. So you
Dave S 27:20
switched over from what was the switch you made?
Evo 27:23
Oh god so I was using just my hosting companies default all right page, they make you know, the same content I was putting the exact same content out but now I’m doing it over on my own domain where it’s all better and I’m probably doing a little bit better on my writing headlines and things like that one of the headlines but but writing the headings that go inside of it some some minor tweaks there but just simply by getting it all together all LinkedIn working it working well with you know, one consistent thing that looks like mine. Gives it a much better visual experience than the podcast hosting companies can provide. Yeah, five X the traffic.
Dave S 27:56
Gotcha. What would be your recommendation and this is early on, we were talking about This little off air, I’m going to be this show is going to go out to a lot of, you know, thousands of people because I have another show that’s also focused in, you know, the outdoor niche. But this, you know, some of this will be coming in fairly new to a new website. I have somebody building that website now. But, you know, what would be something to think about there to make sure to get that thing ranking? What if you have a new site, and I can see, you know, you have an older site that has some domain authority, any recommendation there?
Evo 28:27
No, my site’s brand new. So there you go. Domain Authority, right. I mean, I, yeah, I mean, there. I mean, I had podcastpontification.com with a single page registered for a couple of years ago, but it wasn’t getting any traffic. Now all these new pages are all brand new. So they they’re each of the pages domain authority or the Page Rank is just really, really low because it’s, you know, it’s
Dave S 28:47
yep
Evo 28:49
But that’s okay. I mean, the trick is when so if you are thinking about launching a site from scratch, the good news for you is that if you choose a modern CMS, Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, I’m using web flow is what mine is built on. Almost all of the current new tools, the new CMS is out there content management systems, almost all of them have good SEO, technical stuff built into them. Yeah, so they will likely already have all the things you need to do, you should be able to make unique titles and descriptions on each individual page and include an image that goes with each one. So when it ranks properly, the show is things well, they should automatically create good permalinks that will link from one thing to another so you’d have to worry about all that stuff. All of that stuff works technically out of the box as long as you don’t pick a theme that screws all of that up. Yeah, you know, there are a lot of times we’re so focused on the visual aspect, I want this thing to look just right. And some of these themes, you know, the cheap ones, especially just destroy a lot of that, that say that same connection. And so that’s that’s kind of problematic, guys. I would I would much rather start from scratch and don’t make it as gorgeous as you possibly as required eventually I would work towards that I just get the content working well so that you know your your blog posts link back and forth to one another the navigation bar looks good there’s you know, just it’s just set up properly and again out of the box most of those tools do that just don’t get so fancy that you start breaking some of those things gotcha.
Dave S 30:25
How do you know what a cheap theme How do you know when you you know, if you have somebody else do it how would you know what a cheap theme is? Is
Evo 30:31
that that’s that’s the real problem. It’s hard to evaluate that stuff if you’re not really well versed in that but i but I’ve seen some gorgeous themes that wind up doing some weird things on the back end, they’ll they’ll obfuscate URLs. They use a lot of weird pop ups and weird JavaScript elements that somehow hide things from Google. They look gorgeous. Yeah, don’t get me wrong but they just don’t do good or they like you know sliders on top which are wonderful and neat. Which don’t which Google kind of hates, because that changes the content all the time. That’s why I say, you know, just try and stay basic. If you have, this gets hard get getting SEO right is easy, but it’s also very easy to screw up. So don’t get fancy. Yeah, just put the right content out there. And you’ll probably be okay. I mean, one of the first things you got to do, and we probably should have said this earlier, is the only way you know how well you’re doing is to know how well you’re doing. And so if you one of the very first things you should do after getting your register your domain, is get it on Google Search Console. Yep. Not Not Not Google Webmasters. I’m sorry, not and not Google Analytics, and not Google Tag Manager. Those are both great. But I mean, Google Search Console, which we used to call Google Webmasters. Yeah. Because Google Search Console will tell you exactly how your content is appearing on Google. You can look at your at your web analytics to see what kind of traffic you’re getting, but I’m mean before traffic prior to traffic when somebody searches? What are they searching on that will your content shows up? And whereas your content? Do you have content that’s showing up on a weird search term that’s on page 275 of Google, okay, you can actually work with that content and see if you can improve it to get it further up the chain to get it up over on on page one, but you gotta be looking at Google Search Console. It is clean as the most important integration, you can set up right away.
Dave S 32:24
Perfect. Yeah, that’s awesome tip. So yeah, let’s, let’s bring it back to that list. Now we’re still moving. We’re gonna get through this thing. We’re, let’s see. Number Number five. Well, we’ve already covered this one, right. 2000 words. So anything else to note on that one?
Unknown Speaker 32:38
Yeah, just just write write good content, because you’re, but the hardest thing about writing and take this from a guy who’s written I don’t know, five or six books right now, before you start tweaking content, you got to write content. So just sit down, turn off everything or on everything, whatever you need to get your writing down there, and just hammer out the writing. It’s gonna be ugly, it’s gonna but we’re gonna fix that in just a moment. Step one. Write a lot.
Dave S 33:01
Perfect. Yep. And then step six is optimize those 2000 words.
Evo 33:05
Yeah. So now we’re going back in and we’re fixing things. Remember, we were supposed to be writing about a particular topic at a particular angle that’s all targeted towards one keyword, or keyword keyword phrase have we have we gone off topic? Because I tend to go off topic. Yeah, how can we bring it back? How can we know those those words we want to topic is great. But maybe we need to tweak some of the language in there so that we’re referencing that keyword that we’re searching for, as well as some variants around that keyword. Don’t just repeat the same thing over and over and over and over again, that gets boring and repetitive. But just make sure that as you’re reading it that you didn’t take it if you did take an aside or some little weird side journey. Make sure you brought it back to what you were trying to do. So optimize it for the topic and the keyword that you wrote this thing for in the first place.
Dave S 33:48
perfect perfect. And then number seven is pretty up your page with pictures which you noted on anything else there.
Evo 33:53
Yeah, just you know, find relevant picture you’d be amazed how well relevant pictures actually work. Oh one one pro tip when you’re adding a Picture onto your page, make sure we use the alt tag, which is all tags for that describes it for screen readers for people who are visually impaired. And don’t try to cheat. Don’t if you have a beautiful picture, let’s say you got this lovely, I don’t know, let’s say you got this beautiful steelhead trout that I got a picture of on your page, right? So how is that for relevancy, right? Yeah. Don’t say, don’t they all tags should not be the best fly box on the planet. No, the alt text is this is a beautiful steelhead trout,
Dave S 34:29
right. That’s what your alt text is supposed to be. Gotcha. And should you have in those photos somewhere, you know, if your keyword your main keyword, you say your fly boxes you’re going for? Should you have a more photos of with the alt tag that says fly boxes in it.
Evo 34:43
If it makes sense. Yeah, only if it makes sense. But don’t force it. I mean, you could say Look at this beautiful steelhead trout that I caught with this fantastic fly box. Okay, that’s fine. I’ll give you that. Yeah, but you know, and sure, I mean, you should probably have pictures of fly boxes in there. And so yeah, you want to make sure that those are in there, but don’t think you have to use that keyword at all. You’re all tags that’s that’s not not completely
Dave S 35:02
okay. And then number eight is organize the structure of the page which you noted a little bit just kind of
Evo 35:07
headlines. Make sure you have bullet points make sure you break it up no big blocks of text. You know, I the kind of general rule is no more than five sentences in a paragraph. Yeah. And quite often we make individual paragraphs separately individual sentences. paragraphs. Yeah, break it up.
Dave S 35:22
Yep, yep. Perfect. And then nine is and then rewrite everything if necessary. Is that something you do a lot?
Evo 35:28
Yeah, I always mean I because what I after I’ve done all those steps, I go back to the top of my page, and I read it out loud. Which bugs my wife who’s, you know, sequestered here at home with me right now, but I still do it. I read it out loud. And I make minor tweaks to things right, I just make changes now that I put those headings in. Do I need to change the way that I did the lead into the next sentence of the first sentence of that paragraph? Do some minor tweaks from there?
Dave S 35:52
Perfect, perfect and 10. Now you can publish?
Evo 35:55
Yeah, right. So now for a podcast. That’s when I go Okay, now I can actually make that page. Live and I can put my episode file up there if you’re not doing a podcast, and instead, you’re just making a page on your website. Yeah, now is when you actually take it off of whatever you wrote it in. And I do most of my development work inside of Google Docs just because it’s easier. And then I copy and paste into the CMS. Like I said, I’m using web flow, and make any other tweaks I need to make there, make sure none of the weirdness gets copied over make sure the things you wanted copied over actually copied over. And then you can hit preview and publish. Perfect and then the final number 11 is syndicate for success, which, which is a big one, right? you publish the work, but some people say you should be actually doing more work to get the word out there. You totally should be doing more work. There’s I didn’t mention that in that article day. But I’ll tell you about a company called story Chief, really like what story chief does. It is kind of a distribution hub, if you will. So you can use story chief to not only publish to your own blog, but also push that content out to medium, which is a great place to repurpose your content out there. If you’re using blogger or Tumblr or other servers like that you can push the content. They’re also relevant to your audience. Dave is the Google My Business. Now the Google Local, we used to call it now it’s called Google My Business. You can through story chief automatically publish your articles your posting on your company website, straight to your company’s business listing on Google. And the reason you want to do that through story, Chief assume we’re gonna do it for medium is not only is it another place where people actually can read your content. But more importantly, those articles will all point back to your primary web page that you’ve posted using something we call a canonical link. Get really tricky about that. So that pushes that authority from those other sites into yours. Google looks at and says, Oh, this content has been syndicated around the web, other places that are all pointing back. That must mean it is a higher authority than something that doesn’t have that.
Dave S 37:55
That’s it. That’s a that’s an awesome tip, too. I was just thinking Josh was another person who’s probably thing to this that he has a small company. He’s basically a guide and small fly shop, but he wants to compete with, there’s a few big shops that have been out there forever. And they’re on top on Google. And he just wants to be number three or four. You know, he just wants to get out there. That’s a great tip for him that if he could produce that content, he might get some leads from local people that want to fish his rivers by doing that, that might help.
Unknown Speaker 38:22
Exactly. Right.
Dave S 38:22
That’s sweet. So So even though this all this sounds like I wonder, you know, you have a 10 minute, your episodes are really sure. I was thinking about this the other day when I was listening, I was like, God, 10 minutes, Man, I wish he would talk longer. You know, I love it. I love your stuff. So it sounds like you’re doing this maybe just so you don’t have to do as much work because this is a lot of work. You’re talking about here if you had an hour long episode.
Evo 38:40
It’s a lot of work. Yeah, no, no doubt about it. And yeah, it doesn’t really matter how long your episode is you, you have to do the work and someone has to really go in and do the work. I chose 10 minutes for for a couple of reasons. One was where I started, there was a 10 minute liability or not a lie but a 10 minute limit on it. But I I’ve learned over many years that work expands to fill the time allotted for it. And so if you give me an hour to talk about something I will talk about something for an hour However, if you say you have 10 minutes, I will nail it in 10 minutes and I have I am of the opinion that podcasts episodes should be as short as they possibly can. And not a minute longer because there’s no need for filler content and a lot of times with for shows that I listen to or that I see out there that are an hour long you can tell that it could have done it a whole lot tighter than that and they should do it a whole lot tighter. So it’s less about less time spent for me and more about if I can get everything out in a nice 10 minute chunk. Especially I’m doing it four days a week. I mean you can imagine I did an hour that’s four hours a week someone have to dedicate I don’t want that that’s that’s too much content for somebody to consume. They wouldn’t be able to do that. So for me, the shorter episode format where I’d like to go shorter, but after several hundred episodes, my brain has been trained to 10 minutes and doing it shorter is very hard for me although maybe, maybe I’m gonna take a break over the summertime and I may come back and try and get it done in like five minutes, which would be which would be great because I can give you the same nuggets of info in five minutes. Okay.
Dave S 40:14
Yeah, well that’s it because yeah, that’s the nice thing about your show in the shorter ones that you know, you could take out or you could take you know, you can listen to five, you know, five quick shows and boom, The one downside to that, is that what I turn around at the end of the day, it’s like, oh my god, I have this whole sometimes a page of notes and I can’t do everything. So I try I try to go to the one thing roll or if I hear something, okay, I’ll take one thing away from that podcast. And and I guess today what would that be you know, as we begin to wrap this up pretty quickly here. Is there a takeaway, you know, from what we talked about anything you would leave you know, people with?
Evo 40:49
Well, I’m glad you brought that up. You know, that’s another reason why I make my shows 10 minutes long as there are about one thing. Yeah, not not not they’re not about SEO. That’s a gigantic topic. So bookshelves over the world, right? So that’s why it’s about one very specific thing. I talk about one very specific thing and it goes on longer format shows like this one, you know, we’ve been talking for 40 minutes here. They go, they go longer than that. Right. And so they typically have lots and lots of things. We’ve been pretty well focused on SEO. Well, we can focus on SEO. Yeah. And really make it specific to two out outdoors. Businesses, although we we tried to do that. Obviously, we talk a lot about podcasting. So it’s, it’s kind of hard to wrap up the longer episodes into into one single little soundbite, but but I guess if it’s if it’s one thing, it’s kind of a similar theme that I did on my podcast episode, and it’s doing SEO right is hard to deal with it.
Dave S 41:45
Yeah, that’s a don’t Yeah, you got to do it. Otherwise, I love that that is a great takeaway, because if you don’t do it, then you’re just not gonna get any results. I mean, that’s the bottom line. Your Google isn’t gonna be sending your stuff out. If you’ve got a three hundred Word just a show notes. Yeah, I guess.
Evo 42:02
Yeah, yeah. I mean that that’s really that’s one of the things I struggle in the podcasting world is trying to get people to understand that the small bit of text that you wrote that you put on pod, bean Lipson, capitvate, whatever else, you know, that’s great. I assume in app that is not what needs to be on your web cell. Absolutely not what’s going on? So I hate the term show notes. those are those are episode details. And I call those in app episode details as opposed to writing an on site,
Dave S 42:32
or do you put in your show notes on your? So let’s say you have shown us a you have a you know, a show notes, list of 20 things with a bunch of links. Do you put those on the blog posts as well? Are they tucked in there somewhere?
Evo 42:43
Yeah, I mean, so you’ve looked at the blog post I wrote for that episode about?
Dave S 42:48
Well, I’m on I’m on Apple on my phone, like, yeah, I’m looking okay.
Evo 42:52
So So yeah, so that that’s fine. So yeah, what you were looking on Apple. So that’s a condensed version of what’s on my website. So I write the very, very long blog post. And then I take that and I condense it down to what you’re reading inside of Apple podcast, it you won’t notice much of the difference. Because the way I’ve got mine crafted, it’s the same. But instead of, you know that, if you’ll notice on yours that the sentences are very short, and there’s rarely more than two or three in a paragraph. But if you go to the blog post, I have some longer expanded version. So you’re probably reading about 50, maybe 60% of the words that I wrote on the longer post. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah, I gotta do I gotta do both of those.
Dave S 43:33
I see it. Yeah, I’m looking now. I clicked over to your website on the phone. And I’m seeing Yeah, yeah, it’s good in the I think that those Yeah, I mean, the 123 obviously, the list posts thing is, uh, you know, it’s not only Google likes it but it’s helpful. You know, it’s really it’s like, here you go. Here’s the eight things I there’s so much out there. You can’t consume it all. You know, you know, people like Neil Patel, who have these gigantic for whatever they are right 40,000 words or something. There’s no way I can get that but by I can just grab like we said one thing, or maybe the top 10 things to do. Yeah, it gives me something.
Evo 44:05
Well, yeah, I mean, follow what Neil has to say, because he’ll teach you about overall things, you know, but you know, it’s it’s it’s a giant course, you know, following Neil Patel following Moz following any of the search, there’s so much there’s so much info for you to get to in there. And it’s and some great tutorials and great places to start.
Dave S 44:21
Yeah, that’s great. No, and that’s a struggle for these, you know, like we said, Jared, back to the start, you know, his struggle, a lot of people struggles that they don’t have First of all, they don’t don’t really have the money necessarily. They don’t think they do. They don’t have the time, and there’s no way they can consume those humongous articles. So so I want to give them some little thing again, like one takeaway, right. And I think that’s it. We talked about it, we covered it, right? write, for a human and right, something that’s beneficial and that’s if you do only that, forget about everything else, you’ll probably be okay. Exactly. Right. Okay, that’s a great takeaway. So hey, one a couple other little quick things. I these are kind of random too, but I had to hit you up with on these real quick before we get out here. So Hindenburg recently. I I’ve been using I’ve been a GarageBand person just because it’s been easy. It’s free. I just started using Hindenburg. I think Dave Jackson when I interviewed him, he mentioned it another person mentioned it. And it’s it’s nice. I mean, it definitely is easier to use. Yeah. Is Hindenburg? I mean, what do you think of Hindenburg? And then also when you use Hindenburg, when you get that export that thing? Do you also ever send something like that through an A phonic as well? Or what’s your take on that?
Evo 45:25
So I use Hindenburg Journalist Pro, as my DAW of choice and so does the, the engineer that I subcontract to. In Australia, she and I both use the same software, which is very helpful when we’re troubleshooting challenges or if I need to fix something after she’s done it or whatever else. Hindenburg is a professional da digital audio workstation. Because you’re not in a garage and you don’t have a band. You should be using something more powerful, more professional like like Hindenburg, you know? Yeah, I mean, I don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of free tools. I use Audacity for the longest time I used I learned how to cut tape, literally. really cutting tape on a four track reel to reel back in the 80s. I’ve done it the hard way. And I know that there’s even the free tools are great. But when you step up to a professional da, you will save yourself so much time. It’s designed to do one thing. And one thing only, which is why I’m a big fan of using Hindenburg. The other nice thing about using Hindenburg. So yeah, to answer your question, no, I don’t use auphonic, which is a great service. But the reason I don’t use it is I don’t need it. And the journalist pro I can automatically get my levels where they need to be across all the tracks, I can export at minus 16 lops which is a perceived loudness rating that we should be using on podcasting. And because I use a variety of plugins from isotope and from waves. My content sounds amazing when I hit export to mp3, so I don’t need to run it through any additional processing afterwards. I’ve done it all inside of Hindenburg. Not everybody You can do that not everybody has the same tool. So by all means if you need to use a service like a phonic, then then do that right especially need to clean up your audio tracks if you got you in a guest and your your levels are way off, send both of those tracks before you do anything else over to off on a cabinet, lift the the volume between the two and then bring it back and start working with it, you know, do what you have to do. But if you if you can make the jump to Hindenburg, journalist Pro, or Reaper, or any of those other tools that are out there for it. Great. I’m a big fan obecause, you know, this is what it’s designed to do make shows just like this one.
Dave S 47:38
It is and I’m totally sold on it. I mean, just in using it right away. You see the time the speed, it’s just everything is way more efficient. And so the the pro versus the non, but I think the non Pro is like 100 bucks, the Pro is like 400 or something like that. Yeah, well, what’s what’s the difference? What’s the difference between the pro quick just quickly, is there a big difference between the two?
Evo 47:54
Yeah, so the biggest one is there’s a couple of hidden features inside of the pro version. So one is Better noise cancellation in the pro version. And I don’t think you can change the export to minus 16 lufs in the free version and the cheaper version. I think those are the two biggest challenge.
Dave S 48:10
Oh wow, that is pretty big. Yeah, that’s huge. I noticed on it it’s 16 or 14 there’s no 15 lufs right.
Evo 48:19
No, there shouldn’t be Yeah, yeah 16 and 16 is the right number 14 is a little bit too loud. There are a handful of shows that have been 14 Some do 12 is what what Amazon and somebody else’s is set to level but the right answer for podcasting is minus 16 lufs Okay,
Dave S 48:36
all right, perfect. And is there you know, on this conversation, if you if you had a resource just for SEO, if you want to keep it there, anything that you had mentioned to somebody want to go deeper on learning about SEO, any person or blog or anything you’d recommend?
Evo 48:51
My go to spot if you’ve never delved into into SEO whatsoever is a company called Moz. I think it’s moz.org but not Um, I forget what their what their URL actually is, you know, ran by really smart for a long time Rand Fishkin was in charge of it for the longest time. I think he’s moved on to something else now. But they do a whiteboard Fridays, I think is what they do. And it just it’s really good, insightful tips. Moz is an industry leader. There are lots of other resources out there. But if I think they probably are the more most approachable for it when I ran the SEO shop, anytime we had somebody new join, for the first two weeks, all they did is sit there and just walk, walk through all the Moz tutorials to kind of get up to speed on where we were.
Dave S 49:34
That’s it. That’s it. Perfect. All right, Evo. Well, that’s about it in the next few months. Anything new we can expect from you. You want to give a shout out to anything you got coming up.
Evo 49:43
I think in the next few months, I’m going to get to go outside which would be great. I mean, I live in Arizona. How is it there? Well, you know, we’re under lockdown. Like everybody else’s. We can get out. I’m a disc golf person and I’ll go In Arizona, you can play almost every day which is great. So I have been going out like I will tomorrow I’ll go out and play a little golf which is really helpful but you know we’ve got beautiful mountains we’ve got beautiful places to go hike. And And honestly, I have gotten away from doing that. Over the years I’ve lived here and I need to get back to it. And the way I’m going to start doing it now is I’m gonna do a lot of it in my car, because I can drive some of these scenic routes that I’ve never really done before so so I’m I’m looking forward to getting out of the house. But I also recognize that this pandemics not going to go away for a while so I will eventually get back to the outdoors. That’s awesome and rather than later I love
Dave S 50:40
that that’s one of my my questions I’ve been trying to pick out you know is that some people are the outdoors. I think some people in the in the online space aren’t really but the cool thing. Yeah, that’s awesome to hear you’re into it. So keep in touch on that. And if they want to find you, it’s just podcastpontifications.com is the best place.
Evo 50:57
Yeah, if you want information about podcasting, obviously, you can listen to that show. podcast pontification. I spew out lots of information over on Twitter, which is where I’m most active on just Evo Tara on Twitter and if you got questions you want to send me a specific email Evo at podcast launch dot Pro. There we go.
Dave S 51:16
Alright Evo, I appreciate the time today. This has been a super helpful episode. I know definitely there’s gonna be a lot of people that are gonna love, love what we dug into here. And yeah, until we get to the next one all keep in touch with you and check back soon. Right on Dave Have a great one. I love that takeaway. Seo isn’t hard. So deal with it. I love the simplicity. And yeah, that is a good way to wrap us out of here. So I’d like to find out what you think in the new show. And if there’s anything I could do a better job at. You can send me an email directly to [email protected] or connect on social. We’re on twitter at outdoors_online. Love to keep this thing going. So you know it’s always hard to get out of here after these shows, I hate having to cut them off because it feels like I can always chat forever. But we’re gonna we’re gonna do it out of here. So let’s scratch it out and we’ll see you on the next one.
Unknown Speaker 52:13
Thanks for joining us today and for your support of the marketing podcast. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it with one other person and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to the show.
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Takeaway – SEO is hard. Deal with it.
Conclusion with Evo Terra
Evo Terra shares some great tips and steps to improve your SEO for your next blog post and podcast. Evo has an 11 step process to getting your post to rank and he saw a 5x improvement once he started implementing this on his website. This was a fun chat so hope you enjoy!
And if you’re looking for more advanced strategies on growing traffic to your website and getting more sales, make sure to check out this Email Marketing course I recently took that helped me scale my business to the next level. By the way, this link above is an affiliate link, which means that I earn a commission if you end up purchasing this course. It’s at no extra cost to you and please if you have any questions related to this product, let me know and I’d be happy to answer them for you.
Click here to get Evo’s Top 11 SEO Steps PDF to get More Traffic to Your Website:
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