Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Julia Borchesi who is going to introduce herself and tell us about her consultancy and what is it in her life that has made us such an expert that we should listen to her.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: So I'm Julia, I'm the founder of Julia Renee Consulting where I do SEO, Pinterest and now AI search for small businesses.
I've had my business for almost nine years now and why you should trust me is because I worked as an SEO professor. So if I can get a bunch of 18 year old, half asleep college students to get websites ranking on Google, then I think I can help my
[00:00:45] Speaker A: clients pretty well fascinated. I've stepped in and taught a couple classes at University of Tennessee for an adjunct professor who wanted a third party opinion.
What is it about, about that college setting that's successful for you to be able to communicate what's going on on a very fast paced industry?
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think it's fun to teach college students it's a little bit more challenging because they don't have skin in the game like a business who is investing in SEO. They really want to get the results because they want the clients and customers and help their income and everything. But college students, they're just there to learn.
But it also is fun because they're more curious about SEO and search, especially because I think it's going to impact their future a lot more than when I was in college with AI and everything that's been going on. There's a lot changing.
So I don't give them textbooks to read because yeah, anything that was printed a year ago is out of date.
So the syllabus kind of, it kind of changes as it needs to throughout the semester. Like if there are new articles, new findings that have come out. So it's a class that can change pretty quickly and be totally different from one year to the next.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: I'm fascinated by that because it is a challenge because you have people who are on that track who are interested in marketing. But SEO is very fast paced.
Actually, ironically, I love to hear you're not trying to use books.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. And also, I mean as a college student who had to buy so many books, like it's such a waste of money sometimes.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: I'm glad that to hear a professor recognize that.
So what transfers over in the lessons that you're teaching to your students and the lessons that you're teaching to your consultant consultees?
[00:03:02] Speaker B: I would say probably for the College students, they are learning SEO kind of for future jobs that they might have.
So focus a lot on the foundations, things that haven't changed that much year over year, because anything that I'm teaching them that could be trending now might be totally different by the time they're out in the workforce.
So it's a lot more on basics. How SEO kind of has changed over the years and things like that. And then with my current clients is really more of like, what is going on now, what matters for them specifically, because they might have a lot of nuances in their businesses that, you know, doesn't really apply to a college student.
So it's a lot more customized with my clients than it would be kind of like in general for my college students.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Is there any general categories or niches that your clients have fallen into?
Happen to work as a hired hand at an agency that fell into the outdoor niche. So, you know, hunting sites and fishing.
Did social.
Social media for Jeff Foxworthy for. For a year through them.
So very niche. And I know sometimes agency owners, they've got that one connection that leads to another and another of the same type. Is that true for you or where has your experience in niching been with clients that have come on board?
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Yeah, so my, my niche is a little bit more, I guess, general than like, outdoor, but it's. I typically work with, I mean, all small businesses, but typically in the, like, creative or holistic industries.
So I work a lot with like, interior designers and photographers and then also some, like, midwives and therapists.
So there's not a ton of, like, overlap between those two industries. But that's kind of like where I've fallen with the types of clients that have come to me
[00:05:04] Speaker A: when it comes to those niche services.
You know, I had a midwife, and I know that the information space there is interesting and challenging because, you know, you had Google come in, what, 2018 with the medic update and put its thumb on the scale in terms of visibility for, let's say, alternative health options outside of the core of what is medically mainstream.
Um, how much is that a factor in your methodology that hasn't affected my
[00:05:41] Speaker B: clients too much that I've seen.
I mean, with like, any content that they're writing, I'm always like, recommend if it's something they're writing. I'm recommending adding, you know, links to medical sources and making sure that they have data to back up any, like, medical information that they're sharing in their content.
But typically, like, for their services pages, when you know, people are searching for like midwife services or, you know, doula, something like that.
I haven't really found it has affected their, like, service pages very much.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: Talking about, you know, doing service area businesses. I'm curious, this is kind of a branding question.
How much do you advise, you know, bringing the local culture into to be a part of the branding?
And the example I use for this is, you know, in New York it was very popular for the to be tiki themed torches, tiki themed restaurants, because it was opposite to the culture of it. But, you know, you also have, you know, the value of, you know, a diner sticking close to its southern roots if it's in, in the South.
How does local culture and local geography play into your suggestion of marketing choices?
[00:07:03] Speaker B: I would say for the branding, I'm typically not in the early stages of branding for, you know, my clients. So they typ are working with an expert who can kind of guide them wherever they need to go with that.
I haven't found that they've incorporated a whole lot of local things.
One that comes to mind is I worked with a midwife and doula team in Arizona and they use cherry blossoms a lot, which I would not think of with Arizona.
So sometimes they, I guess go the opposite direction of kind of like what speaks to their local area. So I don't think they've really, really like incorporated a lot of the local touches with their branding that I've seen so far.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: You listed amongst your assets a skill set around Pinterest.
Tell me a little bit more about how that developed and how that usually plays out in the conversations and execution at scale as strategy.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: Yeah, so I focus on Pinterest because it is more of a search engine than like Facebook and Instagram. They're, you know, very social media. But Pinterest doesn't really fit in neatly with those boxes because most of the time when people go to Pinterest, they are searching for something. They're not really going there to like follow people or to comment on pins. They're really searching for information, ideas, inspiration, products.
So that's why I have added Pinterest on. In addition to SEO, I also don't really like Instagram and Facebook. So I did do that for a couple of clients at the beginning and then realized how much I hated it. So then I just focused on SEO and Pinterest.
But with Pinterest, there's a lot of overlap with SEO strategies because you do need to be incorporating keywords in the pin titles, pin descriptions on the pins itself. If you are creating graphics that have text on them, optimizing the boards and profiles and everything like that. Because you both want to tell Pinterest what your account is about, what your pins are about, in order to rank for those, but then also reach people who are searching specifically for the different topics that you're writing about with your pins or the different, you know, categories you have with your boards. So there's a lot of, you know, kind of overlap with keyword strategy with Pinterest. The primary thing that you need to have before getting started on Pinterest is you need to have content.
So that's where there's also a big overlap between SEO and Pinterest with, you know, writing, you know, well, optimized content, having a strong blog post strategy. Because then you can use those blog posts to, you know, on Pinterest and really perform well with that. Because people aren't going to Pinterest to search for like Midwife Near Me. They are searching more for that information piece. So that's where blog posts can really help you with your Pinterest strategy.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Now I've got a client that they sell permacast concrete walls for data centers. I'm guessing that there are certain types of products or services that align better with some of those common searches. What are the common niches where Pinterest, the volume of search on Pinterest is going to align well with an audience versus and also what's the most unexpected niche where there is a Pinterest interest for a niche or industry that you wouldn't expect?
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Yeah. So a lot of people think that you have to be a visual business to perform well on Pinterest. You have to be like a photographer or designer.
So that's not true. You just have to have that content piece. If you have videos more than you have, like, you know, blog posts, you can also use those, I will say probably concrete walls for data centers probably won't perform well on Pinterest.
You can, you can check it out to see if there is any content on there already. But some of the big categories on Pinterest are like fashion, food, travel. But if you are in an industry outside of kind of like the big ones, that means you have less competition, which can help.
So I definitely encourage everyone to go onto Pinterest. You can start typing in maybe some like general topics that you typically write about or things that your clients would be interested in. I actually have a blog post on seven questions you should ask before trying Pinterest as a business.
So you can check that out and kind of ask yourself those questions and figure out if Pinterest is a good category or good fit for your business.
But one business that actually performed really well on Pinterest that I was surprised was they specialize in training videos for swimmers training for the Olympics.
So it's not just like content on how to swim freestyle. It's like really specific techniques that I had never heard of even though I swam all through high school.
It's very specific to the elite swimmers. But they absolutely knocked it out of the park with Pinterest somehow. They had no competition on Pinterest, so they were able to perform really well for people who were interested in that really niche topic. I've also worked with a boarding school in Switzerland that performed really well because again, they didn't really have any competition and they could write about different types of topics around international education and things to do in Switzerland with children and things like that. So they could cover a lot of different topics that would reach people who might be interested in their school and their services, get them on their website and tell people about what they do. So you don't have to be a visual business. You just have to have some sort of content that you can put on Pinterest. I've also had people ask me if like the luxury industry would perform well on Pinterest and I did some research and luxury yachts are actually a huge product on Pinterest that you can check out.
So if you sell luxury yachts, you might want to try Pinterest.
So it can be a variety of industries that can perform really well there.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Was surprised to hear you say videos because I Associate Pinterest 99% in my brain with images. So is there a video pin process and is there best practice around that? Is it TikTok ish Instagram y or is it just an. An alternative for an image is just a video. Is there anything around that?
[00:13:32] Speaker B: Yeah. So with videos you can definitely test out different types of video to see what performs best. Um, I will say most of the time the audio is muted on Pintere.
So things like trending audio like you would use on Instagram does not matter for Pinterest, if you are speaking, you need to make sure that you have captions for people who don't have the volume turned on. Usually under 30 seconds is kind of a good thing to aim for and then just some. It kind of depends on business. But whatever is visually appealing in videos, you know, typically performs well. If it's like, like a talking head video that probably won't perform as well on Pinterest also because like I said, people aren't going onto Pinterest to follow people. They're searching for information, so they likely don't know who you are. If you're just, you know, a video of you speaking to the camera, they probably don't really care. They just care about the information.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:26] Speaker B: So doing videos that show, I don't know, maybe the process of whatever you're, you're working on. If you are in a visual industry like interior design, showing before and afters, you can also create videos that are like a carousel of images if you want to show the process of something.
If you sell products, videos can be a really great way to show the products, you know, if it's shoes or something, how it can be paired with different outfits or different, just angles of the actual shoe. So there are lots of different ways that you can use video on Pinterest. But yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing that you're doing on Instagram because some of those things won't work as well on Pinterest.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: It occurs to me that it's kind of potentially also from an SEO perspective, a bit of a barnacle SEO type approach of hey, I have my core keyword search. I get one bite of the apple through my website. But hey, there's a Pinterest board showing up. That means maybe I could get another bite at the apple, another opportunity, show up in that search result. Because I understand a lot of Pinterest activity actually comes from search results sending people onto those boards, then through those onto your website.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: Yeah, when, sometimes when I do keyword research, like SEO keyword research for my SEO clients, I will see that some of the top ranking websites are like Pinterest boards or even just Pinterest pins.
So you can kind of get that like I guess double dip, get, you know, the traffic from Pinterest itself, but then also directly from Google as well.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Now turning to our friend in the room that as my friend Matt Brooks of SEO Teric says, our least trained but most popular Customer Support Representative, LLM Tools ChatGPT as a channel when it comes to search. And I have to differentiate that because we can talk about LLM tools and they're great for productivity or X, Y and Z. But there is an aspect of them taking a role in the Discovery Channel, a marketing channel aspect of it.
Chris Tweeten of Spacebar Collective says that they, they do help, but they have muddied attribution so when it comes to your discussion and thinking about AI LLM tools as a channel, what's your discussion look like with your clients?
What's your best advice?
What's your go to market strategy these days?
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of overlap with SEO strategies. Especially for my more visual clients. Getting them to have enough website copy is always a struggle. They always want to show off their images more than have text on a website, which I understand like, you know, their photos are going to be what sells their work. But then if they can't reach anyone on, you know, these AI platforms or on Google, then where the customer is going to come from. So kind of getting them to focus a lot on their website copy. Doing things like making sure. I know typically with AI platforms they only crawl like part of the page, so making sure all the most important information is towards the top of the page.
I mean a lot of SEO best practices with having like meta descriptions optimized.
One probably newer thing on site that I'm helping clients with is having more like FAQs on different pages because a lot of them would have a search standalone FAQ page, but kind of, yeah, having some of those FAQs throughout pages where it's relevant.
Doing things like having that kind of quick information that might help the LLMs a little bit more.
So that's kind of like on site what I'm focusing on.
With a lot of things off site, I'm more recommending things they can do since I'm not really in PR and can't really help with a lot of brand authority in other ways. But definitely making recommendations for them to get featured on directories, obviously get reviews on Google business profile and things like that.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: That touches on the question of authority and that naturally comes to the oldest aspect, what made Google Google is the application of links.
So is there a role for link building when it comes to AI or is it exclusively mentions or is link building even more important?
Gets down to it. A lot of these LLM tools are just fancy wrappers for Google results behind the scenes.
So what's your link building game look like and what's your outlook on digital authority?
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Yeah, so I mean I definitely think link building is important for, you know, the AI search world for my clients specifically since they don't, they're very small businesses, they're usually like solopreneurs, maybe have a small team.
So they aren't able to do a lot of, you know, major outreach. So I help them like find places, especially locally for local Businesses that would both give them some links, get them some brand authority, but also get in front of their, you know, potential clients where they might be not searching for them on Google, but they might be, you know, reading an online magazine or something like that that's local to them. So kind of like trying to find those places where they can both get in front of clients in a new way, but then also get the links, get the brand authority, get more, you know, mentions across the web, essentially.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: I was talking with the co founder, Zapdigits. They're like a competitor to agency analytics.
And I'm curious as an agency owner, what the reporting game looks like right now for your agency. What are the metrics that are still important for you to report from the client side? What do you push as far as KPIs?
How do you. A great conversation with another guest about how there's this, you know, focus on revenue now as an SEO, but we only control aspect of that. So it's, it's like a goal, but we don't actually fully control all of the angles of conversion there. But if you're not connected to that end revenue, what are the metrics and measures that you use to justify your role in their marketing process? Us.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So I mean, I always tell my clients like the end goal is to get more conversions, but like, I have no control over what the price of their services are or, you know, what the. If they have a direct competitor who lives down the street, like, I don't control those things or even if they're terrible at selling, like, I have no control over that. So, yeah, I do focus on traffic and also making sure that it's quality traffic that, you know, people are staying on their site for, you know, a good amount of time, depending on the, on, you know, what the, what the website is, how much copy it has, how much content it has.
But if, you know, they're getting a lot of visitors from Google who are only staying on for like five seconds, you know, that's an indication that something isn't lining up. And we need to kind of like, you know, revisit their website and, you know, talk about the strategy again. So really looking at the traffic and then also making sure it is engaged traffic. And I know there's also been a loss of traffic with, you know, all the AI overviews, things that are going on. So also just looking in general to make sure that they are, you know, getting impressions, being seen by people.
So even if they're not getting quite as much traffic from Google, as they could have like two years ago, making sure that they haven't like lost rankings or, you know, there's no crazy issues that's like blocking Google from their site or something.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: The fundamentals, the amount of times that I've seeing sites blocked on robots txt is too damn high.
I mean, even a organization that was nationwide, they had links from NASA, the White House, and 99% of their entire site was no follow and no indexed because of Dev's misunderstanding of what that terminology meant.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I recently I recommended a website designer to a client and I was gonna, you know, help with the SEO side of things.
And I didn't know the website designer had published the new site. They went on vacation and they published it. The entire site is no index. So the client came back to me, he was like, hey, all of a sudden we're not getting any traffic from Google. And I was like, what?
So that. That happens a little too frequently.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Oy, oy.
Speaking of common pitfalls, what are some of the biggest traps to fall into in SEO in this day and age?
[00:23:45] Speaker B: I think one thing that I keep seeing with my clients is that they do want to focus on obviously getting traffic from Google and AI, but they are focusing their copy more on, you know, writing for the bots crawling their website rather than writing for the humans that are actually going to be hiring them and giving them money.
So I think it's like trying to find that balance of making sure your website can rank well and can be recommended by AI, but that you're not doing it and ignoring the side of your business that is actually growing your business and, you know, giving you money. And so I think it's kind of a tricky balance sometimes. But I'm trying to make sure my clients are focusing more on like, the human side than the bot side.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Bots don't have any cash to spend.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Sorry, folks,
[00:24:40] Speaker A: If I had a soapbox for you to stand on and sound off and give your hottest take on any topic whatsoever, where does your mind go? What's your hot take?
[00:24:53] Speaker B: I mean, I think part of the hot take is just focusing on humans. But for the Pinterest side, I would say more businesses should be on Pinterest than currently are because it can be a really good source of traffic. Because one thing I love about Pinterest is that the pins that you put on there, they can live for months to even years.
Unlike social media videos and photos, people stop seeing it after like a day, maybe two, unless you go viral and then maybe you've got Like a week.
But I've seen clients who have had pins on Pinterest from like 2009 that are still bringing traffic to their website.
So if you are, if you're already creating blog post content, if you have videos, like you should be on Pinterest pretty much.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: I'm curious about your on page optimization practices.
You know, as time progresses, you know, we kind of get stuck in our ways. I have my list in my head of what to do when it comes to, you know, somebody gives me a site, gives me a page and they say, go optimize it. You've got X hours.
What are your top five things that you're doing to that page, to that site? To quote unquote, SEO it?
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say a lot of times for my clients it's adding more website copy to what they already have.
I've had clients come to me and they have like two sentences on their homepage. I'm like, that's not going to cut it.
So a lot of times it's adding more copy.
A lot of times even if they have a lot of copy, it can also just be kind of sprucing things up for user experience. So I had a client recently who had tons of great copy on her homepage, but you looked at it and it's just like blocks of text. And she was in the home industry. So I'm like, you should have a lot more photos that are actually showing off your work. Breaking up this text, making it easier again for the humans who are going to be paying you to read.
So it can either be too much text or not enough and just kind of like trying to find the balance there, making sure keywords are incorporated.
One issue I have a lot of times with my clients is they come to me with multiple H1s on a page. So, you know, making sure their heading structure is cleaned up with that.
Because a lot of times they like how the H1 looks and don't understand that the H1 actually serves a purpose.
And yeah, just making sure if it's a location based business that their location is actually in the website copy and not just in the footer.
I see that probably most mostly with my location based based businesses that they only say the location in the footer and nowhere else on the website.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: I'm working with a local contractor and remodeler. I'm curious what your go to advice is for local SEO.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I think making sure you say your location, that's the number one issue I see.
And yeah, just making sure it's clear on at at least most of the pages. Especially if they want like their services page or their about page or something like that to to rank on Google, then they do need to make sure they have the location listed there.
That would be my number one. I mean obviously have Google business profile if they have a like physical location. Because that's really going to help like with reviews and you can, you know, add photos of the work and things like that there.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: Fantastic. Give a shout out again to your, your website and any particular clients or case studies that you're proud of and where people can find and connect with you if they have more questions.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yeah, so my website is juliarena consulting.com you can see some case studies and data that I have on my different services pages.
Yeah, probably one of the ones that I'm most proud of for Pinterest is that Olympic swimming company because it was such a specific niche that like, no pun intended, knocked it out of the water.
So you can see some of the data for that client on my Pinterest page. You can follow me on Instagram @juliarenne consulting or connect with me on LinkedIn @juliaboccase.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: And I'm guessing on Pinterest.
[00:29:16] Speaker B: Yes. Yep, you can follow me on Pinterest. Juliarene Consulting.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Thank you so much for your time.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me.
