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The one podcast you need as a C-level Marketer, Director or Entrepreneur looking to rock your Business Growth. The Marketing Innovation Show is the official Podcast for our Global Digital Marketing Agency "Marketiu". With each episode, we bring you top performers in Marketing, Serial Entrepreneurs and renowned Digital Growth hackers. discussing top-edge Marketing Trends & Tactics, to help you skyrocket your success online. Topics will include Social Media Marketing, Strategy & Ads, Marketing Strategy, Performance Marketing & Google Ads Trends, Growth Hacking, Ecommerce, B2B Inbound Marketing & Lead Generation as well as Email Marketing & Automation. Tune in, and if you'd like us to cover specific subjects, let us know - we'll do it!
Episodes
Thursday Jan 21, 2021
SEO Trends & Changes for 2021 [with John Vuong]
Thursday Jan 21, 2021
Thursday Jan 21, 2021
In today’s podcast episode, we have invited John Vuong, who is the CEO of the Canada based SEO agency called Local SEO search. The subject for this episode is SEO changes, hacks and trends for 2021, looking back at what has changed in 2020, and what marketers should pay attention to.
John Vuong is a seasoned sales professional and Internet marketer with an exceptional track record helping companies grow their clientele and profits. Through 15 years of experience working with CEOs, business owners, and marketing leaders at some of Canada’s most successful corporations, John developed a deep understanding of local marketing dynamics and consumer behaviour. John’s entrepreneurial spirit and experience working with more than 5,000 local business owners inspired him to start his own company, Local SEO Search, in 2013.
Local SEO Search is a full-service search engine optimization (SEO) company. Founder John Vuong started in SEO near the beginning. Back in 2010, he was working with Yellow Pages and the company was offering SEO strategy.
Connect with John:
Website: https://www.localseosearch.ca/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/localseosearch
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/localseosearch/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnqrrXnknCW5nii5y4qatzg/featured
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LocalSEO_Search
John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-vuong-205b2917/
John on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/john.vuong.108
Connect with Andrei:
Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro
Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/
Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu
Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency
Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/
Email at hello@marketiu.ro
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Episode Transcript:
Andrei Tiu
Hello, everybody! This is Andrei and you're on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is John Vuong, who is the CEO of the Canada based SEO agency called Local SEO search and today we'll have an in-depth discussion on SEO changes and hacks for 2021, as well as what has changed in 2020, that us, marketers, should pay attention to. So John is a great pleasure and excitement to have you here on the show. How are you? How's the morning going for you?
John Vuong
I'm doing great, Andrei! Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be on the show today.
Andrei Tiu
Excited as well. So let's kick it. I think SEO is a hot topic. We are at the beginning of the year, so many people are looking forward to how they can best improve their marketing tactics, stack strategy, so let's give people what they want. First of all, I think let's dive a bit into your background. Tell us a bit about you, a bit about your experience about the agency so that we get to know you a bit better as a person. Yeah, definitely. So I started this agency called Local SEO search based in Toronto, Canada seven years ago. So 2013. Prior to that, I studied my studies in business finance. And I worked in advertising sales for 10 years, traditional advertising performance-based affiliate online advertising, to then directory advertising and I was at Yellow Pages for 10 years, where I found my sweet spot, where I really enjoy dealing with the small medium-sized business owners, community leaders, people that resonate with the average person, versus when I was in the affiliate online world. Yes, big fortune 500 companies, SaaS companies, huge companies. All they cared about was CPS, cost per acquisition, didn't really care about the realness of relationships. Fast forward now, I do only with small, medium-sized family-run kind of businesses, dentists, Cairo, physio, massage therapists, restaurants, etc. And then a lot of trades and 20% is more national, international, B2B driven, but mainly service as opposed to product type clients. So that's why I've done and we're a full-service boutique SEO agency, we only do SEO, we don't do any paid ads. We understand and, learn a lot about email marketing funnels journey behaviour ads. In terms of advertising, that's my passion. But we really, as an agency, just focus on search engine optimisation.
Andrei Tiu
Mm-hmm. Super cool. It's very good that we have a background of your clients now, because I'm sure that there are a lot of people here on the show that can relate to this. So I think it's gonna be very insightful for them, as well. But also, for you guys, working in bigger companies. I think we're gonna keep this very relevant, because we'll also discuss not only local SEO but also SEO in general, on-site and off-site. So just to get into the flesh, tell us how you feel this year was for SEO in general? How does Google behave? Was Google good?
John Vuong
Well, as a SEOer, we're always at the pulse, right? We know what's going on and we've always been doing everything that they tell us to do. As a white hat agency, you do best practice, you understand the foundations, you do make sure that it's all about the users and focus on delivering great content, great user experience, things that it's logical, because if you don't go on Google and you have a bad user experience, What don't you like, right? So think as a customer, and what I really focus on, and what we've seen at our agency is: Yes, there's a lot of pivots and changes in terms of keywords, trends, volume, but as a business owner, we have to be nimble, we have to pivot quickly. People that are stagnant, especially in the SEO world, like big fortune 500, bigger, larger companies that have in-house teams, it takes some time to deploy changes. But if you're small and nimble as a boutique agency, we can actually stop something and transition and pivot fairly quickly within days or weeks, as opposed to months or a couple of months of planning, strategy, implementation case study, AV testing, changing the server over to a different platform. There's a lot more at play when you're moving databases and moving much search volume as opposed to smaller search volume.
Andrei Tiu
Mm-hmm. Cool. So let's discuss a bit about the best practices. Now, I think we can also maybe have a dialogue here because I'm curious to hear your thoughts in terms of your geography and where you operate mostly. And then also, maybe we can compare these with some of the data that we have from Europe and the UK and see how maybe they compare or some differences that we have discovered working with our clients and then see if there's anything that we can generalise, that applies maybe to everybody that people can take away from the show, and then look at their businesses. So let's take on-site SEO, and look at some of the best practices there. Did you find anything particularly changed this year?
John Vuong
It's always the same right? The title tag, description has to be engaging and you have to really focus on users. Don't clickbait it. People overcomplicate things in the marketing world. And I don't know what other agencies are doing, but because I only focus on SEO, a lot of people moved away from different forms of advertising. Yes, a lot of people jumped into Facebook, but when people aren't spending, what are they selling them? If it's a product, sure. Doing influencer marketing, you do different offers, then you drip them with an email sequence. But as a service base, and that's primarily our type of client. We saw them close for a couple of months here in Canada, we had shutdowns. They didn't have any business. But they stayed with us, because they understood the importance of building authority, building expertise, understanding that you keep producing good high-quality content, positioning yourself as a long term, stable business, because eventually things will open up again. People who do SEO are in it for the long term, they're not in it for testing the market, which is a little bit different. So you have to figure out what you're at, what kind of industry and business you're offering, what is your strategy long term, as well. So I always tell people to get into SEO as soon as possible. If you haven't, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. Because when done, right, it's the greatest lead source out there. Great quality, inbound leads of your ideal type of client. So understanding the whole perspective and SEO campaign, because it's not as simple as people think backlinks content, on-page, off-page, boom, boom, boom, reputation, there's so many other things that you have to understand, as a marketer, you get it: user behaviour. So you have to tie in user behaviour with SEO strategy, and understanding who your ideal customer is, and speak to them, resonate with them, provide them quality content, that will have multiple touchpoints, longer sequences, longer user behaviour, but really solidify why they should choose you.
Andrei Tiu
And looking at this, because I think it's a good moment to discuss these scenes, we have a year ahead of us and I think it's a good timeframe for you somebody that never ran a proper SEO campaign or looked properly at SEO before, I think this year is a good initial time frame to look at. What would you say are some good things that people could look at when auditing whether they are in a good spot, or not to start with? You mentioned your user experience and the other things that go beyond internal linking and content on-site, and content off-site and backlinks.
Andrei Tiu
Yeah, a lot of people are very caught up with metrics, a lot of people are looking at analytics, they're looking at timespan bounce rate, user engagement, how many organic traffic, direct flow organic. There's a lot of metrics. And you can track a lot of this, call rail, you track everything. But ultimately, it's your ideal customers, are they transacting, what is the actual revenue? Like it makes sense if it's a product play, because you can actually determine the sales, the volume, the price you pay for it, and then give you a good ROI. But when it comes to service, it's all about the lifetime value, the type of client that comes in. Is it a good fit for the mole of the business? Is he someone I want to serve? Am I attracting it with the type of advertising that is playing, right? So I do things a little bit different in our agency, which is: we personalise, we care and we want to dissect that campaign to see if it's effective. Not only do we want to ask them how much revenue sales have, but it's all about getting good clients. Are you happy with the results? Because the data can show 50-100% organic traffic increase, numbers look great, but why are they not happy? Because the numbers aren't translating to real customers that are your ideal customers. It could be the flaky type of people that you're targeting to your site that doesn't transact
Andrei Tiu
Either that, or maybe the keyword targeting is not good to start with, and you get people on your website that are coming for the wrong type of keywords that drive that traffic organically. I'm curious, have you not discovered this often, when you were maybe onboarding new clients that were getting some traffic organically, and then you discovered that maybe it's only the brand name that is driving traffic, and maybe some of the other keywords, but not necessarily the ones with the high purchase intent? I mean, I'm curious for this discussion that we have, I also want to help people tuning in to think about sound good things that they could apply to their businesses.
John Vuong
Keyword research is very important. Onboarding of keyword research, understanding the customer is by far the most important thing. And if you don't do it properly, everything is going to be not properly implemented. So you really have to get to the root of understanding that journey, understand who their ideal customer is, what their nuances are, what is their behaviour? What is the search intent: navigational or informational? What does the journey look like? How long do they stay to then transact? What kind of client are they? Does it take longer for them to actually take that initiative, to then make that phone call or transact with you? There's a lot more to it than just keyword research content and putting links together. Like that, in-depth discussion, when you're onboarding there should be five pages of exact questions of that personality trait, knowing the persona, avatar, understanding and mapping out, but you have to know. These business owners that are trying to do SEO, they don't really have that information. So you gotta dig it from them. Because they probably never did it before. They've never done marketing.
Andrei Tiu
You are talking about the small, local businesses, right?
John Vuong
Yeah. So if you have a marketing company, again, what worked and what didn't? You have to really have a grasp of what your competitors are doing, understand where you are playing the field of expertise, and where you want to position as a brand, and then go after and test it. Always testing and pivoting. And that's the biggest thing with SEO, you gotta be nimble, right? It's not like this one strategy is gonna work for every single company. Because there's so much competition for every single industry. Every business has 10-15-20 other competitors competing with you. What are they doing well, what aren't you doing? Well look at the gaps, look at opportunities, just the strengths that you portray, and push it out there. And this is marketing and marketing is a big umbrella of it all.
Andrei Tiu
What do you see SERP features coming into play? Because they are an element of organic ranking and they somehow relate in a way to offsite SEO. But when looking at the recipe for increasing the chances of success of an SEO campaign, where do you see these things coming into place?
John Vuong
Yeah, snippets, knowledge panel, discovery, there's a lot of search features out there. Understand the best practices, laying it out so that it's foundationally done properly. The challenge with my type of client is small, medium-sized businesses unless you got a lot of budget on PR, where they get amplified for that specific blog or whatever page that they're trying to promote, they're not gonna get that traction, which gets a lot of reviews or a lot of shares and comments. So I would say do best practice for everything. Because you never know. If it gets picked up by mainstream media that gets amplified. When you are that featured snippet, yes, you're gonna get a lot more exposure, but the quality is what's in it. It's usually an informational base. It's not a transactional base. That is a featured snippet. It's more like people want to drill deep with, they have a question. They Google Home it. They ask that question, they dig deeper. So it's good that your reference here, you might get a lot of traffic, but is it transactional traffic? Is it actually generating you business?
Andrei Tiu
Cool stuff. Okay. So let's look at off-site, then. Looking at the 2021 marketing strategy. First of, all of us look back to the best practices and make sure that we implement not only on one specific niche, such as producing content for our blog, but rather have a look again at our customer avatar, and then make sure that we produce it and we target the right types of keywords for the content strategy and the best practices in order to increase the chances of the content that sits on our platforms to rank a bit higher or to maybe make it in specific places in the world where you can drive traffic. And this can be a good starting point to then consolidate an SEO campaign, and to track it over, let's say, 6 - 12 months. What about off-site Seo? Depending on who you're talking, there are different opinions based on the off-site SEO done with more popular websites. Generally, 98% of the results that we saw were very good results coming from publishing on high reputation websites and making sure that you have a good amount of backlinks coming from trustworthy sources in the right industries to your website. We generally saw really good results this year, which was a continuation from 2019. So not much change in terms of this. What are your views? Is PR and backlink generators working as it used to be? And also, after we answer this question, but just because I have it in my head and I don't want to forget it. How do you then apply this best to local SEO? I would like to get your thoughts on this.
John Vuong
Yeah, so backlinks, PR strategy, guest posts, skyscrapers. There's so many different types, there's probably 100 different backlink type strategies out there. My thoughts on that is yes, you got to position yourself as a thought leader, you need to be exposed in more influential sites that are within your industry within your niche within your region that will amplify you to become that thought leader. And that's the best part of backlinks: do trust flow organic traffic, look at the metrics, that's where the tools and software actually help you, assist you. But the challenge is, if you're doing it in house or you don't have a team, it's very difficult to do and implement things. What's the scale? What's the budget? And what's the performance metric, because most of these sites will require not just good content pieces that resonate with audience members, but you're pitching them. So what's in it for them, you need to really understand the whole sequence and pitch relationship building. It still applies for local as well, where links are a hugely pivotal role. Also city pages, service pages, understanding semantic keywords, keyword variation, long-tail keywords, all that matters, right? It's pretty straightforward if you're in this industry. But if you're not, as a business owner, it's very difficult to do all this and rank well. That's why you hire people to do it well for you. Because it's overwhelming, especially because as a business owner, you have so many other things you have to worry about. On top of that, there's this pandemic. And you don't even know if people are even shopping for your product or service, because they're shut down, especially if you're a restaurant where you're in the travel hospitality industry. So you need to figure out where are the opportunities, where are the gaps keyword research, understanding how to position yourself so that when things open up again, and get back to normality, at least you're there in position well. So you have to continue investing in long term strategies. Paid strategies work if you're looking to acquire quick wins sales. But long term SEO is a lot of work: creating content pitching, getting backlinks, it's not easy. But that's the whole purpose, right? If business was easy, everyone would be doing it. If SEO was easy, everyone would be doing it. But it's not.
Andrei Tiu
No, I totally agree. You need a team to be able to implement SEO. You can't even say that if you are a small company, it's easier, because it's not. It's the same competition for the same keywords and you might be fighting against competitors that are 100 times bigger than you, if you are a one-man band. Even if he's just local. And also, you mentioned something before, that is also something that I'm empathising with a lot. And is: start to look at SEO as soon as possible, because you will need to at some point in time, and also, this is something that we always say to everybody that we speak to, in general: this is a part of the marketing mix, whether you want to consider it at this point or not. So you will want to do it later on, at least, make sure you implement best practices right now, even if you don't have full resources, and maybe 10 K to invest in SEO per month, every month. But just make sure to stick to the best practices so you can build as much as possible for when you will be ready to scale everything up and really be aggressive with it. Because you can save a lot of money. We have clients that save maybe double the paid ads within six months budget because of a good SEO strategy. This is why I'm curious to also get your thoughts on specific things, because I think that many questions are on many people's minds and I think that us, having this conversation really upfront is going to be useful for them when they are looking at their marketing budgets, marketing, planning, content planning, because content marketing is on everybody's minds now. And it's gonna stay here. So it's really good to look at it. Let's take a scenario. We have an accounting firm in Hammersmith, in London. How could they look at SEO and then be certain that they are combining the local SEO tactics and local SEO building for ranking well with other types of general SEO? Is there a recipe that you usually advise clients to apply?
John Vuong
Yeah, it's a good question. Because not only is it boutique, which is all situational, we need to benchmark it, figure out where the gaps are, opportunities and figure out what the competitors are. Because there's no point, generalising it. Everyone is unique in their own situation. They might be hyper-competitive in the region, or they want to dominate for the Bachelor top in London, which is a huge marketplace. But in Google SERP does that niche or category display a radius of five miles, or is it 25 miles as well? So it all depends and there's too many variables. But best practices create a good website, create good content, resonate, understand your community, locality, understand that schema, set everything up so that it's properly deployed, speak to the persona avatar as your ideal customer, start creating good asset pieces from social to bookmarking account profile counts, start populating it. Get a good reputation out there. Start getting third party reviews, start implementing on your own site. All these are best practices, but business owners have no idea what I'm talking about. The challenge is: how do you educate them to then get them to take action? Because they're so busy running a business, that you want to do a lot, but you need them to understand the importance of them, just taking care of their clients and game reviews. A lot of people don't even do that. So reputation is a huge signal today. Because if you go to Google, that map is always there on the first page. And right now, it's a three-pack. I don't know what's gonna happen next year, year after because Google is always changing the layout. And for me, it's always focused on what is out there today. And do best practice and yes, they're gonna pivot, they're always going to be added somewhere. Either play to pay or you want to earn it yourself. Organic is earning yourself without paying, you're gonna get a lot more quality clients because you and me, we might not even be clicking on ads, most of the time. 70 80% of the users, myself included, click below the ads knowing that that business owner paid for the ad. So if I'm the average customer, I want to be found on the map and below, because that's earned. And understanding that and business owners just want to be on the first page of Google, they don't understand how it works. They don't care. So the whole challenge is education.
Andrei Tiu
Super. And I'm thinking because there's another case that I'm sure you encountered a lot. Mainly in the startup world, or when the business is small, and they try to get the most off their back, and maybe the first website that they have put up, I'm sure that this happens a lot for you as well, when you work with local businesses, many of them would many times go for the cheapest option, or one of the cheapest options in terms of website providers, and they end up having maybe like a nice looking website, but probably not SEO optimised at all. What would be your favourite tool that you'd recommend people tuning into you to audit where they are from an SEO perspective?
John Vuong
So not just an audit, but just building a website, there's a lot of options. You can go with Shopify Squarespace, then you can go WordPress, Joomla, you can custom. So depending on if you have a budget, do it properly, own the asset. Make sure you set it up properly so you have full ownership. When you're renting space, like on a Wix or Squarespace or Shopify site, you don't have full back end access to do the things that a full SEO agency can actually implement and do. So that's the first thing. If you're serious, do it properly and be serious. In terms of audit tools, there's sem rush, there is Ahrefs, there's Moz, there are so many different tools out there for SEO purposes, but each of them will have it for different purposes. Once for links, once for on-page, if you want to scrape for title meta tags there are other tools. The only problem is: which tool would be beneficial for you and how do you utilise it and what are you going to do once you figure out what's wrong with the issue? Do you have a team to implement the changes? Do you understand what these tools actually mean and how do you deploy it across the board? Because a lot of SEO companies might show you the tool, but what's gonna happen? Are you now accountable and responsible to make and implement the changes? If so, do you have people that actually can do it? Do they even know what to do? And then it's the team versus an agency which includes a team of people that do content, SEO strategy, link building, development, graphic design. Everything is for SEO, which is strategy consultants, versus someone that is trying to do all those things very well. And it's very hard to do that. So how can you compete with someone or an agency that does everything really well?
Andrei Tiu
For sure. But the reason why I was asking you is that, since the pandemic is becoming even harder in medium-sized companies or larger corporations when they need to approve budgets for specific things or initiatives, including SEO in this case, they need to be able to justify the claim and to showcase the benefit. I know that many conversations that had lately revolved around this challenge, so that's why I want us to be able to help people listening to maybe get a better pitch, if they feel this is what they would need. Because you're right, you can't do everything right. And mainly, if you manage five channels and maybe a team, is going to become impossible. If you don't have Google Search Console set up, then maybe this is a good thing for you. Initially, in order to see what keywords drive traffic to you, what pages get traffic organically and maybe if you have any issues in signals in Google. And then, personally, I like h refs a lot, but it's pretty complex and it's gonna be hard to learn it quickly. But you have a $7 trial that you can try for seven days. So that's one good tool. Also the Neil Patel too, which is pretty okay and it's free, or it has a free trial. So if you guys want to look at that in terms of seeing what the backlinks are to your site and things like this, you can compare the data from Google Search Console and one of these tools. And I think, if you have these two points of reference, you might be able to get an overview of where organic traffic is coming through, if you don't already, and then to identify what could happen if you were to pursue an SEO strategy for the next year. Also, you can use the Google Keyword Planner, if you are curious about search volumes and things like this, Google Trends is also good, because you can see the trends in searches for specific keywords that are relevant to you. And then also, as John, you were saying about combining more broad keywords, maybe or key phrases with key phrases, that can indicate better or higher purchase intent.
John Vuong
Yeah, I think the biggest challenge for marketing teams that are representing a fairly large brand is: all the time, you have to pitch your case, right? What's the benefit, versus doing what we're doing now? What are the pros and cons? What are the case studies? What have other people done? Even if it's a big ITM of structure, you need a case. And the reason I focus on small, medium-sized businesses is decisions are made really quickly. When it comes to budgeting, it takes time to implement, to pitch to see if it's approved, there's a lot of middle people, a lot of things never get done in a timely manner. And as an SEO agency, we always focus on being proactive, because by the time that pitch is done, 3-6 months down the line, things have changed. The whole proposal piece is different, because now Google changed their angle, right? There are keywords that are different, there are competitors that have already overtaken you that you don't even think that we're going to and they've invested heavily. So with SEO, I feel it has to be a part of the marketing mix. You need to make it a vital part of every marketing campaign. Because if you don't, you're going to be left behind, and it's going to take you longer, and it will be more expensive to start later.
Andrei Tiu
Mm-hmm. For sure. And also being consistent is key. Once you started, I think you guys should really stick with it, even if there's one month that you feel is not going particularly well or you feel 3 months is a lot for you to have the patience to see some results, I think that you should really be consistent and as John was saying, build everything that you need around your brand, from an SEO point of view all the time. Because when you're tracking competitors, even if you have a good content strategy, and maybe two weeks, for any reasons, you are not posting those new articles, or you are not creating those backlinks or certain activities that are best practice, and you need to do in order to stay competitive, mainly, if you are competing against very popular keywords, then this can have a very big impact on your performance and as John, you were saying, there's probably always going to be bigger competitors that are fighting with you or against you for those keywords. So it's gonna be easy for them to take you over. So this is a long term thing, you should start as soon as possible and stick to the best practices and don't interrupt it as much as possible. Because a paid campaign you can implement now and you can run for three weeks, and then you can stop it for a week and restart again. And you might be losing a bit of that algorithm optimization, but then you can get it back. Well as with SEO, you probably have to work a bit harder in order to get back to where you were at if you stop it. John, what are your thoughts for 2021? Any insights that you found and think would be good to bring forward?
John Vuong
Just be careful. Understand where all your asset pieces are. Understanding your biggest asset, your website, your community, and don't play in the community of other channels like Facebook. You don't know what's going to happen. If you have a Facebook group, be careful. Anything that's not your own database, be careful. I always say: own your tribe, own your community, get those email lists, get those contact information, so that you can then market to them or inform them, educate them, because it's your database. As opposed to SEO driven. Yeah, continue to produce good quality content in depth. Understand your avatar, understand your client. SEO will not change if you're doing things right for 10 years. So I forecast to keep doing the right thing, there's always gonna be people trying to hack the system, thinking they can get things done in a month or two months, and slowly and steadily wins the race. Everything is earned. Yes, you might suddenly get someone that buys 1000 backlinks on Fiverr. They're gonna get hit. Don't worry about what other people are doing. If they're not real competitors. Look at what your true competitors are doing and if you're not following the footsteps, you should. Mimic exactly what people that are ahead of you are doing. And once you're at the same level, do a little bit different, unique. But until you're there, that someone you should replicate, follow it. It's not rocket science. For me, it's just learning, understanding. There's a lot to be learned. I didn't know much when I first started. Now I know a lot more and I'm comfortable speaking it, because now I speak in front of people. Because I know what it takes, I know what happens, how it's happened, I have a team that's educated me every single front with hundreds of campaigns that we've worked on. So we actually have proof of what works and what doesn't. So again, it's different when you're working in house versus a company that's seen with so many other best-case scenarios, as well. So look at what you're planning on doing for next year or this year. Work with someone that you can trust that's in it to help you assist in whatever direction that you want to go with. Because there's a lot of good agencies out there.
Andrei Tiu
Super. Would you have any information hub that you'd say people should be looking for news or for advice?
John Vuong
Yeah, I still rely on blogs Moz, to Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Lan, h refs is great. SEM rush has its own. I mean, there's tonnes of information on SEO, I go to a lot of conferences. So now it's more about the relationships right. I'm part of some private slack groups as well. It's all about knowing what's out there. Building your own community of people that you can trust, they're giving real information. And once you are comfortable with whatever you're doing, it's okay, because you're never going to be learning everything and it's okay. Because it's impossible to know everything. Just know what you can, control and do the best you can.
Andrei Tiu
Super. Sounds good. So John, if people want to reach out to you directly, or if they want to connect with you guys, what are the best platforms? Where can they message you?
John Vuong
Yeah. You can check out www.localseosearch.ca. We're based in Toronto, Canada, but we service clients across North America, Europe, as well as Australia. If you want to connect with me on a more personal level, you can check me on LinkedIn, you can find me on the team page of the company site and just find my name. We also have social channels. I don't know what they are. I have a team that manages all the social and for me, that's not our biggest driver of leads. I mean, just do good work. We got a few referrals and word of mouth and we enjoy and we're passionate about helping good businesses become great businesses.
Andrei Tiu
Love it. Okay, so we'll have the links in the description below as well guys, check them out there. And John, until next time, it was a pleasure to meet and to discuss. Wishing you all the very best for this year and really keen to stay in touch. Guys, as always, if you feel that you'd like us to organise a second episode together where we would dive deeper into a certain area that you felt was particularly interesting, let us know. Either join me, ping us on our team email we'll try to make that happen and until next time, John, thanks so much again, have an awesome year, rock it, and look forward to speaking soon.
John Vuong
Thank you.
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