Brad Post - Welcome to Create the Movement Podcast My name is Brad Post and I’m here with Liz Montgomery.

Liz Montgomery - Hello

BP - Liz, how are you doing?

LM - I’m excellent.

BP - Today, it’s kind of early in our podcasting but we are going to be talking about websites. For instance why would a small business or a law firm need a website?

LM - Why would they need a website, Brad? That is a good question. Well, first of all nowadays, and maybe this wasn’t true five to ten years ago before we had smart phones and ipads so many electronics devices available to access information. But, now when you want to find a new service or a new product or if someone needs an attorney the first thing they are going to do is pick up their phone or go to their computer and google, find the best person, right. So this is why SEO is so important on a site. But a small business needs a website because they need to be found. If someone says I’m opening a bakery downtown how is anyone going to know about it except for the people who live on that street. It’s important to have a presence online.

BP- I kind of feel too that traditional advertising, which is expensive, like radio ads, billboards, television can be expensive. Websites can be less expensive than traditional marketing.

LM - That is true. If you are on a budget as a new business starting out it could be a more cost effective way to get your name out there. If you do it right. And you can do it right for not a billion dollars. Then you can create a lot of engagement online and that will attract people to your business and will put the word out about you.

BP- You mentioned the SEO. It is important. Would you say an optimized website is important?

You kind of touched on when you google something.

LM - What is an optimized website, some would ask. What is SEO and what does that mean. So, search engine optimization is what SEO stands for. The reason it is important that your website is optimized is because you want to show up in search engine results. What you have are hundreds of thousands of other businesses competing for those keywords. And depending on what market you’re in or maybe what city you are in, you will have different levels of competition for different keywords.

BP- Keywords are what people are searching for, right?

LM- Exactly, so if I just got into a car accident and i don’t know, do I need an attorney? I might google “car accident attorney Tulsa” or where ever I am. So you will start going down the list and the first folks on that page that showed up on your search list. Also, it’s really cool that google tells you the way to optimize you website so you show up in their search results. It’s almost like having a healthy website that google responds well too.

BP - Google gives you certain guidelines such as meta-descriptions and title tags, right? And how you should follow their rules in order to show up well.

LM- It is definitely down the  rabbit hole of information because it is very complex and there are a lot of terms that could get confusing. Even saying that meta-description and title tags for someone that doesn’t know anything about the website industry could be easily confused by that. Having somebody who knows all those standards and is familiar with those best practices from google and is setting up your website according to that, it’s like night and day in terms of how you are going to show up in search engine results.

BP- It’s not just about having an amazingly pretty website, you also have to make sure it is optimized.

LM- Right, you need both things. Because we also come across websites that are not beautiful but they are really well optimized and the problem with that is that they may show up really well in search engine results and then you go to the website and then you leave it really quickly. Like, this isn’t giving me the information that I need or it’s just not nice to look at. Or that it doesn’t look updated so it doesn’t look ...