Terry Samuels 📚 Advanced Schema Markup for SEO

Terry is the Owner of Salterra Digital Web Services
 
He is the host of SEO Spring Training & owner of Roundtable SEO Mastermind Series.
 
He has spoken at conferences over the last four years, including SEO Spring Training, SEO Rockstars, SEO Mastery Summit, and Mastermind in Hell.
 
He has over 12 years of experience in digital marketing.
 
He is an authority in On-Page SEO, Siloing, And Advanced Schema Markup
 
Please welcome the return of Terry Samuels.

Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gItEVwNXVKA

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Transcript

Welcome back SEO fans! I'm pumped to share the key takeaways from my latest interview on the SEO Knowledge Bomb podcast with Terry Samuels.

Terry is the owner of Salterra Digital Web Services and has over 12 years of experience in digital marketing. He's an authority on on-page SEO, siloing, and advanced schema markup. I was eager to pick his brain.

One of the first things Terry talked about was how he actually got started in SEO. He was originally a software developer who lost his real estate business. So he started building websites for his church and some people around his church.

One of those websites was for a charity. The charity then asked Terry to look at some SEO work they were paying for since he built their site. This got Terry into investigating SEO, which was still a new and fairly unknown field at the time.

Terry shared how those early SEO tactics were all about just buying links, without much attention to quality. Then when Google rolled out one of its first big algorithm updates, the charity website he worked on got slammed and lost all its rankings.

So Terry had to learn how to get the site out of penalty and recover its rankings. This trial by fire in SEO recovery mode taught him more than just regular SEO work.

Even today, Terry prefers focusing on on-page optimization rather than link building. He'll fight for on-page and argues it can get you ranking eventually even without links. But links help accelerate it.

When it comes to his agency Salterra, Terry said they market primarily for web design. He finds it an easier sell than trying to convince someone who's been burned on SEO before.

For clients who come through the web design side, he chooses who to talk to about SEO services after already building their site. Terry niches down his SEO clients to things like medical spas and home services.

He stays away from lawyers, especially personal injury lawyers. Terry won't optimize legal services that don't bring in much money, like dog bites. Instead he wants profitable focuses like construction accidents.

Something interesting Terry talked about was white label SEO services. This is where an agency hires him to do SEO that they market to their own clients.

Terry said most people don't charge enough for white label SEO. He has a minimum around $2000/month, to cover the costs of doing quality SEO with a team. At $600-$800/month, you'll just lose money.

For white label clients, Terry provides reporting systems the agency can show their clients. He also trains the agency on talking to clients and upselling services like content each month.

Okay, now let's get into some of Terry's SEO expertise and knowledge bombs!

The first big takeaway is how powerful schema markup can be. Terry shared an example of ranking a whole website with only schema, including service pages and location pages.

The key is that schema acts as a second website almost. You can have thousands of words of content just in schema. Terry stacks different schema, like site-wide, service, and local business.

He also silos within the schema, interlinking related pages. The schema content doesn't duplicate the page content. Instead it enhances the page by bringing in related information.

Terry recommends focusing on schema like sameAs and mentions. This allows you to aggregate all your citations, brand associations and offline authority building.

You can also use schema for misspellings and alternate phrases. Terry said schema is especially useful for ecommerce sites to optimize for all their products.

For anyone wanting to tap into schema's power, Terry advised analyzing sites like his Salterra site. His templates are complex and require research, so they aren't just sold. But you can reverse engineer them.

Next, let's talk about siloing. Terry gave the simple but brilliant advice to think about siloing as directing users through a process.

For example, keep website visitors focused only on web design services. Terry uses different navigation menus on his homepage tailored to each service. So clicking 'Web Design' changes the navbar to just website-related pages.

Siloing also helps search bots crawl efficiently. Terry keeps services and locations siloed in both content and schema. He'll only cross-reference services briefly on blog posts, not main pages.

The last key takeaway was Terry's advice for learning SEO. He said to focus on testing and building your own sites to rank them. Stay away from SEO groups and instead, learn from proven experts through content, events and networking.

Implement what you learn, even if just a small test. And focus on ranking factors like on-page, schema and siloing. Avoid trying to take short cuts. Put in the work and time to build authentic SEO authority.

Well that wraps up the key SEO knowledge bombs from Terry Samuels! Let me know what you thought were the biggest takeaways. Until next time, keep ranking my SEO comrades!