Leslie Carruthers

Biography:
Leslie is the CEO of The Search Guru, a ontent marketing and SEO agency.

Through speaking and serving startups through Fortune 50 companies, she is recognized as an authoritative voice on content marketing, search engine optimization, conversion tracking analytics and conversion rate optimization.

She has received rave reviews for bringing energetic, inspiring, and practical insights to companies like Advance Auto Parts, Connection, a Fortune 50 Healthcare company, General Electric, Cleveland Clinic, BooksAMillion, Rakuten and others.

She was named as one the top women in SEO in 2012 from Level343, one of the Top 50 Content Marketing Influencers 2018 and 2019 at CMWorld and is a Techstars Anywhere 2020 Mentor.

Leslie Carruthers!

27:39 – How Did Leslie Start Her SEO Journey?

Before becoming a prominent figure in the SEO community, “The SEO Guru,” Leslie started with humble beginnings back in 2000. She joined conferences from Danny Sullivan & Heather Lloyd-Martin, joining events and more. Leslie was determined to know more about search and how she could use that gained knowledge in the future.

30:45 – When Did Search Guru Start?

Leslie mentioned that it was 2004 when The Search Guru was founded. During this time, she was just targeting small businesses, helping them grow, until she learned a lot and gained a lot of experience that eventually helped her expand her business.

35:00 – Two Kinds of Sweat <3

In the middle of Leslie and Dre’s discussion about how Leslie’s business started, she cracked up a meaningful joke. She talked about the ‘Two kinds’ of sweat, one is the sweat after working out, and the other one is the nervous sweat. The nervous sweat is what Leslie would describe her first days starting her business, but for her, it’s all about making a difference for people first before making it about yourself.

37:50 – Common Challenges from Clients and How to Deal with Them

As the show moved forward, a question was brought up for Leslie (coming from her audience) asking about the common challenges she faces from her clients and how she dealt with them.

43:30 How can CRO make you look younger!

“Conversion is money,” as mentioned by Leslie. “When you spend time on that, it’s the end goal.” For Leslie, Conversion Rate Optimization is the fountain of youth because it keeps all the engines going; it lets you stay in the game and move up in the game.

45:20 – Leslie’s take on AI-Generated Content

“AI is great, and we can use it for hands & feet.” For Leslie, using AI is definitely one of the advantages SEOs should consider. For her, it’s not about AI taking over our jobs but using them as a supplement to what we’re already good at.

49:19 – Ways to Get People to Talk About You

Leslie is a master of persuading her audience, and she’s done this successfully a couple of times throughout her whole career. In this section, she shares some of her best tips on gaining a better audience for yourself as an SEO.

54:00 – Leslie’s answer to one of the audiences’ questions: “If there is one answer to a question answered by 100s of sites, how do you distinguish yourself?”

Before ending the show, Leslie was asked one good question from the audience. For Leslie, it’s all about strategizing and gathering up things that you have that most of your competitors don’t have. Being smart is key in ranking.

New stories:

https://blog.google/web-creators

New open source robots.txt projects announced by Google. They created a testing tool that can validate whether a robots.txt parser follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol and an official Java port of the C++ robots.txt parser
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/09/new-open-source-robotstxt-projects.html

Shout out to Simon White for sharing the source of this piece of news Schema App Live: News, Multi-Type Entities. Schema to get rich snippets?

Interesting how news travels and gets reported.

In the latest Search of the Record podcast the Google team talk about Google’s Honest Results Policy. Don’t bother asking how to be number 1.https://search-off-the-record.libsyn.com/honestly-about-googles-honest-results-policy-and-more-0 For technical issues I have found the Google Webmasters office hours very helpful and their forums. You can build up your SEO reputation in there with badges given to you by helping others

There’s a bunch free communities to get some solid answers, like IMG InternetMarketing.gold and DMO digitalmarketers.org or even attend live SEO shows like SEO this Week, SEO Fight Club, Craig Campbell’s Q & A and you can ask questions on here on the SEO Video Show to my guest.

Speaking of communities. The latest SEO Mythbusting episode features Barry Shwartz and they discuss the relationship with Google and the SEO community. One nugget that came out of the conversation was on the topic of AMPhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwgnwtQcSWQ

Over at the Inlinks channel this past week Michael King drops a nugget on how you should be 301 redirecting your broken pages
https://youtu.be/tvdKisKYryQ?t=818

Kevin Indig interviews Christopher Penn on the TechBound channel and Chris talks about a CRO technique of using conversion attribution as way to prioritize pages to SEO increase conversions

Tweet of the week:
Need some numbers to support your #SEO strategy? Check out this guide to find up-to-date stats about: https://twitter.com/semrush/status/1307820839715340289?s=20

Google Ticker:
New Schema.org support for retailer shipping data https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/09/new-schemaorg-support-for-retailer.html
Starting 9/22, we support shippingDetails schema.org markup as an alternative way for retailers to be eligible for shipping details in Google Search results.

New open source robots.txt projects https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/09/new-open-source-robotstxt-projects.html

New Search Off the Record podcast episode posted: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4GT9r19lnxM0OuDiqxfJeg?si=WaGqnhDtRU6_85P6_5mk-Q

Google Web Creators Twitter handle just created https://blog.google/web-creators

Bonus backlinks:

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) – New Free SEO Tool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipTk-qGrNlc

Speaking of backlinks. Grow with Google channel has been releasing a bunch of tips to help small businesses. One of the videos show how you can get multiple backlinks right from your public facing GMB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgxGbEOEBzc