SEO Tools & Mindset Tips for Entrepreneurs w/ Matt Diamante
Which SEO Tools do you really need, how to talk yourself down from self doubt, & what else you need to know for 2025!
There are loads of SEO tools out on the interwebs. But which ones does a small business owner really need to invest in?
And what advice can the experts share with you when it comes to those mentally challenging days—in business and with SEO? (Spoiler: plenty!)
It’s been a year since Matt Diamante was on the podcast! To say we’re pumped would be a gross understatement.
Tune in for a conversation about what your SEO strategy requires in 2025, mindset tips for entrepreneurs, & the best SEO tools for business owners!
(Note: you’re definitely gonna need your notepad or Notes App for this one.)
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
Affordable SEO tools Matt created for business owners
Why it’s beneficial to stalk your competitors
How social media supports website SEO
How to maximize branded searches for your business
One thing to do right now to your Google Business Profile
What to do in 2025 to compete with spammy websites
Pro tips for handling those mentally tough days
The folder ALL business owners need to create ASAP
How to spot legit SEO experts from shady ones
If it’s possible for SEO to not work for a business
How to adjust your SEO strategy based on the data
…and which metrics to track each month
Ways to stay creative with content creation
Best practices for SEO blog content creation
…if business owners actually need a blog for their business
The very first step to take to start doing SEO for your website
Meet: Matt Diamante
Matt Diamante is the founder of HeyTony, a digital marketing agency helping entrepreneurs and small businesses grow through SEO, social media, and paid ads. With over 260,000 followers on Instagram, Matt has built a reputation for making SEO simple, actionable, and accessible to business owners who want to take control of their online presence. His expertise in digital marketing has helped thousands of businesses get found on Google and turn traffic into revenue.
Beyond marketing, Matt is an animal lover with two dogs and two cats, and when he’s not helping businesses grow, he’s probably hanging out with them. Today, he’s here to share his insights on what it really takes to rank online, grow an engaged audience, and leverage free organic traffic to build a thriving business.
Mentioned Resources:
SEO Tools:
Watchdog (for Competitor Research)
Related Episodes:
The Best Way to Learn SEO w/ Matt Diamante
Connect w/ Matt:
Connect w/ Brittany:
This episode of The Basic B podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ Leah Bryant Co.! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of The Basic B podcast follows
Welcome back to The Basic B podcast. I'm so happy you're here and I'm thrilled to bring back Matt Diamante, also known as hey Tony. If that's confusing, go back and listen to the last episode. We're going to be talking all about SEO things. Neither one of us really have a clue where this is going to go, but I love having Matt on. You all really loved the last episode, so we brought him back. Before I let him talk though, here's a quick intro for you. Matt Diamante is the founder of hey Tony, a digital marketing agency helping entrepreneurs and small businesses grow through SEO, social media, and paid ads. With over 260,000 followers on Instagram, Matt has built a reputation for making SEO simple, actionable, and accessible to business owners who want to take control of their online presence. We love that his expertise in digital marketing has helped thousands of businesses get found on Google and turn traffic into revenue. Beyond marketing, Matt is an animal lover with two dogs and two cats. And when he's not helping businesses grow, he's probably hanging out with them. Today, he's here to share his insights on what it really takes to rank online, grow an engaged audience, and leverage free organic traffic to build a thriving business. I love that bio. Hello, friend.
Matt Diamante: Yeah, that's pretty great.
Brittany Herzberg: I love having guests on because I get to read the bios and everyone's like, man, I'm pretty awesome. Yeah, we are. So there's your hype up track for every single morning.
Matt Diamante: You could just call me in the morning every day and just read that to me and I'll be like, okay, you know, today's gonna be a good day.
Brittany Herzberg: If I see the download numbers for this episode go up, I'll know why.
Matt Diamante: Yeah, exactly.
Brittany Herzberg: Well, it's so great to have you back on. Thanks for all the expertise you shared last time. I'll make sure that that last episode is linked as well. But what have you been up to in the I don't know, year ish since we talked last.
Matt Diamante: Oh my God, so much stuff. I don't even know where to begin. The newest thing that has happened is I just moved. So we're dealing with all the, you know, move in, unpacking, building the IKEA stuff, you know, moving stuff around, trying to figure all that stuff out while still running an agency full time and, you know, making content and all that kind of stuff. So I think since we chatted, I've developed two SEO tools. One's an audit tool that just does a technical SEO audit of your website. And the other one is called Watchdog, which allows you to put in competitor sites like nobody else has a tool like this. And I like double checked with a lawyer, I'm like, can we do this? Is this good? Like, so basically what it does, you put in your competitor's website and then it basically tracks the website week over week to see if they've made any changes on their website. So you can see if they're doing any kind of SEO. Like, exactly what they're doing as well. Like their title tag was this, now it's this. Or they updated their content or they're linking to other pages, whatever it might be. So that's really cool. It's really interesting. I love that tool. And I made them both like 10 bucks a month because small businesses don't have a lot of money. And I am here to help small businesses as much as possible. And you know, I could probably charge 50 to 100 bucks a month for these. But for what? Let's help as many people as we possibly can, right?
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. No, this is part of why I enjoy having you on. Because we definitely share that vision of making this accessible and not having it break anyone's bank just to tap into SEO and organic marketing a hundred percent. These tools were so cool because I'm on your email list and I'm like, what did he make now? What is this one? I don't think I ever did go and play around too much with Watchdog, but I remember getting that email and going, oh my gosh.
Matt Diamante: Well, I think Watchdog, that just came out like two months ago, something like that, Three months ago.
Brittany Herzberg: So I'm not too far behind.
Matt Diamante: Yeah, it's relatively new. I think I only did one or two videos about it and I need to promote it more because it's such a valuable tool that literally nothing else like this exists online. Like Semrush and Ahrefs. Like all those websites will track, like, oh, your competitors are ranking for more keywords, but they won't tell you exactly what has changed on those websites.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah, I think that's wicked cool that you were even able to make something like that.
Matt Diamante: I mean, I didn't make it. I hired developers. I was like, here's what I want to do. And they were like, okay, sweet, we can do that.
Brittany Herzberg: Let us go to town. We will geek out on this stuff. What are some of the things that you're hearing from people who are using Watchdog and the Site Audit Tool?
Matt Diamante: Well, people are obsessed with their metrics. Right. So I have A community as well. It's a private community. Registration opens up every now and then. So in the community, I get a lot of feedback. Like, they'll share their wins, be like, oh, my website was like a 56 health score, and now it's like a 95 or a 99. Um, you know, I fixed all my broken links, I fixed my title tags, my meta descriptions. I had duplicate content, all this kind of stuff. So they go through and they fix everything. Like, okay, that's sweet. Like, now I have a baseline, and every week it sends them a new report. Because if links break on your website or if you're publishing new content, sometimes you forget to do stuff, or it creates, like, a tag page or a category page, and you might not want that. So they're constantly monitoring that stuff. But they're saying, okay, my rankings are going up. Like, obviously, they're doing SEO stuff as well, but because they're using these tools, they're able to see, okay, this is, you know, doing really well. So when it comes to the Watchdog tool, people are watching what their competitors are doing so they can make adjustments to their own sites if it makes sense. Right. So they're like, okay, well, I saw that they started going for that keyword, and we actually didn't consider that keyword at all. So we created a page. Right. Or we updated our page, or they updated the pricing to be more competitive, so we were able to make some kind of offer or deal. So it's a lot of stuff like that that's happening, and it's really, really cool. Like the Watchdog tool, as much as it's an SEO tool, it's really like a. Watching your competitor's tool.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah.
Matt Diamante: For any marketing they're doing.
Brittany Herzberg: Right.
Matt Diamante: Yeah. And with the Watchdog tool, even if it's. And I'm not here just to promote my own stuff.
Brittany Herzberg: No, he's not. But I geek out on it.
Matt Diamante: Yeah. With the Watchdog tool, if you publish a page on your website and it's, you know, a landing page, you know, you're running ads to it, whatever it is that will pick that up, even if, like, the public can't find it. Right. If it's a live link, we'll find it.
Brittany Herzberg: That is really, really cool. I love how you tie in social media with SEO, with paid ads. Paid ads I don't think I'll ever be touching. But social media is definitely part of some of the stuff that I work on with clients, because I like to say that, like, SEO is almost a stalker and it's following you all the way around online. So what are some of the things that you notice with that? Because, like, you're nodding, so I feel like you have things to say.
Matt Diamante: So one of the benefits of social media is if you have something that goes viral or is getting a ton of views reaching people outside your followers, what tends to happen is people will then go to Google and type in whatever your business name is. So for me, it's hey, Tony. And they'll go to Google, type in hey, Tony. And find my website, or find blog posts, or find other social profiles that I have, or even mentions, you know, in podcasts or publications, stuff like that. But they'll do that. And what that does is it helps your business's SEO, your website's SEO. Because what Google and search engines are looking for in 2025 is legitimate businesses. Because anybody can spin up a website and write a ton of content using AI and just publish it, and it's just garbage. But a legitimate business has very different signals to search engines than, you know, one of these spam sites would have that somebody just spun up. And one of those things is branded search, right? If people are typing in your business name, unless it's like a generic name like breadcrumbs, I don't know, maybe you have a breadcrumbs website or whatever. But like, that's a terrible example. But they want to see branded searches because if people are looking up that business, it's probably a good business. And then also branded searches with a keyword at the end. So, hey, Tony, if they're just searching that, that's a branded search, that's great. Hey, Tony. SEO, right? That's another search that's coming up in our Google search console or another keyword or anything like that. Google wants to see all of that kind of stuff. Additionally, when you're posting on social media, that shows that you're a real person, that you're a real business, right? That's, again, these are all signals that you are a legitimate business. So you can link from your website and your Google Business profile, you can link to all of your social media profiles from your Google Business profile, which again, reinforces that you're a legitimate business. Google will crawl those sites, see that you're posting, you know, whether it's daily or weekly or whatever, and they actually pull information from that as well. And then also on your website, you can post, you can share links to your social media profiles, which if you're already including your name, your business name, address and phone number in your footer, which you should if you're a local business. Having those social media links just further reinforces like, hey, we are a legitimate business, right? Legitimate businesses have like a Facebook page, at the very least, an Instagram account, probably a LinkedIn page, right? Or a profile. So having that stuff linked in your footer definitely reinforces that you are a legitimate business. And it doesn't hurt to get organic traffic from these social media sites back to your website. Because again, Google's looking for diversity in traffic, right? So if you're able to get traffic outside of just Google, right, Outside of just the organic search that is going to help your organic search. Did I say that in a way that makes sense?
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah, I was following. I mean, you do a great job of breaking things down in a way that people can understand it. So I'm sure that made sense even to like, quote, unquote, normal people who don't do all the SEO stuff that we do. And I still feel like you're light years ahead of me with all the SEO things. But it's cool hearing what you share because I'm like, oh, yeah, it does confirm for me or reaffirm for me that, like, I do know what I'm talking about. And it's really funny. Like, there are so many pros or experts or specialists or whatever where we all get so in our head about, do I know enough? Can I charge for this? Do I really? Like, it's pretty wild.
Matt Diamante: Well, still to this day, like, I'll be having a down day because I posted something on social media and it's not doing well. And then I'm like, we had got an email from a client, like, questioning, like, what are you guys really doing? And not that that comes up very often. It's never like a malicious thing. It's always like, hey, like, help me understand this. And I just, like, I'm down in the dumps and I'm like, do I even know what I'm doing? Like, should I just get a job cutting grass somewhere? Like, at least I'm cutting the lawn. The job's getting done. There's no dispute there. But then, like, I, I have to go into, like, all of our reports and look and be like, okay, no, you know what? Everybody's getting results. This is really great. People have growth. People are making more money. Clients are happy. I know what I'm doing. So at any point, like, I've been doing that same practice, that same exercise for years and years and years, and I'm still doing it even though we have a lot of clients and we're getting a lot of results, you still have that like imposter syndrome self doubt that creeps in and you're like, do I actually know what I'm doing?
Brittany Herzberg: Should people trust me? Yeah, yeah, no, I do the same thing. So I have the reports that I now get to go look at. At the beginning I was really struggling to even know what the data was. And I figured out that that's because I was relying on my clients to get back to me. So now I'm like, I need access to this, I need access to that. I will be going and checking on things. And so now my happy folder has a crap ton more like SEO related things and not just like Brady, it's great. But it's literally I'm ranking on Google after like two weeks. You know, I have clients coming in from Google. It's great.
Matt Diamante: So good.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. But it's nice to hear that that happens to like multiple people.
Matt Diamante: I like how you say you have a happy folder. Cause I literally have a folder on my desktop called Nice Things and it's screenshots of like things that people have said that are really nice. That I'm like, okay, I could use this like either on a landing page or I could read this if I'm feeling down or anything like that. Just Nice Things.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. Mine's always like down in my bottom right corner is this happy folder. And then SEO wins is right over that.
Matt Diamante: So good, right?
Brittany Herzberg: I love it. It's just the best. Like speaking of this, this is just like so timeline. I didn't anticipate I was going to say any of this, but I had a discovery call this week with someone and the person really wanted hard numbers and data and they want to build out this like crazy amazing spreadsheet. And I'm like. And even in the conversation it came up that other SEO people that they had talked with couldn't give them numbers. I'm like, yeah. Cause like, what do you mean? It depends on a lot of things. Of like, you're definitely gonna get this much more traffic. You absolutely need to post this many blogs per month, stuff like that. So like, I totally understand it but. And they were looking for hard numbers. And I'm like in my head, like, I can't really give you a hard. No one can. You've been told this by other people.
Matt Diamante: Yeah.
Brittany Herzberg: So I left that call in for a couple days after. I was just like, same thing. Should I continue with this? Should I go back to massage Should I be a priest again? Like, does anyone in the neighborhood have kids they want me to take care of?
Matt Diamante: It's crazy because, yeah, some potential clients, okay, well, how much traffic or how many impressions can I expect? And I'm like, I can't give that to you. Nobody can give that to you. If somebody gives you like hard numbers like that, you're not going to meet those expectations. So what I do and what I say to these people is I can't guarantee anything because Google's going to be Google. And what I can say is all of our clients get really great results. We have one client we worked with for a year, they literally got no results. And that's the only client and the reason that they got no results, which we found out after a year of doing all this stuff. Because SEO takes time, so you need to give it time. And I had some suspicions and we looked into some stuff but couldn't really find anything. But after a year I was like, is there something wrong with this domain? The backlink profile looks fine, all this kind of stuff. And I talked to the client, they were like, oh, we bought this from, it was like a used domain, whatever, pre registered. So they bought it from somebody else who's running another business. And that business, I don't know what they did, but the domain was, I don't want to say shadow ban, but like there's something going on with Google where it did not like that domain. So we switched the domain. And I shit you not, like a month later, they're getting way more traffic than they were getting on the previous domain. And I'm like, there's no specific thing that is saying that website is not ranking. Like Google doesn't like it.
Brittany Herzberg: That is nuts. Yeah, all these things happen. Whether it's on social media or with ads or with your website. Like, things are always happening. And so you need to pay attention to the metrics and the data and actually like analyze it and. Or have someone who can help you analyze it. Yeah, but also sometimes it's just like, I don't know, this seems weird, let's try this other thing. And then boom, it like takes off.
Matt Diamante: Yeah, that like, that's something too that I always say to clients or potential clients is like, we don't exactly know what works because there's like slightly different things that work on different websites and different industries and we have a really good idea of what works. But that same strategy probably doesn't work across the board. So you have to experiment. But we're just really Good at determining if that is a good strategy or bad strategy because we've done it so many times. But you need to run it. You need to see the numbers come in before you can make any determination as to, you know, is this going to work? Is this not going to work?
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. And something that comes up a lot with my potential client calls is what is your bandwidth? Am I talking to a solopreneur where they're wearing all the hats and they don't have as much capacity for things as someone with like a 10 person team? So it's that, what's your goal for the website? What are you really looking to have happen? And then we can attack it strategically and within your capacity. Yeah, that piece has to be there. And some people are like, I'm seeing this person do this. Like even talking about social media numbers or website traffic visits, whatever it is, it's like this is happening for this person. Yes. And what does the back end look like? What does their support look like? What's the actual strategy? You know, maybe someone even has a really big following on Instagram, but are they getting engagement with the people that they're talking with? Is that translating into email subscribers or dollars at the end of the month?
Matt Diamante: Yep.
Brittany Herzberg: So you can't just look at things, surface and assume stuff and totally agree with you. And I said the same thing on the call that like, you're really not going to get hard numbers. And anyone who does give you hard numbers, like, it's a red flag.
Matt Diamante: Yeah. I was working with a company who was like scripting videos for me and editing the videos. I just had to film them and like do what they said basically. And that was really great because I didn't have to think about content. You know, I've been doing this for two years now, which doesn't sound like a long time, but posting two, three times a day every day for two years, you run out of ideas eventually. Eventually. So you have to get creative. And it was really great to hire this agency to help me with that stuff, but I was like, I need to do this on my own at this point because I'm getting lazy. Like, if I show up every day and do it, the content gets better and better and I can make better decisions. And I'm flexing that creativity muscle, right. I'm looking at a topic and I'm like, how can I do that in a different way? And I'm doing that every day. So by flexing that muscle every day, it's easier and it takes less time I hate batch doing content. It's the worst. You know, you give me 30 scripts, I'm like, okay, half of these, I have to be two people. It's back and forth. I have to go to my kitchen, then I have to go over here, then I'm setting up, I've changed my shirt. I've do all this kind of stuff. But some of those videos did really well. Some did average like my videos would normally do. But with them, it's very similar kind of thing where they don't sell you. Like you're going to get this many followers. They will say you get X amount of deliverables per month. Right. And it's better to do it that way than to do it. We guarantee you're going to get X, Y, Z when you do this. You could say you will see growth. How much growth? We don't know. We don't know how much effort you're going to put into this. So the same thing with SEO. Like one SEO product at this point and it's. You get eight pieces of content per month. So eight blog posts or a mix of blog posts and service pages or other pages on your website or updating pages. So you get eight of those and you get four backlinks. Those are the deliverables. That is legit. I don't wanna say everything. Cause we do some technical stuff as well. But that's what you're getting every single month. And as long as you can hit those deliverables, the client's gonna be happy. Cause they're getting what they paid for.
Brittany Herzberg: Right. And the expectation has been set.
Matt Diamante: Yep.
Brittany Herzberg: And no one's like pulling the rug out from under you or whatever?
Matt Diamante: Exactly.
Brittany Herzberg: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. No, I love that approach so much more. Okay, so I mentioned metrics.
Matt Diamante: Yep.
Brittany Herzberg: What are some things that you encourage people to track on a, let's say, monthly basis for their SEO?
Matt Diamante: Honestly, just track your clicks and impressions. If those things are going up, you're getting more traffic. You know, at the end of the day, it's up to you to see how many people you're converting. But that might be a metric that you want to track monthly as well. And that's outside of SEO. But how many people are filling out the form? How many people are buying my thing? Is it going up? Can I correlate that to SEO? Am I running any kind of other marketing as well? So I think like a monthly recap, like that's what we do for our clients. Monthly analytics. If you do weekly, there's too Many fluctuations with Google and Google Search console. It's going up and down all the time because Google's trying to find where that piece of content belongs in their index. So that's what I would look at monthly as well as, like, if you are going after a specific keyword, which I don't necessarily recommend, you know, for me it was like SEO and Hamilton or Hamilton SEO or whatever that keyword search was. I was looking at that every month saying, why aren't we ranking number one for this? And you can certainly do that. But I know I can spend more money and more time trying to get that stuff to rank. Whereas a client isn't going to buy 20 backlinks, right? 20 backlinks is very expensive. What is that, like three grand or something? Four grand? It's going to cost you for 20 back. Like it's not cheap. So I'm like, I can start buying more of that stuff, I can spend more money because I know I'll see the roi. But trying to convince a client, like, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't work, you know, that's a little bit of a different story. But all back to the metrics. Like, I will look at some of those keywords that I want to rank for and say, are we doing better, are we doing worse? Is there competition? What's going on here? It really depends on how detailed you want to get into it, like how meticulous want to be with all of your data. Because you can, you can report on anything and everything forever. Like our SEO Reports are like five pages. You can do like a 500 page SEO report talking about all these different things. But for what? Just give me the metrics, clicks, impressions. That's all you really need to see.
Brittany Herzberg: That's helpful to hear. I have one specific client that comes to mind where we've been tracking their SEO metrics for a few months now. And one thing I saw was that their keywords were going down and I, you know, I record videos and, or go to like the marketing meeting, depending on the month. And so I was always like, it's going down. But look at this, like the keywords that we actually want to rank for, we are showing up higher. We're in position 1, 2, 3, 4, whatever. You know, we publish a couple of blog posts and they've ranked very quickly into like position one or two for certain keywords. So they're really happy. They're also seeing people hanging out on the pages longer, they're seeing people commenting on things and they actually I was such a proud SEO expert because they had a reel go viral on Instagram, and that happened on, like, a Friday. Or maybe they posted it on Friday. They saw it go viral, like, Saturday, Sunday. I'm imagining by Monday they were like, because we saw this happening, we put together a blog post. Can you, like, create an SEO strategy? And I was like, yes. Yes, I can.
Matt Diamante: That's amazing.
Brittany Herzberg: Like, they're learning, and that's probably, like, for me, the coolest thing to see.
Matt Diamante: Yeah. And, like, I love that that client's proactive. Not all clients and not all businesses are proactive like that, but they also.
Brittany Herzberg: Have a large team.
Matt Diamante: Okay. Yeah. So, like, that makes so much sense. You have people to do the work. If you have something go viral on social media, like a topic, you can write a blog post and elaborate on all of that. I wouldn't necessarily recommend, like, I'm posting every single day, multiple times a day on social media. So for me to write blog posts for that, like, that would literally be. My entire job is writing blog posts and filming videos. Probably just writing blog posts would be most of the job. But if something does really well, way better than everything else, that's probably a signal that people are looking that information up. Write a blog post. Do keyword research before you write the blog post so you can, you know, make sure the title's good and everything like that, and people will find it. But that's a really great way to come up with a piece of content. It's tried and true. People are looking that stuff up. People want to know that information.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. And it's even inspired, potentially another service. Like, it's pretty wild. I'm so excited for them.
Matt Diamante: That's amazing.
Brittany Herzberg: So, okay, let's bounce over to blogs for a little while. So what do you feel like business owners really need to know and think about when it comes to SEO and blogging and content creation and, you know, wanting to pour more of their effort, time and money and energy into their website.
Matt Diamante: So we had a client, this was last year, they were like, we don't want to do blog posts anymore. We just want to do, like, service pages and location pages, all this kind of stuff. And we were like, you know what? Let's try it out. I don't think it's going to work. We let them know, but if that's what you want to do, it's worth a try. So we weren't doing blog posts, and their results were not great compared to clients in similar industries who were doing a lot of blog Posts, I say a lot. So we do eight blog posts per month. They were seeing way, way, way better results. And this all goes to topical authority. If you look at tools like SEMrush, they now have topical authority, I guess meters, what do you want to call it? Scores? So you can type in your website and say, okay, for this topic, for this keyword, what's my actual difficulty? Right? Because Google is looking and search engines are looking at. Is this website posting a lot of content that is helpful about that topic or that, like, topic group? If the answer is yes, it's probably going to be easier for you to rank for, you know, topics within your niche. So, for example, if I'm talking about digital marketing in any way that makes sense, it'd be a lot easier for me to rank for those terms than somebody who's an electrician. Right? Because they're not talking about digital marketing, and it just doesn't make sense that their business would be talking about that. So on the other end, if I start talking about, you know, electrician stuff and how to change a light bulb, that's probably not going to rank really well. So with blog posts, the reason why they're so important. Oh, my God. There's so many reasons why blog posts are so important. But one, it helps your topical authority of your website. It helps you get more traffic to your website for, you know, lower volume and lower difficulty keywords, which you definitely need. I know a lot of people are like, let's go after the 5000 volume a month keywords. Because that's the keyword I want that's going to change my life, change my business, all this kind of stuff. But your website's not ranking for anything. You're not getting traffic. Google isn't just like, oh, Brittany's website. Like, yeah, we'll rank her number one and give her all this traffic. She's not like, we don't know her at all, but she's probably good. That's not how it works. You need to show Google that they can trust you, that people can trust you, that people are finding the information on your website useful. So you do that through blog posts. You can't, again, go for those crazy difficult keywords. You want to go for the easier stuff. Basically show Google, like, hey, you can trust me. Give me, like, some, you know, crumbs. Crumbs, Crumbs. Then eventually those crumbs, you make a slice of bread out of the crumbs, you push them together and you're getting more traffic. And then all of A sudden you have a loaf and Google's like, okay, well now you can make a sandwich. If that analogy makes any sense.
Brittany Herzberg: It does. I followed it.
Matt Diamante: So, yeah, you need the blog post to develop traction basically to your website and to develop that trust and the topical authority. One of the things that blog posts allow you to do is get backlinks to your website for free, which also increases your credibility. So if you're writing about topics and you have the best piece of content about that topic, other people are going to organically link to you. They're going to say, oh, go see Britney's blog post about blank topic for more information. And that's a backlink for you. That's also potentially referral traffic from that website. That all helps with your SEO. So blog posts, they play a pivotal role in ranking on Google. I wrote a book and it's being edited right now and we're going through that whole process, but I went off on I don't know how many pages, a lot of pages about the importance of blog posting and all the benefits and if you don't have a blog, what the downfalls are and all that kind of stuff.
Brittany Herzberg: So we need to get the book. Once you have it out there in the wild.
Matt Diamante: Yes. Everybody needs to buy the book. Buy two of the book.
Brittany Herzberg: Give one to a friend.
Matt Diamante: Yeah, buy one for yourself, Buy one for a friend. Buy one for your clients. That's actually, that could be a good strategy. Buy this book for all your clients. So blogs are important. I don't know if I answered your question at all, but blogs are important.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah, I love hearing that and I feel like I say that. So it's great for people to hear that from someone who's not me. With websites and SEO, I get this question a lot and I have my answer. But I would love to hear what your answer is for. What is the low hanging fruit like if you had to choose one activity to start doing SEO on a website? Sounds like blogs are important. So we know that. But like, is there anything else that you would say, like, do this?
Matt Diamante: Yeah. So look at all the pages on your website. And most websites don't have thousands or hundreds of pages. They'll probably have 20 pages max. Think of a local service business and we're excluding blog posts from this. Go through all your pages. You could do one page a day, one page a week. Depends on how quickly you want to do it. Make sure that the keyword that you want to rank for is actually on that page. Make sure it's in the title tag, the meta description, the heading 1 tag, and at least one heading 2 tag. And in the content write. Right. You'd be surprised at how many people are like, why aren't I ranking for this keyword? Because I do a lot of website audits on, like, webinars and calls and stuff like that. And they're like, why aren't I ranking for this keyword? I'm like, well, what? Where is it on the page? Used it once at the very end. Like, that's why you're not ranking for it.
Brittany Herzberg: So that doesn't work.
Matt Diamante: Yeah. The lowest hanging fruit is just make sure the keywords are on the page. That sounds fucking crazy.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah, it is. Thank you for saying that.
Matt Diamante: Yeah, that's the lowest hanging fruit. Things. That isn't necessarily going to guarantee that you're ranking, but it'll at least give you a shot.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah, it will. I'm glad to hear you say that. Because the thing that I tell people, the very first thing I did once I learned about SEO, and I was like, oh, I want to see if this can help my website rank for things and bring in traffic and bring in clients. And it did. I made sure that I had a unique keyword that I was trying to target for every single of the main website pages. So again, that's like, you know, home, about, services, whatever. And I made sure that the SEO title and the meta description were done at the very least, because that's the first thing I see with my clients or potential clients. They come in and it just says home or about.
Matt Diamante: Yeah.
Brittany Herzberg: Or their name. And I'm like, that's cool. But people generally aren't looking for you. And that's why we want to beef these up.
Matt Diamante: Yeah. If they are looking for you, you're going to come up in the search results because that's what your business is called. That's your business name. Right. One thing that I will say, because you touched on, like, you have a homepage, you have an about page and all these other pages. I'm like, I am a firm believer. Fuck the about page.
Brittany Herzberg: That's right.
Matt Diamante: We've talked about, like, what is different from your homepage than your about page? Like, what other keyword are you going to try to get that about page to rank for? Unless you don't want it to rank at all. That's totally fine. People can just go, like, our story, learn more about the business, all this kind of stuff. But that's what the homepage. The homepage should have that information somewhere on it. Not at the top. That should be about your offering. But, like, lower down, here's who we are. Here's about us. All this kind of like, why should you hire us? Why should you work with us? Why should you buy our products? That should all be on your homepage. Why an about page?
Brittany Herzberg: I have had a lot of clients come in, and my background is in healthcare. So I have a lot of clients come in or attorneys or therapists who are like, I need to put my entire educational background on here. It's like, okay, we'll just stick that over on the about page. I am a big believer with the about page. You have to make it sing to the person. It's not just like, I'm great because this. It's like, I'm here. This is my background. Here's how I can help you. And I do like, storytelling. And so that is one way that we can, like, weave it in on a. In a spot.
Matt Diamante: That's not a blog for sure. But rather than an about page, I would say have a meet the team page. And then you could be like, Hamilton divorce attorneys or whatever it is.
Brittany Herzberg: Right?
Matt Diamante: And then there's a list of, like, three or four people there with their credentials, and each of those people may have their own page on the website as well. Like a bio page. Like, that makes more sense to me than just having a general about page.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. What you just described. The more I like to meet the team, that's more of what, like, my clients coming in do that or that's how we spin it. We're meeting the hey, Tony Standards.
Matt Diamante: Perfect. I love that. I should make a Hatoni seal of approval stamp.
Brittany Herzberg: You should.
Matt Diamante: No, that. That sounds so egotistical. I'm not going to do that. Yeah, this passes my. This passes my inspection.
Brittany Herzberg: Two other things I want to touch on. What's a big mistake that you're seeing business owners making with SEO?
Matt Diamante: Okay, so there's two things. One, not including the keyword, which we just talked about. The second one is not having and changing things too often. So I'll just give you an example. Like, on my own site. This is like, two years ago now. I was like, I want to rank for SEO in Hamilton or Facebook ads in Hamilton. And I optimized the pages, not like a hundred percent, but I just wrote content, made sure the keyword was there, put it on the website, published it, and just let it fly, you know, see what happens. Six months later, I was like, okay, like, we're starting to, like, slowly come up in the search Results, that's great, but we're not doing that great. I still didn't change a page. Then I continued waiting, waiting, waiting. And now we're ranking number one. Right. So had I gone in and messed around with it, changed stuff that could have impacted that. But one of the reasons why we're ranking number one is like, yes, I optimized the pages. I made sure that we were using the keyword on the page and that there was good, helpful information there. One of the reasons why we're ranking is because we're writing blog content, and this is another benefit of writing blogs. In every single blog post, we are linking to one of our service pages using the keyword that we want that page to rank for or a variation of that keyword. So if it's Facebook ads in Hamilton and we have a post about how to create a Facebook group, for example, on that post towards the bottom, it'll say, hey, you know, once you've set up your Facebook group, if you're looking for help to run Facebook ads in Hamilton, you know, we can help you out. And the words Facebook ads in Hamilton links to our service page that is giving juice from that piece of content that is getting traffic to our service page. Right. Because it's really hard to get service pages to rank and build backlinks to service pages, all that kind of stuff. So that is another benefit of blogging is getting those internal links with the anchor text to help rank the other pages. So it's like a roundabout way of doing it. So you're optimizing the service page or the product, but you're really driving as much as possible from blog posts.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. And that's a benefit not only to the people, the humans actually going to this page, but it's also like, hey, Google, this is, you know, a thing, and this is what we're talking about, and this is what we're doing. So it signals both for the robots and for the people, which is huge.
Matt Diamante: Exactly.
Brittany Herzberg: So good. Well, talk to us about what Google is looking for in 2025 when it comes to ranking and SEO. And I don't know, probably got to throw in, like, AI and SGE in there too.
Matt Diamante: Yeah. So I think we. We touched on, like, I would say most of it during this conversation.
Brittany Herzberg: Great.
Matt Diamante: But it's really the legitimate businesses, so they are looking for people who are blogging, people who are doing helpful content. They're looking for people who have social media profiles. They're looking for diversified traffic. Right. You're not only getting all of Your traffic from Google or organic. You're getting traffic from social media, from email marketing, from paid ads. Like, you don't necessarily need to run paid ads, but there's a bunch of different ways you can drive traffic. So they're looking for all that kind of stuff. And it's really just, are you a legitimate business? Are you helping people? Is your goal to help people? If your goal is to help people, you will always win. That's what I think. And with our clients, that's where we're winning. And our clients are winning because we're doing that helpful content. We're legitimizing the businesses.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah, I just feel like that's just like, such a pretty place to, like, wrap up with a bow because, like, just. Just help people. You're always going to win the end. All right, Tell the people where they can find you and what else you've.
Matt Diamante: Got going on all over social media. Just type in Matt Diamante. It's going to be the account with the most followers under that name. It's different on other platforms because some platforms like TikTok don't allow a dot. So I think on TikTok, it's like, hey, Tony agency. On Instagram, it's HeyTony agency. You know, I'm on RedNote as well. That just came out. Or that's been out.
Brittany Herzberg: I've never heard of that.
Matt Diamante: So, yeah, when TikTok was banned for like 15 hours, a bunch of people went over to RedNote, which is also. I think it's like a Chinese app. Well, it's definitely a language I don't understand or I can't read. But they've since translated things to English, which is great because there's so many American users coming on. But anyways, it's basically like TikTok, but slightly different. So a bunch of people jump there, literally. Like any of the major social media platforms, I am on Matt Diamante. I'm sure my name's in the show notes somewhere.
Brittany Herzberg: Oh, yeah.
Matt Diamante: I do have a free course called Understanding SEO, which I can send you. Brittany, as well, to put in the show notes teaches you the basics of SEO so that you understand if you. Even if you aren't trying to do SEO yourself and you're looking to hire somebody, it will teach you how to understand what the hell they're talking about so that you're not getting ripped off.
Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. Which is, like, super critical.
Matt Diamante: Yeah, it's, you know, it's pretty good.
Brittany Herzberg: Thank you from all of us, Matt. Because, I mean, this is always so helpful. And like I said, just love talking with you. So I'm sure you'll be back at some point in the future.
Matt Diamante: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Again, this has been great.
Brittany Herzberg: Of course. No, this is fun. I will catch you next.
