Keyword Research and How to Rank in Google

Manage your all-field operations from anywhere with Rigor online or offline. Whether it's scheduling and dispatching jobs, tracking employee hours, managing equipment rentals, or inspections and maintenance, you can create, review, approve, and upload all types of field tickets and agreements securely from any device. Plus, you can generate invoices same day and run powerful operation manager dashboards on your desktop or phone. No paper, no errors, no headaches. Learn more at rigor.us. Link is in the show notes. Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing

podcast, where every week, your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Welcome back everybody. And Matt, we didn't get a review today, so we don't have any reviews. I'm telling you, come on people, if you'd like to show, leave us a review. If you don't like it, leave us a review and tell us what we need to change. Today's topic is something that's very important. Something Matt is an expert at and that's keyword research and how to rank in Google.

Now, there's a second part, so our next show after this will be on competitive research, but for now, we're just going to talk about the basics on how do you rank in Google. Yeah, Mark kept telling me, no, we need to save that topic, we need to slow down, we need to start here, and I'm going to do my best to try to do that. Matt's suffering a little bit. He's sick, so he's a trooper and showed up, so his voice sounds a little different. That's why it wasn't that he was up too late last night.

So, I have a little bit of experience, Matt, ranking with stuff from my old market research company that actually drove almost all of our businesses ranking for things like oil and gas sales experts. Let me rattle off what I think the basics are and then you come back and correct me because you're the experts, not me, but if you're in the oil and gas patch and you're trying to rank for whatever you sell or rank for the problems that your customers are looking for, you got to start with the basics, which is a website that Google can read.

WordPress is one of the most really common formats for websites, even CNN uses WordPress, and besides all those other attributes, it's a very easy website for Google to read. Then the next thing is you need to learn how to develop a little bit of keyword research, and if you don't know what a keyword is, it's literally what do people search to find you. So, in Matt and I's case, if somebody's looking for a podcast on how to sell to oil and gas, hopefully this podcast comes up first. That would be the phrase that Matt and I would

intentionally try to rank for. Then we would have to develop content around that. There's a bunch of different ways to do that, and then you'd want to optimize that content so that it makes it easy for Google to understand what you're saying because Google's always going to try to give search results to answer that is the best fit. Then there's little things you can do to show Google that it's an important and vital piece of content such as backlinks. So that's what I think of as the fundamentals, Matt. Let's go ahead and let you jump in and kind of break that down.

Yeah. So, a little bit of trivia. WordPress is one of the most, if not the most used platform. A lot of Fortune 500 companies, a lot of $100 million plus companies I've seen have moved to it. Now it is open source, and a lot of times they like to use platforms that they can point the finger at whoever owns the software right on the licensing and say, hey, fix this. I've seen a shift away from that, but an interesting piece of trivia related to that. A guy by the name of Matt who actually grew up here in Houston invented it. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah. I don't know. I haven't talked to him in a long, long time, but he was dating one of my friends like years ago. He doesn't live here anymore, but he would come back and visit her. So the thing about Google and WordPress and the reason why people, if they're doing SEO, tend to gravitate to WordPress is one, it's got a huge ecosystem like Apple and iTunes and all that kind of thing. But also one of the things that people don't know is those teams have some kind of deal or work together where WordPress sites get indexed faster. And if you're going to change

in the rankings, whatever you're looking at is static. It's a static database. Getting indexed faster is really advantageous if you're trying to move the needle. There's a lot of reasons behind why you want to consider WordPress, and that ecosystem is quite big, and there's a lot of security, and there's workarounds with e-commerce and stuff like that. But to dive into the topic today, I even like to back up a little bit more and say it's not about keywords, or that's not where you start your search. You start with topics. And so using Google Trends, for example,

you can figure out whatever the topic is, and it gives you a variety of different keywords that are all in the same, I call it a theme, all the same vertical. And so you get better ideas before you start that process. Also, if your company is big enough, like Exxon is maybe buying Pioneer or whatever, if you're in the news, if you're big enough like that, you can actually see trends for your company name, if you're big enough. And I use a lot of trends for seasonality. How are we doing versus like whether the trends are? When are the spikes? Because it's not just

steady, hey, I need 25 leads a month, every month, no matter what, there's more factors that maybe go into it. The thing I see with B2B in the data is they tend to be best in January, like the most deals, the most activity seems to happen with B2B companies in January. But Google Trends is free, you can go search it, there's a lot of tools that you can play with, you can use it for PR purposes, along with like Google Alerts and stuff like that. All right, so now that you know that there's a topic, and then you select keywords inside that

topic, now you can use different tools. People that have sponsored my other podcast, Ahrefs, SCM Rush, Ubersuggestion sponsored my podcast, Neil Patel bought that, keywords everywhere. If you just search like keyword research tools, there's tons of them. The one that you can start with, the one that's absolutely free that gives you the best data potentially is Google Keyword Planner or Google Adword Planner, I think. Now the only caveat, okay, with Google Adword Planner is they only give you the search terms that are related to Adwords because they want you to bid.

So if there's little like, quote unquote, honey holes where no one's bidding on and there's opportunity for search, they're not going to show you that because they only want to show you, hey, here's what people are bidding on, here's the bid data because that's their business model, right? They want you to bid on that through search marketing. I think that's really important to understand, but I think starting with Google Trends, right? Because I mean, we're using the Google Database mostly, 98% all searches or whatever. Well, things starting to elbow in, I would say, but

you want to start with Google Trends and then Google Keyword Planner, both free tools. And Matt, talk a little bit about the ability to rank for keywords. So there's certain things, in my case, if I wanted to rank for Internet of Things, there's just no way, no matter what I did, there's no way Google sees Microsoft as the more of an expert on that and they're going to give Microsoft the organic search engine rankings. However, if I intentionally misspelled it, as called Internet of Things, I could rank for that. And the reason is that there's not as much

search traffic around that and there's not as much domain expertise around that misspelled. So talk a little bit about, because what I don't want people to do is try to rank for something that there's just no way they can rank for no matter what they do. Well, yeah, I think that it's important to understand there's something called seed terms, like the most general parent topic terms. Those are typically the most difficult because they're non-specific and it's like one word or two word or something like that. The majority of the searches, 75% of all searches, are actually

new searches to Google and they're all long tail because everybody's learning how to use search engines differently and voice search is really changing things. And okay, you have your topic and here's the thing, you need to rank in the top 100 for your topic to qualify for all the long tail key phrases. So it is an important focus, but that general topic, if you think about the customer journey, it's really going to lead to a conversion, okay? Like it's very top of the funnel and it's not that important. You've got to rank for it top 100, but after that, really it's the

long tail key phrases of where they're at in the buying cycle that they want to rank for and there's different keyword difficulties based on how many callbacks. So I'll give you example, you can rank and everybody's like, oh, there's like spammy stuff that's ranking and this that. Well, a lot of times that stuff's ringing because Google has nothing else to serve. Okay, so if someone's optimizing and building pages or whatever, I'm not suggesting new this for misspellings like common misspellings. For example, in Houston, sugarland, sugarland, right? Like they're a little

bit different. There's one right way to spell it, but people might optimize for the other way because that's how people might be searching for it. And that's going to be less competitive. And so if you're doing some kind of spammy tactic that the algorithms don't catch. So how it works, this is really important. I have a really good diagram. If you go to our side, I don't know what page it's on, but think about a standard deviation. Okay, think about a formula for each keyword combination. There's a perfect score. It's mathematical. I don't know what it is.

Every single search, if you put, let's say sugarland, we use sugarland at the front at the back, like phrase matches it part of a lot, like every single combination, you can think of what you would search in Google, there's actually a perfect result. That's why it's very hard to know what you're really ranking for, because you search this way, you change one word, and then you don't show up, right? What your goal is, is try to kind of shotgun, hit as many terms as you can with one page that answers the most questions without watering down what you're doing. I mean,

that's the best analogy I can give in a really short amount of time because there's 200 plus different ranking factors. But essentially, you need to know that, yeah, the reason that spammy page may rank, because Google hasn't found it one, because a lot of this is algorithmic, and they might not be outside the standard deviation to raise red flags as far as their like quote unquote spam score is. And there's not a lot of people that might be building the page wrong or optimizing for that word. So Google's going to serve whatever it is. Like I do some

marketing for vacation companies in the islands, and I can tell you there's one island I work with, there's literally like three content producers on the whole island that are consistently pushing out content, and they rank in the top search results. Well, it's a very easy to rank for terms related to that because you only have three publishers that are really putting out any kind of content. So you put out mediocre content, it's going to rank first page without any real effort or even SEO because Google has nothing else to serve. And so it's like, here you go.

Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes total sense. But let me bring you back to more of an entry level because a lot of our listeners really have never played around with this. So in the oil and gas industry, there's something called a sucker rod. A sucker rod is a part that a lot of companies make and sell. If you search for a sucker rod right now on Google, Weatherford comes up first, but not because Weatherford's trying to rank for that. To bat's point, that's Google's best guess at who should come up. When you read the search and results, you can tell that Weatherford

did not optimize for that and that it just Google's best guess because nobody else is trying it. Now, let me tell you where the value is in this. If you make or sell sucker rods and you intentionally produce good content around sucker rods, you're going to outrank Weatherford. And so when somebody searches for sucker rods online, you will come up first, even if you're a million times smaller than Weatherford. And Mark, let me give you a caveat too. Depending on what you were searching for previously in

that search, something might other come up for sucker rods, depending on what your previous searches were because Google's trying to look at, what are you actually looking for? So, everything's personalized. My favorite story about that is I was searching for this vehicle called a sprinter that Mercedes used to make. That's a commercial van. And don't you know they're sprinter porn out there? The first thing it popped up was sprinter porn, right? So, to Matt's point, be careful. The other thing that you touched on that I want to revisit that's super

important is Matt talked about the, in the key phrases, the order of the words. If you notice, almost all of our podcasts start with oil and gas. That's not an accident. That's so we intentionally rank for oil and gas podcasts. So, this one's called the oil and gas sales and marketing podcast. We did the oil and gas in the name on purpose so that we rank higher for stuff. All right, Matt, you know, if you're an oil and gas company, if you're a marketing person and you've been tasked to try to sell valves in this industry, I can tell you right now,

nobody's intentionally trying to rank for valves. So, it would be relatively easy for you to rank for something like a one-inch ball valve or a gate valve or whatever. What would be the process? What would a marketing person need to know that's never done this before? First, one of the things that you said that's really important is putting oil and gas at the front of the phrase. Anything that's more towards the front, just like in a paragraph if you're writing, like what's the most important thing? It's the title, right? It's the first paragraph.

It's the first sentence. It's the first word. Like you're going to lose people over time. But also remember, engineers built this algorithm, all these algorithms, and they have to categorize it. So, if you put oil and gas first and then podcast second, you're going, okay, put me in the oil and gas category and then put me in podcast category. Or if you said podcast and oil and gas, okay, throw me in all the different podcasts and then show me oil and gas. So, what could happen is your search results could be a bunch

of different podcasts or your results could be a bunch of different oil and gas terms based on where that keyword is, on how Google does that. Ask your question again. I'm sorry. It's okay. So, if I'm a marketing person and I work for a company in oil and gas that sells valves, I know from experience that nobody's intentionally putting out content to rank for, say, a one-inch ball valve. So, if you're a marketing person and you want to rank so that when people search for one-inch ball valve, they see your company first,

what would be the process? Again, we're going to try not to go into competitive research, but what I would tell you is, remember, I just said there's certain callbacks, there's a certain amount of inventory that Google can serve. The goal for Google is to serve the absolute best content that answers the best question. So, a lot of this actually comes into why do you want to rank for ball valves? There's four different kinds of searches. Like, are you trying to get to a ball valve company? Probably not. You're trying to educate somebody

on ball valves? Maybe. You're trying to share commercial terms? Yes. Are you trying to get transactional terms? Are they trying to buy online or do you want them to call you? So, you want to understand what is the intent of the page or the content you're going to create for? What is it going to do? What is the purpose of that content? It's absolutely the first thing. And go, what questions, if someone searches for XYZ, if we want to show up for this, what questions do we need to answer as fully as possible, more fully than anybody else that's

put that information out on the web? And I want to stop you right there. Marketing people, this is why it's important that you talk to your salespeople. Your sales team, if you sell one-inch ball valves, has heard the same 20 questions over and over and over again. And I promise you, those questions are very close, if not 100% of match to what people search for, that actually need that valve. So, by understanding what the questions are your sales teams ask, it then helps you develop the content. The keyword doesn't matter as much anymore.

Does that make sense? Pages now rank with the keyword not even on the page. The algorithms have gotten so smart with, it's called like semantic language or semantic SEO. There's a lot of things you have to do from like schema markup, like letting Google know what this is about. Like you're trying to build trust with the search and you're trying to create signals, but you're trying to answer intent. You're not trying to actually rank for a keyword. And it's very hard to rank for a keyword because guess what? Like everybody thinks you're trying to rank

for that head term or whatever it is. That is like the worst approach and you're going to spend a ton of money. Now, there's different things you can do is like, how competitive is this term? I think again, with voice search happening, it's more about answering a question. And one of the big things too that a lot of people don't do, and there's a lot of bad information out there, but they don't want to link out to anybody. You want to link out to credible resources that support your viewpoint and also will help that person make the decision. Now, not redirect them to another

page, maybe open up another window, but Google is going to be like, hey, if they ask this question, boom, boom, boom, they look at all the links, they look at all the content, they see the call to action. Hey, does this answer the question and do people take action? And we're going to look at, like think about everybody using Chrome browser, I'm using Chrome browser, why did they give that away free? They want to see what you do after you leave the search. And it's all for like advertising and usability and all kinds of those purposes. Well, again, it goes back to intent,

not keywords. So back to our example, where a marketing company is trying to rank for one-inch ball valves and they're trying to find people that want to buy them. I would think one of the easiest things for you to do would be to talk to your sales team, gather up those questions, those 20 questions that people ask about one-inch ball valves and then do a Q&A piece of content. So it literally write out a Q&A document. In that document, you would mention one-inch ball valves where it made sense. You don't want to keyword stuff, you just want to make it where

it's easy to read. Now, to Matt's point about external links, one of the first things I would do is link back to Wikipedia on what a one-inch ball valve actually is. I would put the link on the name one-inch ball valve. In my experience, Google sees that as you being helpful instead of you trying to control everything. And the more helpful you're trying to be, the better you answer that question, where can I buy one-inch ball valves, the more likely you are to rank organically. So again, this is going to be something we're going to say for the insider group. And it's a

lot easier to explain with a white paper. But where the links get placed, where you link out to, there's mathematical formulas, there's patents that are public information that you can look at, like you can go to Google patents and you can look some of this stuff up. Where the anchor text is, what the anchor text says, how close it is to other words. There's so many factors. Also, you were talking about podcasts, like leaving us a review. Say that we're personable in the review because Google looks at sediment too, like positive, negative. Use some, is it adjectives?

I have this right. Basically, describe things in a positive light. Easy to explain. These are positive terms. Hard to navigate for the website. These are negative terms. Google's looking at this because they want to serve the best user experience. I would also say the thing that people miss the most is they're maybe trying to answer the questions as mid-funnel. A lot of people go after informational, top of the funnel. People go back to a website or a page or whatever. Either they convert the first day or they convert on day 10 or whatever. They go back a lot of times

before they buy, depending on what your sales cycle is. If you're trying to sell ball valves, you should probably use the word shop. You should probably use the word buy. People forget to do this. That's where someone is at the bottom of the funnel. I want to buy ball valves. I want to shop for ball valves. Now, not everybody searches that way, but do you see how that sends a signal to Google that what this page is about? This is about we're selling these. Let me tell you a tool that I use that helps with all the math. It's a plug-in for WordPress called Yoast, a CO Yoast.

What it does is it basically red light, yellow light, green light. It will tell you if your content's good, if it sucks. It will tell you if you have enough internal links or external links. It will tell you if the key phrase is mentioned in enough places. The thing I love about Yoast is it's a bunch of Google engineers or former Google engineers that are constantly trying to reverse engineer the algorithm. Then Google's engineers are constantly trying to beat Yoast and re-engineer the algorithms. It's like this mini warfare over understanding what the algorithms are. The Yoast

guys don't get it 100% right. They never do, but they get it close. It's an easy tool if you're creating content to help write it in a way that you will rank for stuff. Now, Matt, here's a question I've been struggling with. In the old days, the way I would create that content is I'd shoot a video, I'd have the video transcribed, and then I would drop it into Yoast, and I would let Yoast help me rewrite it. The end product was a video and a bunch of text. The text did not match up to the video 100% because the way you read is different than the way you speak. If I picked a long tail

key phrase that wasn't extremely popular, I would rank for stuff organically. Now, here's my question. I think now Google understands audio. In that same scenario, I'm wondering now if I even need to write the text. I'm wondering if just the video itself would rank because I think Google now can understand what the video is saying. Well, yeah. There's a couple of things. Typically, when you're selling a product or a service, it's different. Google looks for different kind of things that they're checking off. Certainly, the worst thing that people do

is they use stock imagery. If they're a distributor, the person that's getting credit for those images are whoever put them online first, and Google's crediting them. You're not getting any credit for any new images. You want to take real images in the field, whatever. You want to have reviews. You want to have the specs. You want to have the specs, but you want to also have use cases and answer some of these things. Things you're talking about in a video is unique content is really helpful. Now, to your point of transcriptions, Google actually does not like transcriptions

because if you're watching a video versus reading the text, it's different and it's harder to do. You want to summarize maybe what it is, and you can use some AI to say, hey, summarize this for me, and Google will like that. The video is unique. Again, to outrank somebody else, and this is something really, really important that we haven't talked about. I'm glad I just thought about it. Most of the traffic, and the reason why people say that SEO is an investment that takes so long, is if you are not really in the first position or second or third, you're getting no traffic.

Almost no traffic. You're getting a lot of spam, or you're not getting anything, so you're like, SEO doesn't work. Now, if you get in the first position, the leads just start flowing in. They just start flowing in. Now, to be in the first position, you say, well, I need to do all these things. You need to do all these things until you beat everybody else and you create better content and you're the absolute best callback for that term, and then you're in the first position. Then guess what? If people are loving your stuff and using it the right way, you stay

in that position unless somebody does something else to beat you, or a Google algorithm does something and you're doing something that is not good, and Google picks that up. But Google is trying to serve the absolute best search result for that intent of that search, and you need to be number one. You're not going to just organically be number one. You have to optimize search engine optimization. You were optimizing for a keyword. Now, you can't get outside the standard deviation. You can't manipulate the search engines,

but you can certainly say, hey, this is the best content, sending Google the signal saying, this is why we're the best, and then Google wants to justify that with user interaction data. User interaction data, I don't know what that exactly means, but it could be the dwell time on the page. It could be click-throughs. I believe it's like all this stuff, but they say that this stuff doesn't matter. And that's why analytics, putting some kind of analytics on your site is really, really helpful, whether it be heat mapping, what pages are converting,

Google Analytics, GA4. I'm not a big fan of GA4. I do not like it. Maybe I just have to get used to it more. I like the old analytics. I thought there was a lot more data. I'm looking at even other options right now. We've actually just installed Microsoft Clarity on a number of our sites because I want to see user interactions, heat mapping, all that kind of stuff, because it's not that simple. It's not just keyword research anymore markets. Google's job is to serve the, well, they want to get you to click on ads, but they want to give you the best information possible.

All these factors are trying to do that, and that's what you should be trying to do too. If you provide the most, again, informational, transactional, could be totally different. Now, guess what? If you have a page that ranks for informational and page for transactional, you could rank twice in the search results, depending on what that search is. You want to target what you're trying to do, and that takes a lot of thought on the front end. Now, there's a lot of little formulas and things that you understand, and that's why people can re-optimize pages.

But again, when they re-optimize for one page, it's kind of like you're hitting X number of terms, but you change one thing and you could lose a term and you could gain some more terms. It's really testing and iterations and optimization to figure out the right combination for you, and not all keywords produce great leads. I'll tell you, even when we talk about these keyword research tools, maybe we would get more into the competitive research, they are not accurate. They're an estimate. You've got to triangulate. The only real good data, even better than the

analytics is search console, because analytics only, again, I'm going deep, I'm sorry, but analytics, if the pixel doesn't fire, they don't show that visitor. So if your page lows slow and you're looking at analytics and you're like, yeah, my traffic's way down, well, what could be happening if you look in search console is you're getting the traffic and they're bouncing so quick the pixel's not firing because the page is not loading. Yeah, and I want to kind of pull you back a little bit, you're very deep there.

So if you're a marketing person, all in gas, you've never even worked with SEO, do a little bit of research. Everything Matt just rattled off is 100% true, but I'm telling you from experience, almost nobody in marketing, all gas is intentionally putting content out there to rank for stuff. So for certain things, you actually can outrank much bigger companies. It's just work. It's just understand how it works. Now understand this as well. Once you figure it out this year in 2023, it won't work the same in 2024. It is constantly changing. And Matt, I want to give some examples

so people can go see. So for me, everybody, go check out, just search for all in gas sales experts and you'll see me organically on that first page. That's a couple of blog posts I wrote intentionally wanting to rank for that for motor point. Go to the blog and you can see where the keywords are with the phrases are in the H2 headings. You can see the backlinks. Same way, check out Google selling to all in gas using podcasts. I ranked number one for that organically. And when you see the post, you can see how I intentionally try to be helpful,

informative. And once again, I use the tool SEO Yoast. Matt, I know you rank for all kinds of stuff organically. Give the audience a one or two search terms for them to search for so they can see how y'all did it as well. Well, I mean, if you search for anything, digital marketing agency, SEO, whatever, I'm showing up in the maps a lot for a lot of different terms. I'm going after a lot of different industries. So I'm ranking niche down. But certainly, I think if you search anything like oil and gas, well, oil and gas marketing is like people are selling petroleum. That's not

what I'm doing. But I wrote an article on search engine journal that ranks really, really well for anything oil and gas kind of marketing related. But the thing about oil and gas, right, is like it's not just oil and gas, it's all these other terms, like you don't say you're only a gas person necessarily might say, Hey, I work in midstream or I work in downstream, I work in upstream or EMP, or I work with petrochemical or like, you know what I mean? Like so oil and gas is like so broad. What I wanted to say before we leave, because I think it's super important is to really just kind

of touch on AI really quickly. Now Google's guidelines, I think they'd kind of wave the light flag and said, okay, we're not going to disallow AI content. But they just released a eat update expertise, thwart a stress and right after that, a helpful content update. What I would tell you is if you're writing stuff and it's all AI generated, you're going to see or you've seen recently your stuff tank. Because if it's all AI generated, there's no opinion in it. It's what everybody else knows. There's content farms and factories out there producing

content 24 seven. It's not going to work forever. You've got to add your expertise to it. Also, if you write anything, now don't put in the byline like, Hey, written by AI, but you need to maybe put a source at the bottom like, Hey, this was helped written by like, you need to be transparent to build trust. And I'm just telling you, people are pushing out a bunch of content. Guess what? It's not working. The update happened. Boom. Because was it better than what's out there? But now it's getting flooded. The market's getting flooded with all this AI content. Well, it's

going to write very similar stuff. So how are you going to be different? How are you going to be one step above it? How are you going to provide that expert level content? I'll tell you, folks, you missed the AI chance. So for a little while, I was using AI right content and it would rank really high. And as Matt said, Google figured out that everybody was doing that and they killed it. In fact, I believe now that if you use AI and you don't edit the AI output and you post it, Google is going to intentionally punish you and stick it on page

1,367,000, right? And bury you. So there's tokens. So copling and pasting stuff, there's a token and they can match it. Everything that's written by AI, they're using API's to go, Hey, this exact thing was written. Boom. Okay, we're not going to give this value. All right, audience, I know we're all over the place, but I'm telling you, if you work in oil and gas, learn SEO, it can help you rank and help drive sales. And I know each and every one of you has to justify a marketing budget. This is one of those ways that you can show

that your work drove sales. It's a very easy thing to track down so that you can justify those budgets out there. We're getting to more of this, like I said, so our next episodes could actually be sort of along the same lines, but a competitive research newsletter. We launched our new Sunday update, Matt. It's been five weeks. We went from zero to 20,000 subscribers in five weeks, which is incredible, which means somebody almost liked the damn thing. The links in the show notes, Matt, we have recipes. We have a 100 year old company that's been catering oil and gas for 100

years. They're sharing their recipes in there. We have behind the scenes look at OGGN and some of the craziest stuff that we go through. We have coupons to give you discounts on everything from exotic hunting to tools that you need in the oil and gas industry. So links in the show note, check out. It goes out every Sunday. Also, our events newsletters also in the links in the show notes, especially if you're in sales and marketing. It's a nice tool to have where we take all the oil and gas events that are going on all over the world, put your inbox once a month so you can

figure out if you want to go to any of these conferences or expos. Matt and I, all our social links are in the show notes. We are working very hard on our insider's group. It's coming. This is the time we did the LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. I actually don't have one. Do you? Well, I can just give you a general tip and you just shared it. Okay. Having a newsletter or working on email marketing in some way of really permission based marketing, right? They give you your information, not cold outreach or anything like that, but is a really, really important because

not everybody is ready to buy as soon as you talk to them or the first time you talk to them. Only about 3% of people are typically ready to buy. So you're hunting for a needle and a haystack. An SEO can hit upper funnel, mid funnel, lower funnel and help support that, but it's one tool in the tool belt and email marketing and newsletters and creating those pens and pads, touchpoints, right? For all the salespeople out there to stay top of mind is really, really important because if they are getting your newsletter once a week, once a month, whatever it is,

once a day, if you're really connected and you have a strong audience, when they're ready to buy, they will engage you and consider you. But if they've checked out your website, they've left, they've never come back, the chances that you're even going to be in the mix, you don't know that and 75% of the sales process now is online. So you can't ignore this stuff and you should start developing your skill sets to leverage marketing and to leverage that in your sales and your sales cycles. All right. Perfect way to get out of here. Remember folks, make a difference and not

a sale. Check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of oil and gas sales and marketing podcast, a production of the oil and gas global network. Learn more at oggn.com.