#310: How To Hire An SEO Agency That Actually Gets You R.O.I. Results

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

google people business seo post website podcast ads content client site blog digital marketing big dan blog post put good paid month

SPEAKERS

Law (56%), Speaker 2 (42%), Speaker 3 (3%) 

Law Smith

0:01

We got some SEO. That's search engine optimization. We got Dan Kurtz coming on Dan kurtz.org. That's ktz.org because he's an organization. Is that our work? Are you sure? Yeah. Pretty sure. sweat equity podcast, streaming show pragmatic entrepreneurial guys with real raw. Real raw, business real real talk business, Rob business, Doc. Hello. Why? Go to sweat equity pod.com we're on Apple, podcast, Spotify, go on there, subscribe rate review. That's the cheat code that gets us up the business charts, we want to be in those business charts because we don't belong there. This episode of sweat equity is brought to you by over 2020 Luxe best Luxe my magazine, best small medium business enterprise sponsored by less than or other global magazine in the world. were one of the best podcasts in the world. That's basically all you need to know. This episode of sweat equity is brought to you by grasshopper, try grasshopper.com forward slash sweat like kieswetter. Who baby gets you $75 off an annual plan, grasshopper business phone line entrepreneurs app for a business phone line don't have Google Voice because he can't put ads to it eventually. You can't market a Google Voice number. Do you know that? I did. I've heard this. Did you know that but Google don't like that. They just want you to use Google Voice for free. Get your freak flag on. But if you get to try grasshopper.com forward slash twit, you'll get $75 off an annual plan, which is another business phone line. You don't need to sell phones like a drug dealer in the 90s. You can have another app with a business phone line that ports right into your phone line for $75 off an annual plan. Let's try grasshopper.com forward slash sweat. Let's get this party started. Hi. My sweater windy.

Law Smith

2:12

Windy. Windy.

2:24

About my sweater.

Law Smith

2:26

Dan, why don't you give everybody your your work? Where to go? Where to find you. Your plugs if we were on a late night show? Sure. Go ahead. Yeah, we're rolling that we Oh, you guys are recording? Yeah, yeah, we sorry, we didn't let you all get more professional podcast selling.

2

Speaker 2

2:49

Yeah, you guys can find me on Dan kurtz.org. It's my personal site. You find me on Facebook, Dan Kurtz. If you go to my personal site, all my social handles are hooked up to it. So wherever you want to chat with me, that's where I am. And that's k URDZ. Right, Dan records,

Law Smith

3:06

if anybody's trying to spell got it listening, you know, and don't look at the show notes that are in there. And I'll spell it wrong on purpose now. Um, so we've had you on before, if anybody's listening that didn't hear you before, go back, listen to that episode. But I'm going to make you backtrack a little bit. and answer the question you get probably all the time from people in your family. or friends you might run into that you knew back in the day. What is Seo? Can you explain it? What is it? I don't I don't know what it is? I hear it all the time. Oh, I heard you need it. I heard you need it for business. I don't I don't know what kind of question you get. Like I get like, if you're a comedian, you're gonna get Tell me a joke. And you're like, no. And then you're kind of an ass. So I assume you get what is Seo a lot, right?

2

Speaker 2

3:58

Yep, sure do. So SEO For the uninitiated is basically telling Google what it wants to know, and giving your website more favor than other people in your space. That's really all it is. So when somebody does a search, if your website answers that question, Google puts you up at the top.

Law Smith

4:17

Yeah, and so and the incentive, Google wants everybody to be content creators, right? That's kind of how I've been explaining it lately. Like, if you have a blog, and you meet the certain criteria, so you have 500 words or more, and you're doing that blog for your business, your personal brand, you do that once a week. That's going to be pretty good. As far as it's not going to be, you're not going to end up on the first page immediately. But if you do it consistently, and you do it with the keywords you want to be found for in these in these blog posts. That's a lot of the game for a lot of people. That's what I tell them.

3

Speaker 3

5:00

And in a way, though, there's the part where Google wants to be a good business. And they have, you know, they want it to make sense when you search something for it to pop up and correctly show the right thing. So like on there, and, you know, they can then sell ads that are, you know, more higher quality, I guess you could say, you know, so like, there's that into it, too. Right, Dan, I might be wrong. No, you're right.

2

Speaker 2

5:25

So it thinking about it, removing all the technical nonsense from it and all the other stuff. At the end of the day, Google is a search engine, but their main focus is as an advertising engine. So unless there's good content, they can't show good ads. So the whole purpose of Google having a search engine is to terminate that search. And if your content blog, post, video, podcast, whatever does that they reward you with showing up at the top? What does terminate the search mean? That means somebody is not going four or five pages deep looking for it. They're not bouncing back and look at someplace else. Like they come to your site. And they're like, oh, here's all the information, I want frickin awesome. I can stay here, put in my email address, get the info I want. Close the sale, whatever it is, whatever action you're trying to have somebody take if your website fulfills that need, and stops that transaction right there. They give you all the brownie points.

Law Smith

6:19

So on the technical side, how do you explain that to dopes? Like me? Sure.

2

Speaker 2

6:24

So the easiest way to think of it and I've been using this analogy a lot is your website is kind of like Kingdom or like a fortress thinking like Starcraft, Warcraft, old school games, like you got to build your foundation, you got to put all your pillars up, and the pillars are your content. But you also got to have your, your How do I put this, basically, like you're on your disciples or whatever, like Think of it like the Conquistadores back in the old days, they have to go out and spread the word of whatever it is you do. So you got to put it on like social different blogs, podcasts, different types of multimedia, to get people to find you where they hang out. So posting to your website is awesome. But there's that extra step of like putting your stuff out there where it's relevant, like going and finding a Reddit on subreddit about what it is you do, or whatever post the link there say, Hey, I just wrote this up, can you guys give me your opinion on it, and you'll get a bunch of traffic to your site

Law Smith

7:15

in traffic eventually equals cash, at some point, you're generating leads, I usually break down websites into kind of three parts your either your lead gen situation, you're a you're an e commerce platform of some sort. Where you're transacting right there typically, or, or your, you know, what used to be a bigger deal back in the day, you're kind of a media site, your blog, your something that has advertising on it. So I usually kind of break that's my Neapolitan ice cream of explaining, like most websites for businesses, is that that fair to kind of say? Yep, absolutely. And so I would always explain it, at some point, traffic needs to be part of your plan. And this audience we're speaking to, for this show is kind of like, there's a lot of people that want to do their own thing, this part gets really confusing. That's why I'm kind of starting at square one for a lot of it. And try not to overlap some of the stuff we asked you last time. If anybody wants to go back and listen to that one. But you're you're the expert. You're one of the funnier people, I follow online that talks about the digital game. Because I that's why I was like, we got to have you back on. Because if we're anything as far as a brand, message or brand voice, it's very tongue in cheek. And we very much want to have real talk about a lot of this stuff. And it's not in the business world, it's especially digital marketing. It's very, like, it's very, digital marketers that really do their own blogs and stuff, or try to reach out about teaching this stuff are either way too confusing, or way too, like in their own head about how great they are. And it annoys me, and I can't watch it. And then there's, you know, there's the broader business people that are just motivational and don't give any advice. So I like that you're, you're always kind of tongue in cheek when you're putting stuff out there. You're doing you do a lot of humblebrag. But I get why. Because no one will know the problem with digital marketing, and just let's use that umbrella term SEO is one part of that. You know, it's you have to do that, at to, to no one else will know, that's the that's the hard part about doing digital marketing is you have to brag about the stuff you've done. And you have to do it recently. You can't talk about something happened four years ago. So it needs to be recent, right? Because it needs to be relevant. And you have to do it constantly. But you do it in a fun way where you're like oh, I got, I got this client on, you know, this much traffic in one month, you know, what can you do?

2

Speaker 2

10:07

Well, because the thing is, and the biggest problem in the space, and I'm sure you've seen it as well is that all these guys go with the Oh, by my course for 1000 bucks or do this or do that whatever it is. And they're just trying to get you enrolled in whatever the courses where they learned from somebody else for 1000 bucks how to do the same thing. They just took the material and re recorded it, there's no original thought with a lot of their stuff. They're just like, Oh, I white label release company or I have white label from that cup.

Law Smith

10:36

I mean, I never really thought I because I had that mental hurdle of like, if I ever did that, like the previous episode, we talked about productizing your IP? I have, I have to get over the imposter syndrome part of it before I could even think of doing something like that. And I needed to think of people scamming, scamming, that you know, oh, yeah, absolutely. It's, it's always like trying to cheat on tests, middle schoolers out many do more work to cheat on the test than if you just studied? Yeah. And created like, kind of your own course.

2

Speaker 2

11:06

Yeah, sitting there, like writing all the answers down on a piece of paper and stuffing them in your sweatshirt, whatever, right? Trying to just pull them out as you're reading. Like, that's not gonna work. Yeah, Dan, how

3

Speaker 3

11:16

does social media and SEO How do they talk?

2

Speaker 2

11:20

I don't know how that works. I'm curious, like, does social media matter when it comes to like Google SEO? It does. So Google does take social media into account. So the big ones that they usually look at are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, those are like the big four, they look at the other ones as well. But those are the ones where people are the most active, it's the biggest user base. And Google, of course, always wants a slice of that traffic. So things you can do is like there's a paid software, you can hook up called missing letter. And you hook that up to your website. And it'll automatically go to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and I think Instagram, with automated posts for a whole year on social media. So you're kind of Yeah, so your content posting schedule is taken care of. And then you can just go about interacting how you normally would on Facebook, or any of the other platforms and not worried about it, so long as you have a year's worth of content sitting around ready to go, Oh, no. So it'll take that one post and then schedule it out for 12 months. So it'll say like, hey, two weeks from now, we're gonna make another post about it a month from now, two months from now, four months from now. So it'll continue to cycle that content for a full year. So as you keep making more content, it'll do a full one year campaign for that one post.

Law Smith

12:32

Interesting. See, this is the pragmatic, that's good. We love Yeah, send me that link. So does it do it in a different iteration? Or is it like, if someone was following me diligently? Would they see the same post for the whole 12 months kind of thing?

2

Speaker 2

12:46

Well, it would be cycled in with whatever your regular posts are. So as long as you're active and being you, it'll still pepper those in whenever it thinks it's a good idea. 12 posts from one year?

Law Smith

12:57

What about what about Google My Business? I try to tell everybody, you might as well be active on there. If you have anything that has to do with your business or brand as opposed. A lot of people think they need an address to have a brand page they don't. Google is what 94 96% of all organic search, right? For the most part, yeah. All the properties I own, I've got I've got, I want to I'm going to put a pin in that. But I definitely want to circle back to that. The way if Google comes out with a product, even when it was Google Plus they had their own social. I remember Google Plus they have an Amazon, they take a lot. They throw a lot of spaghetti on the wall going we can do that, too. Yeah. It's not as good. Usually, some things but Google My Business, if you are a local business, especially, you should be on there. And you should be actively trying to get reviews there. Because that seems if you're a local business, that's number 100%. Right? Your auto body repair shop, you're a painter, your you know, office, you know, office, property manager kind of stuff like all those kind of look very hyper local businesses, lawyers, dentists, Doctor, all professional services, specially.

2

Speaker 2

14:11

Absolutely. So think of it this way. Google, my business is a social media platform for Google, for you to talk about your business. So if you so if you go in there and you're met, you're the only guy let's say you're an attorney in Tampa, or wherever you are. And you're the only one who is posting about cases that you've won, or people that you've helped, or, you know, your company history, whatever. All of that stuff gets indexed in Google as a blog post. So that counts as content creation. And because it's on Google's platform, and Google's narcissistic, they're going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say, Okay, well, you're the only one in the area who's actually making regular posts. So you're the one who's the most active in the local community.

Law Smith

14:46

So we're gonna give you priority. So the long term tip is if Google comes out with something that looks like it could incentivize like that, like, hey, Google My Business, you should just be attached to kind of Google Maps right then Like, hey, you can post on that. I'm sure a lot of people listening don't even know that. Yeah, that you have the social aspect to it. It's only been around like two years or something. But like

3

Speaker 3

15:08

when a teacher tells you to write something down, that's gonna be on the test. That's Yeah,

Law Smith

15:12

yep. So do it.

2

Speaker 2

15:15

Yeah. So the piggyback off of that missing letter also integrates with Google My Business. So your blog post can go there too. Nice. Nice. So that'll take care of your content posting there as well. So then you put sprinkling your regular coupons, COVID, updates, whatever you have going on. And now you've got a full marketing strategy without lifting a finger. That's

Law Smith

15:34

pretty gangster. Yeah,

3

Speaker 3

15:36

this is why I like to have any on. So that'll we'll push it out to social media platforms individually, like social violet or something like that, as,

2

Speaker 2

15:44

Yeah, pretty much. So you can actually create the hashtags that had the description of the content that you want, it'll also come up with its own based on what you typed in. So like, it'll figure out what the trending hashtags are for the content they wrote. Really? Yeah. How much is this? Like nine bucks a month at the lowest Really? Yeah. Wow.

Law Smith

16:05

So does the publishing part and and it'll give you the research part.

2

Speaker 2

16:09

Yep, publishing scheduling. It also has its own link tracker. So it'll track clicks from whatever social platform to your website, it integrates with your analytics. So you can get full data back on your social pilot by

3

Speaker 3

16:24

Yeah, an ad for missing letter. For sure that now you already don't get sucked into that.

Law Smith

16:29

Yeah, I'm not. Oh, trying to dangle too many carrots while we're talking. Oh, no, no. It's my add, what's it called any, any other tools like that you can kind of throw out for any neophyte that's trying to do their own thing with the SEO game?

2

Speaker 2

16:48

Sure. So an easy one is if you're writing your own content, if you're a blogger, you can grab a tool called vid Nami, which will take the text that you type in and turn it into a video that you can upload to YouTube or any of the other video platforms. So it does it in the Tiktok format, the Instagram story format, Facebook format, and then it has like digitized voice or you can record your own voiceovers, whatever you want to do. But that'll give you videos that you can put out on YouTube with the same piece of content.

Law Smith

17:18

You have vid Nami, vi d a, or in a m II. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I see a lot of people do that with their, their podcasts with the a lot of like, audio wave kind of animation. Right? I'm just like, why don't you video video? Yeah, exactly. But I get it. You know, not everybody loves your podcasts like we love our own. Our baby. Yeah. What about what else? What other tools resources like I listened to all check into Neil Patel's podcast? Because it's seven minutes. Every now and again, I'll get something like, you know what you can do? Like it kind of I need? How about this? What are good things like that, like people I can either follow or get their RSS feed for good information on a continual basis. Because like, Neil Patel's is really good. I don't love the podcast as a podcast, but information wise, it's very good. Like, he was saying, if you do if you do like a poll, on LinkedIn, or or Facebook, you can eventually use that poll as a blog post. And as a research murder trial as legit research, which gets you up the ranking for that post. Right?

2

Speaker 2

18:37

Yeah, and that's something to take into account as you start building things up is use your audience to have your audience tell you what they want to listen to what they want to what content they want to consume, then go make it Yeah, and that's the easiest way to do it. And then just be like, Hey, you guys mind sharing it on social now you got a bunch of social media followers on your posts, and you didn't do any additional work except ask a question first.

Law Smith

18:58

Yeah, so you can you can almost commoditize a poll question. That seems silly, right? Yeah, your audience tends

2

Speaker 2

19:07

to like you take it and turn it into like top five things you need to know about podcasting, whatever it is, and then you just boom boom, boom, boom boom covered the top five answers that people gave

Law Smith

19:18

any so yeah, who were like the knowledge now like, continue to turn out good knowledge like that, like for Facebook ads, I tell everybody follow Jon Loomer. He'll he does everything very basically, like square one all the way to advanced. You're doing you're doing the one on one stuff for us right now on the show. But yeah, if anybody needs to hire you, it's easy for experts to give out the smaller stuff, the free stuff, because you can execute it but once you get to the real shit, that's when you need to call Dan. Well, what's, you know, you get a little cocaine taste, you know, little little taste. Yeah. Make sure it's not baby laxative in there. Exactly. get you hooked. Get the kids hooked like cigarettes. But so what are some other like resources we can follow, or that you enjoy? Doesn't have to be knowledgeable 100%. But

2

Speaker 2

20:12

so one of the guys that I've always looked up to in the space, as far as marketing is concerned is a guy by the name of Matthew Woodward. He started his blog back in 2011 2012, as a case study. And then every month that he was posting content, he would do an income report based on the content he was posting. So the blog was 100%, transparent front to back. So he would go and write content, say, Okay, well, here's, here's the post I did this month. Here's how much revenue it brought me. And can you make money? Can you make money online, just blogging, and continue that up until I think 2018 2019 and killed the project. But all the resources out there the project? killed himself? Yeah. Yeah, but he's got a ton of stuff. He's got a YouTube channel full of stuff. He doesn't really do podcasts. But he's got video content. He's got a blog full of stuff. If you type in a software or a program for marketing, or SEO, chances are he's got a post about it. But he's got some really unique ways that he does stuff. custom scripts, templates, more of the technical side, but it gives you a lot of good value.

Law Smith

21:16

Any Any others? Did you prepare at all? No, I got what else? No, I got some stuff. I want to make sure. I'm like this is self serving, too. I want to know, I want to know some of the stuff. It's like 15 minutes before we started, I got in laws, like I'm going to go for a ride. I'm like, I'm super sweaty. My brain takes off. He's like, I'm gonna take your questions. I got like, All right, cool. That's how I pre pro I just want to make sure we like anything else that come up. Okay, what else? He may have had another example. I just want to throw. So here's my thing. Here's what I wanted to get back to. So Google runs 94 96%. I always forget that number of organic search. Do you? And I, oh, I don't want to get to conspiracy theory ask. But does that bother you in the sense that they control information? Right?

2

Speaker 2

22:14

They do to an extent. So here's the here's the fun part. Google controls a lot of organic traffic. But think of all the other places online that you could hang out your whether it's Facebook, you know, there's people that just run Facebook ads, you've got your LinkedIn experts, you got your Instagram experts. And then think back to years and years and years ago, like when Google was just kind of in startup, where do you go for information, blogs, bulletin boards, forums? You know, things like that, if you think about it, yeah, like, yeah, so like mica is the number one site on the internet right now, as far as like the front page, the internet is Reddit. And that's a giant forum. That's all Reddit is. It's a forum right? We'll share links and then a comment and threats. That is the largest source of traffic on the internet that you don't have to try and SEO, you could go in there. build up some knowledge hanging out with people get your karma points up. Karma is like how they have their user score, whatever. You get your knowledge up in there, hang out with people and then say, Yo, I saw this post that this guy did on his website, what you know, what's your opinion on it? Now you've got 4300 people flooding your website, because that's the right got uploaded to the top.

Law Smith

23:18

So you can do stuff like that really easily. So but basically, a misinformation disinformation era that we've kind of been in let's say it's kind of come to the public site Geist a bit more. Thanks to Big Daddy, Donnie T. or former president. Your favorite your favorite I love talking about I'm so cool. Like, I just love going to my liberal friends at a table. Just go in one Donald Trump pretty awesome. And then just walk away and just be like, God, what an asshole. Just to see what they how they react to it. It's a good Rorschach test. Yeah, nobody knows what table you're talking about. Like a bridge table like my friend. You know, a bunch of brunch table. Yeah, I don't know when somebody's Sunday. Yeah, just to poke the bear. It's my grandpa's. You know, for hanging out with me at brunch. It's good. I'm gonna bring up I can't get to small talk. We're gonna go right past that to some medium. Yeah, maybe. Hey, I went talk. Maybe I don't get invited back. I haven't been to brunch in a while. Who knows? Yeah, exactly. They blame COVID on that, but I don't I don't know. I still see them out on Instagram runs ruiner. So. So it doesn't, it doesn't frighten you as much that one entity, it almost seems like you can if if government understood how much control they have on search, I would almost think they would call it a monopoly. They have that word because he knows how it actually works. That's all I know. I'm giving. I'm giving the extreme opinion. So he could Yeah, he can. He can tell me why I'm wrong.

2

Speaker 2

24:49

Now you're good. So Google owns a bunch of stuff. Obviously. They got YouTube. They got drive, they got Gmail, they've got all the other stuff they on blogger, their partners and medium They've got if you go look at Google Ventures gv comm they own like, part of like 200 companies, including like Uber and a bunch of other ones, right that they basically just like pump money into. And then they go ahead and like, change things up. So like, for example, whenever you go look for a product, you'll see Amazon's letters, the first one to pop up. And that's because Amazon pays Google billions of dollars to make sure that they get that slot so they make their margin. So there's that take into consideration. But that's that's big, big boy money. As far as monopolizing search, though, is, like I was saying before, you can route traffic from wherever you want on the internet, it doesn't just have to be Google, like SEO is a part of marketing. But it's not the only thing. You've got your page, you've got video, there's all sorts of platforms you can post to, if you want to find where people are talking about what you're doing, there's a service called awario warrior with an A in front of it. You plug in your social handles, and you plug in basically, whatever it is that your business does. It'll go out on the internet and listen for you and go find people having those conversations, pull them back into the dashboard and allow you to respond in real time to those people. Whoa. So you can completely circumvent Google and SEO if you don't want to go that route just by plugging in your handles and just let it run. Interesting.

Law Smith

26:15

Oh, yeah. So it's like, it's Yeah, it's just it's just indexing everything right? just constantly. Interesting. Yeah. So that none of that scares you from? Yeah, I'm gonna skip them. Right here too. So he moves on? No, it's it's kind of a big discussion going on in the in the digital marketing world. That's all.

2

Speaker 2

26:43

Yeah, for sure. And, you know, there's always gonna be, let's say, Google hasn't monopoly, or Google does this, or Google does that. Or, you know, for example, a client, I'll come to me or somebody that wants to be a client, oh, Google did this to my site, or whatever. And I'll go ahead and pop the hood and look at their data. I'm like, now you tried to gain the system, and they slapped you on the hand and told you no. You know, they're they don't necessarily do that. As long as you're not trying to manipulate their system. Like if you're doing blackhat stuff like cloak gang and doorway pages, like there's a whole back end to SEO. That's just people trying to gain Google and make a buck.

Law Smith

27:16

Yeah, they're a bigger deal back in the day for sure.

2

Speaker 2

27:19

Yeah. So it's, like you said earlier, like we've entered the deformation age of data, like it's just now being manipulated, regurgitated and pushed back out. But with what Google's doing, they're still trying to keep the algorithms somewhat intact, because remember, that's their moneymaker. Okay, they can't serve ads if they don't have searches. Right.

Law Smith

27:37

Right. Yeah. And, and like you said, it's integrated SEO is one one piece of that Trivial Pursuit pie of digital marketing, you know, paid another part. data, you know, social media is kind of in between both. I always kind of put it emails still big. If you have a good email list. You got to have content to be able to push out like video or a blog post or a podcast or something. Yeah. So you need those vehicles to be able to publish on on your site and other places. What What do you see is trends coming up that what I guess I want to know what makes you mad, cuz I like some of the posts you have. I like cuz you're like a friend of the program. Adam. Karp Kaepernick Kapur cardiac? cardiac. Yes. Who on LinkedIn is the funniest guy. He's funnier than almost all the comics I follow on Twitter. Like, he's funny for his like, HR, recruiting kind of niche. But he's really funny about it. Like, really, really funny. As far as being witty, and always having something every day. That's pretty good. But you're you're not too far behind. I see a lot of your stuff coming up was good. But you're getting there. You're getting there. punch up some stuff for you now. Perfect. But now, you know, I don't think you want us to punch up anything. Right? Yeah, it'll be like, how's your guj looking? You search? Google image by tape, bro. So so what what makes you angry about kind of getting this information out there? It feels like what I used to have a bug up my ass when I had the full service agency was there's so many fake people that are selling marketing or digital marketing. And they don't do it. And the deal with SEO is you won't know for four to six months, whether they're actually doing what they're doing a long time, unless you've really opened the hood, which is the laptop and ask them. You know, what, what are you doing? Show me you know, yeah,

2

Speaker 2

29:51

exactly. So that's, that's a huge one is a lot of the technical stuff that goes into it. So my pet peeves are the people that I go and look at what They're selling like, Oh, go and I'll copy their sales page, type it into Google. And there's 35 other sites that have the exact same sales letter because they bought it from a course, stuff like that. So they're all selling the same product. They're all using the same back end fulfillment company, whether it's e brands, or some of the other ones, there's a ton out there. And they're just white labeling. They don't do any of the work. They don't have anybody in house that knows what's going on. And basically, it just, it creates a disservice to the client, like sure scaling as a white label is great. If you're in a business to be in the business. Like if you want to start an agency and you want to be successful, sure, start with white labeling, get your bearings and then start bringing that team in house. Like relying on fantastic until you reach $100 million a year is not a strategy.

Law Smith

30:43

Right? Right. Yeah, it's it's to me, it was just unethical it. I have a weird integrity thing with digital marketing, like a lot of website companies rip off, people piss me off. And we were always a rebound boyfriend, agency, you know, someone that got churned somewhere else by someone. That's good. On the business development side. I always call them business development marketers, like, they're good on that side. I wasn't. But like, we were doing the work, would you make me mad? And I think that's the same thing that drives you to be a little counting online.

2

Speaker 2

31:17

Absolutely. Yeah. It's just, you know, you see, so many of these businesses get jilted because somebody went and sold a website for 399 bucks, and they got it outsourced. And all this other sort of stuff like this is great. I'll go look at the website. And just like look at speed and performance on like, your website takes a minute to load on mobile, right? average person on mobile is gonna wait about four seconds before they back out if your page isn't loaded with their credit card in hand, you are losing out.

Law Smith

31:42

Yeah, I used to just go to Tools dot pingdom comm and just show them in real time and go, look, this is a third party. This isn't even Google. Like, yeah, this is legit. I sprinkle in some kind of Asian joke in there. But what that

3

Speaker 3

31:57

did, you would probably squeeze in some sort of Asian joke. pingdom pingdom. For to do it, have I

Law Smith

32:05

man, I'm a hack. past me was a hack. What? So anything else that that's on your mind about this world? How, how if I'm a business owner, small business owner, how do I not get ripped off by an SEO company?

2

Speaker 2

32:22

So they should be able to provide you metrics, they should be able to clearly define what you're going to receive, like, for example, some of the stuff that we do with clients, we say, Okay, here's what we're going after. Here's what we're going to focus on on your website, here's exactly what you can expect through utilizing our AI technology. You know, this is exactly what it does. It's worked in, you know, I've been testing it over the past year and a half. We put up 10 million pages online, we've never had anybody have less than acceptable results, period. You know, it does the work. It does the inputs, and then we let it rip and do what it's supposed to do. And it just does it. So we've had clients jump up, like right now I'm working with a real estate client, their national, they went from having like, 75 keywords about six months ago. We're sitting on 650. Right now, we made two additional blog posts.

Law Smith

33:12

Wow, I love it. Yeah. You didn't even see your head swag. When you did, but you're like, Yeah. Like you just dumped on someone. I love it.

2

Speaker 2

33:22

Yeah, like it's just it's a matter of knowing how to do the thing the right way. And the problem is, is everybody's used to this push button. People tend to treat SEO like it's a factory job, you know, do this, get links, build content and just do this process, go through the motions, go through the numbers, get the client payment every month, and just tell them Oh, we're waiting. Oh, we're waiting, you know, for results to come in. And then six months later, they don't have any results. And they've already renewed for another 12 month contract because your sales guy pushed them.

Law Smith

33:51

Right. Yeah, that is disgusting. Yeah, it's a tech gap. It's a tech educational gap. It's, you know, the a lot of people that are owning businesses that are over 50 definitely don't have it. don't even want to talk about it most of the time. And then you've explained it to them. And then a lot of them used to be Boomerang clients, they come back because they'd be like, we should, we should have gone with y'all. Or we asked why they just called us up out of the blue and we went with them and like they called you and you went with them. You were on a leads list. You even know it? Yeah. Well, before we go too long. Is there anything else you want to get out there? Because we we'd like to end? We never asked you this the first time around. We'll ask you. What advice would you give your 13 year old self? But if there's anything before that, before we get to that question, if you got anything to promote blood before it's

2

Speaker 2

34:51

not really I'm working on building an online marketing community that's going to be filled with actual courses over the shoulder training of how I do what I do. So take Somebody from zero to building their business up within 12 months, every step of the way, full over the shoulder training, marketing, SEO paid traffic, how to build a website how to craft an offer, how to do what they do specifically working in a one on one environment. And then there's going to be other courses for people who like just want to learn ads or just want to learn how to monetize on social, that somebody could go in and grab and just take the course and go run and execute. Where are you going to put that Facebook group? Now? So it's actually building a full community from scratch? So it's going to be a website with a mobile app.

Law Smith

35:33

But it's on a list? I definitely Yeah, I definitely want to be on that. Yeah, we'll

3

Speaker 3

35:37

do we'll take the course and talk about it dude, give you a bunch of material to spit out there. We're down Do it for her. And also,

Law Smith

35:44

one thing we've been meaning to do is have more community marketing, which is a whole other maybe a whole other episode for it. But you know, Facebook groups are big for marketing your fan base and growing that we like Reddit is another that you're talking about. slack I, I sat too long trying to figure out what's the best one to really put a lot of energy into your last one investment is going to be discord

2

Speaker 2

36:09

really interesting. Yeah, the reason why is because you can separate the channels, it's free, it's unlimited users. And on top of that, there are apps and programs, you can install that you can have a paid membership channel, specific to certain clients or people that you work with or whatever. And you can have them basically checkout via stripe, and then the bot automatically adds to the channel. When they cancel, they get access removed.

Law Smith

36:31

I don't have to pay attention. Now we just have to figure out a premium. We got to do more stuff. So yeah, what advice would you give your 13 year old self?

36:46

Do more faster and fail harder,

Law Smith

36:49

do more faster and fail? What can you give us kind of example? Sure.

2

Speaker 2

36:55

So I've been doing technology computer stuff since I was a kid playing with different things, figuring out how to build machines, all that sort of stuff, which finally led me down the route I'm on now. So my advice to me would be keep doing what you're doing, but try and break stuff a lot quicker. It's just you'll get to that point a lot faster. You'll have a lot more. You know, after years of doing SEO and marketing and stuff, the faster you can get to Oh no, I thought up is the point where you can go Okay, cool. We found another way to not make a light bulb. Let's try and run it this way.

Law Smith

37:27

Yeah, I think a lot I would say the general advice. If there's like a if there's a kind of a motif or a mantra to most people's advice themselves as gas. It's not getting in their own way. A lot of the time by overthinking. Yeah, I'd kind of put that if we're doing family food. I put that in that bucket.

2

Speaker 2

37:49

Absolutely. Yeah. It's one of those pull the trigger, do the thing. See what happens?

Law Smith

37:53

Yeah, so you were perfectionist and or fair or scared to fail? Like I used to be? I used to have fear of failure.

2

Speaker 2

38:01

Yeah. And that's the same problem with every business owners. They're like, Oh, my God, do I pull the trigger on this? And the best advice that I could give myself is fail faster. Fail fast, fail faster.

Law Smith

38:12

Interesting. I like that. I can do that. Well, I appreciate you coming on. We appreciate you coming on. In, you know, let us know if you ever want to come back on. Target. chew the cud? I know, I know. I'm a great interviewer. I've got a lot more questions you do. Oh, I didn't know. Well, I mean, you didn't you didn't go for a job or a job before at Brown? Well, we'll have to go on a man jog. Real Man, john gray before real sweaty?

2

Speaker 2

38:41

I'll give you guys one more thing that I'm noticing in the industry right now, which is making things difficult for a lot of marketers is Facebook is having a problem with the iOS rollout. Right now with that ad blocking privacy thing. And Google's having the same problem. The cost for ads and acquisitions is starting to skyrocket. It's starting to climb up right now. I think the data was 94% of all iOS 14 users have the app, the ad tracking turned off on their phone. And it's one of the biggest selling phones right now. So all those people are not being able to be targeted pixel cookied. any of that stuff, Google's going back to first party data, so they're actually going to put a third party cookie blogger in Chrome in 2021.

Law Smith

39:22

Yeah, that's a big deal.

2

Speaker 2

39:24

So things like that. So I'm having a lot of clients right now that are leaving the paid ads community and coming to me to recoup the traffic investment by doing

Law Smith

39:31

SEO. Well, let's do a part two month then you can get a question you got and I got a lot more questions about that as well. And I think more of the dust will settle a little bit because this just started a month ago right? have asked the app not to track kind of thing.

2

Speaker 2

39:48

But it's gonna happen on Facebook for a couple months. Now. There's a lot of ad agencies getting their accounts, disapproved turned off stuff like that. I know people that are just Facebook ads agencies have closed up shop overnight because Facebook just said Nope. Yeah. And that's why I never liked the margin on the ad spend as a payment.

Law Smith

40:05

Because there are a lot of people will do that the business development kind of ad agencies, they've put a margin on your ad spend, and go, Okay, that's our fee, which it makes a lot of sense. If you're, you're decent at what you're doing, or you're white, labeling it white, adding it, whatever. For people that are good, you know, Philippines, you found someone, whatever, because your ad spin is going to increase. So that's your commission increases. But it, there's too many hours that there's too many external variables, and that you might as well just do a flat fee, because it's going to be the same amount of work. Exactly.

2

Speaker 2

40:40

So when I was doing it, I used to do one of two ways it was either pay for performance, or it was pay per lead. Yeah, just because if I'm delivering new business, and we can verify that it's a qualified lead, and you guys are handling it, then I should get paid based on that. Not on the fact that I did the ads, right, and whatever's left over is what I can buy at Starbucks.

Law Smith

40:59

You're one of the good race. Yeah, you're brave. Yeah. put your money where your mouth is. I love it. Exactly. All right, buddy. We'll reschedule you in a month or schedule it again in a month and we'll we'll do a part to reschedule work, right I'm worried me Alright, man. Alright, got it, guys. Have a good one.