Transcription
Zach, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
>> I'm doing well. Thanks for asking. How are you?
>> Yeah, I'm I'm doing awesome. I'm excited to be here. I think this will be this will be really interesting. This is the first part of what we are planning as of now to be a five-part series all about SEO. We've done this in the past. So, if anybody's missed it, go check out the PPC essentials or the the PPC master class. Also, we have the Facebook ads master class that we've done. And SEO has kind of been a long time coming. So, I'm I'm excited to dive into this and and start to to demystify this a little bit because I can tell you the number one thing that we hear from people when we talk about reservations with SEO is that they feel like it's a back it's a black box. Like they just don't understand what's happening with it. And our goal here, while we can't teach you everything you want to know about SEO in a series of of five podcast episodes, our goal is to give you as much information as we possibly can so you can be a savvy business owner, not just blindly trusting anything that any SEO agency tells you. So, any thoughts on that, Zach?
>> Honestly, that's one of the biggest things for me is that black box. And that's something that I believe through my work is transparency. So, I'm I'm really excited to dive into that stuff.
>> Yeah. Let's talk about you a little bit because I don't know I think we've done one podcast episode before. We haven't introduced you to the podcast audience very much. So, for for anybody listening that's unfamiliar with Zach. He's our director of SEO, which means ultimately everything boils up to him in terms of what's what's happening with our with our SEO product for SEO clients, all that kind of stuff. That said, there's a lot of people involved with making sure that we have we have good SEO results and we're making things things work. But but Zach is in in a lot of ways the mastermind behind it. Zach, do you want to share a little bit about about why you're passionate about it? You know, what did you do before this?
>> Yeah. So, I am about 15 years into the the digital marketing with an emphasize in social media, SEO, website, web development, and stuff of that nature. So, really where my passion comes from is helping clients succeed. that that has been ever since I started in this industry that's been my passion because it's something fulfilling. It's something that gets me up in it gets me up in the morning and allows me to know that everything that I'm doing has real world impacts. What I was doing prior to this, I was running my own business for about four years. So, I have a lot of experience not only doing the work but managing all the backend things as well. So, I have a lot of knowledge in that regard. I just want you all to know that I have your best interest at heart and I'm here to kind of drive that and get you the results you need.
>> So So what I thought it'd be cool to do in this episode, we we've kind of we talked a lot about how we could break this out because you're taking this big amorphous giant thing of of SEO and you're trying to to like chunk it out into these these pieces that are easy to understand. And what we talked about could be a good idea for the first one is just to talk like more from an expectations and an overview standpoint of what to you know what can you really expect with SEO. So to give give you guys an idea of some of the stuff that's on our agenda for today. I want to talk about the timeline of how long it takes for SEO to work and what metrics you can look at along that whole timeline. What's the right amount of money to spend on SEO? Can you spend too much? Can you spend too little? How should you be adapting your strategy over time? and and also what do you need to be ready to do as as the the business owner or as the business marketing director, whatever whatever your role is in the business to to facilitate this. So, that's kind of what we have in the agenda for today. I guess we'll call it like the 12-month SEO game plan. This is sort of overarching what does this look like? And then the other four episodes that we're going to do, again, four as we tentatively plan this, but sometimes these things kind of change over time as we as we realize we want to go deeper on one topic or another. But our plan in those ones is to go a little bit deeper into specific SEO strategies that are working really well for our clients. And then today we're kind of overarching it and talking about how you should even be coming up with strategy and what type of cadence, what should you be expecting, how long should it take, etc. So let's jump right into that back. Let's start with probably the biggest question that we get around SEO, which is what do I get and how long does it take? Those are those are the that's what everybody wants to know, right? Because as a business owner, right, you're just you just want to know how long is this going to take to work and how well is it going to work when it does work. And that's a loaded question, right? It's the most it's the thing that everybody wants to know. And it'd be really easy for us to just sit here and just kind of throw a bunch of smoke at you that that isn't real. And the reality is it varies a lot. But Zach through through his process of working with a lot of our clients and understanding the backend metrics has kind of put together a framework to understand what can be expected in different time intervals and and I'd love to dive into that and and let me just tell you first from the standpoint of business owner. We all know that SEO is a long-term investment, right? That's the number one thing when we bring up SEO in our calls and stuff like that. Our clients say, "That's a long-term investment, isn't it?" I think if you're like a real estate investor out there that doesn't know that SEO is a long-term investment, then I don't know what you've been missing because he's like most people know that, right? So, so I'm not just going to be like everybody else where like it's longterm. It's long term. It's long term. Like you know that we want to get deeper than that. We want to go further into this. I can tell you my number one concern like I invest in a number of things in my business long term. My number one concern anytime we invest in something longterm is the feedback loop. And the reason this is really important is you and I both know that 90% of the things that you invest in in your business are never actually going to pan out. That's the truth. It's it's a sad truth of business, right? And and hopefully 90%'s too aggressive of a number. Hopefully, it's closer to 30 40%. But it's it's reality that that business you strike out a lot, right? And the real risk of long-term investment, and I think this is where a lot of agencies get it wrong. and they look at it, they're like, "Oh, the client's not willing to invest in something long-term." They're not long-term minded. No, that's not true. Oftentimes, what's happening is you could be very long-term minded, but what you're afraid of is a lack of a feedback loop. Because if I go test something that I know if it works, it's going to work this month and I test it and I realize it doesn't work, then I can go try another thing next month. And I could do that over and over again for 12 months and I could try 12 things, right? versus with SEO, if it's going to take me 12 months to find out if it works or not, then I'm going to be 12 months into investing in that at that time period, right? So, the the slowness of the feedback loop is one of the most dangerous things. And that's why a lot of what we structured for the episode today, we want to talk about what metrics you can look at at each range because while it is true that SEO is a long-term investment, it's not true that you have to wait 12 months to see if you're on the right track, right? because there are early signs that show that it's working or that it's not working. It's not like you get nothing and then suddenly all of a sudden you get this great return on investment. There's a lot of steps in between getting started and actually getting that return on investment which for me as a business owner is an important thing because I'm willing to invest in one year, two year, three year, four year plays all the time in the business because I understand that's what makes a great enduring business. I just want to make sure I'm not investing in those consistently for a long time only to find in a long time that they didn't actually end up working. So there's the there's the intro. That's why all this stuff is important. Zach, I'm going to open up the floor to you. Tell us a little bit about, you know, what kind of time periods you're looking at in terms of sitting next.
>> Yeah, most certainly. Just something to add to this. The way that I've always looked at this is that we're not looking at a 12-month strategy and then at the end of the 12 months is when everything starts skyrocketing. That's not the way this actually works. Is you're going to see that upward trend, maybe a little dip just because of Google and the algorithmic changes that happen. That is a part of life and that is a part of SEO that Google is our friend and our enemy at the exact same time. So we got to work within that space. So the way that we typically break this out is we break it out in quarters. And the way that one of the reasons why we break it out is so that we can get that feedback loop. So we're able to determine what we're doing actually has direct real world effects and also make sure that it we are adapting to your needs and your concerns that are showing up. But realistically, the four phases that kind of break in, pardon me, the three phases, I apologize, is early stage, growth stage, and mature stage. The way that we break this out is the early stages, that's where we're ramping up, depending on where you're at in your flow. You could be at the very beginning of this, your brand new website with no name, no authority, or you could be a brand name that's been established for a couple years, 10 years, whatever it is. We still need foundational pieces in there. That's where we look at your technical. That's where we look at your your Google business profile. That's where we look at your content. We look at your analytics, your benchmark data. We look at everything in that regard to determine that. And one of the biggest things, and this is something that I don't think we talk about enough, is your competition. like how much your competition is doing, how well they're doing above you, how well they're they're they have been doing for years. This is something that that is where that early stage comes into play. That's where we're laying the foundation, making that plan, that strategic approach that we're able to really get that growth. The next phase comes in after all of that foundation has been set up and we should start number one having good reporting, good dashboard information, good metrics for you to be able to find. That's where you'll start seeing some of your keywords starting to increase because you don't go from zero or pardon me 100 plus in the results to page one. You go from 100 plus to 90, then 80, then 70. It's that that process and those are the items that we should be able to start seeing in that time and that's what our reporting is presenting to you. That's where you're going to start seeing more impressions. The way that I generally break up the major metrics that we look for. It's kind of a feedback loop itself is your keywords turn to impressions, your impressions turn to clicks, your clicks turn to sessions, and your sessions turn to leads. So any time during that process that we're seeing an issue, you can reverse engineer that and at that point those are the issues. Those are the things that we need to fix in order to to get that growth, get that stable results and that is something that we have to work through with some of the lead quality also. Sometimes we could get some really bad lead quality in the beginning because we are growing. we are getting found in certain keywords especially with the website the way that it may have been built. Then that very last phase is that mature phase. That's where your local market position, constant lead generation through your organic search, getting a lot of buzz, getting a lot of value through this. And this is where some of your local uh authority and some of your trust signals really kind of build together. And through our reporting, we're able to see those those pieces. So generally speaking, in a very broad level, those are the the kind of the success indicators that we're looking for.
>> Yeah, that that's super helpful to know. And I will just emphasize something that you said, which I think is a fantastic a fantastic way to to share this, right? Is at the end of the day as business owners, what do we want to rank on keywords? We want to rank like number one on everything all the time, everywhere, right? That would be that would be awesome. And also, we're probably starting nowhere. And somewhere in between nowhere and everywhere is this in between, right? Where like you you weren't ranking for a keyword and now you're ranking number 70 for a keyword, right? And Zach, how many impressions, how many clicks, how many leads do you get ranking number 70 for a keyword?
>> Zero.
>> Yeah. Zero. As as someone named Noah in our company often says, the the best place in the world to hide a dead body is the second page of Google.
>> Nobody goes there, right? So, especially for these commercial queries, like if somebody's looking for a way to sell their house, look, you can you can survive on the second page of Google if you got some like obscure technical thing where they're going to go through the first page and they're not going to find what they're looking for and then they're going to find you. But like, I need to sell my house to an investor. Sell my house fast. We buy houses. Do you think they're not going to find anybody like you on the first page of Google?
>> Yeah, they're going to find somebody like you on the first page of Google. They don't have to go to the second page of Google to find somebody like you, right? So, so that's that's kind of like an in between step on the way. So, someone else was talking about how the feedback loop is really important. This is an example of something like that, right? Progress looks like going from nowhere to position 70 and then from position 70 to position 60 and 60 to 50. And at that point, you're not you don't have revenue, but you can see you can see that progress, right? And our goal for all of our SBO clients is return on investment in in that first year. What I can tell you it tends to look like is imagine a graph where you have your PPC ROI next to your SEO ROI. You'll find the PPC tends to be a little bit more stable over time. Sometimes a little bit growing, shrinking depending on what's happening in the market and definitely usually ramping up after a first, you know, little period where it's worse in the beginning, but after six months, we're hoping for a lot of stability there. And then SEO, we'll find starts out like rock bottom. like you don't really expect very much from them at all. And then it's going to grow over time and then at some point that line is going to pass PPC meaning for every dollar you're spending on SEO you're now getting more from SEO than you were from PPC and it's going to continue onward and above PPC. And and the difference here is that just the type of asset you're investing in because SEO has a compounding nature versus PPC, you're going to like you're just it's kind of like every time you send the direct mail, you're going to get a you're going to get whatever leads you get from them. Yeah, sure. There's going to be some stuff like somebody's going to throw that postcard on their on their fridge for the next six months and they call you after. It's not that those things can't happen, but it's like SEO is almost as if like a direct mail campaign where if you pay to send the postcards this month, next month when you pay to send more postcards, you're going to you're going to pay for those on top of you're going to get those on top of all the other ones that you paid for. So, it's almost like if I send a thousand postcards this month, I got that thousand locked in forever and next month if I send another thousand, it's going to be 2,000. And then the next month if I send another thousand, it's going to be 3,000. because when I pay to send those postcards, I'm basically paying to send them like for a really long time every month instead of just paying once, right? So, it's a it's a it's a compounding nature just based on how it is. So, if I were to summarize what you said though, Zach, you basically said like initially there's going to be foundational elements at the beginning there, we're not really expecting movement in metrics. that is.
>> So like we're talking probably three months where the needle is completely stagnant.
>> And then sort of that months three through nine, that's when we start to see some keywords popping on the popping onto the the radar and we start to maybe not get a ton of traffic, but we're, you know, we're seeing that we're like, you know, maybe moving from position 70 to position 50 for this keyword that's important to us, right? And then it's more like months 10 plus 10 to 12 where it's often that we start getting leads those leads start converting into deals etc.
>> And yes absolutely one thing I want to clarify is that there are variations of keywords that you may jump from position and naturally you are already 70 and you may jump to 20 just that quick. Especially within that early phases those ones are typically very low traffic. you may only get one or two impressions for them, but you got one click and maybe even a deal from it. We're not saying that that's not possible, but on the the overall that's exactly how it is is the very beginning is the foundational. Let's make sure everything is good. Let's make sure your website's sound. Google's crawling it properly, users can crawl it properly, forms are working accurately, sending in information to your CRM accurately. So, there's a lot of back-end things that need to be fixed generally within that first three months.
>> That makes a ton of sense and and I think it's it's normal that like some keywords are going to be less competitive. So, you'll find faster progress. Also, a big factor, this is where you're starting too, right? It's something that we like to look at a lot in our SEO audits that we do when people are coming to us and they're already doing SEO with another company. We like to look at striking distance keywords and these are these are great keywords that are just like not quite there, right? Maybe they're positions 11 through 20 a lot of the time which which fall often on the second page of Google and it's showing that Google thinks you're relevant for this keyword. It's chosen to rank you. You're just not quite there competition, right? And what that shows us often is a lot of lowhanging fruit. Like we're we're pretty close there. If we could just get a few of these keywords past that threshold onto the first page, that's when we'll start to see a lot more leads. We'll start to see a lot more deals from from this. So there's a there's a small scope here. And I will I will emphasize this SEO. The reason it feels like a black box is because it's complicated and because there's a lot of moving parts and because nothing can be said. Absolutely. What we're trying to do here is we're trying to distill our experiences with a bunch of different clients and Zach's 15 years of experience managing SEO campaigns into like this is sort of generally what you can expect. But what we're doing there is we're just kind of shooting straight like right in the middle. And if you have outlier cases on both sides, right, where where clients can take exceptionally long to rank, some can like make a few tweaks on the website and it starts to rank really quickly. At the end of the day, SEO is not an exact science. At the end of the day, we're trying to influence this algorithm, right? And the better you can do at being on that same page with your agency that you're working with about that, the it it helps the relationship work a little bit stronger, right? Because what you don't want to approach is what you don't want to do is approach every single thing with skepticism. you needed like that good partnership where where you have that curiosity and that benefit of the doubt going both ways. And you know, sometimes sometimes an okay SEO campaign could produce great results and sometimes a great SEO campaign produces okay results. And it's it's not it's certainly not a perfect science. And you could take that from a company that's doing a lot of SEO campaigns in one industry where where we know exactly what's going on even sometimes in situations that are very similar from one client to the next and finding that the results vary a lot because there's there's this unknown nature of the algorithm. I'm curious to hear in in your perspective, Zach, what the best way to prioritize and know what's got to happen on the SEO is. And we are going to go into all those strategy elements in in future episodes here. So if you're looking for the nitty-gritty, the nerdy, then we'll we'll get there. But if you're if you're looking a little bit more high level, like more of a business owner standpoint, I I'd like to hear from that perspective. Zach, how do you know what to do and when?
>> Yeah, that's a great question. The way that we present our analysis, first and foremost, everything has to be done from an analysis. I'm a data-driven person. I believe everything needs to come from data. So need to remove the bias from it. One of the ways in which I do that is I look at the competitive landscape that you're in. Who you're fighting against, who's in the top five positions in some of the primary keywords that we're looking for. What makes them good over you? And it's that comparison to determine this is where I'm at. This is where they're at. What's the gap? Another big thing and this is industrywide for all of our clients generally speaking is that content is a very big issue for us. Google has an algorithm strictly dedicated to content and the acronym is called eat e expertise authoritiveness and trustworthiness and what that boils down to good relev relevant topical valuable content for our clients. So for your clients really and the way that we look at that and we analyze that is through there's a few tools that could be done from an SEO side one of the bigger tools is looking at where you're currently ranking versus what where your competitors are ranking and that'll give us a good understanding of how Google has assigned your website to those individual industries. So if you're looking at you're looking specifically for divorce divorces or if you're look for grandparents or whatever the case may be damage whatever and looking at those competitors you can see that their content is very relevant very topical very actionable and those are the ones that are getting the leads. So that's a uh in a nutshell those are the the primary things that we look at.
>> All right. Very cool. And what's the So I can tell you go to most SEO companies and they're going to basically give you the the menu, so to speak, which is sort of like, look, these are the things we do, pick a package. And honestly, we were like that one once upon a time before Zach kind of changed it. So, so talk talk a little bit about how we do our strategy now and why it's why you believe it's better that way.
>> Yeah, mostly. So, one of the biggest things looking at marketing, it's not a one-sizefits-all. We cannot put Joe Schmo and Jane Schmo against each other and say that they're the exact same and they this package will work exactly perfect for each one of them because their scen scenarios are different. One's on the east coast, one's on the west coast. very different markets, very different terms that are used, very different lo local jargon that's used. So, one of the ways in which we produce our strategy is we produce it on a per client basis. So, we're looking at your exact needs, your exact challenges, and your exact items that need to be addressed in order for you to rank to meet best SEO standards, best practices, and therefore the best results possible. So each client every quarter we go through your website and are providing an analysis to create the next quarter strategy so that we're able to come in there understand your exact needs do the feedback loop understand what was successful what may have worked what didn't work and then make adjustments to that as well we also go in a monthly cadence and provide you with a monthly report and then we do that exact same feedback loop. What was good last month? What happened? What did we do? What did we see? What areas are we going to change based on the new analysis that we've done? So, we're always looking at what is happening on your website. We're not putting in you into a package and setting it and forgetting it, saying you are good. There's no issues. Everything's happy. You're good. We are looking at everything and saying what can we do better? And that's what our approach is. That's why it is better is because we are not looking at you as the same as everyone. We're looking at you as individual websites, individual companies.
>> Yeah. And this will be more clear as we talk about more of the more of the concepts that we will be in in in future episodes. To give you guys a a brief preview, we're basically going to be talking about like websites and technical SEO, onpage SEO, off-page SEO, Google business profiles. Those are kind of like the four legs that that make up this stool of of real estate investment SEO, so to speak. And and what people ask us all the time is, well, which one of these is most important? And what agencies often lean on is like, oh well, we know that this one's most important, right? And all that's just based on whatever experience they had. And and our approach is like whatever whichever of those legs of the stool is the shortest, that's the one that probably needs the most focus right now, right? Because what we keep on seeing happen in the industry is it's like, you know, your your real problem is that you don't have enough authority, you don't have enough backlinks, yet you're about to post your 600th blog. Meanwhile, blogs one through 599 have done nothing for you, right? That kind of stuff is what we see commonly. And the and the the SEO company's like, well, you know, we we told you in your package you get this many blogs per month, so here's your blogs, right? But it's not it's not focused on what actually needs to get done. Right? So that's why I I'm pretty passionate about this idea of we have to identify where we're weak because SEO grows like I'm not sure if you're familiar with the theory of constraints for business, right? It's this it's this idea that every business has something that is constraint, right? So, if your business today is a million-doll a year business, there's some reason that it's not a $3 million per year business. What that reason is, I don't know, but it stands to reason that if we could find that and solve that constraint, then the business would naturally grow until it would then reach whatever the next constraint is, at which point it would start to plateau. And then if you solve that constraint, it'll continue to grow until it reaches the next constraint. That's why you see that businesses often don't grow linearly or exponentially, but more in like steps like stairs where they grow a little bit and then they plateau, grow a little bit, plateau. And it's the exact same with SEO, right? We kind of have these four different pillars. And if one of them is suffering, it could be that it's holding all the other ones back. And then fixing that actually gets more value out of the work you did for that one and more value out of the work that you did for all the other ones, too, because these things compound on each other. and and that will I promise you that'll make more and more sense as we get more into the weeds of of how the SEO structure and strategy works. One last thing I want to ask you, Zach, just because I know it's going to be like one of the biggest questions that we get on this before we dive into it. We covered a lot of what we wanted to cover today and then we'll be diving, like I said, into strategy in the in the future episodes. But let's talk about the the elephant in the room with SEO right now, which is that some people are saying SEO is dead. We're talking about a long-term investment here. What if you're setting up this ladder and you're climbing all the way up this ladder just to realize that by the time you get to the top, what you were climbing to get isn't actually there anymore. Is there is it true that AI is negatively impacting SEO?
>> No, I actually think that they are working together in the way that they present the information because without websites AI won't have places to gather their information. So, it is something that does require that general feedback loop of you need us to survive, but we're making things easier for people to find things. So, I think it's additive. So I think SEO will encompass AI and that's something that we're actually including within our strategies as well is an AI focus. So it is something that I don't think it's taking over. I think it's just being absorbed into.
>> Yeah. And I I I agree with you. I think it's it's a natural transition in a lot of ways because language models are used in similar ways to search engines. And still you just have to think of it like this. Are there still going to be motivated sellers in 10 years? Yes, they're going to be motivated sellers in 10 years. Are they still going to search through some type of means to find the way to deal with that problem? Yes, they are still going to search through some type of means to find the way to deal with that problem. Okay. Then you just have to think, is there going to be some type of engine used for searching? either it's a search engine or it's a language model or whatever the case is that is leveraging content which is trying to find which content is authoritative and relevant in order to feed them the best possible answers and could you be optimized in that system to allow your company to be featured in those situations I think so so there's a there's definitely a there's definitely still a feature in this I will say there's a lot of talk in the industry right now of like people don't Google anymore and all that stuff And maybe that's true among some business owners, but we can't forget that motivated sellers do everything that everybody else does, but like 10 years later or 15 years later, there's a reason direct mail is huge in this industry when it's dead in a lot of industries because they lag a little bit, right? So, I can tell you for our clients, we've been doing a lot of focus on the overlap between what language models need and what search engines need. And while we can we understand how to influence results for for AI, we're focusing a little bit more on the search engines because that's where there's most of the results today right now. That said, could that shift over time? Yes, it could. But I think to say that like I think we're probably looking at least a ways out before for motivated sellers specifically we're finding that language models are providing more leads than search engines are because it'll take a long time for that motivated motivated seller behavior to change. I mean heck a lot of the issue three years ago was motivated sellers don't use the internet. People tell us like are you sure these people are like you know using Google? So it's it's like it's a slower moving segment of the population. So we'll talk about those things. So let's let's make an effort, Zach, as we're going through the the other four pillars that we're going to end up talking about to talk about like which one of those ones apply to language models as well. I think what you'll find is there's a lot of overlap between what language models need for optimization and what search engines need because at the end of the day they're both it's just algorithms that sort through content in order to find related relevant and authoritative information. And in both cases they have tons of content. So for them to choose to feature your content to feature your company you have to convince them that you're the best. And that's basically this whole process of optimization of of SEO is Google's just trying to do its job when people search, let's give them the stuff that they're looking for and be confident that it's the best stuff we can give them. And your job is just to convince Google that that's you, not somebody else.
>> Yep, that is correct.
>> Cool. Well, thank you for taking the time, Zach, today. This this has been awesome. For everybody else listening, we'll we're going to be releasing this series. As we record it, there will likely be a few weeks in between each episode. And I hope you'll enjoy it. And and because this is kind of a live series that we're that we're getting through, if you have any questions, if anything's on your mind, like this these are the kind of the things I want to know for for SEO, we're willing to kind of shape it around that a little bit. So, please send that stuff to us. Let us know what you really want to see addressed in these next episodes we'll be doing on SEO. And I will see you there. Thank you. Thank you.