Breaking Down The Business Side Of SEO

January 09, 2025 00:43:26
Breaking Down The Business Side Of SEO
The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast
Breaking Down The Business Side Of SEO

Jan 09 2025 | 00:43:26

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Show Notes

This is a new recurring series, I'll be talking with Greg Digneo of Content Guppy as we explore the business side of SEO. We got into why it's crucial to move beyond the old-school focus on search volume and start thinking bigger. Greg and I explored how the landscape is changing, especially with AI in the mix, and why building solid distribution channels is more important than ever.

What I really enjoyed about our discussion was diving into how SEOs need to evolve their approach – it's not just about traffic anymore, but about keeping audiences engaged and actually generating revenue. We shared practical strategies for adapting to these changes and building sustainable, revenue-focused SEO practices. If you're looking to stay ahead of the curve in SEO, this conversation packs some serious insights you won't want to miss.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, host of the Unscripted SEO podcast, doing a special edition of Business and SEO with Greg DeGnao. Did I say that right? Dineo. [00:00:13] Speaker B: Dineo. [00:00:14] Speaker A: Dineo. I could have been so smooth with that. But it's unscripted. It's okay. Errors are fine. We're going to make it up as we go along, but there's a lot to touch on, I think. There are so many podcasts out there about the algorithm, you know, oh, the Google Lake did this, this, update that. But when it comes down to it, SEO, search engine optimization is an industry and a business because of the people and how we approach selling that service, providing a service to end clients or providing it in house to ourselves. So let's get into the nuts and bolts of the business side of SEO. And I know that you do a lot, but go and give yourself an introduction and a little bit of history, and then we'll choose one of the many branching paths of SEO to explore. [00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So I had an agency, a marketing agency from like 2008 to 2015, and one of my clients was a company called Time Doctor and around 2015, I started to burn out from my agency, and the guys at Time doctor were like, yo, why don't you just come work with us? And I was like, I kind of jumped on that opportunity. I was really excited about it, and that's where I started to really get into SEO. We. We kind of stumbled into it. We weren't really doing it, so we just stumbled into it. We wrote like a post, like, I think it was like an alternatives post or competitors post or a comparison post, like what we would today consider a bottom of the funnel kind of post. So I forget exactly what it was, but we kind of were tracking it, and most of our content up till then did absolutely nothing. But this one post, we started to see, like, you know, a month after we published it, we got a new user from it, and then a month after that, we got two. And then. Then it started to rank higher. We got three and four users just from this one post. And so we were like, this is actually working. Nothing else. None of the other content stuff that we're doing is really working, but this is working. So. So we doubled down on that first. For the next seven years, we grew the. The business from under a million ARR to 10 million ARR with pretty much exclusively SEO. Then after I left, I started an agency in 2021 called Content Guppy. And I basically deployed a playbook that I Learned at time doctor across other SaaS companies. And so that's what I do now is I grow revenue for SAS companies through SEO conversion and growth channels like that. Yeah. [00:02:35] Speaker A: Though when it comes to SEO and business, obviously there's kind of different pieces of service that are sold by agencies to the end user. So that, that's a model in and of itself. Right. Like as an agency or as a freelancer, you're kind of looking at what are the pieces of SEO and how are they sold and how are they valued. So when you're approaching that conversation, how does that look from your side? [00:03:08] Speaker B: Yeah, so I tie. So there's basically three pieces that you're selling. There's basically a technical SEO service, link building service or a content production service. Like those are, there's other stuff that we could talk about and things like that. But, but those are strategy kind of fits is like the overarching umbrella above all of them. But like those are basically the 3ish pieces of services that you're selling. The thing that you have to do as a salesperson or person selling SEO services, whether you're in house selling it to your boss or you're an agency it to a client, is you want to tie that back to revenue as fast as you possibly can. So for instance, you have a post a keyword or a keyword topic that you're like, okay, this topic can get 500 searches a month. What does that actually mean in revenue if we rank it in the top three? What does that mean in revenue if we rank it in the top, at the, at the top one or the, you know, the, the first position? That's what, that's what sells the service. It's not like, oh, we're going to do links, we're going to build you content, we're going to do this or whatever. It's basically like we're going to increase your revenue by doing these three things and that's how you sell it. [00:04:19] Speaker A: So that means that we navel gazers, us algorithm chasers, us linkhounds, content creators and strategists really need to take note because it goes back to kind of a bigger theme of understanding that search engine optimization is part of a business model and its home is in the marketing department largely. But it, it doesn't end there, does it? I mean I've seen a lot of benefit of tapping into and relieving some of the problems that sales teams have in lead quality or in the support department for SaaS company having to have a full on staff of People constantly answering questions about your SaaS is a lot easier if you're. You have a knowledge base that's indexed and people can search it and find those answers in Google than it double duty, right of surfacing for pain, painful pain. Managing to be your first support agent out there so that you don't have to have as many tickets. Right? [00:05:27] Speaker B: For sure. It definitely helps in that regard as customer support. It also helps with like product development too. So for instance, if you're SaaS and you know that there's a popular integration mechanism that, that people are searching for within your your area. For instance, a popular CRM with a pop with a, that needs a billing agent billing SaaS connected to it. Right? You happen to be a billing SaaS. Well now you know that people are searching for billing apps with, you know, with pipedrive or billing apps with Salesforce or whatever it is, billing apps with HubSpot. Well now you could build, now you could integrate with those popular CRMs and capture that search data that, that search volume as well. So it definitely helps with some product development as well. But going back to your, but going back to your initial point, it definitely helps with sales for in a number of reasons. One is the inbound marketing qualified leads for sure that's really beneficial. Like so you know, you bring in 100,000 visitors to the, to your, to your blog or your, to your website. You could expect a bunch of them to convert into a, an mql. Whether that's somebody tries up for signs up for a demo, signs up for your product, whatever it is. But on the other side where it really helps and I didn't understand this until we built a sales team at time Dr. Is it really helps with your outbound as well because what typically happens is we would reach out to people and to executives or to HR managers or whatever and they would say, you know, they would say oh yeah, we've read the Time Doctor blog or, or yeah, we saw Time doctor on this listicle of best time management software. Or so a lot of our, our outbound leads were no longer outbound sales were no longer cold emails. They weren't the warmest of introductions. But the people who were reaching out to us, who we were reaching out to were very much a part of the they very much knew who we were and were tangentially into our ecosystem because they had signed up for our newsletter and forgotten about it or because they had read the blog one time or because they had heard us on a PODC podcast. So all those like kind of SEO plays that we do, that we did really sort of helped out that sales as well. [00:07:49] Speaker A: So. [00:07:49] Speaker B: So it helps both ways. Helps both the outbound and then it also obviously helps the inbound as well. [00:07:54] Speaker A: I think that's an interesting to. To break out for a second because that actually is a reflection of brand and brand awareness and you know, as much of a like it is a knife at the throat of SEOs at the moment of brand's role and how focused Google has been on surfacing large brands. And there are those who hypothesize that the helpful content update, that a portion of it really was about the percentage of branded clicks versus non branded clicks as a percentage of their, their click profile, which is not, you know, it's really difficult to bear out that theory, but it does kind of reflect some of that bigger value. And I had a conversation with Morty about brand and talked with Garrett and the impact of brand and it's definitely something where it is an intangible, but it certainly seems like something that including that in the process, the description of SEO as you're selling it or trying to fulfill it. [00:08:59] Speaker B: Jeremy, do you use Ahrefs or Semrush? Which one do you use? [00:09:02] Speaker A: Yes, both. [00:09:03] Speaker B: Alright. Do you use Moz? [00:09:06] Speaker A: No. [00:09:07] Speaker B: Okay, so if a person from Moz reached out to you whether you want to use the product or not, are you like just cold. The sales guy from Moz reached out to you, are you not going to be like, hey, let me see what this is about. Hey, Jeremy, we have a new feature that I think you're really going to love. It's going to help you with xyz. Would you like more information? Are you not at the very least going to be like, yeah, send me the, send me the info. Whether you're interested or not, you're going to be like, hey, send me the info, right? Yeah, exactly. [00:09:35] Speaker A: I think I saw a tweet last week of someone saying like, what's the Most familiar SEO SaaS that's probably the least used. And it is moz because they 100% they were ubiquitous. [00:09:47] Speaker B: Right. [00:09:47] Speaker A: And now they're a bit of a faded giant because they're, because Rand's off doing a spark Toro thing, doing awesome stuff, getting lots of data for us. [00:09:55] Speaker B: But, but, but regardless, you know, you know the boss brand. So you're going to at the very if they give you a send you a helpful email or an email that' resonates with you, you're gonna, you're not gonna blow it off. [00:10:09] Speaker A: That's True. [00:10:10] Speaker B: Because of their brand. [00:10:12] Speaker A: I'm much more likely it would be like if you received an email from Nike, you know, you're much more like I got an email from Nike. Yeah, there's definitely that representation. So it's interesting to think through. We haven't talked about search volume, we haven't talked about ranking or any of those factors. But this, this comes back to one of the value aspects of SEO that probably should be a larger part of our discussions going forward and understanding what are the larger ways for us to multiply the reach of the brand and not just focus on how much search volume comes to these keywords, but also like how much of the market or how much, how accurate are we being about representing ourselves in the market? [00:10:59] Speaker B: I think search volume is kind of the most overrated metric in this entire sphere. I don't care about search volume so much as, I mean you and I both have know somebody who gets 300,000 visitors a month or 200,000 visitors a month and 90% of their search traffic is mean squatta. It's just totally irrelevant. So of those 200,000 visitors, it's like who cares? Because only 2 or 3,000 of those visitors actually are valuable to the business. So we go after like those 10 searches a month, those 20 searches a month, those 50 searches a month, all the time. Because if it's relevant to the business, that's what we care about is how, how relevant is that, is that topic to the business. If there's 10 people that are searching for that topic and that's, and those are, those are 10 people that we want to talk to every single month, then we write that content and then you start and it doesn't sound like a lot, but like usually like 10 searches a month usually winds up being 20 visitors a week, give or take. So it really is winds up being like 80 searches a month to that 80, you know, traffic about 80 to the, to the article and an article that converts, you know, you converts 2%. It's not, again, it's not tons. But we're talking about, you know, one or two new users a month. Here's where it gets exciting. Every business has 10, 15, 20, 40 of those types of topics, right? So now, not only now those 80 visitors are becoming 800 visitors, 8,000 visitors converting at 2% all of a sudden that those four visitors become 40, 400 new clients a month. And that's where it gets exciting. So that's where we focused. Those folks could have the top of the funnel. Okay, so here's an example. If you're a CRM, one of the top one of the search terms in the CRM business is going to be what is a CRM? Right. It's the single most useless term in the industry because if somebody is googling what is a CRM they are not going to buy a CRM from you. Right. They're not spending 50, 100, 200 bucks a month to buy your CRM. So we give those, we, we will gladly give those to other companies to. Yeah, you write your what is your CRM term. [00:13:34] Speaker A: I think Michael Buckbee also made a good point. His interview's not out yet, but we were talking about how you break out the buckets of what AI powered search results do really well. And that's answering that informational bucket of it's either a yes, no, does it do this or doesn't or it's like a short film fact. And those, you know, those represent like half of all search volume. So we need to kind of let those pieces go and push ourselves further down the funnel because you know, like informationally, you know these, the AI levels of tools are going to be more ubiquitous and they're going to be answering those, those questions. [00:14:17] Speaker B: So 100% and like so, so like where we're focused a lot of our AI like our efforts on and it's not tons yet but I think we're going to be doing of it this coming year. But we have to be is like like what we'll see is like somebody will be like hey, what is the best CRM? Right. We want to be answered there. Like that's where we want like our clients to be. What is the best, you know, billing software for SaaS. Right. That's where we want to come up. Not what is a CRM, not what is a, what is billing software? Like we don't care about that. [00:14:51] Speaker A: Which is a shift away and it's a pivot from the bigger content marketing game that we have usually seen which is you know, write about everything up here, write every about everything in the sun and it'll generate traffic. Yeah. And it'll drip down. But you got to have a, you link it down and you try to drive deeper into the funnel. [00:15:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:15:11] Speaker A: It seems like the business model is moving away from that as that gets eaten up in chunks. You know, I worked with Poppy Press and they did content marketing at scale and you know, one of the largest job job board companies out there had a multimillion dol level engagement with them, you know, a few years back and you know that, that pivoted to them using AI generated content and then eventually AI itself is starting to answer those top level queries. And so like the level of investment and the return on that investment is not, it's a changing game. [00:15:48] Speaker B: Yeah, like, like you, like. So if I, I used to think like we used to do and we, we used to do that for like the branding purposes of time. Dr. As well, we used to be like, hey, let's, we're going to do all things remote work. Now though, I think the shift is we're gonna, we're gonna be on Reddit, right? We're gonna be, we're not gonna worry about that stuff on our blog, we're gonna be put that stuff on Reddit, we're gonna put that stuff on other publications, we're gonna get, we're gonna write about that in podcasts, we're gonna talk about that in YouTube channels, things like that. We're gonna talk about that with some sort of PR play, like those kinds of things. And that's how we'll cover that and that's how we'll get, that's how you'll get your brand out there. And then when it's like, hey, best, best, best remote work software or something like that, we want to come up there and we'll get that, we'll get placed there because we'll be in every single, Every single Hey, 10 best remote software tools list poster that we could get. So we'll get that AI, we'll get, we'll get the answer in the AI plus we'll also get all the traffic, will get this, the referral traffic from those search terms and things. So from the list posts. So that's how we sort of think about that now. [00:16:57] Speaker A: So I posted this the other week of that. At its core, SEO is about adding to the entity of a business that a search engine can understand. And I pulled back on those two sides from ranking in Google, but also from the website because I think a lot of our focus since, you know, 2000 has, has been do the website, do everything on the website. Oh yeah, and links and like the only thing you care about is the link and then the website. And I think we put our blinders on and say, okay, I'm going to optimize the site, I'm going to look at the page, I'm going to look at this and then I'm going to get a link. And I think as an industry we need to zoom that much further out. These as vehicles. Yeah, the arms of an octopus reaching out and grabbing things. [00:17:51] Speaker B: Like, like I'm not a, like I'm not an E commerce person. But like so it's not my area of expertise so I don't know tons about it. But like, but I do know that, you know, you're, you're in TikTok, you're in Pinterest, you're on Instagram, right. Like so you're on YouTube. Right. And then so that's where your brand is. But, and then that all focuses back into that one big cohesiveness of that is SEO. It doesn't, it's no longer like you said, hey, website link. It's, you know, you're in B2B SaaS, right. You're, you're on Reddit, you're answering questions on LinkedIn and you have your website and then you're doing your off, your off site SEO in other sites and not in so much the form of guest posts but in the form of again being top 10 top 10 software tools. Right. Remote software tools. Time doctor on all those posts. I mean, no, not the, not, not to totally give away the secret sauce here, but no matter how much you have to pay for it, it's almost always worth it. [00:18:49] Speaker A: I think there's also, I think there's attribution of budget too for those things that has been kind of locked away or siloed. And we tend to think, you know, like we've been trained that buying links is a naughty thing. [00:19:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:05] Speaker A: But when you look back to you know, before 2008, you know, or 2005, you know, look at the, the 90s, like how did people get people's awareness? Well, you got, you paid to get, have your content appear in a popular magazine. You know, you paid for an interview on a popular radio show. And so like the, the, the Google prohibition. And it's reasonable, there's a reasonable aspect of it because we have people in the industry who you know, look for exploits and look to push the, you know, find the easiest way to do X, Y or Z. But that has led to kind of a reluctance to think about placement of your article for the value of the traffic. You know. [00:19:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:51] Speaker A: Where, where's the audience at? How can I tap into an existing audience? Is a much more valuable approach to SEO than simply relying on. I'm going to make this so that I, my only reason to to get traffic is because Google rewards it with traffic and that's pain. Even more painfully true because Google's HCU specifically know a specific sub niche at first that said explicitly, if you made this content just to rank in Google, then you're eligible for this site wide penalty. And that's, you know, that's an existential threat on one layer. It makes sense in another bigger picture of we've really like the value of the content, the value of what we do as SEOs. You know, we shouldn't just be looking to set up a site that has scraped all of the Adventure time paas and used a machine use AI to rewrite those answers and slap them on our own site and fill it full of ads. Like that was what they were really targeting at first of like, hey, this is programmatic SEO and it exists, it's celebrity birthdays. Like it literally has no purpose but to be the answer for it. So you kind of have to extrapolate and say, okay, well if Google is saying that content's meant just to exist, to get search engine traffic to be monetized is something that they're continuing to try to quash, that's not going to let up. You know, that's going to be something that we're going to have to keep in mind going forward. So how can we still optimize, how can we optimize for search when we know that creating content just to rank is something that we've done for so long but now we need to need to take a different approach. And I think considering that brand perspective, that value perspective, the audience acquisition perspective maybe starts us down that path. [00:21:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean the other thing is this SEOs can't like what are you doing with the traffic when you get it to your site? Like that's more, that's as important as actually getting the traffic. Like so again my agency, we don't look at like yeah, getting the traffic there is kind of one thing, but that an SEO is just that vehicle to get the traffic to the site to provide value to the reader, to answer their question and all that stuff, get their, get their, get the, the attention. But then the other half of what we, what we do is now what? [00:22:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:22:22] Speaker B: And so, and so and so again for companies it's the smart thing to do is to build their, like that traffic now and build their own distribution. Right? Because the secret is to your audience here is don't rely on SEO, stop. Leverage it for, for, for the length that you can and build your own distribution channel. Right? Get your, build a hundred thousand person newsletter, a 10,000 listenership podcast, build a 10,000 subscriber, 100,000 subscriber YouTube channel with that traffic do those things that can then own that distribution. Because you, the truth is you don't own the distribution that you're getting from Google. And so, so don't rely on it. Leverage it for all it's worth. Leverage it as best you can. Focus 100. I mean, that's, again, for my clients, we, we do content, we do links, and that's like probably 30% of what we do. The other 70% of what we do is helping them build their distribution channels. [00:23:23] Speaker A: Now, that's an interesting way to put it and an interesting way to approach it too, because. [00:23:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Like, like, like if, like, like I will say this. If you're an SEO and you're focused on links and you're focused on content like that, like you were saying, you're siloed. You're gonna be, you're. You're not gonna exist in a year or two, maybe three. You're gonna be, you're gonna be totally. You're gonna be 100. Like, if you're chasing algorithms and you're chasing. Hey. Oh my. Let. Let me sweat this core update or let me sweat this little, this algorithm change, right? Like, like you're, you're not going to exist in three years. Your job is going to be your. [00:24:00] Speaker A: That's a hard, that's a hard thing to hear. But I think, I think we need to hear it because, like, you're right. Like, when I think about it, you know, like when you do those use Semrush, use Ahrefs and you see, you know those search volume numbers in your keyword research document, like, you know, Sercade, like, gathers search volume and gathers those buckets. But thinking that that water wheel is. [00:24:25] Speaker B: Let me ask you a question right here. What's. I think I know the answer to this, so I'm asking a question I think I know the answer to. But what's your. What was your best channel for acquisition from. For SEO Arcade? [00:24:37] Speaker A: You know the answer because you gave it. [00:24:39] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:24:40] Speaker A: I got one link from you. I sent more conversions for my SaaS tool than I've ever received from. [00:24:46] Speaker B: Yeah. So. So for, for. For. So for everybody listening, Jeremy, I have a. An article on blog called Semrush Alternatives. As an experiment. What about half a year ago, six, eight months ago, we put SEO Arcade at the top of the Semrush Alternatives article. Now that at last I heard it was converting, it was getting 110 trials a month is the last I heard. I don't know what it, what it is now, but just from that one article, that one link and that again. So when you, when we're talking about SEO, like those are the things that I as an SEO want to leverage. Right? Like search traffic is awesome, I love it, don't get me wrong. But like start looking at where else can we start to get traffic from as an SEO, off page, on page, other avenues, Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, things like that. [00:25:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think it's again, it's that broadening of the perspective of it's we should be looking at, you know what, where is search aggregating in my industry and niche and periphery. Not just to be like, I want to be that one source, but also where are the playgrounds, where are the users, where are the audience? Where is the audience and what is the intent of that audience? Because if there's a particular aspect of what it is that are that my SaaS does, my tool does, my service does, my company does, and they're getting that answer from somewhere else else that has authority topically gen people are having genuine conversation about it, then it is search engine optimization for me to find a way to get listed there, find a way to tap into that, whether that's paid ad, content placements, creating a race relationship with that host, with, with the, the owner of that company, co marketing. You know, there's so many, like, there's so many opportunities. There's so many opportunities. The idea of it's kind of offensive now when I think about it of like, you know, in 2012-2018, how many people are like, oh yeah, to generate links, just send cold emails to all of these people and basically trick them into giving you a link, you know, and it's like, well, hold on. What if instead of trying to trick them into creating a single link on a single article one time, what if I found a way to connect with that other business entity that's not directly competing with me and we find a way to share that audience because I'm sure I'm reaching part of their audience too. And I can send it back. I've got an email list and I can offer, hey, do you want to trade sends to your email list to my email list for your email? [00:27:33] Speaker B: 100%. [00:27:34] Speaker A: You know, can I create an article that helps describe your business? And you know, there's kind of a reciprocity thing that we've kind of in the fight in the. There are 10 rankings. There are only 10 rankings. There could be only 10. That Highlander mentality means you trying to kill off everybody else who ranks in the SERP and see everybody else as an enemy. [00:27:55] Speaker B: As an enemy, as opposed to. But they're not. They're. They should be your. They should. [00:27:59] Speaker A: Collaborators, allies and market opportunities, you know, only your most dire direct competitors, you know, who do exactly the same thing as you should be treated with that edge of suspicion. [00:28:13] Speaker B: We put together a proposal yesterday for a company so we, I can't get into the specifics of exactly what it is. So we talked about five or six different content parts of the content plan. SEO was only one of them. So SEO is one. And then we have an inbound, we literally called it an inbound workflow. So what happens with the traffic when it comes to the site? So the pop up and then the email sequence and all that stuff. Then we have a, you know, how do we convert that traffic and you know that we capture their email address. Now how do we convert that into a trial or a demo in this case? And then we have what's called an outbound workflow, which is, hey, somebody gives you your email address, right. Because they came to your site and then, oh wait, this is, this is [email protected] Johnson and Johnson is one of my customers. Let's see who Greg is. Right. So now we created, now we're building out an outbound workflow for them. Then we have partnerships like we just talked about in terms of like building out newsletter exchanges. We have an email list now of a couple thousand people so we could do list exchanges with them and again, get more people into the email sequence, get more people into the outbound workflow. And then we have part. Then the last but not least, we have founder. We have founder newsletter content where we take the orders of the founder and turn it into a weekly newsletter series. Right. So all of that I think is under the purview of the, is going to be under like, again, I hate to use the word the SEO, but like it's under the purview of the content marketer, slash SEO manager. But only one little part of that was where is one fifth of that was actually like SEO where we're going to be like, hey, let's go after this keyword and let's go after these. We're going to build links and we're going to acquire traffic in that way. [00:30:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's a broad. So like, yeah, bringing it back to revenue. And about that conversation, how do you, like, how do you value your time as an agency for fulfillment of that and engaging. Is it, you know, do you Calculate, you know, does there it play a role in how much revenue you could potentially gauge and potentially generate from that? Like that that gets super squishy. [00:30:42] Speaker B: We productize our service so it doesn't get squishy for us at all. Like we're not trying to. Again, like, so this guy was basically like, I was on the phone with him yesterday after going through this proposal and he was like, hey, listen, why don't we do a bonus of like this after this? And I'm like, dude up. Like, I'm not trying to work with you for an extra $5,000 right now. I want to work with you for the next like, like I want to work with you for the next 24 months. Like so like don't worry about, like, don't, don't cares about that little bit of money. Right? Like so, so we, we productize the service. So it's like, you know, if like, like everything that we talked about is, is, you know, is like a 10 to $15,000 a month engagement kind of thing. [00:31:22] Speaker A: So when it comes to so but. [00:31:24] Speaker B: Like if you're just want to buy. [00:31:25] Speaker A: Like instead of valuing engagements directly off of like an hourly retainer, we don't do that. [00:31:33] Speaker B: No, no, no, we don't have to. [00:31:35] Speaker A: Yes, your model and expectation not be like, okay, well we've got 15 hours and we'll do X, Y and Z. Or yeah, you don't. Instead you're saying you need to productize what it is that you're doing in this, this vein and then allow yourself to build bundles of A, B and. [00:31:54] Speaker B: C. My job is to be like, listen, our service is $10,000, right, or $15,000 a month. You're, here's how you're going to make 45 to $60,000 a month. That's what my job is, you know, and it's going to take three to five months to get there. So here's your initial upfront investment, but then after that, here's how you're, you know, but by month four or five, depending on like how obviously like six, whatever, how competitive the keyword, how competitive the industry is. But like a lot of this stuff, again isn't SEO related. So it's not time sensitive. Right. Like we could get started on conversions and email sequence and partnerships today. And then while we're building up the SEO about building up the contents. So our job is to be like, here's how you're going to make $60,000 this month off of our, your $10,000 investment. [00:32:46] Speaker A: You know that that puts a lot less pressure. [00:32:49] Speaker B: And that's what I sell, puts a lot less pressure. [00:32:53] Speaker A: Because, you know, if you are strictly, if you're only looking at a sheet with a list of SEO key of keywords in a cluster and you're calculating out of this cluster of keywords, how many can I reasonably rank for and how much revenue could that potentially come from? There's still huge assumptions of that conversion rate. And then how much of that conversion from lead into sales occurs. And those are, those are very hard to control. And then it becomes a complicated process of, and of guesstimating it. Well, how long does it take for an article to be successful to get that much search volume? [00:33:34] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:33:34] Speaker A: And there's, there's no genuine way to answer that because you and I know, like, you probably created, you know, a hundred articles in the past month. How many have fizzled that you expected? Hey, this is great content. And it just. [00:33:50] Speaker B: Yeah, it's 50%. [00:33:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:55] Speaker B: I would guess like easily like that. I have to, like, I haven't looked, but it's, it's about 50%. Yeah, yeah. [00:34:01] Speaker A: So if at least half of the content you create fizzles from a large volume of SEO perspective anyway. [00:34:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:34:10] Speaker A: And then you cut. You can't quantify that. [00:34:13] Speaker B: But the content that fizzles is usually, I will be honest, the content of fizzles is almost always the content that they, that the client wants me to write because of a particular reason. Large amount of search volume, whatever the reason, the content that we want to write, where it's like Pipedrive Alternatives or SEMrush alternatives, those ones we rank almost every time. [00:34:35] Speaker A: Right. So it's almost more like our bottom. [00:34:39] Speaker B: Of the funnel content ranks almost every single time. It's the top of the funnel content where we're like almost never because. And that's for a variety of reasons. It's because like the content that's there is already good enough. It's super competitive, it requires a ton of links. So. And Google really appreciates, as far as I could tell, they really appreciate content that has been there for a while. So if yours isn't really, really. So if yours isn't much better than what's already there, then you're going to have a tough time. [00:35:10] Speaker A: So from a, from an SEO, from a business of SEO perspective, we're basically saying the inherent reliance on just search volume to generate the model of SEO, it needs to become only a part. [00:35:27] Speaker B: Yes. [00:35:29] Speaker A: And kind of a more of a even like a hand wavy kind of part. And then it Kind of hurts because I made a tool all around search. [00:35:37] Speaker B: Volume, but I don't think it's hand wavy at all. I think it's just, I think it's the, it's, it's just, it's, it's not hand wavy. Like that's just disingenuous. It's, it's just a part and that's it. Like, it's just a, it's like, like I said, like in our proposal for this company, it's one fifth of the work that we're going to be doing. That's. Yeah, but it's like, you know, like, like it can't be a hundred percent of the work that you're doing for a company because if it's 100% of the work that you're doing for the company, then, then you're going to be obsolete. [00:36:07] Speaker A: I think it's about, I think, I think maybe one of the biggest impacts I'm, I'm feeling or thinking through right now is the audience access and retention is. Angle is more important. It's more important. [00:36:21] Speaker B: It's more important than the, than the acquisition for sure. [00:36:25] Speaker A: And it should be. And we shouldn't treat Google as the eternal fountain that we're trying to constantly tap into that flow. We want to because it's, it's, you know, what is that stat that it's way easier to sell via email. Like the conversion rates of email are way higher. So yeah, for sure. As far as like traffic, like treating the site and the search and bringing it in and then trying to capture and recirculate that audience and build that audience so that you can continue to profit off of that piece. I think that that piece of it has been lacking in most of my clients. [00:37:05] Speaker B: Chet Holmes said that in any given audience, only 3% of the 3% of the marketplace is ready to purchase right now. That means that 97% of the people. And honestly I think that's high because the most I see in like, that's the ceiling of what I see in most of the best converting articles is 3%. But usually I see about 1.8 to 2.2% of like a converting article. So we wrote an article for a company, it ranks, it gets 1500-2000 visitors a month. It converts right now 2.2%. That's where I see most of the articles. Right. It covers 2.2% of all traffic into users, into paying customers. What we did was we said, okay cool, let's keep those 2.2%, but let's also capture as many of the other 97.8% of the people who are not converting, right? That's thousands of visitors a month that are not converting. So we're like, okay, so let's put a pop up here. Let's try to give them some more content, right? And let's get them onto an email list that we can recirculate. And now we're, now that article is converting. We're still keeping about that 2.2% of the people who are not. But we're adding an additional 6% of the traffic to our email list that we're able to recapture and remarket to down the line. So they're doing now monthly webinars, they're doing email marketing now, things like that. And that one article is now going from 2.2%. Now could go to like 3%, 4%. Right? So we're, you're adding literally thousands of dollars in revenue per month just from put, just from thinking about Google isn't the only traffic. Let's talk about retention. Let's talk about keeping these people under our ecosystem. And now we can go up. Now we can generate even more revenue. So, so search is important there. It's just that like you can't. [00:39:10] Speaker A: The only thing that's hard tier. But you're right. I think, you know, like the, the towering ego of being me wants to say no, I did all of this work to learn SEO to bring this traffic and I know how, how it works and it will always work this way. [00:39:30] Speaker B: I think it's, I think like I said, yeah, it's just, just go learn the other half of it, right? Like we open this conversation like, I don't, I'm a terrible SEO. I don't know anything about the algorithm. I have no idea what eat means. I don't care about hcu. I don't know what that is. I don't know what Penguin is. I don't know any of this stuff. All I know is that I could get traffic by creating content, building links, and then once I get that traffic, I can know how to convert that into customers. And I know not only that, I know multiple ways to leverage that traffic. So now again, this company now has an email list, right? Because we're converting thousands of visitors into their email address email list every month. So now we're going, hey, let's, you know, partner A. We have, we have 5,000 email subscribers. How many you got? Got 3,000. Cool. Let's do a list. Let's do a, let's Do a list swap. Awesome. Now those, now that 5,000 visitors become 7,000 visitors, 7,000 email addresses and 7,000 people who. And another 2,000 people who are exposed to the software and things like that. That's all it is. It's just we're starting to leverage these other entities. Search is sort of like the tip of the iceberg. And then once we get into the, or the tip of the spear and then once we kind of get some depth, we're like, okay, now we can leverage all these other things. [00:40:49] Speaker A: I think that's fair. Let's top this off with two action items. Let's say that you're an SEO and you're either a freelancer or working at an agency. What does that conversation look, look like talking to your boss, the head of the department, the agency or the client? What does that next recommendation? Next two recommendations to spread that out, to change the model, to start tapping into those things. [00:41:16] Speaker B: Yeah, first of all, it's whatever your KPI is marketing, you're probably new users, new trials, new MQLs, whatever it is. This is how we're going to 3x this or 2x this 2x our current users, 2x our current MQLs 2x, the pipeline we give to our sales team, Things like that. So those are, so that's the first thing, right? Like start, don't think about traffic, don't think about keywords, think about revenue. Because that's all your CEO cares about, that's all your client cares about, is how much revenue are you going to bring in. And then the second one is, the second thing I would say is create a list of things that you can do that are quote unquote easy and things that you could do that are hard. Okay, so for instance, creating an email sequence is relatively easy, right? So instead of getting one touch point, we're going to get seven touch points over the course of the next two weeks. That's relatively easy to do. Something that might be hard to do is. Or easy. This could be easy or hard if you don't have a, have a strong network. If you have a strong network, then creating partnerships is very easy, right? Like you just be like, hey Jeremy, you and I are friends, dude, let's do an email exchange, right? Like that's a no brainer for us. If I don't know, have a strong network, then doing partnerships is a little bit more challenging. So start ranking like a bunch of items. LinkedIn content might be easy. Growing a LinkedIn network might be hard, right? Like start thinking about all the things that are easy, all the things that are difficult, you know, start to rank them. Put them on, like, a little, you know, your little business school matrix here, low effort, high impact kind of matrix, and start, start kind of of formulating a plan that way in which you can say, okay, this is gonna, this is gonna generate the most revenue with the least impact, with the, with the least effort. This is gonna generate not a lot of revenue and take a lot of time to do. So start thinking along those lines as well. [00:43:16] Speaker A: Thanks so much for the business insight on SEO. [00:43:20] Speaker B: Yeah, no problem. [00:43:21] Speaker A: Let's have another conversation soon. [00:43:23] Speaker B: Yep, for sure. [00:43:24] Speaker A: Thanks for your time. [00:43:25] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Take care.

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