Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Daniel Molina. Why don't you give yourself an introduction.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Hey, Daniel Molina. I am owner of Rev Palm Studios and we based out of Dallas. I live in Hawaii and we've been doing marketing. I mean, I've been doing marketing for 24 years. Started Rev Palm about 17, 18 years ago, and we're a digital marketing firm. I mean, we can do print, but who does print anymore? Right. But we're a full service marketing company and we definitely have expertise in the digital landscape.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Do you find yourself working in a particular niche with a certain industry that goes back?
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. We specifically focus on the trades. So plumbers, electricians, heating air companies, landscaping, tree service. It's anybody usually that's looking for a homeowner to contact them and fix something with their house is usually the kind of clientele we like to, to help. And we're really good at it, especially when it comes to localized SEO. Right. Which is like the, the buzzword and you got AI and chat, GPT and all this other stuff that's going out there. But yeah, so I would say the trades is our like 95% of our clients.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: That makes sense. Now that's probably a lot lower margins than working with like Fortune 100 or big enterprise where they can throw you a fat load of cash.
So how do you work on an agency model with a smaller size client? Because I'm imagining they're not throwing you $20,000 revenue contracts. You probably have to take more of those smaller businesses to work your model. So how do you work that out over time?
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. Actually. We do have clients spending over a hundred thousand dollars a month with us on marketing spend. And so it just depends on the size of the trade company. So if they're a big operation, like 25 trucks, 30 trucks, I mean, they're spending a million dollars a year in marketing. I have a client right now who spends a million dollars a year marketing. Not all with me, but we help them, kind of consult them on how to spend that money. And so, sure, you got your little three truck operations that maybe they got 8,000, $10,000 a month to spend on marketing, which is still, you know, that's pretty, still a decent amount. And not all of that goes to ad spend. And that's where, you know, a lot of these agencies, they, they just go to ads and they're making 15 to 25% on the ad spend. Yeah, you're not gonna, you're gonna need a lot of clients to make anything big. But because we provide SEO and really good at it, that's where, you know, most of our action is, right? It's the SEO. It's creating content, it's posting it. You know, it's my own staff, my team creating that stuff. And so the margins are way greater when you're providing SEO services than you would ads, which is fine if you want to go to those wells that are spending, you know, five $600,000 budgets a year, which is fine. And we have some of those. But you gotta be careful with those. Cause you can, depending how big, how size, how big your team is. Also, you got, all of a sudden, you got three wells, and then all of a sudden, two of them leave. And he hired all these people, right? And then you're. Then you shot yourself in the foot. Oh, we're going a different direction. Or this agency, actually, Wild is better, right? And so I always tell my. My staff and my team, like, look, I don't want. I don't want big wells. I want little guys. I want guys who spend around 10 to 15 grand a month on marketing. And we want 100 those. You want 200 of those, right? I don't want, you know, 50 clients and, you know, 10 of those are huge wells. And, you know, which is like 60% of your. Your gross revenue. Because if, you know, a few of those start to get a little shaky, you start to sweat bullets a little bit. Right? And so I'll be careful with the mindset. It depends on the agencies, right? If you want a big agency, obviously, I have a friend that ask.com, la Quinta. La Quinta, you know, they have big accounts like that. And it's fine. That's his model, right? But that's not what we want to do. We want to do small home service contracting companies. When I say small, like the small business owner budgets between $100,000 a year to spend to a million dollars a year spend in marketing. And it's just like the mom and pop shops, the guys that own the trades and just helping them. That's kind of like our niche, not like big mega brands. Like, you know, that's. I had that experience back in the day working for Rob Collins and, you know, accounts like Best Buy, Direct Energy, you know, Southwest, like, we worked on, you know, I was part of teams working on those projects. And so I just decided to do go on my own and just kind of help the small business owner.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: That definitely makes sense to me. Because I've been at an agency where we had that problem where we caught a big fish and they ended up scaling 3x with one client. But then slowly, you know, over time, that client came back and decrease spend and said, oh, well, we're only. We're removing the European market. Oh, well, you know, we're trying this model. Well, what they were really doing was replacing content writing by humans with content writing that by AI.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: And so it eventually dried up and then, you know, 3X, you know, you've got one fourth of your business stable and three, four isn't because you had that. You landed the whale, right?
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Your eyes were bigger than your stomach, and so you made your stomach bigger. Now your stomach's too big.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yep.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: I talked also to like, Lorraine Ball. She's another agency owner, and she said that she was happiest, you know, keeping her own, you know, looking at her agency load based off of how many people on her team that she wanted to keep and trying to keep a lean team and grow, you know, depth and margins, but not, you know, some people don't want to constantly scale. I think there's something in our American culture maybe in that profit mindset of like, you've got a company, you have to grow by X percentage a year or you're failing. That, I think, becomes kind of dangerous. What do you think about that concept?
[00:06:21] Speaker B: Can you ask the question again? Sorry.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: That the, the hunt for just profit can lead to some of those questionable decisions.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the balance. Yeah. Sorry. No, yeah, it's the balance of, obviously we got to grow. We're not, you know, this is not a charity case where we're just trying to help people out, which that's part of it. Right. If you like. For me, I enjoy helping these small business owners win. They say, tell you got to pay your bills. And so if you go to profit, only then you are looking for these big wells. And I always say, look, you got to have the elephants and you got to have the gazelles. The gazelles feed you every day. And then the elephant is like the, you know, it'll last you a little longer. I remember one of my mentors, when I was early on, he says, Daniel, like, you know, this guy, he's a big dog, you know, agency where he does gaming. Like, he creates games and, and purchase games and all that, which is like a, you know, I don't think it's probably like an $80 billion industry right now, even more.
And he says, I love it because people come to us with their ideas and we build out these games. But they're only two year contracts and they're huge wells. They're two year contracts, you know, or three year contracts, depending on what it is. And so those are great. But what you really want is you want the retainers that are there, they're smaller, they're more, they're easier to manage and you want those little gazelles that just kind of, you know, pay your bills, feed your fish and you know, feed your family. And then the big wells here and there is okay to have, but what happens is you get a little greedy or you're like, oh, I can have all this money. Oh, I could build this team. Oh, I can. Whatever. So it's just really like, it's subjective, right? It's like, okay, well if you're ambitious and all you care is about the money, well then you're probably going to build a company that's probably not good quality. It's probably going to be very shallow. Your front door is as big as your back door, you know, but you're going to make a lot of money, right? You try to feel like, I love Alex Hermosi and I don't. I'm not throwing any shade on Alex Hermosi, but I stopped listening to it because you started, started just looking for the best deal. Like trying to almost manipulate people into buying for me versus really offering a product because I believe in my product. It's just like more like tactics and like, you know, this is how humans think and this is how the psychological mindset is. So therefore do this way and then you can hook them, right? Which I understand, it sells, I get it. But for me, the way I build my clientele is definitely off relationships, right? And so, but, but it's different. Like I'm not, again, no shade on Alex Hermosi's model. He's obviously makes a lot of money, right? But then I don't know what people are saying about him. I don't know what his clients are saying about him. I don't know, I don't hear that side, right? I don't hear, you know, because he's growing. He has acquisition.com, he has all these things. Like because he's, I'm not saying he's money hungry, cause that guy makes a lot of money, but he says it himself. He wants to be in where he's making a hundred million, he wants to, you know, then you know, the next step and next step. And so if you're it just depends on who you are as a person and where your values are, then that will drive where you want to be. For me, I don't want to grow fast. I want to grow slow. Because for me, if I grow fast and your system and process and SOPs cannot handle that scale, then you're bankrupt. Right. You implode. Right. And so for me, and then the stress is I have seven kids. I didn't say I'm married 24 years, seven kids and thank you. So if I want to scale to like, hey Daniel, I want to be a 10 or 20 minute agency, well, I know how many hours it's going to take me per week to be that. You see what I'm saying? So I think that the answer to that question is not necessarily wrong or right. It's more like what's your goals?
You know, what kind of person are you if you, if the money drives you to what end? You know, right. You know, it's like, you know, I want now a million dark agency. Now I want to be a five man, I want 10. And then, and you go on. And then if you're looking for fulfillment in that, you're probably going to end out empty handed. And I'm not saying this, you could just talk to so many successful people, but if you're doing it just to man provide income for people, you know, growing your company, obviously winning some, going on vacation every year, you know, afford a house and all that, then man like figure out what that balance is of growth. But don't lose quality because if you continue to grow, grow, grow, look for those wells and just looking for that profit margin, well, you know, I seen it. And the quality starts to suffer. And so that's the, that's the balance. Like man like, you know, If I take 10 more clients right now, can I actually sustain that? Can I scale that and treat them just like they feel like they're only one client and that's where you have to. And again, that's the balance of hiring people and growing. Hiring people and growing. Right. So I hope I answered that question.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: No, that was perfect. That's beautiful. And it's a great transition too because it's about hiring people and growing. And you mentioned one of my favorite three letter words, which is sop, standardized operating procedure. And I think it is really the differentiator between a rep Scrabble freelance consultant who's just flying by the seat of his pants. He kind of knows SEOs. He was learning it, he's doing it. And Actually like being able to productize and do more because you can know a lot about SEO, but if you don't establish some sort of SOP operating procedure, you're going to end up wasting a lot of time investing a lot of reinvesting in the same thing over again, every single client. So what has that looked like for your agency over time?
Productizing your service, creating repeatable success with the new clients that you take on, having a process you can train new people towards. What does that look like at rep on?
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Yeah, so I would say I'm more of the visionary guy. SOPS is not my lane, like administrative systems and process. When I was a one man show 17 years ago, I was a bookkeeper, I was a, I was creating content. I was, you know, back then you could get away with 300 words, right, on a blog. So I was creating content, I was SEO, I was web developer, I was everything. And so I didn't have SOP to your point. Like, I was just like the one man show. And then as I started to grow and build a team, I started to realize when I would add a client in, I was like, oh my gosh, that's not scalable, so I gotta fix that. So over time I've created SOPs. It was never a, let me do SOP for everything. It was more like, you know, like, oh, I need SOP for that. So then I'm growing like, ooh, that sucks. I need SOP for that. Right? Which is not the right way to do it. Right? You know, you want to make sure you have SOP for everything. But over time, as, as the weight of having more clients start to, to, to get onto our company, it starts to expose areas where you need work, especially for areas where there's bottlenecks. It starts to expose areas where you know you may fail. And so, and so I was very reactive versus proactive. And so my recommendation is definitely be more proactive with your SOPs versus reactive. But now I learned that lesson. So now we have SOPs, you know, for things, right? And so, and so it's very important, especially when it comes to scalability, because without a sop, and then without, okay, well how long does it take to do that? So then all of a sudden you grow and you go viral and all of a sudden everyone wants to hire you. Well then how do you know how long it takes to write that content using ChatGPT or perplexity or whatever? Because whatever system you need you to know who's doing it, who's quality control. What takes me an hour to write about 2,000 words worth of content, or, you know, I'm meaning by using whatever and then photos and all that. All right, well, then how many employees do I need to write that content? So you need to figure that out because then as you're growing, you know when you need to hire and you know when you're actually like your employees or your staff is like, man, you're working me way too hard. And you'll be able to see that SOPs help with that. But I think when you do your sop, you need to also attach the time of how long it takes. That way you can obviously see as you're growing, for every five or 10 clients, you know, you need about 40 hours worth of employees to do the job. So then that helps you also grow.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: So are you doing, like the one direct person that speaks with the agent or is the agency voice to the client, or do multiple people on your team make contact with the client? And how do you organize and keep that conversation? Same?
[00:15:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So we have client relations, and there's three of us. So I'll talk to the client, depending which client it is. And then we have two other people that do client relations. And then our project manager usually joins these conversations as a fly in the wall, taking notes, taking minutes. And so we record everything. Right. And we use.
Forgot what software it is that actually records, you know, the transcript and then creates bullet points.
Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And so. And so, yeah, and so we're touching the client and having that white glove experience with them where they can actually talk to someone once a month is what they get once a month. Where we go over their marketing, we go over there, you know, because in my industry, where we do is they care about call volume, they care about how many, how many calls that I'm getting, how much did it cost me for that call, how much money did I make? Those are the kind of conversations we have once a month.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: So that kind of also helps consolidate that way. Because I've been in agency situations where it's an open door, you know, oh, they messaged at 2:00am and they need this and you know, 6:00pm and you know, they have all these requirements. So it sounds like you've kind of taken the lead on pretty much everything that, hey, we're going to talk about it once a month. Bring it to the table. We're going to do X, Y and Z and hang on to your stuff and we'll, we'll address it during that meeting.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Is that well, we actually created a SOP out of just even that because we were getting those kind of crazy stuff. But we wouldn't answer if it was on the weekend, and we'll just deal with it on Monday. But we created a ticketing application. We just have a ticketing application that they can actually fill out their tickets and then it goes to the, to the designated department and then it gets done. But as far as, like, face to face talking, that's once a month. We're not going to, you know, if it's an emergency or they're freaking out or if it's like, you know, they're doing paid ads and like, hey, Daniel, you know, slow us down, you know, because we're so busy. And so they'll send us a text. There's SOPs on what our clients do when there's slow volume or hey, Daniel, we're slow. Can you increase PPC this week? You know, go. Go crazy. You know, there is still some of that talking, but as far as like a, hey, what's going on with my marketing? Let's review your account. Just make sure everything looks great. That's once a month.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Got it. I mean, I've got somebody who's, you know, they're doing inflatable sailboats, Red Beard sailing. Sailing.
They've got high seasonality, obviously. So how do you bake that into the equation as an agency, knowing that your clients then have those seasons? Is that something where you have cushion or set expectations beforehand to address that? What are your seasonal adjustments you make to both SEO and, you know, on the paid so side? Is the answer to that paid on SEO or is it. How do you view the season? Seasonal issue.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's great because in the trades, it's very seasonal. Right. The H Vac companies in the Midwest, down South even, it's like they're. It's hot in the summer and it's. We call it the shoulder season is going to be the winner where, you know, Texans are not. Their systems are not breaking or the south are not breaking in the winter, they're breaking in the summer because it gets to 105, 110. And so it gets more expensive for a lead in the off season because there's less demand. And so maybe they're spending about a hundred dollars a lead in the summertime or less. But then in the wintertime, they're spending around three to $400 a lead because, you know, if there's 100 people looking for H Vac service and you got a Hundred, you know, H vac companies, they're, they're saying ppc, like spend as much as you want to get me that lead, you know, and so we do have a, we get ahead of it. Obviously with SEO it's pretty, you know, SEO obviously is hot and you know, talk about cooling in the summer and talking about heating in the winter. But as far as SEO that continues to go, it's just a strategy of PPC is different. The specials we put on the website is different and we get ahead of it. So we know we're about to go into the spring. So then we have tune ups, we have, you know, you know, a lot of times even with the plumbers, there's like root intrusion. So we have root intrusion, you know, specials. So we get ahead of it when it comes to more of like the specials they offer and then the ppc, you know, we just know in the summertime we're not going to spend as much money on PPC because it's, you know, everyone's busy. You should be, if you're doing the right thing, you should be busy.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: That makes sense. Let's talk about local SEO.
It's a specialized niche. You got to get on that map. Pack what has been happening as a trend in the past two years that you've seen what's the most important element of your local SEO mix?
[00:20:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say probably three things. I would say I've been doing SEO since 2007, 2008, and then one thing that has never changed since then is content is king now. If it's now how you write the content, how you optimize the content, that's where now you know, if you're, if you're, you say, hey, you know, my mom's chocolate cake's better than yours. Well, it's subjective, right. And so we'll let the people decide. And so we can have all the same ingredients but not put it all together. Right. It'll be a nasty chocolate cake or a really good chocolate cake. Right. And so if Google was the taster of our chocolate cake, they're looking for the best chocolate cake. They know there's a ton of content. Especially now, I don't even know how they're doing it, where everyone's writing content using Perplexity or chatgpt or whatever they're using. You know, how are they, how are they defining what's good content and what's, you know, what's human and what's AI, which is fine. They even said it's fine to Write AI content as long as there's some as long as good content, that's all they care. So if content's king, then you gotta make sure you're writing the right kind of content and you're splitting up your content in different forms. Just like in video, there's long form, there's short form content. And same thing with SEO and then writing blogs or service pages. You know, you got to write that long content of 2,500 words that's got photos and you know, backlinks and all that stuff. But then you also got to write FAQs shorter and you got to write even little snippets because now perplexity is grabbing your snippet. So you got to know how to write that content. So content's king. And in answering the questions that people are having, being the topical authority of whatever industry you're in, that's going to be important.
So what here's, I think here's where there's a, A, at least I'm giving you. It may be a secret, I don't know, but I'll give it to you for free. A lot of people are writing content around the high traffic keywords, which, yes, I agree we need to do that. But a lot of times people miss opportunity and long tail keywords or even keywords that barely get any views. And if you could just go and find the keywords that also don't have a lot of views, then Google seeing that you're the, you're the authority of this whole topic versus just the high traffic keywords, right? And so now when maybe, maybe five people a month look for that one 2500 word page, you know, but then Google says, oh man, if you're a plumber and you're answering every single question, whether there's a hundred people looking for it or two, you're answering those questions. Therefore we're going to make you the authority when it comes to plumbing. And so you have to make sure when you write content you're not just only doing content for high traffic keywords though that is important. And then second would be reviews. Reviews are insanely important, right? You gotta make sure you got reviews, not just get a bunch of reviews and stop getting reviews. Constantly get reviews, reply to reviews. How you reply to reviews are important too. Throw some keywords in there. You know, Janet, I'm glad we were able to help you with your water heater repair service, you know, whatever. And then the last one I was gonna say is social media signals when the, when the Community is validating that you're awesome and you have engagement that I think Google is gonna be like, okay, well if the community says you're awesome, not only with the reviews, but then you're getting all this kind of engagement and shares and likes on social media, then you must be the authority when it comes to whatever trade it is, right? Or whatever service or product. So I say those three things and maybe a bonus will obviously be backlinks. Right? That's still, you know, depending, you know, you can't get crappy backlinks, but if you get the really good ones, then that's going to help too.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: I think definitely on social, I think because of the nature now of Instagram, the Nature now of TikTok and Facebook, we're very much moving, as Rand Fishkin puts it, towards a clickless social experience where that's not what you do. You, you watch a video and somebody's wearing pink pants and you like them. You're like, oh, okay, well where are those pink pants? And you do a Google search and maybe there was a brand, it was like Gabano pink pants. You might get that brand phrase. So, so much more of that traffic flow now. You know, on the social side is the exposure to the concept. But then it comes back to Google and that brand signal plays such an important role, role. Whereas I think 10 years, even 10 years ago I would, the first thing I would do in Google search console is like, oh, well, let's ignore all of your brand searches because that's already in the box. Let's look at, oh, you only have this much non branded now. I would kill for an account that comes to me and it's like 90% brand search and 10% unbranded. I want that flip. I want to bring that flip and get that strong of a brand.
So what role do you see? You know, I see Google rewarding brand in certain, certain ways. Are you seeing that reflected too? And is that something that you pursue in your campaigns?
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Yes, branding is definitely important. But I think what happens is the, the way vendors are branding themselves is changing. So when I was growing up, I'm 45. When I was growing up, it was very much who they endorse. In my time was Michael Jordan for Nike.
You know, Mike Nike, Michael Jordan endorsed or signed Mike Jordan. Everybody wanted to wear Nike. Everybody, right? And then he did Hanes underwear. So everybody want to wear Hanes underwear. Why? Because Michael Jordan has Hanes. If you were, if you play basketball, you're a Nike and you're wearing Hanes, Right. And so then when, when Nike did that, you know, a lot of people started to see, wow. So let's start like trying to get these big celebrities and big sports people to like, let's get them and sign them for our product because the person is what's making the brand. Then I feel like in the 2000s, the early 2000s, the. They start shifting to. No one cares who that person is and they care about the brand. Like, like Louis Vuitton and coach and Versace and, you know, and I mean, I mean, think about this. When I was growing up, Champs was a Kmart, like off brand that you get made fun of if you were champs. Where now Champs is in Macy's next to Lululemon and, and Reebok and Adidas, right? It's like what Champs is like, made a comeback. What. You know, and so, and so in the early 2000, it was more the brand. They spent a lot of money on, on the actual brand and the. But not just the brand, but the brand experience. They went away from like the Michael Jordan and they started focusing on the brand experience.
And so, and so then now. So let's fast forward to now where we are today. I feel like now we're going back to who's behind the brand example, the Rock. Everyone loves the Rock. He's the most followed human in the world right now, right? The most followed, highest paying actor. Like, he's on top of the world. I'll be surprised if he doesn't run for president in the next whatever, right? Well, he is selling shampoo. Let that sink in.
He's bald.
He's selling shampoo and the bruda is bald.
So what is that telling you right now? We're back to like, who's behind the brand? And I want to support that person. And so what I tell my clients right now is when you're doing social media marketing and you want to do branding and awareness, stop promoting just the brand and make sure there's your person behind it. Hey, I'm Daniel Molina, owner of, you know, H Vac Service. You know, a H Vac service. And we're here to help you. You need any questions, check out all the tips. House hacks, you know, here's how you save money, you know, or hey, you know what, I'm here with Janet and man, she was really struggling to pay for her water heater, but we took care of her today. Check it out. Janet, I'm so glad you have hot water now. I'm so sorry, but we can't do this all the time but we do have a giving budget every month. So if you know any mom in need or anybody in need, let us know. Like really brand your company. Get that out there, human connection because people buy from people. We're back into that again. And so if you're just advertising your brand like everybody else, you're not going to stand out. But if you advertising the people behind the brand. So not only you're saying experience and the people behind the brand, that people be like man, I don't care that they're more expensive but I want to support what they're doing. I want to support that guy. He seems like a family man. He seems like he gives back. He seem or she seems like, or she. Whatever it is. That's what we're starting to see again is now people are behind brands example. And this is a, it was a failure. But hey, Bud Light put the wrong person behind the brand and they still haven't recovered. Now I'm not saying if you support it or not support it. I'm just saying for the Bud Light demographics, they literally alienated a ton of them by supporting a specific person and they tanked overnight and they still haven't recovered. So you gotta be careful who you're trying to put behind what represents your brand because it can actually hurt you too. Right. And so. Right. And so that's where it's going now. It's going back to the people people buy from people people want to hear from people. I don't wanna hear about the brand like you know, so that's kind of where I feel like to answer your.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Question, I think it ties into on two different layers as well. Cause we have you know, the classic eeat, the expertise, experience, authority, trust statement from Google. But I think it's also a reflection of, you know, as I think this statistic was shocking. It's 51% of all content on the Internet right now has either been created by or processed through AI Aurora the snake has begun to eat itself. And there are no safe repositories anymore that AI hasn't got its claws into to digest and eat.
And I think we're starting to see a blowback effect of that. Like people are suddenly more and more hungry for that one on one connection of seeing a face, hearing a voice, seeing two people discussing. Because there's so much fake now. There's so much that's just repeated or drops or low value and you know, first hand experience.
You know, AI doesn't know what it's like to wake up at 4:30 in the morning and have like, you know, have to throw up, you know, it doesn't know that feeling. It doesn't know that feeling of waking up at five in the morning because you're so excited about what's happening or you're gargling with dread of like all of these problems.
The human experience is not something that is fully translated and it's something that we can talk about and connect with. And it's something where if you're smart, then you can use those human discussion points and surface it in your about page. Don't be like, oh, we're the best at what we do and we'll get this done. No, it's like, hey, we're struggling too. We're real people that are doing this. We're pros, we're happy to help. Like, you gotta work that into your about page. You can't have a faceless business anymore.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Cause people don't wanna because they, they was just stop. They won't even use you anymore because it's just you don't stand out. And what your point is, like humans, that human experience, hard to translate. And I know when people reply, whether on social media comments, whether on an email, I know when they're using AI and it's just, yeah, there's just something about it that just takes away from that human experience. And will I eventually fix that? Maybe. But right now it's not there. And I get almost annoyed sometimes. And that's why when you're a content creation company or if you provide content, you got to be careful. You can't just say chatgpt, write me a thousand word blog on this and that because that is crappy content. You know, use AI to help you, you know, structure the content and maybe some research and hey, tell me more about this. All right, cool. All right, tell me more about this. And so it just, it should, it should. The way I tell my clients is like, AI is enhancing our ability and to be more efficient and give you even better content. It's not replacing, you know, and now we just, you know, we sleep and we're just making money off of just AI doing it. All right, it's definitely human experience because when someone lands on that page and it's just, there's no human experience in reading it, they're gonna not. The bounce rate's gonna pop high and then you're not even helping with SEO anymore. Right, Because Google said no one's finding your information helpful. And so you just gotta be careful with that. Use AI, but don't replace yourself with it. Because then, like you said, it's gonna get to the point where humans are not gonna read your crap. They don't care.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's going to be soon somebody that invents like organic certified content where you have like a video of your creation process, then it's time stamped and like a fungible token associated with your content to prove that it was written specifically by a human. And then someone will create a fake human.
It's going to be a battle. But so as you kind of wrap up and draw things to a close, what's the biggest action item that you give new clients that come on board with you? What's your first mission with them once they're, once they're in your hands?
[00:34:53] Speaker B: So the first thing is obviously finding out the baseline of where they're at. And so in my world, it's like, how many calls are you getting? Where are they coming. Coming from? Like, understanding the framework of what we're dealing with. Like, you know, hey, today we're getting X amount of calls we're getting. You know, Google is not giving me a lot. We're getting all our calls from PPC and Angie's List and all these other places. So finding that out. And then we're building from that, right? We're going to build from that. So then, so then, hey, you're. And even with SEO report, right? Hey, here's where you are today. You're on page five for this keyword, two for this keyword, and you don't even exist for this keyword. And so we have a, we use Pro rank tracker to, to, to. To actually put a baseline email with their SEO. That way when in two to three months, when they see, wow, we move from page eight to page three, or we move, we didn't even exist and now we're actually showing up. Or, man, we're now on page one. They see that progress because we have this baseline, right? And so it's like, hey, here's this baseline. And so as we're doing SEO, as we're doing ppc, Facebook ads and everything else that we're doing, we are monitoring our growth. As they landed with Red Palm, now they're doing better. Because what happens is if you just provide SEO and you don't have any kind of data to show the growth, they don't understand it, at least in my world. And they just see you as like, I don't understand it and I understand I'm on page one, but I don't even know if you're really helping me. So therefore we're gonna stop the service, right?
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Yep, yep.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: And that's what you don't want. So you gotta have all these indicators.
We use call tracking for SEO for PPC. So we let them know, hey, that SEO call cost you only $40 and it made you $3,000, right?
[00:36:39] Speaker A: Yeah, you gotta connect the metrics.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: Yeah, you got the roi. And so the number one thing when it comes to like the client experience in the beginning is showing them where they're at and then projecting where they're going to grow.
And then second, I would say is video, video, video, video. Please give me videos and photos. Hire some photographer to follow your trucks around taking photos. Because putting a customized or, you know, photo from your company on a blog or service page is way better than using Shutterstock or istock with everybody else has that same photo. Google will see. Wow. They're actually taking the time that you even have your own photos and then the video.
[00:37:23] Speaker A: It's even geo stamped too.
[00:37:25] Speaker B: It's even geostamp. Exactly. Even take pictures in front of monuments. Put your truck in front of a water tower in front of the neighborhood. Like, like those kind of things you want to do. And so, and so anyway, so that's why I tell my clients, it's like, go out there. Do they listen? Not. No, not really. But it's like, but this is what I hope for them to do. Right. You know, but that's going to help with SEO, you know.
[00:37:50] Speaker A: And so, yeah, I love that. Yeah. I mean, I have one guy that have been like three months, hey, send me some photos and videos. Just show me how the asphalt's being made. Oh, yeah, I'll definitely do that. Oh, we didn't completed another job. Did you get photos or videos? Nah, they didn't come out. How could they not come out? You point at the machine. It's a big machine. You can't like just take a picture.
Where are you next? I'm going to send somebody there to just take some pictures of you making asphalt happen.
[00:38:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it's just, it's just crazy. And what phones now are like professional.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: High resolution photographers in 2005 would have murdered, straight up murdered someone for the capability of an iPhone right now, like, oh yeah.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: And they have it in their hand and they still don't take photos.
Yeah. So I would say those are the things and I'm coaching them every month. Hey, take I know, Daniel, I know. I know you know, so. But if you want to show up SEO and you want not to get out of above the noise, you're going to have to have your photos, your videos, you talking to people, you creating that personable experience to the person looking to buy from you. And that's the people that are going to stand out.
[00:39:08] Speaker A: Agreed.
Stock photos are slowly being replaced by AI photos, which are not as good.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: No. Yeah, they're not there yet. Like, we use Mid Journey for certain things.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: Yeah, there's some things where it can totally help. You're like, I just need a good driveway picture. Like, I am not never getting a staged driveway photo from this guy ever. So I. I gotta take a shortcut here. But, like, I wish he would just take a picture of his dirty machine, because that's real, right? Refuses to.
[00:39:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, Yep. Yeah, it's. We, we try to use AI. There's like six fingers or weird like. Yeah, it's just not there yet. It's not there. Especially in the world of pipes. If you type in, put a water heater in the background with a plumber, like, arms crossed, and it's like they build a spaceship. It's like water heater, not a spaceship.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:40:03] Speaker B: It's like all these pipes and gauges. So, yeah, AI hasn't landed that ship yet.
[00:40:10] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, tell the people where they can find you. If you hang out on any particular social network where people can throw some extra questions for you. Where are you at? Where are you at?
[00:40:22] Speaker B: Yeah, they can go to Daniel Molina Life and all of my everything that. Who I am and all my pages are all there.
[00:40:28] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks so much for your time.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: Yeah, my pleasure.
