Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Tom, who's going to introduce himself his business and tell us why we should trust him.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm tomlessek. I'm the founder and president of Easy Marketing and We started in 1997 as a website development company and we've moved into full service digital marketing and I even spun off an IT support business in the process because people thought if I could build your website, I could fix your computer.
So we've been doing this a long time. I've got a team of about 27 people and we focus on small businesses.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: What is it about the small business niche that attracts you?
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Oh, that's a great question. I just love small businesses. I love when you can take a company and watch their sales grow and watch them expand and hire more employees and really propel the local economy.
I just, I just love making small business owners dreams come true.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: What is it about small businesses and their small budgets that makes that game harder to play?
[00:01:11] Speaker B: It is harder, but it has so much more value to them. So we've really been able to tailor our services that the price point is to a small business versus a publicly traded company.
So you just have to look at how do we.
There's so much marketing that you could do, but what's the marketing that you should do? What's the foundational pieces that that small business needs?
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Well, what are some of your foundational, you know, low hanging fruit that you come at first?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I look at it that the website is the center of all your marketing. If that piece sucks, it doesn't really matter. Anything else you do is also terrible. So I kind of liken it to like when you were first started d meeting Jeremy, right? So wherever you went, let's say you went to the local, the local like bar, dance club, whatever to go and meet and meet people, right? So you, you went there, you probably didn't wear the jeans and T shirt that you just mowed the lawn in and have dirt all over you, right? Like if you're the smelly, stinky guy at the bar, she's just not going to want to talk to you, right? And that's what so many small business owners do with their website, right? They outsource it to a high school kid or they try to do it themselves on wix or however they're trying to do it and it just looks horrible, right? So you get there and there's no trust whatsoever. Because as much as mom used to say don't judge a book buyer cover, like marketing is the COVID that we judge your business by, right? And then if it has really bad copy, it's kind of like you look great at the bar and then you open up your mouth and you're an idiot, right? Like we have to have the words on the page match how great a business you are. So it has to look good, it has to sound good. And then if you never ask her out for a date or ask her for a phone number, you miss the main call to action on the site and the visitor gets there and they have no idea what to do.
So really focus first on building that just amazing website for that small business owner. It doesn't have to be a hundred pages, but it has to clearly speak to who their customer is and why they should buy from you.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Matt Brooks of seoteric, he says that there's a measure of pretense in pretending in marketing, but because you have to put forward a certain projection of image, of value, of a unique selling proposition.
But at the same time, if it's too fake, people will sniff it out because you have to have.
The conversation I just had on the previous interview was about the fakeness of those default images that we used to see all the time, those stock photos and how terrible Getty images is.
Two people shaking hands.
The SEO joke is like, oh, I need to add alt text description to this guy shaking hands. Do I, do I put the alt text as a random white guy shaking white couples hands?
Like why is this image even here? Like he was saying that he'd much rather have like a kind of not great iPhone picture that you took of an actual person who you know, you just paid for their home or you know, you're an Atlanta lawyer, take a picture like on an obviously Atlanta street with a client or next to your sign, like it might be cheesy to be next year sign. But if that, you know, that facade that building communicates and sends that signal of you are actually in that community,
[00:05:05] Speaker B: then it's part of looking great.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Authenticity.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: It's part of looking great and looking like you.
So many people try to look like a business that they're not.
But how does that help you, right? So the more original photos you have, or heck, in today's world, I can just take three pictures off your Facebook page and stick you in any environment I want through AI.
So getting those photos is much easier today than it was 10 years ago when you really had to rely on these really terrible stock photo sites.
So yeah, it's about being authentic to who you are. So that when the customer does come to your site and reads what you, what you do and then says, oh, these people can really help me. Right? The goal of that homepage copy is for them to read the storyline in there and say, oh, finally these people get me. This is the people I want to reach out to.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: What's the process that you've found most effective of actually having a good sense? How do you get that intel out of your clients so that you can put it on the site so they
[00:06:14] Speaker B: can answer the questions, but they generally can't create it themselves?
So most people are really terrible writers. If you think of the last time most people wrote something, it was in the 11th or 12th grade, right? Maybe you wrote some papers in college. I mean, I went to Penn State. Most of my tests were Scantron tests. So they didn't really teach you necessarily how to be a sales copywriter.
But business owners know what they do and they know who they help and they know the problem they solve. So we just have to say, we just have to get them to say, well, why you? What's different about you? When people come to you, what do they complain about the competitors about?
So then we take the what they complain about and the customer says, well, well, I. They don't complain about me because I do X, Y and Z. And then we just keep walking them through and get them to talk and talk and talk and our copywriters take it from there.
They can definitely tell you the problem they solve.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Question is, you said the C word. What's the proper way to leverage competitor analysis so that you don't just become the same voice in a crowded room as they are while cherry picking their, their biggest successes?
[00:07:27] Speaker B: So for small business owners, their competitors are generally small business owners, and most small business owners, marketing is terrible.
So I worry less about sounding like the competitor and I worry more about creating the voice and sounding like the business that I'm representing. So that's never been a problem. The competitor analysis in the small business world is very minimal.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: I've run into it quite a bit when it comes to the keyword research side of SEOs, trying to, you know, cherry pick, you know, oh, hey, looking at the top 10 competitors, these are the most, 10 most competitive pages that have the most keywords that they're ranking for, which, you know, like from a keyword gap analysis, you know, they forget that the gap often is not just what they're ranking for and what you're ranking for. It's the gap of what neither of you are ranking for where there's a market opportunity for you to explore. Not to say that you shouldn't address things that your competitors do, just do it better. But I do think there can be a danger in SEO games of using that as the primary driver of your content strategy of if the next 10 pieces are of articles that you're writing and creating for your client have already been done somewhere else, then you're dooming yourself to automatically competing with somebody that's already succeeding on that keyword focus.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Yeah, you bring up an interesting point. I think so much it depends on what's the spin you put on that article or that service page. And it's also how are you competing local or nationally? So when we compete nationally, it's so much harder, but on the local market, well, let's, let's build 50 local service pages and keyword load those and make them unique. And that's been really effective for us. And just building that domain authority overall, because most small businesses have virtually no domain authority.
[00:09:34] Speaker A: I'm curious what your take is on this. I had a client challenge where they went from being, you know, the precast concrete wall of Florida company and now they want to be serving and delivering nationally.
And the the VP wanted to scrub all references to Florida from all titles, descriptions, pages anywhere.
So how would you approach that conundrum of okay, we got their success with the state, but now we want to purge our success in the state because we want to target everywhere.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: How quickly do you cannibalized all the success that you had because you're trying to go nationally? Or do you say, well, let's add the states that touch that are near Florida instead of doing it all at one time? I think so much also depends on your budget, right? So to drive traffic in Florida is very different than trying to drive it nationally.
So most small businesses don't have the budget to pull that off.
And I think having that conversation of what's it really going to take to get you someplace is part of our job is to set those expectations and say, well, what's going to make sense and what can we, what what can we do within what you want to
[00:10:47] Speaker A: spend there is always that, that challenge of some dealing with a customer and setting their geographic and range expectations.
And I've had conversations of okay, who is your target?
And they're like, I'll sell to anybody, anywhere, anytime. I'm like, okay, sure, yes, that you probably could. But do you want to drive four hours to do your remodeling work? Like, do you really, you have a crew four miles away, that or four hours away drive so they can get there in an hour? Or are you just saying that you could have a much wider space when you really can't deliver service that far?
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's about asking the right questions. So when I ask a general question, I get a general answer of, oh, we solve everybody. Okay, well, let's narrow that down.
And so how far out are they? How far do you want to drive?
Oh, you're right. I don't want, I don't want that. Well, we could do that. But do you really want it that far away? Or what if we started close as a radius and then expanded out from there?
So I think it's really just trying to give them options because anything's possible.
But is it. What's the time frame and the budget that's going to take to do that?
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Would you agree with this perspective that out of the things that have changed in SEO, local SEO has changed the least?
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Change the least?
It feels about the same to me.
I think SEO in general has evolved and changed, but local feels like it probably changed more because of the focus on local service pages and the Google Map pack.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: What's changed about those aspects of local SEO, in your opinion?
[00:12:53] Speaker B: I think it's become more important and more dominant on the strategy.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Is there any particular tactics within that suite that you've hit a pretty good sweet spot. You found something in there that you gotta, I know you gotta maintain it, but there's only a certain number of buttons and levers to pull in there. So which buttons and levers are you pulling? That seems to be having an impact.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: Yeah. So for the local business, I'm going to take whatever the core keyword is and I'm going to build out local town pages for that.
And then I'm going to take the next keyword and I'm going to build out those same pages. So if it's somebody with a tight radius, let's say they have an hour radius around their business, well, then I'm going to look at towns that have 2,000 or less.
So then I want to take with those town pages, if it's a smaller radius, I want smaller towns in there so that I get lots of towns in the smaller radius. But if they're bigger towns or further, then I can do populations that are a little bigger.
So I really view it as quantity.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: That makes sense. I've found a pretty good amount of success of making it a habit of regularly Uploading more photos and more videos on almost even a daily basis for my local service providers and asking for a ton of photos and just putting in a stockpile and also leveraging Google posts to help with indexation of new pages. Yeah. So when you know, we add a new deck page, know that I've got 14 photos of decks and so I'm scheduling out. You know, looking forward to putting up a Google post.
Hey, thinking about replacing that deck. We've we got you in hand. And then the Learn More link goes to that page. I found it kind of helps with that conundrum of trying to get service pages indexed.
And sometimes you might manually submit and it won't catch it. Manually won't. You'll submit and like, come on.
But if I find that if I get at least one external link and a Google post to it, then I don't have to struggle with indexation.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I would totally agree with that.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: I'm curious when it comes to the concept of link building visibility, mentions and authority. Now obviously you know, LLM tools are not using links the same way Google is, but are leveraging citations and mentions in a much more aggressive, easier to win way.
Yes. So what's your take on that push and pull of that? Is it just made it easier to justify a link building budget because you don't even have to talk about links, just hey, we need to get you mentioned other places. And by the way, while I'm doing that, I'm getting links. Or is it some a hybrid of that?
[00:15:55] Speaker B: We talked about it as a hybrid of that.
But I do want to build as many high quality backlinks as I can. But do we want them to be listed on their chamber of commerce or manufacturers association website or all those things that are kind of mentiony? Absolutely.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: What are some fertile unique areas that small business owners ignore that can yield either great content or great links for their business?
[00:16:27] Speaker B: So we take care of writing all the content for our clients just because we don't. They hate writing. So it's just easier. And obviously with AI it makes our lives a ton easier. Writing more content and better content.
But the more they do on their own, the more they talk on their social channels and are active in their local community, just the better it becomes overall. Right. You're you sponsor that charity golf tournament or whatever it is, the more the better.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: What are you looking forward to in the next six months of SEO and marketing?
[00:17:04] Speaker B: I'm looking forward to more advancements in the large language models. So we're having a lot of success in driving traffic from ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude and seeing it not just from a traffic standpoint, but from a lead conversion standpoint. And that's just been really fun. And I think it's just going to become more and more prevalent in advance. And we're already having that small business owner say, well, hey, how do I get chatgpt to talk, talk about my business and link over to it? And that's been, that's been a great advancement. I think it's going to start to level the playing field a little bit. I feel like for the longest time we just have, we don't have Coke and Pepsi, right? We just have Coke. You know, we have Google, which is Coca Cola, and then maybe we have RC Cola or something, you know, another cheaper brand in, in all the other search engines. But I think, I think chatgpt, Claude, Gemini are going to start to represent as a group kind of the Pepsi version of Coke and Pepsi.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: Interesting. And you preempted. I've been adding, asking my guests to give a question to ask to the next guest. And the question from Mike Ginley literally was like, what is your, um, you know, what's your new strategy when it comes to LLMs and visibility?
So that kind of dovetails a little bit. But if you'd like to go in into a little bit as a distribution channel as opposed to a productivity tool on the back end, how, how are you thinking of and approaching that visibility side?
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's been really, it's been really fascinating. Not just from a we use it, but how do we, for lack of better terms, how do we rank on it?
And it's so much about content. Content, content. Right.
It's questions and answers because you're going to those, those places and you're asking them more detailed questions. More detailed than what you're going to ask Google. So if we have lots of FAQs on, on within the, the service page or product page, then we're getting a lot more exposure within ChatGPT.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: So then the tactical advice is think about adding not an FAQ page, which is the old go to. Oh yeah, we have FAQs. We have a singular page. No, no, let's talk about what are the FAQs for your, for your Atlanta Lawyer page, for your Cookville Construction page. Like what are the specific things for that?
[00:19:44] Speaker B: And it's not just having like a little FAQ section on that page. It's taking the H2s and H3s and having that be a question where Normally you might have had that just be more of sales copy, but now you can convert that to a question and the paragraph below does the answer to your question. Because every section of the page technically is answering a question. You just have to figure out what question are they asking that you're answering.
[00:20:08] Speaker A: So then is that much more in line with what Google Views is? I believe it's called segment rank or section ranking your content. You know, it used to be, you know, they would generally take a page or passage rank, sorry the patent is called passage rank where it's looking for a section of your site. Whereas they used to bias towards in 2010 to 2015, towards a single document that overall answered it versus, oh, this one section answered it.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: I'd say that's similar if you think of just how much content is on the page. Right. That's why long pages are better, right? Like because you have more chances whether Google's viewing is a long section or you got copy in there that Google liked in a, in any section.
We just feel like you get better rankings if you're, if you're the one talking.
And the way you're talking is you put words on a page. And small businesses and owners don't always like that. They're like, oh my gosh, somebody's gonna read this, it's too long. And I always respond with, well, you're right, because a lot of the owner, the person who's that we're building the website with, they're a Cliff Notes kind of person.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: Right?
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Cause it's kind of in the profile of being a business owner. Right. We're moving too fast. We're not going to read. But my wife's going to read everywhere on the page because she's very detail oriented. She wants all the information. I'm going to scan it and look at the H2s and I'm good.
So you got to hit both people.
So I say for those long pages like you're trying to, you're trying to hit my wife who's going to read it all, but Google's going to read it and we have to make it that it's good for Tom the scanner, my wife the reader and Google the I want to know everything. And then the more copy you have, well, that's better for ChatGPT too, I think.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: It was Mark Williams Cook who I interviewed who said that you need to consider this psychological profile of different people addressing the same problem. Like if you're selling a home, what my A type wife looked for in a Home was very different from what I more of a C type, laid back type of guy. I was like, I just want to know if it's like a chill neighborhood around us. She wanted to know the statistics. What was the price range? What were the other homes priced? Like, what was the zoning? What are the, the restrictions? What, you know, when was the basement refurbished? All of these dates.
And I was like, am I going to be like sitting on the backyard looking into somebody else's like back window the whole time or is there like a field back there that I could just, you know, enjoy?
[00:22:49] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. We've got to hit, we've got a broad hit, everybody in that from a content standpoint. Now from a messaging standpoint, we need to hit the core customer.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: It's true.
Let me give you a soapbox to stand on and give me your hot take. If you could get into the brains of small business owners, yell at them for one minute, what's your hottest take? What are they doing that they ain't, shouldn't be?
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Oh, what they're doing that they shouldn't be is that they're not spending enough money on their marketing budget and they're viewing it too much as an expense. And I get that it is an expense and you have to spend money on it. But the more you can do more with it and add an extra thousand, $2,000 a month to your marketing budget, the more it's going to magnify itself. And I think business owners tend to look at it as well, I'm doing one thing great. Well, if you did two things, it's going to make that one thing even better. If you did three things, it's going to like it becomes exponential as you do more marketing because they all compound on each other. And, and I think business owners don't understand the compound effect of marketing. And then they try to try to Mickey Mouse it and cheap and make it cheaper.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: As an agency owner, and this is another question from a previous interview, but from the small business side, as an agency owner, what's your big, your own biggest pain point in your agency?
[00:24:27] Speaker B: A year ago I would have said it's AI.
So AI is radically changing how agencies function and most people, they hate change.
And well, this is how we've always done it and I'm comfortable with doing it this way. And we're really asking our team from being self creators of things, whether it's you came up with a design or you handcrafted all that copy to become editors of things. Right.
Flawed as writing the copy based on your instruction. But we had to be the creators of training our agent to speak in that company's voice and know what that company knows. And then we're creating the copy and we're trimming it down, or we're the editor of things. And I think we've definitely seen an evolution in content and I think in this next 12 months, we're going to see a complete evolution in design.
Right, so now that you can create images with Nano Banana and when did you can create video clips like we do AI video. So most of the videos on our YouTube page, it's an AI clone of me. I didn't stand there and say those words or shoot that video. I've replicated myself so that my marketing manager can do all that for me. And I think we're going to see it in website development and with vibe code and how we're going to move forward. It's going to be we're in the wild west, I think of the AI websites and I think five years from now, it's, we're going to look back and be like, oh, that wasn't too bad.
It's going to be a radical change. Just like when we went from writing straight code, which is how I started, right? There was no. There was no platform, there was no WordPress.
Went from straight code to WordPress and I kind of moved in that world kicking and screaming, like, I don't know, why do we want to do that?
And we moved to WordPress. And I think the same thing's going to happen with AI.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: The shoe on the other foot. If you could gain some knowledge, if you could ask the next SEO X or Y or Z, like, what's a challenge? What's something where you're like, ah, how's somebody else tackling this particular problem? What would that question be for me to ask? And I'll let you know when they answer it.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: Perfect. My next question is around.
Is around AI code and how they're using that and then making it that it's secure and easy for the end customer to edit. So we always have customers that want to make some of their own updates, which is why they love WordPress.
And that would be my question. How are they leveraging AI website codes and have they integrated that into WordPress or is it standalone kind of thing that they're using cursor for?
[00:27:08] Speaker A: That's a fantastic question. Yeah, I'll definitely circle back on that.
Give a shout out. Where can people find easy marketing? You said there's an AI clone of you out in the world. Where can they absorb your marketing team's information through your avatar?
Let us know where we can connect. I'll add these links in the show notes for anybody that wants to pick your brain.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: Yeah, perfect. So they're just going to go to the letter E, the letter z marketing.com and visit our site and we have our social channels on that. Or you can go to YouTube and just search for easy marketing and you can find us there. And yeah, we're happy to connect. We do a lot of like free website audits, those kind of things just to give some advice to small business owners.
Whether they use us or not, we're going to give them a lot of great professional advice.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: Well that was easy.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: I appreciate it.
Marketing shouldn't be hard. It just shouldn't be.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Thanks so much for your time. You bet.
[00:28:03] Speaker B: Thanks Jeremy.
