How Local Service Businesses Should Actually Think About Digital Marketing with Phil Anderson | Ep11

From here to here, I guess. I feel like we're the same height, but I'm assuming just from here to here. Yeah, I feel like you sit up straighter. Yeah, you just have really poor posture. Yeah, I agree with that. When I walked in seeing you in Norris's office, I was like, wait, where is he? Is he behind the, you're like this behind the monitor, just like, getting work done, very comfortable. Did you, well, there were those chairs by under his desk in the front. Somebody did something last night. I bet the chairs in front of his desk as the prank or something, like underneath the back side of it. Oh, I guarantee you. And then there was like a tree on there. Like some of his little knickknacks just like muddled up on his desk. Yeah, that would be Matt Pritchard was here last night for a book show, his brother-in-law. Calling you out, Matt. Tyler's gonna hit this episode. Gotcha. But yeah, that's definitely who it was. That's not very subtle though. The good pranks for Tyler are really subtle. Cause you know, he's OCD. So it doesn't take much for him to realize something's off. Trying to think of the best. Oh, the Anthony and Chandler moved a piece. It was like really small. Like, I mean, they just turned it. Not much at all. It was finally the first thing he didn't catch in the office like it was such a subtle movement, but he was still surprised he didn't catch it. All right, dude, here we go. Yeah, feel free to drink and do whatever. There you go. And you can put whatever you want up here too. It doesn't matter. Okay. I'm gonna leave all mine up here cause it's that time of the year. We need fluids. All right. I think without having our producer, Tyler here, we did pretty good. Who needs Tyler? Yeah. I think it's good. What do I do? Yeah, I think it's good. What do I do? All right. Hey guys, Sam McVay here with the Killer Growth Podcast. Today I have Phil Anderson with me, partner at Killer Growth. So just gonna start off with a little introductory from Phil. But first off, you've listened to every episode, right? Every episode. Every episode. 100%. 100%, okay. Every second of every episode, yeah. I feel like you're lying. My mom has. I believe that. So that counts for something. That means more to me that Jan has watched the podcast than you, Phil. No, that was just a tease. I haven't even listened to all the episodes yet. We've been putting out a lot of episodes. A lot. Yeah, we're already, I think like 12. There's still two, one more that's not posted, I don't think, and one that's not been announced. So two more going up. Yeah, booked out till February. Yeah, booked out till February. Yeah, doing two a week, which has been fun. So, okay, let's start with this. So Phil, I'll, for the sake of time, Phil loves attention. So instead of letting him just talk for an hour, because that's his favorite thing, I figured I'd start with context of Phil runs all of our media buying and SEO for Killer Growth and manages our team on that side of the marketing agency. But I'd love to just go back to your first, how many years ago did you start in digital marketing? What did that look like? And then different iterations, you don't have to go into great detail, but just like a little overview of what brought you to Killer Growth. Yeah, probably about 10 years ago, I got into it. I didn't go to school for anything. It was just a learned, you know, training I guess. Why were you there if it was for nothing? You just were hanging out? I couldn't tell you, yeah. Made some good friends, that's for sure. Yeah, so yeah, it was probably about 10 years ago. Started running Facebook ads for some businesses. I couldn't even tell you what the first ones were. There was a junk removal business, I remember that I ran some ads for. And yeah, so Facebook ads was definitely the main kind of foray into the digital marketing arena and did that for a couple of years, two or three years, like kind of Facebook ads exclusive. And then I wanted to get like kind of more formally, you know, trained in some areas and kind of expand my ability to service different businesses. And so I joined an agency in Boston. Man, I'm bad with years, probably like 2016 maybe. Okay. And was there for about three years. And yeah, we scaled that really fast. I was actually the first full-time employee with that agency, really small at the time. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, and I came on as like the client success kind of manager to handle the clients that were there so that we could focus on growing the business while maintaining the clients that we had. And within probably 18 months, we, yeah, I think we started out about 50K a month when I joined and within about 18 months to two years, we were doing almost 900 a month. Jeez. So it grew super fast. It was really fun, learned a lot. And then kind of after that time, after three or four years there, I kind of went back to do my own thing again and started running multiple different ad platforms, Google ads, Facebook ads, SEO. We kind of focused more on SEO for the next little bit, next couple of years for mostly service businesses, more local type businesses and grew that for a couple of years. And then I guess that kind of leads up to in short form, killer growth, which was a little bit over two years ago. And we've kind of been utilizing those skill sets and for those types of digital services, SEO, Google ads, and Facebook ads, along with a couple other peripheral services that we've added on. It's kind of where we're at now, so. Yeah. I didn't know how much that first agency scaled that you took a job at, that was a pretty big. How many clients were under that agency at that point? That's a good question. I don't know if I can tell you. Probably like at a time, there were probably like between, it was higher ticket. So it was probably between 75 and 100, probably over 100 once it got to that highest scale point. Yeah. So yeah, it was pricier. Crazy. Cool. So yeah, then I guess I'll fill in the gap there. We've known each other for, gosh, I don't know what, I'm bad with years too, but some year in between you moving to Maryland, you were in my- Yeah, probably close to 15 years. Yeah, was it? Gosh, that's crazy. Yeah, it was probably before, I don't remember. This was when I was in college. Yeah, I don't remember if I was married yet or before, it was probably before. You got married when you were like 18. Yeah, I think, right. So I was probably already married like five years at that point. But yeah, fast forward, we kind of just hung out a summer playing tennis and basketball and then stayed in touch. And then we just really, you would just reach out periodically and we'd just talk about marketing because I was building service companies. I remember that at the cleaning company, you jumped in and yeah, we just tossed ideas back and forth for years, just randomly over a decade. Never actually did anything together, but you just always kind of stayed in touch and we're always researching stuff. And I always found it super interesting being on the other side of the fence. So yeah, it was pretty cool timing when Tyler and I started the agency idea or we're forming it and you happened to be coming to town working on the exact same project. Essentially, we're like, hey, we think we're gonna do this. You're like, hey, I'm doing this. You're like, we should do it together. So pretty easy start. That's pretty cool. Totally. All right. So here's kind of what I'm thinking for this is I think my goal would be any local service company, regional or local, B2B or B2C, kind of provide a construct of how you think about digital marketing, how we think about it also as an agency. So not a sales pitch, just more informative. Hopefully there's something they can take away from this. But to kind of just lay it out, the simple model for us is, right, Google ads are capturing demand, meta ads are creating demand, and then SEO is owning that demand. And then kind of just going through those three from when Google, why Google, what does that actually look like? Because I think there's, we get a lot of service companies that come in and they're just like, I don't know, should I do Google ads? Should I do Facebook ads? Should I do SEO? Just tell me what to do. And a lot of that depends on obviously where they're at in the business, their budget, how much they have to spend. So there's a lot of factors, but let's just start real simple. What are Google ads essentially? We'll start there. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, when anybody goes to Google, you're searching in a plumber near me or your HVAC is broken or you need your carpet cleaned. So you're typing in some type of, some form of keyword around that service. And there's a couple of different things that you find whenever all the results pop up, you'll see a couple, three, it depends now, they're changing their format so much, but let's just say about three ads at the very top that are gonna say paid or ads, different, it depends. And then under that, you're gonna have the maps results where you can, there's usually three results there. And so there's gonna be a little map next to it and you can kind of click on a business. Google My Business listing on the maps. Yep. And then underneath those, you're gonna have like your search results, whatever. A lot of times you'll have like the Yelp results and yellow pages and all that stuff. Organics. Yeah. But the top kind of initial results are those paid ads. You do have some paid ads in the Google My Business maps kind of listings right down there too. So sometimes maybe you click on those and you don't even know they're paid. Yeah. But those are ads a lot of times. The first ones you see usually. Yes. And then I guess the only other ad on the service type would be the guaranteed, Google guaranteed ads. True, yeah, sometimes. What are they? Sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. I feel like I don't see them as much as I used to. It depends now. I would love to know. Google, please tell us how you decide. Yeah. It's definitely industry dependent. They don't exist for every industry. Well, and I think, yeah, probably on however many industries are bidding. I just assume it's like an auction war, you know, who's spending the most money. Yeah. LSA, lead service ads is the term I think in our industry that everyone uses. But it's that Google guaranteed badge that you pay a lot of money for. Definitely becoming, I mean, as far as the feasibility of those or if you're running those right now, I would say they're, we run them some, but we definitely don't focus on them at all. They're definitely, I think, less, the leads are just kind of less quality than they used to be. Kind of how those ads run, I think, just work worse than they used to. I think Google's just kind of moved on to other things. It seems like they haven't put as much effort into those in the last years as they kind of originally did when it came out. It's kind of like, does it need, it looks exactly the same as it did 10 years ago. Yeah. Like, do they, they've never redressed it or, you know, I feel like Google's switched up their program enough to where people are like, oh, this is interesting. Yeah. And now it's just kind of the same thing. If you see that 20 times over, you're kind of like, what is this even? And then you kind of scroll down to get more information. Yeah. Because there's not a lot of info on those either. Totally. The name and, so what are a couple things gone wrong? First off, when should they not do Google ads? What are some things people do wrong when they're running Google ads? Yeah. High level. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So I think putting, keywords are probably one of the biggest lever, I'm thinking in terms of levers that you can pull to make a Google ad campaign successful. Like the keywords that you use are gonna be one of the biggest levers there. If you're a commercial roofer and you have some residential type roofing keywords in there or you put maybe a broad keyword that just is roofer, then that's gonna show it to people who are maybe looking for residential roofing. So the types of keywords that you put in are definitely one of the biggest levers that you can pull to have a successful or a failed Google ad campaign. Yeah, what else would be? Still there now. What else did I ask? Budget, budget-related, tracking. Yeah, budget's good. Yeah, the budget is definitely another one. Not having enough budget is almost kind of throwing away money. It can be sometimes. That's also like depending on your market and how much competition there is and everything. But a lot of times you do need to have a substantial budget if you're really looking to compete and generate leads with Google ads. And that, I mean, people may want an amount. That amount, I think, is gonna vary. But I think it's probably a good rule of thumb to have at least 1,000 bucks in most markets to spend a month to spend on your ad spend for Google ads. We have clients that spend less on that and they're typically in smaller markets and that it can still work. But you definitely need more to play on Google than you do on a Facebook ad. A smaller market, the reason they can get away with lower budget is usually the volume of search is so much lower for that keyword. Competition's less, volume of search is less, so therefore the cost that Google is charging somebody to play the game is less. Makes sense. Tracking is another part, which is obviously pretty simple nowadays with Google, but understanding what it actually does, how in the service, and it's hard in the service world, how do you do tracking with Google ads? Or do you just not? Yeah, yeah. Most people don't. Yeah, so there's a couple different ways you can, I mean, one of the biggest mistakes is sending the traffic to your homepage on your website. So that's gonna be, again, what most ads out there are doing. Best practice would be to create a specific landing page for the traffic to go to when they click on the ad that is specific to the keyword that they just clicked on. So if you're a business that does HVAC and you do electrical and you do plumbing, you're a big business, and somebody clicks on a plumbing-type keyword or ad, and then they're taken to a page that has HVAC across the headline, there's not gonna be congruence there, and so the likelihood to click off is gonna be higher than if you had congruence between the ad messaging and the messaging on the landing page. So specific landing pages is a big deal. But as far as tracking, you can track the phone number that somebody calls, if they click on the phone number on the ad and call it, you can track that. You can track when somebody fills out a form on your landing page or your website, wherever. Those are the two biggest ones that we really track. I mean, there's definitely other, more granular ways to track people, but just knowing when somebody takes those big actions that could potentially turn into a conversion for you are the biggest ones. And if your method of tracking, and I can say this as a owner of a cleaning and pest control company, if your method of tracking is, your person answering the phone is going to collect that information accurately every time, do not hold all of your bad results against your current marketing agency, or against yourself. Consider those not tracked. Consider those not tracked. It's tough, it's hard. People don't really even know what they clicked half the time. So yeah, creating a funnel to where you can actually get that information is huge. And it's more expensive. It's not the same price. If you're just going to turn on an ad, and you might as well just put up a billboard, right? And they drive by, and you have some funny line on the billboard, and you hope they say that, or there's some special offer. But yeah, I highly encourage the effort. It does, it stinks, it's hard. It's more money out of pocket to create a attribution tracking system, but totally worth it. Because give yourself, if you're running your own ads, give yourself the benefit of the doubt. And at the very least, provide very thorough evidence that it's working or it's not working. And more importantly, it is working, most likely to some extent, but is it bringing in what you want? And that becomes to me like a big deal of like, yeah, the phone's ringing off the hook, but we're only getting this. Let's make that adjustment. For sure, yeah. Awesome, great, dude. Yeah, so I think, yeah, at the end of the day, Google is, somebody's searching for you. Do you show up? Yeah, yeah. Pay to play or don't? So let's go meta, meta ads. Facebook and Instagram are now meta, apparently. Yeah, I still call it Facebook. I'm stuck in the past, I guess. There are apps still on like Shopify and most of the ARMs say Facebook and Instagram. They don't even say meta still, which is surprising. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, Google is gonna be more, I'll do that over. What's the? The lower funnel. Yeah, what's the word? Higher intent. Intent, yeah, higher intent. And social media is, yeah, more passive. Yeah, Google's. That billboard verse drive-through, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what a good driving illustration would be. Yeah, yeah, Google's more intent-heavy. So if somebody's searching specific keywords for the thing that they want, they know that that conversion could happen like right then. Meta ads are gonna be more passive. So somebody is scrolling, they're coming across an ad that they may or may not at the time have a need for or a care for. And so the importance on meta is more placed on the creative itself, like the image or the video that they see, and what offer you put on that image or video. So the success of a meta ad is gonna be a lot more dependent on that than Google. I mean, you can have offers on Google, but really it's like, you know, you can have offers on Google, but really it's like, if somebody's searching for you, they're gonna come across, if they're not, they're not gonna see you. But meta, they're scrolling, and so therefore they're gonna may see your stuff and could have interest in it, could not, but so are you enticing enough for them to take some action on it? And that's a lot of what we work on with clients is like figuring out, okay, what is your offer here? Like, do you have an offer? And if not, we'll help you do that, but you need to put something out that people might be interested in. I agree, I think the most valuable part of a good Facebook ad partner is actually the value creation, value proposition, offer, whatever you wanna call it, depending on what it is you're pushing, because you're not always selling a thing in the ad. You know, you might be just trying to connect or, but yeah, that creative process is so important and really fun, but it is the hardest part. Like, once you get that part figured out, then we know how to run the tools, but if there's not a really good offer or a solution or service or a way to talk about it, no matter how well you A, B test the ads, it's probably not gonna perform super well, which goes back to the creative side. But I- You have a really unique advantage on that being in having had service businesses and being on the marketing side. I think you have a really unique ability to draw those kinds of things out and help people come to what those offers can be that can work for the business, but also work for the consumer to give them a click on it. Yeah. So that's a super useful thing that you bring to the table. Appreciate that. I've been desperate so many times with my back against the wall. I need people to book this service or buy this thing. No, I love that part of it. I think it's a difficult thing that's really fun when you get to the end of the road, like when you find that thing, it's like treasure hunting. And then I feel like on Facebook, you have to find it every couple times a year. It's not, or maybe four times a year, depending on the market size and what seasonality is. Yeah, seasonality, exactly. And then the best clients we have are they workshop those with us. And that's how we get there really quick. The clients that, if you're working with somebody currently, like give them as much as you can. They want your feedback, whether they're good at communicating that or not. Like that's where we get all of our ideas from are the way they talk about their business. Yeah, you gotta talk to the people that are in the business to know about the business. Exactly. What are things they can do wrong with Facebook ads? Like the DIY, nothing wrong with that, but also what are some common mistakes on, yeah, I'm gonna do Facebook ads today. Yeah, not having an offer. I mean, a lot of people are just running an ad just with their name on it or something. And so nobody really cares about that. They care if they can get like a deal. They care if they feel like they have good value in the service that they are wanting from you. And so it has to appeal to what the user is, what their mind wants. And so, yeah, I mean, I think the offer is huge. Okay, so this is a huge thing. So that we ask clients all the time before we even start Facebook ads, before we even think about starting them or planning them or strategizing about Facebook ads is what does your followup system look like? If you generate a lead on Facebook, it typically is not gonna be someone calling in hot and ready to buy. It's gonna be somebody that saw your offer and is curious about it. And maybe they need their carpet cleaned right then, and that's great. But a lead comes in, the followup for that needs to be like immediate. Because anybody that's ever run Facebook ads knows what I'm talking about here is that you can get a lead that you call the next day and they're not even gonna remember that they filled it out. And that's the nature of just scrolling and switching between apps and short attention spans. This is the nature of the beast of the modern mind. I guess. Yeah, for sure. Not, you know, of just switching from thing to thing. And so this is- I don't even remember what I had for breakfast. Totally. So this is like, it has to be very, very top of mind and systems in place and very tight on the business's side to be able to make Facebook ads work. Yeah. No, it's really good. I honestly had forgotten about that common mistake. And I can testify the amount of Facebook bookings we've had when we relied on just our office to call was zero automation. They, yeah, they get mad. Like, what, why are you calling me? We didn't put this in here. Yeah, yeah. No, you did. It was just yesterday. No, I never, I never signed up for anything. I don't know what you're talking. It's like, they're not even listening. And I get it. I mean, you're, you hit something cause it makes sense and it's low buried entry. It's like, all you had to do is put your email in to get an offer. Right. But yeah, they go cold. They're already cold to your point. Yeah. They go cold real fast. And we'll set it like, you know, we do our part in setting up automations and doing everything that we can to hit the lead right when it happens that isn't, you know, the front desk person at the, you know, from our client actually calling or reaching out. We'll send a text. We'll send emails. We'll send those touches. But ultimately like somebody talking to the lead is what's gonna convert them the best. Yeah. Another thing I would add to that is boosting, just boosting a post without any strategy. So back to your point of no offer, but also not having a strategy of what you're promoting, what the goal is for Facebook, because Facebook works so well when it understands what the goal is. Yeah. Right. So is this, is the goal to get a click to the website is the goal for them to take action once they get to the website? It's a goal for them to call, right? So if you, those are so hard to properly set up when you just boost a post. So you need to do it from ads manager. Yeah. You can't boost a post unless it's just a local promotion for like an event or something, you know, like you're sponsoring something that's hyper, hyper local and it's a temporary one time, one off, one week thing. But that's where I think, yeah, zero thought and then just spending money. And then you quit doing it because you just say nothing happens. And then the other thing I would say is quitting too early too. I think it takes time to find the right offer, the right idea, the right communication, the right back to your point of creative. Cause you have the best offer, best idea and then your creative sucks and nobody watches even two seconds of it. Yeah. And they never get a chance to hear what your offer or the reason why they should follow you is. And I mean, that leads into a good point. Like the, I think the best, you're really good with like framing the mental model of how to look at these things. And I think one of the ways to look at it, paid ads specifically, especially if you haven't run them in the past or you're coming up with a new offer that hasn't been tested before is you're buying data to figure out what works. And so if you're coming in and wanting, you know, thinking that you're gonna put some money into some ads and it's gonna start chucking out leads, you know, right out of the gate, that sometimes happens, but you need to look at it more in terms of like, I am buying information or buying data to figure out what can work. Yeah. Figure out what offer can work, figure out what creatives can work. And we, you know, we have good insight on our side to know in various different industries, what has a good chance of working or what has worked in the past for other clients. And so we can help a lot there, but the idea of really buying information, it should be the, how it's looked at initially when you're especially testing stuff new. So the, and you and I have talked about this a lot and we both have used this line a lot when I heard it from Alex Ramosi, but when to your data point, which is perfect, there are data, the data you're buying is of a substantial value, even if it proves what you're selling and how you're selling it doesn't work or even what you're selling, where you're selling it. So for example, you're selling X service on Facebook and it takes $500 in spend to book a $200 job. You're probably not gonna keep doing that. You're probably gonna stop spending 500 to book a $200 job, but then you realize, okay, every $500 I spend, I can book a job. So this is good data. Like this is good data. Like now I know this. So then if you work backwards from that point, and again, I'm stealing this from Alex Ramosi, if you work backwards from that point, then you're like, well, maybe we should just find a thousand dollar service to sell on this platform. And then it takes, let's see if it takes $500 to book a thousand dollar service. And so like a failed ad campaign is not always bad news if you can track what it actually costs to get the bad results. So to your point, again, that's just the data. What is that data that comes back? And if the data is it takes X to sell this, and then you're upset with those results, then maybe sit back and think about the full picture of, okay, maybe it's the wrong product. Maybe my price point doesn't make sense. Maybe there's not enough margin to even try and push this product. And that's usually the case. Usually the case is it's not a high enough ticket value. It's not in enough demand or it's too competitive. So therefore you need a higher ticket item. You need more margin, or you need to find a platform where it's not as competitive across the board, which is where Facebook is a, that's a superpower compared to Google because you can reach so many people for so cheap on Facebook compared to Google because it's higher intent. On Google is why it's more expensive, lower intent on Facebook, top of funnel colder, right? Then it gets warmer at Google, so you're gonna pay more. But because of that, if you can find something that catches people, like on the first time they see this, they weren't thinking about it, they take action. There's a reason Facebook ads still work. People have money and they're on Facebook. You just gotta find the right thing to sell at the right price point. Good stuff. Okay, let's jump into, well, and last thing I would say on that too, because we do the organic side and that'll be something I'll talk to Tyler Brickley on for that. We'll talk about just social strategy on the organic side. But I also think the connection part of not selling too soon or selling too fast to people, especially in like a local market doing a service, right? Doing something that's a feel good connection, an offer helps, but also just not always selling hard in their face all the time. So having that blend of strategy is important and I think you can do that on the organic side. That's the next episode, a little tease for Tyler Brickley coming on. We're in the business of selling. We'll leave that part to Tyler. So let's go SEO. What is SEO? Good luck. I'm just gonna drink my coffee. Yeah, so similar to Google Ads, the whole Google Ads kind of layout on the search results, you're showing up in a couple of different places. You have the ads and you have the Google Business Maps and so those are organic results and underneath those are the other kind of organic search results, Yelp, Yellow Pages a lot of times, but you'll have like the service business websites there or whoever, you know, whoever's searching. And so yeah, SEO is the process of ranking as showing up as highly as possible on those non-paid mediums. And there's two of those places on Google, the maps and then the search results underneath of those. So being in the top three is always the goal for each of those. Because that's where the vast majority of clicks are gonna happen. And there's lots of different ways to make that the case, but that's the ultimate end all be all. What are the key factors? So talk about click through from what we understand the Google My Business, the map listing, as you're referring to the map listing of their business on Google, that is 47% of clicks for search results. 57% of clicks for service near me is those top three is that the data we've been looking at. And then it's 20 some percent, I think on the organic below and then 20 some percent of the ads above. So I mean, essentially quick math, you're 60, 70 or 70 some percent of all clicks for local service businesses. Non-paid. Non-paid, which is I don't think a lot of people know that and they get scared. Obviously, being at the top guarantees some certainty and predictability. Immediate eyeballs. Right, yeah, exactly. But yeah, talk about that as far as that balance because that's a tough balance. Should you do both? When do you do both? When do you just do one? What's the right balance of Google Ads and SEO? Yeah, I think you're really good at talking about this, but I think SEO is a long-term play. And so paid ads can always get immediate results or have the ability to. And so it is all budget dependent and how much you care to look into the future, how you're building your business currently. I think like all of these things kind of matter in terms of the strategy in which you, or how you approach growing your business. But yeah, SEO I think is always gonna be the best long-term way to kind of establish yourself in your market. Paid ads are always gonna be there and different brand building things can always be done over time. But yeah, SEO is, as far as how we view it, the best way to really kind of establish yourself in the online marketplace that has long lasting results. Like once we typically get, it can take some time to get up into those tops, one, two, three search results, but we tend to stay there once we get there. And so that can really help a business have some good like foundation and ability to kind of have a place to grow from with some good certainty. Yep, for sure. And I mean, a testament, the nice thing is like my companies are often the guinea pig to a lot of different experiments that we try internally, which works out great. But one of my service companies is spending thousands less a month on Google ads now because of the SEO benefits. And like you said, some of those positions, there's positions we didn't have number one on for 13 years of being in business. And just like in the last year, since we've like ramped that up, got the partners agreed to switch our strategy heavier on SEO, it's wild the difference of what's happened for those listings. And to your point, yeah, I always, I'll go check them. I kind of like freak out about it. And there's some maintaining of those. But talk about just like a tip, like a tip for everybody listening. Cause again, it's like SEO, such a buzzword. They get a call. I mean, how many people get a call that own a business every day about their Google business listing? How much better it could be when they would guarantee it? How much better? Like, I feel like it's such a, SEO is such a scam ridden, like it gives agencies a bad name. And so it's like, it's hard to talk about without people just thinking of every freaking phone call they've gotten. But like breaking down what it is, it's just work, right? It's strategy, it's research, and then it's putting in the data. But what would you warn people about if somebody calls and says, hey, 200 bucks a month, I'll get your Google business listing up to X. Like, is there any questions you would advise them to ask? I mean, I still don't really know what those people are doing on the other side. Cause it doesn't make sense. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. A lot of times that's probably them just like putting some posts on your Google business or like very, fairly minimal stuff. And I think the best way to think about SEO is that really you're just giving Google signals that it wants. And so there's, if you've run SEO in the past, currently or in the past, and you probably heard or seen yourself or from your agency that there was an algorithm change. And so we dropped all these search results and that's not entirely untrue by any means. There are changes that happen. And so how you go about SEO can kind of morph and change over time. But I think there definitely are strategies and things to do under the SEO umbrella that are kind of evergreen. And because what Google wants really kind of doesn't ever change. Like they want to give their users a good experience and information that they know that they're looking for. Okay, and so we can kind of work back from that and I'll try to stay at enough of a high level for anybody to like, not probably already clicked off. But yeah, but so yes, like if you do a search, I'll try to give a quick like, hello example. You do a search and you go into, you look up something on the Google maps or something, you're gonna see some icons up at the top that are like, it's gonna say restaurants or hotels or things to do or weather that are just these widgets that are kind of across the Google platform. And so these are really good indicators that this is, and you click into one of those and then it's gonna show you some hotels in that area or whatever, the different categories. And so these are good indicators. These are things that Google focuses on and ways that it wants to distribute information to people in a useful way. And so you can use those same things and put them onto your website and really use like geo, what we call geo data on your website to give Google like really strong signals that you are a local business in this area, serving people in this way. And so I have a couple other thoughts on websites, but yeah, I think the idea of giving Google, like sending Google the signals that it wants and not trying to manipulate it in order to get a result is the way to kind of think about SEO at a high level. Yeah, not the quick fast track approach that's not gonna, yeah, more of the long-term approach of what always works and will stay on the test of time, which does take more work. So on the combination of, so you've run your listing, you want reviews on your Google business listing on a map, you wanna respond to your Google reviews, right? That's the best practice. You want to post on your Google business page, even though no one looks at it on your map page. And then that's just one piece of it. Then how do you construct a website that benefits that listing? If that's almost half the clicks, and hopefully I'm setting you up on what maybe you're about to go into, but if that's half the clicks, then what should you be doing on your website? And can you do anything on your website to boost your Google business listing? Yeah, yeah, no, the service pages and location pages are probably the two biggest things to make sure you have and optimize for on your website. And so if one of your service companies services an entire county or multiple counties, but you're gonna wanna look at at least the primary towns or cities within that county that your business services. And so you're gonna have a page for each of those towns on your website. And same with your services. You wanna have a page for each service that you have that is on your website. And on each of those, you can have, again, what we call geo data, that's send a signal to Google from your website and connects back to your Google business page and your search listing or your results, Google search results that has, maybe you have a weather widget on that location page that is Wichita, Kansas has a weather widget that is connected back to the search results from Google that you can embed on your page. And you can do that kind of thing with a number of different widgets that Google has. This is just one kind of way of giving really strong signals back to Google because this is already what Google is showing people information that it knows that they want. And so if you're putting that same thing on your website, it's a really strong signal back to Google for that specific location, do that each location. So service pages and location pages are huge. That's what we put a lot of our effort into on the website side of things. And last question on that, on the common question we get is, hey, I'll just, yeah, I wanna do SEO, but I'll write my own blogs. That's a common thing we get at Killer Growth, which is fine. And there's two ways to do this and we've done it both ways a lot of times, but speak on that. If somebody, what's your first concern? What's your first piece of advice? If someone says, I'll do my own blogs, you do the technical and the optimization and the page building, but I'll write my own blogs. Yeah. Yeah, the content is, again, probably one of the biggest levers that there is on, for SEO. If you have, you kind of have a couple of different categories of things to do within the SEO umbrella. Content is one of them. Blogs, written, video, audio, it's content. Then you have kind of the backend side of things, like the technical. There's probably three or four of those different categories, but the content side is probably the heavily, most heavily weighted one in our experience. And so, yeah, if somebody wants to do their own, the biggest thing to think about is you have to write it in a way that has the keywords that you want to rank for for that particular piece of content. You know, a lot with AI these days, it's obviously not difficult at all to just like whip out, you know, 500,000, 1,500 word blog article. And you can do that. And, but the main thing is really making sure that it's optimized in a way that has the ranks for what you want to rank for. And that's probably the biggest piece that we're going to be able to help with is kind of knowing how to structure a piece of content so that it actually does what you want it to do, which is like get you a phone call. And most people don't really think about the end results much. I think when they- They think more about the content that their customers would read, even though their customers are probably never reading one of these. Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, that's a great point too. That's kind of what we- Not that we're writing them in a way that people don't want to read them, but like the nature of these things for, like people don't really care. People don't care. No. So, you know. Yeah. So, you know. Yeah, when a cleaning company writes a blog post, they're not reading it. I mean, and we're talking in that context. Now, if you're a business coach or, you know, there's different industries, you're a nonprofit doing a newsletter. I think there's different areas where it does matter more where people might actually want to go read it. But depending on your industry, if it's, if the goal to your point, which is a good point, is to get a phone call, they're going to be written in a way that's still fine. You're not going to build a big following on a blog about plumbing. Yeah. Most likely. I'll say one other, I think this is, I'm trying to be like useful to what people may want to, if they want to go implement some of this stuff themselves, it's great. But one of the biggest, most powerful things that we've found on the content side is, again, back to the sending signals to Google. Like what are the other platforms that are also, so Google owns YouTube. This is probably the second biggest search engine. I don't know if you, maybe YouTube is bigger now than, or, you know, gets more search volume than Google. Google does, I'm not sure. But nonetheless, it's probably top three search engines. And then you have audio in the podcast form. And so how we approach that is kind of thinking about it in a flywheel. So we have written content, we have visual content, and we have audio content, where we're turning, writing an initial blog and turning it into a video that we then post on YouTube and an audio, which you then create into, send out into a network of podcasts. These, again, are signals that Google finds really powerful. And so this is probably like the, this is like part of the core of our content strategy is not just a blog on a website, but using a flywheel approach that all work together and all point back to the website in a strategic way. And so I don't really see many people doing that or talking about that, but I think it's proved pretty powerful for us. There you go. Phil revealed the secret sauce. It's a lot of work, but it does work. Yeah, on that note, does Google favor Google products? Is Google happier when you post on Google products versus other products? Versus Bing? Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, I would assume. Yeah, I mean, regular posting on your GMB, regular posting on, I mean, all of this does come down to consistency. And so like SEO isn't just a two or three month thing. Like it is a consistently over time thing that builds on itself and compounds. So yeah, posting on all, really all Google mediums are gonna be great signals. They're all super powerful. Love it. No, it's good stuff. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I kind of, how it all works together, we can kind of end on that. So from, and I've been trying to think about how to recap this in a way that would be helpful to some business owner out there. But yeah, maybe just the whole approach, depending on what their goals are, intentions are. In summary, if you are a, let's just use the context of you're an HVAC company or you're, well, let's go plumbing, switch it up. We've been saying HVAC, crazy. So let's say you're a plumbing company and you are at, let's just say you've got four employees and you're kind of in that awkward spot of, okay, time to grow. You've got one guy that's got availability, a balanced structure. They can't usually do everything. And we're very, I feel like we do a good job of not telling people to do everything, right? When they come in, once we understand their budget, but I feel like our advice consistently, they come in and I say, okay, what is your realistic budget? You can spend each month and it's not, your business isn't at risk. Cause this isn't, marketing shouldn't be gambling, right? You shouldn't just be thrown in a bunch of money and you're really hoping for a return. Like it should be strategic and it should be responsible. So they give us a budget, right? We get a budget and then based on that budget they give us, then we make a determination of where will that budget go the furthest, right? Between each platform across the board. Sometimes we deal with people that are larger and their budget is large enough to where it can cross all three strategies, right? From Facebook, Google, SEO, which is where we live. And we didn't really get into that fully, but that's just the best place right now for the type of companies we serve, I think in the local service industry overall. But once they get in there and they look at that, that's kind of our balanced approach of, you can't do everything, don't worry about that. There's all parts of the marketing tree that you can start with one piece and be good at one piece with a reasonable budget. And then obviously then it builds on itself, right? It starts compounding and building. In that position, someone comes in, they're listening to this. What would your advice be to them after they hear all of this? What would be your advice to them if they have not hired an agency or have not done marketing themselves and they're about to spend their first ad dollar? And they're freaked out. We talked to a lot of business owners. They're always scared. They don't trust anybody. Rightly so. There's a lot of- There's a lot of- A lot of $200. Yeah, a lot of $200 offers, a lot of guarantees out there. I mean, constant cold calling, especially in this climate right now, business is tough for a lot of industries. So I feel like there's a lot of agencies hunting people right now. And we're gonna see a lot more of that, I think, rolling into 26. But yeah, for that person that's kind of right at that beginning, what's your advice? You've gotta hold their hand and tell them it's gonna be okay. You have to tell them to take the leap somewhere. Yeah, that's usually what you do, is hold their hand. This is you getting your reps in. Guys, Phil does not like this context and he's been killing it. So please show him some love in the chat. You have a great podcast voice, by the way. You have such a better voice than I do for this. I'm like sitting here like, I wish my voice sounded like Phil. A bit more of a radio. Yeah, you've got a great radio voice. Yeah, I think it's probably gonna be most useful to do some paid ads and get some calls and some leads coming in quickly. If you're in kind of that position of really needing things to work in short order. But to me, it really is kind of the fastest path to be able to get a substantial SEO strategy going for the longevity of your business. And so the sooner that someone can implement really solid SEO, the better. I think that while we can do all kinds of caveats for depending on the industry and where you're at, and et cetera, I think it's always gonna be best for pretty much everyone to, as quickly as possible, get a solid SEO strategy in place that can start getting you those calls organically, that you don't have to pay for every single one of them. And in tandem and have supplemental paid ads running as well, that doesn't necessarily replace that. But it does depend on your growth trajectory and how fast you wanna go and everything. So yeah, it probably is gonna be most useful to do some paid ads, to get some calls and leads and business in the short term. But as quickly as you can get some solid organic leads coming in, I think that's always gonna be useful for a business that's growing. That was perfect, that was a great answer. Start out with something that's gonna get you some wins, build some confidence. And then if you're in a place where you can grow at a more steady, slower pace with a better long-term result, go the SEO route. I think that's why it's like, hey, ads are great, let's get going on ads, but let's get into SEO at some level as soon as possible, because it does take time. And then obviously, finding someone you trust that's actually gonna do it the right way is a big piece of it, because it is scary when someone says, yeah, in six months, you'll see some results, right? And it happens quicker than that in some areas and some keywords, and we don't talk about results that are unrealistic, because it is different for every market and industry, it seems like. But no, that's really good, I agree with that. I think it's, start with some ads, find someone you trust to help you through it, and then roll into organic as soon as you can. If you're doing it yourself, or if you can find a partner you trust, go into the organic side. I wish I would've done it a long time ago, for sure. And I can testify, and it's easy to talk about it, obviously, on this side, but at the beginning, it always freaked me out, and mostly, because I didn't trust anybody that talked about SEO. I didn't trust them, I'm like, dude, I don't, like, this is a lot of money. This is more than what I'm spending on ads most of the time, too, and I will say, pricing's a big deal, too, and there's a reason SEO is cheaper now than it was then, but SEO is more affordable today than it was 10 years ago, ironically, because of AI and efficiencies. Yeah, it is, when you're actually doing it, it is time-intensive, and historically, it is time-intensive and laborious, and you have to consistently do all the things, but yeah, with tools, AI, et cetera, the efficiencies are much greater. And you've created a really powerful product, I will say, kudos to you. This isn't advertisement, more just complimenting my teammate, but you've created a really amazing product at a great value that's sustainable for people, and I think that's key, too. Having a sustainable SEO strategy that can just stay on, the value starts over, the value goes above and beyond the cost at a time period that makes sense, and I think that's powerful, and that's what's missing a lot, is that we've seen people with SEO costs that are 4X what our price is doing similar stuff, and so I think pricing needs to be reflected on where a business can keep it, as you said, always on. Like, SEO should always be on, and so you need a price point and a strategy that could always be on and fit within a, yeah, marketing budget, but I'll get off that. I appreciate you, dude. Yeah, you're awesome, thanks for hanging out. Good work with us. Yeah, it was a good conversation. You'll be, like, episode 13, I think. Okay. Something like that. But yeah, thanks. I'll take it. This was not planned at all on a whim. Yeah. Phil lives in Maryland, so. He's in town, and we jumped in the cage. Yeah, he flew all the way here just for this podcast. Yeah. Jan, Jan, that was for you. All right, thanks, brother. All right. Appreciate ya.