- Getting started with marketing—what to do first
- The one thing that will destroy your website if left unchecked
- The importance of TRUST online and in choosing SEO partners
- What type of paid media your business absolutely needs to run
- So much more….
Send us your questions, comments, feedback, praise! We can’t wait to hear from you!
Transcription:
Devon Hayes:
We are so excited for today’s episode. We have been reading all of this guest published articles. He’s always been on the forefront of things when it comes to SEO. Today, we have Matt Bertram of EWR Digital Agency, and they are an international digital firm located in Houston. Matt, he’s the majority owner of EWR. He’s been published in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, For Us, SEO’s Search Engine Journal. He is just an SEO guru and a wiz. He’s also the host and co-host of three other podcasts. You can find them in the show notes. And he’s also published two books, going on three. So with that, he is a trusted mentor, partner. He’s going to provide some immense value in today’s show.
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly. Stick around to very end. There’s going to be some really meaty insights around AI, paid media, SEO, you may it, just digital marketing in general. Just get ready, you guys, this is going to be such a great episode.
Devon Hayes:
Welcome to Trade Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.
Amanda Joyce:
This is for you if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.
Devon Hayes:
Learn from home service’s industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.
Amanda Joyce:
Let’s dive into today’s Trade Secret. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Matt. It’s such a pleasure to have you on.
Devon Hayes:
Seriously, we’re so excited.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, we so appreciate it. But one of the first things we really wanted to dive into, just thinking about our audience, the contractor space. What would you tell someone where to start with their marketing?
Matt Bertram:
Well, certainly since COVID and even before there’s been a big shift online. A lot of people aren’t going into your showroom or your office much anymore. Certainly people will come on call to meet you, but your first impression today is your website. So your website, if you’re going to generate… Referrals are great. Well, guess what? Social media is just a new medium to generate referrals on, and people communicate along with other social platforms. But certainly, if you’re talking about your digital presence or your digital office, your website’s where you really should start. And so making sure your website’s maintained, in good shape. Communicating what you want to communicate is where you want to start. You want to have a high converting website, so you’re capturing leads online. And if you’re going to delve into digital marketing, I believe the first place to start from all the data that I’ve seen is search engine optimization because, well, Google and to a degree, the other search engines, but if you look at the market share, it really is mainly Google.
It’s the closest point from point A to point B of someone that is looking for your service to find your service. And so, Google is where it’s at. Search engine optimization has the best ROI, how people are searching online today, your website, and having that be optimized. That’s what search engine optimization is, optimizing yourself for the search engine is the absolute best place to start. And then, everything else you can start tacking on. I would add retargeting after you do that. People that come to your website that didn’t buy. Typically, people take, I don’t know, 10, 20 times coming to your website before they purchase. You want to show an ad. Those are the pens and the pads, those are the staying top of mind that you want to be. And then you can start layering all the shiny strategies on top of that. But the foundation should be in conversion rate optimization, CRO, website maintenance, and SEO in my opinion.
Devon Hayes:
And I liked what you said. We had a little sidebar before we started recording, but you phrased it beautifully when you said that doing SEO is like having the wind behind your sail and really just helps guide you along on your organic digital strategy. And we talk about that a lot on this podcast, and so you being a massive agency owner and published author and just very widely respected in this space and stuff, we’re excited to have you on. But that’s what we tell people, but where it gets confusing and hard for contractors to understand… I wouldn’t say hard to understand, but really when their expectation of the ROI for these organic efforts. We know what we tell our customers, but I want them to hear it from someone larger. Again, you’re on Forbes, you’re in Search Engine Journal.
We read what you say in your opinion on the data, and you have your own data pool with an agency that big and things like that. So will you talk to us a bit about expectations on how long should SEO take? This is a twofold question. I’m going to tee it up because I know this is your world, but two part question. Number one, how long should SEO take before someone sees ROI from very beginning? Say they just launched a new website, they’re starting from scratch. That’s what we’ll say. And then the second part, we’re going to talk AI and AI content and SEO. But let’s go into part one. How long should it take? You’re starting with a brand new website.
Matt Bertram:
Well that, it’s tough. You have to evaluate a website because it all depends on where your starting point is. So you just said if you’re just launching a website and you’re new to digital marketing, that means you’re not ranked for anything. That means you have no domain expertise in any area, and Google’s probably not even indexing your site yet. And if you’re not indexed and you’re not ranking and then you’re not getting any traffic, you’re not getting any leads, you’re not getting any ROI. So you got to walk it all the way back and say, okay, what does that process look like from soup to nuts, beginning to end to rank? Now okay, end goal. Here’s the thing. If there’s a bunch of contractors out there listening, how many of you search past the first page of Google? How many of you search past the second page of Google? When you get in the game, when you’re getting indexed in, you’re ranking for a keyword, that’s the top 100, okay?
So you’re like 10 pages back, you’re nine pages back, and you’re competing against every single other person for that keyword phrase. So you could put the location of the city at the beginning, the middle, the end, whatever. It’s all different. All that is a different algorithm of what the perfect score is based on a bell curve. You’re trying to rank for the most keywords possible with that keyword, or you have different pages that are targeting different keywords. But to break it down for you is it really depends where you start. Your investment in what I tell people. If we’re redoing the site, new brand, changing everything, Google’s going to consider it a new site if you’re thinking over 20% standard deviation, all the content, everything like that. Don’t quote me on that but that’s what I’m seeing in my data, is Google will consider it a new website. It’ll hit the reset button and everything will reevaluate when you’re… So building a new website or changing brands is absolutely critical to do it right.
But what I would tell you is six months until you even start seeing some kind of ROI, because you have to be on the first page of Google. You actually have to be at the top of Google. The first position in Google gets 33% to 37% of all the searches. So if there’s a hundred searches, they’re getting 37. If you’re in position nine or 10, you’re getting one or two clicks. So it’s like the lion’s share of the traffic. You got to be better than everybody else for that keyword and you got to rank at the top. So going from zero to a hundred to position one, two, or three, five, whatever, is going to take a while. So what we tell agencies, or I guess clients, we tell both, is six months investment and then the ROI starts happening at the backend. And that’s why a lot of people offer these year contracts to get started.
We offer six-month contracts. You have to invest in the foundational work to start getting that. Now, if you’re already ranking, and you might be paying for SEO, but when you look at some of these tools, you realize you don’t know what the company’s doing or they’re not doing anything. People are like, “I’ve spent this much on SEO,” and I’m like, “Well, I don’t see any indication of that in the third party tools that I’m using, so we really got to consider your site brand new.” Six months. But if you are ranking, if you’re ranking and you want to push it up, you’re top of the second page, bottom of the first page, 45 days.
Basically two index cycles of Google which, depending on how much crawl budget you have, if you’re a big site, it could be a week. You know what I mean? So it really depends, and it’s very tough to say how long it’s going to take your site to rank, but rule of thumb, four to six months is really good. But here’s the deal, four months a link. If you get a link, and I know I’m going on a little bit of a tangent here.
But if you get a link, a link takes on average 60 days to come to full strength. So four months means you got a link in the first month of your campaign that is starting to have an impact in month three. So if you say four months, that’s no margin of error. Does that make sense?
Devon Hayes:
Yeah.
Matt Bertram:
And also, Google, if you’re not ranked for a keyword, could sandbox you. They say they don’t. They do. They’re trying to hit the affiliates.
Devon Hayes:
The sandbag inside of a-
Matt Bertram:
The affiliate marketers, the churn and burn sites. They want to make sure you’re for real. You got to continuously send the right signals for a certain amount of time to even get in the game. And if you’re not in the game, minimum six months. I don’t even care. It’s just going to take that long unless you come through with massive amounts of domain authority, massive amounts of inbound links. If you get a link that’s worth a 100X what other links are worth, okay, it could be different, but that’s certainly like an outlier. So for most of our clients, we tell them a year. You’re going to start getting ROI, this is going to start paying off in a year, and it’s an investment.
And if this is not something that you’re committed to, then let’s understand what your business strategy is. Now certainly you can accelerate that with paid media. You can actually run clicks to that search term and you can push it up faster if you have the budget. But four months is no margin of error, access day one, immediately. I think, clients giving you everything within an hour of you asking for it. You know what I mean? So I think the reality is you want to look at it like six months. You want to track, are you making improvements? Are the activities there that are going to produce the leads?
And if you see continued movement that’s positive, keep going with it, but don’t expect to get ROI, return on investment, until the second half of whatever, not the calendar year, but the year that you start. So the first six months is investment, look for all the positive signs. The second six months is where it’s going to start getting fun. And certainly, the wind under your sails is absolutely true and it helps every metric. SEO helps every metric. The data shows that the more you show up in the search engines, the more trust you build, the more people click, the more they’re exposed to your brand, the more times you’re in the search engines. If you’re in the maps, if you’re in paid ads, if you’re inorganically. People buy familiarity.
People actually buy two things. People buy familiarity and people buy novelty. Those are the two things. So now you say, I’m familiar with your brand and you’re doing AI stuff. I want to work with that company. Does that make sense?
Devon Hayes:
Yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
Absolutely.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, definitely.
Amanda Joyce:
I was going to say, can I jump in on a couple of follow-up questions on that? I know we have a-
Matt Bertram:
Sure. And I super ran on big tangent. I apologize. I’ll try to be-
Amanda Joyce:
No.
Devon Hayes:
That was great.
Amanda Joyce:
It was so good.
Devon Hayes:
Relevant.
Amanda Joyce:
I’d love for you to touch a little bit on the paid side of things. I’d love to hear your thoughts on if you feel like sometimes if you’re running traditional or GLSA, if you think that ever actually does have an impact on how quickly your rankings start to grow, and what you tell somebody if they are going to start investing in paid, where to get started there. And then I’d also love for you to touch a little bit on the dangers of bad links because I know that’s something a lot of contractors are like, “Oh, I did campaign a year ago.” And we’re like, oh my god. You know how much time it’s going to take us to remediate all those links? Okay, I’m going to hand it back to you.
Matt Bertram:
Okay. Yeah. So let me just continue on the SEO and then we’ll get into the paid. Links are like a neighborhood. And you’ve maybe heard that before, but you want to be associated in a good neighborhood, you want to live in a good neighborhood. Who are your neighbors? Who are you linking to? Basically you’re connecting to people. You’re saying, I’m connected to this person. I believe in this person. I’m voting for this person. Well, if they’re voting for you, how are they voting for you? Why are they voting for you, and who else are they voting for?
Google’s looking for associations through the algorithm. And so what negative SEO is, and I’ve had to deal with a couple of these types of campaigns. I actually have a client right now that’s in a lawyer IP. You’re talking big cases, you’re talking lots of money kind of thing. Negative SEO is associating you with neighborhoods you don’t want to be associated with. Google looks at that and says, okay, this is untrustworthy. This is not in this industry. So why is that? One of the typical things is porn links. So running porn links to someone’s site-
Devon Hayes:
Yes. We just had a client with that where you have a 0.5 domain rating and you have 2200 back links porn to a contractor site. We’re like, oh.
Matt Bertram:
No, I had a publicly traded company. They asked me to do an audit. And I was like, “By the way, I don’t know if you know this, but you probably should address this immediately.” And they were horrified, and they didn’t know. There’s other ways to do it and also, things that used to work that were blackhead SEO become toxic. PBNs. Google can pretty much see the PBNs, definitely bigger PBNs. I’m going to talk about some SEO providers, I won’t say their names, but they just run basically giant PBNs. It’s pretty easy when you’re 40 million a year running PBNs for Google to see it. So any link you have from that PBN, it just basically could dampen what you’re doing. So it could not do anything, Google just won’t count it, or it could dampen what you’re doing or it could hurt you, or there could be a manual opinion. There’s different levels. You got to remember, this is Google’s search engine, so Google’s going to do whatever Google wants to do, and you’re playing by their rules. And it’s crazy.
It’s not public whatever utility. It’s their database and they can do whatever they want. If you don’t follow the rules, they’ll kick you out. And I’ve seen people kicked out and it hurts. So you want to look at the links that are coming to you and you can basically say, yes, I want this link, no, I don’t want to be associated, and Google’s still going to just decide whether they want to associate you with it or not. Even no followings, now, Google’s just making the decisions now and it’s heavily algorithmic based. There’s very few times that the manual penalties come about, and when the manual penalties come about, they dig into everything.
So anything that ever happened on your site comes to light and algorithms don’t forget. So when you look at this data in massive data sets, big data, you can see this stuff. You can see, okay, this page that’s on page 30 or whatever, three pages back, four pages back, has more links than who’s in the first, second or third position. And then, everybody in between doesn’t have anything. You know what I mean? It’s so obvious when you look at the data. And so, what I can tell you is SEO used to be a cat and mouse game, and certainly I am guilty in the past of doing things that worked 10 years ago, even five years ago, things that absolutely worked. The algorithm, talking about AI, if we transition to that, is so much smarter now.
I’m reformed. Follow the guidelines, do the right thing, and Google will ultimately reward you. And so Google says purchase links are spam. That’s what they say. And so spend your efforts, your time, your energy of acquiring quality back links where… And also, if you can purchase it, they can purchase it. You know what I mean? But if you can get a link that is… And Google has a database, I believe. And basically they’re like, “These people sell links.” And if you get a link from that, it’s like you’re just throwing money away. It’s like the link doesn’t even work. So it’s really about doing the right thing and building a community online and connecting with people online that are relevant and that are earned links.
And so links is a whole separate thing, but certainly if you don’t know what people are doing or if people are charging almost nothing for SEO. Good SEO is not cheap. There’s no way around it. And there’s a couple vendors out there that are, “Hey, we’re going to manage your site for 300 bucks.” And I was like, “300 bucks?” What they’re doing is they’re buying a bunch of spam links that may work or may not work, but they’re going to burn out and they’re going to hurt you in the longterm. And if you don’t know what they’re doing, I would be scared, because they can move on and they burned your brand and they burned your URL, and they’ll just move on. They’ll just keep going. And that would be associated with your brand forever. So you really got to be careful and you got to know what you’re doing, you got to know why you’re doing it. And think about it like this too. This is the last thing I’ll say about that is people that are selling links honestly don’t care about Google’s rules, okay?
They’re blatantly going against what Google wants and they are, I don’t know, scrupulous. I don’t know if that’s the right word. But imagine what they’re doing when they’re not working with you. You know what I mean? And what they’ve been doing and how their mindset is. An SEO in my opinion is your online representative. They’re your online agent. And you want to trust your online agent to make sure they’re doing the right thing for you and they’re managing your brand effectively. And you’re trusting them, so you got to look at people’s character and you got to look at, yeah. So just be careful. And if you don’t know what they’re doing, I would rather do nothing than do something like that’s going to detrimentally hurt you in the future.
Devon Hayes:
And I think that’s a good segue because there are a lot of people… I think we know, on your podcast and on ours, we’ve talked about AI, Chat GPT, and there’s other softwares out there that write content for you. And so I think a lot of business owners are thinking, well, why don’t I just use chat GPT to write all this content and publish it for me? Why invest in an agency? And that falls into what you were saying about do nothing over hiring the wrong person. But maybe some business owners are thinking, well, I’ve got an admin who can enter a prompt into Chat GPT. Why wouldn’t I do that? Or what are some of the pitfalls?
So I think that goes into one of the myths that we’re all seeing in the SEO space of SEO is dead because of AI generated content. You don’t need an SEO anymore. But I think we all know in the SEO space, well, that’s not a long-term solution. And I don’t think any of us here are against using AI to an extent, but your output is only as good as your input. But will you touch on that myth that SEO is dead because of AI? And I think I know where you stand on this, but I would love to hear you just spitball on that topic.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah. I think AI, just like paid media, I know we didn’t cover that, Amanda, but-
Devon Hayes:
We’re coming back to paid, Amanda. We’re coming back.
Matt Bertram:
… they’re all tools in the tool belt, and they’re only as good as the person holding the tools. And what gets missed on a lot in SEO in my opinion, and certainly, we don’t do SEO month to month. I know that’s an advantage in no contract SEO, all that kind of stuff. You cannot plan out strategically month to month, and you don’t have enough budget to plan out a long-term strategy. It equates to me as publicly traded companies are always looking to hit the goal for the next quarter so they sacrifice the long-term because they’re trying to meet shareholder value. And SEO, in my opinion, is a long-term strategy in its investment. And you need to put together thought and business strategy and marketing strategy with what you’re doing, and content creation, and where you’re taking your online presence. Strategy. Like, okay, you have this great tool. Okay, you have a gun. Okay, great. But if you don’t know how to use it, it could hurt you more than it could help you, or it could just sit there and do nothing.
So this is how I think about strategy, is you can be the little mouse. This is a good analogy, I like this analogy. You be the little mouse that’s in the bucket of milk that’s paddling, paddling, paddling, and they paddle so hard that they turn that milk into cheese and they step out. Yeah, just go with it with AI. And if you don’t know what you’re even trying to do or where you’re trying to go or what’s trying to happen, and if you looked across the little bucket, you could see that there’s a little steps or whatever. Follow guidelines, follow strategies. Yes, SEO or AI is probably the biggest disruptor ever since visual interface, I think that’s what Bill Gates said. But when that came out, and that’s the difference between what’s happening. AI’s been around for a long time, it’s just getting better and the user interface is getting better. Because before a graphical interface or before, okay, if you’re using WordPress to build a website and you’re using a visual interface on the backend, you had to code everything.
If you’re having to code everything, you can still achieve the same results, but the visual interface makes it that much better. AI makes it that much better, that much faster, but guess what? If you knew how to code or you had to visual interface and you don’t know how to build a website, does it help? It might be easier, it might be more accessible, but again, it’s like a tool. Paid media, also a tool. Also like, okay, if you’re going to spend the money to buy a link, why don’t you spend that money strategically spending it on search terms, on the keyword that you’re trying to rank for, to send traffic of people that are looking for that specific thing to your website to give Google data on how it’s going to interact with it?
How about spend that money on retargeting clients that have already come to your website to get them to come back to buy? Certain money that you spend could be dead money or you’re looking for ROI or you’re looking for long-term investment. And guess what? Even when you think about marketing, when I talk to these Fortune 500 companies, there is a certain amount of budget that you want have to bid on your name. And well, why do you want to bid on your name because you’re already going to get that traffic anyway? Well, other people are bidding on your name. You’re building a positive click-through rate based on this campaign you’re running associated with your account. I can go down the list on why you should do these things. There’s certainly different opinions and I’ve vacillated between this or that, but it all depends on that particular instance. And you need to look at your business strategies.
And we can go way into the weeds on different type of content. So there’s informational content, there’s transactional content, there’s commercial content, there’s navigational content. Guess what? Google’s trying to serve up that mini micro moment for each one of those things, and one page written one way about the same topic could give a better answer about those specific things. And so okay, well, why are you writing this blog? What’s the intent of this page? What are you doing? But if you don’t have any of that strategy together, okay, yeah. AI is going to solve all problems, but it’s going to be the people that know how to use AI, know how to write the prompts, know what they’re trying to achieve, where they’re trying to go, what the 200, 300 plus different algorithms that they’re trying to check the box with Google on how to do it.
So yes, it’s going to be really helpful for people that are using it, but you got to know how to use it and you got to know what you’re trying to hit. And paid is a lot of the same way. You can use pay to do all kinds of amazing things and target all kinds of people and get all kinds of data, but it’s all about how you’re using it in that overall strategy. And that just doesn’t go back to SEO, it goes back to what’s your digital strategy? What’s your digital presence? How are you going to roll this thing out? What are all the different tools in the tool belt that you’re going to utilize?
Amanda Joyce:
And I think the point you were making earlier about that very top organic search result, that’s what Google has decided is the best, strongest content. And if your ultimate goal with your AI content and if you’re just having an admin just throw something in there is to rank and to get that traffic, you’re never going to win that if you’re just throwing stuff at the wall, you’re not being strategic. You’re just leaning on a bot and not putting your own IP in it. Unless you’re real lucky, your admin’s probably not going to come up with that super strong piece that Google’s going to favor anyway. And at the end of the day, then what are you doing?
Matt Bertram:
The two things you said I want to hit on really quickly, I think there’s two really good points in there. One is AI, if you’re just throwing content against the wall of something’s going to stick. Yes, that’s true. But remember, we talked about being in the top of the search results. Do you think you’re going to be the best result if you’re dealing with people that are strategic and know what they’re doing? Okay, you move from page five to page three. Guess what? In the big scheme of things, that’s zero traffic to your website. Does that really help? You know what I mean? Does that really help because it’s not targeted? That’s the first thing.
And then the second thing is AI, if everybody has access to AI. Well, the data also says by the way, I think just like Redbox, just like streaming, I think there’s early adopters. Maybe 13% of people will start using, and then maybe it will level out, about a third of the people will use it. So 70% of the people won’t use it. So people that are using it versus people that are not using it are going to do far better. Well, okay, if you put everybody on an equal playing field, and Google does… They came out and said, it was hilarious. They came out and basically gave up and said… I don’t know if it was with y’all that I was talking about this, but it was the American Constitution. They came out and said, maybe it was written by AI.
AI right now can’t figure out the difference between real writing and non-writing unless that token is exactly cut and pasted. So if you break the tokens up, they don’t really know. Google came out and waved the flag, the white flag, and said, “We give up,” and AI content is okay. Now, different publishers, if I’m publishing on Forbes or entrepreneur or Search Engine Journal, now they’re looking at their AI tools and they’re like, how much of it is human written? And there’s like percentages, stuff like that. But Google said if it’s good content and it helps the user and it’s placed properly and it has the proper citations and all that stuff, and it helps the user experience, it’s okay. So it’s not against Google rules to use AI, but here’s what. AI is only going to give you the standard knowledge of what is about that topic.
So if you’re not adding your personal IP, as you would call it, if you’re not adding what makes you different outside that, what I think’s probably going to happen is Google’s going to go, “Okay, all these sites are saying the same thing. So whoever said it first, I’m going to give them credit, and everybody else, I’m going to unindex them.” And that’s what I’m seeing a lot in Google, is Google’s indexing pages that are not relevant that they have to keep adding. So 75% of all searches are new searches still. People continue to evolve how they’re using search engines. And they have a database that they have to maintain. And they’ve decided, they came out and said, hey, if this is not relevant and somebody else is saying it about how to fix a sink. If you’re a plumber or whatever, and you’re just saying how to fix a sink, and it’s like basic content and Chat GPT wrote it, that will not even be indexed.
And if it’s not indexed, it won’t help you. The only place that I’m seeing AI really working where it’s just you don’t touch it at all and it helps, is in areas that have really, really thin content. So I was telling you all about a client I have. We have international stuff and there’s small islands and different places, and there’s small economies on some of those islands. And I’m working with a company on one of those islands, and there’s just no content. There’s three people total on the island that are publishing blogs or something. And so there’s no content getting pushed about this topic, almost nothing unless it’s travel. And so write something with Chat GPT, make an image with Midjourney. And certainly AI images, if they’re unique, which they are, that does help your SEO.
So we’re writing articles with different AI software, not necessarily Chat GPT. There’s a lot of other ones out there. And we’ve been playing around, I think it’s called FullJourney now, you can do videos. But like Midjourney, making an image, throwing it up there, doing the SEO, adding the links, boom. Ranking first or second. Really, really impressive. The only reason that’s working is there’s no other content for Google to serve. And so a lot of people like to rewrite other people’s blogs. Here’s a trick for any SEOs that are listening. So if you do a RSS feed, just make sure you have your interlinks, because people scrape my content all the time. As soon as it goes up, within an hour, somebody else has written the same article or whatever, but they copy the article verbatim. So they copy my internal links.
And so I’m generating links-
Amanda Joyce:
Oh, you’re like, thank you.
Matt Bertram:
… Because they’re copying and pasting my content with the links in it. And they’re-
Amanda Joyce:
That’s a free press release. Yeah, that’s crazy.
Matt Bertram:
So if I just wrote it with Chat GPT and I didn’t put the interlinks in it and I didn’t have the strategy involved with it, they would just be stealing my content and they would rank right below me or whatever for the same thing because it’s almost exactly the same. But now they’re ranking below me and then they’re shooting me links, so I’m like, “Okay, thank you.” At least if-
Devon Hayes:
You’re like, “That worked.”
Matt Bertram:
Let me let me get some value out of it if you’re going to rip off my stuff.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
Oh my gosh.
Devon Hayes:
All right, let’s see here. So we had a whole list and we touched on a lot of this. Let’s see here. And I think-
Amanda Joyce:
Can I ask one thing? We touched on paid a little bit, but I would love for you to say, knowing we’re talking contractors and knowing the way Google’s moved towards GLSA over in these service spaces. When you’re working with somebody in this particular vertical, do you typically recommend to them that they focus on GLSA over Google Ads or? I’d love to hear it from you.
Matt Bertram:
I do. I think they need to do GS, LSA, sorry. LSA ads. I can’t talk today. First. They should do them first if their industry qualifies. We actually offer a service where we just listen to them and push them back. So we say, hey, spend $5,000 and we can probably get you 75 of that back in a credit, and then it’ll start to roll. That is absolutely, you pay for what you get and then you got to figure out, hey, is the lead worth it? Because a lot of other people were doing it again since COVID. Back in the days, I ran this campaign for a medical company that was doing IV drips, and I helped them launch all through Houston back in the day and built their brand. And it was brand new and we were crushing it and all this kind of stuff, but I was paying 20 cents a click. And then-
Amanda Joyce:
The good old days.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah, COVID washed it all out. And then another company, and this is five years. Well, I don’t know, four years. I don’t know when COVID started, but basically when COVID started, first couple of months, they were like, “Hey, we can’t do face-to-face, whatever.” Well, they never picked me back up after COVID came back. And my fault maybe for not following up with them, but another company contacted me and said, “Hey, we want you to do our marketing. We’re not in the same geographic area, whatever.” So I start running paid ads for them and I already know what to do. And it was 380 a click. It went from 30 cents a click to three 380 a click over whatever happened since COVID.
Devon Hayes:
$380?
Matt Bertram:
No, no, no. $3 and 80 cents. So 20, 30 cents to $3 and 80 cents. And I don’t know what the multiple on that is, but I couldn’t run the same type of campaign. This strategy had to change to produce the ROI. And also Google is like, “Hey, this is a medical. You need to do this, you need to do that, you need to do that.” And also for industries that have that, influencer marketing and SEO are almost the only ways to go. And so, we had to develop a whole new strategy for that. You were asking a question, Amanda, about paid and I went off on a total different tangent and forgot what you were asking. Ask your question again.
Amanda Joyce:
Well, in one of them you just answered with the GLSA thing. I have a follow-up on GLSA real fast.
Matt Bertram:
Let me finish GLSA. So the local ads, you should do them. You get your money back. You should do them. And Google’s job is to take your click’s money. And if you have the ability to say, “Hey, I don’t like this lead. I want to give back.” We have some clients, some lawyer clients that are in an area that are in different counties, and he’s only able to practice law on one of them, but the city name falls over both of them, we have to push those ads back all the time. So you have to watch them. But also, if you talk to any platform, any platform, they will tell you if you want to get the benefit of the AI. We talked about AI, but we’re talking about search AI. If you want to get the benefit of AI, you need to spend about three grand a month per platform.
So if you’re spending money on SEO or if you’re spending money on paid ads, you could build a strategy to put 500 bucks in all these places. But are you going to get the brand awareness, the recognition, the frequency rate to make an impression? Google recommends on Google, and that’s people searching for it, 80%, 85% in the bid auction. So if you’re trying to make an impression of people that are not actually searching for what you’re looking for, that frequency has to be a lot higher. And so you got to spend a lot of money. So if you’re spending money a lot of different places, it’s because you have a specific strategy. Or if you just want to spread it around, it’s like posting organically, only 10% of your audience can see it unless you put money behind it. That’s how the platforms work, right? They’re given to you free. The days of broadcasting live and reaching a bunch of people are somewhat over and it continues to be a moving target of what you have to do online and how people are searching.
But yeah, I recommend, do the Google guaranteed ads first if you qualify. And then after that, actually you should spend on Google after that because that’s where people are searching for your product or service. And performance max works good, there’s different strategies with display ads. YouTube works really great because not a lot of people want to produce videos. AdWords is sometimes expensive. Depending on your industry, you got to make sure that ROI works. I like to use it as a multiplier effect but a lot of people will come and be like, “Hey, I want to go on four different platforms.” I listen to them and then I try to understand what they want to do. And then I recommend a different strategy, and then there’s been sometimes that I’m saying, okay, we’ll do this, but I want you to sign a form that says that I am telling you not to do this and you want to do it anyway. And if it doesn’t work, I don’t want you upset. And that’s happened to me twice.
Devon Hayes:
I love that. We need that form.
Amanda Joyce:
Does it work? Sometimes do they wave the white flag and say, “Okay, I’ll go through your strategy,” or do they sign?
Matt Bertram:
Well, so I’ve had two people in the last three years, so it’s not a lot, sign it. And you know what happens? They get upset that the campaign’s not working. And then I go, “Do you remember when you signed this?” And I show it to them. And then they just crawl into a shell and they say, “Okay. What do you want to do, Matt? You said it wouldn’t work. It didn’t work. All right, I trust you. What do we need to do?” That’s literally what has happened, and they go, “You did say this wasn’t going to work.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I said this wasn’t going to work and you want to do it anyway.”
Devon Hayes:
I tried. I tried to tell you.
Matt Bertram:
“Are you ready to do something else now?” And what it does is if something doesn’t work, that’s when people are like, “Oh, I want to switch agencies.” But if you are giving them proper coaching and direction and you’re like, “This is not going to work,” that builds the confidence in their eyes. And I’ve had sometimes where you have a lot of conversation and I tell my account managers, I’m like, “Document everything.” Because in a month, in three months, in six months, if they can come back and pin something on you and they forgot about it, they’re going to be convinced of whatever they thought in their head. And if it’s not documented, you’re in a world of hurt.
And a lot of these contractors are busy doing their own business and they’re trusting you to do it. Or they’ve asked you to do something, it’s really, really important to document it because you’re not going to remember everything. They’re not going to remember everything. Also, I like to have an email sent to say, “Hey, I’m confirming this is what we’re going to do. This is the strategy we’ve agreed with. This is what we’re doing.” Because you know what? Everybody miscommunicates.
I had one time, we were running a million dollars a month for a client and they wanted to cut budget in the middle of it. And they cut budget, but there was a different definition of what bucket was needing to be cut. And then we were on the hook for a lot of money because nothing was in writing and it was like a meeting call, and then there wasn’t even a follow-up of a confirmation. And the client went back literally to five months ago, one email, and was like, “This statement right here, legalistically, is what I meant.” And I was like, “Well, there was three conversations since then, blah, blah, blah.” And we ended up meeting in the middle and working it out. But because it wasn’t documented… And I worked with this company for four years. There was no-
Amanda Joyce:
It’s a good relationship.
Matt Bertram:
It was just a miscommunication happened and you’re not going to remember, and not everything’s going to work. And what you think in your head constantly changes, and the strategies change and how you interact with people. Think about it. Do you still have the same friend group that you had when you were in high school? Do you hate those people? Probably not. But your life changes, things move, things change. And whatever you said to them back in the day, they’re going to remember or they’re going to remember a version of something, right
Devon Hayes:
And I think you made a really good point too earlier, sending that follow-up saying, you want me to make this change. Because we had a client recently where it’s like every time they heard a new podcast or read some new article, they were directing us. They’re like, “Stop doing this. I want to do this. I want to point to this shiny new tool I have on my website,” and derailing everything that we were trying to do for them in paid and organic. And we’re like, “This goes against everything we’re recommending to you,” but we never said that in writing. We weren’t like, okay. It was just like we became order takers and I don’t think we pushed back enough to say, “This doesn’t make sense for you.” So I think that’s really smart to actually call that out because definitely in the contractor space, there are a lot of marketing agencies that really do a good job marketing themselves and their services. We’re not one of them. They’re certainly out there. We don’t market ourselves a ton, is what I’m saying. But there’s a lot of noise out-
Matt Bertram:
Cobbler’s kids have no shoes. We’ve talked about it.
Devon Hayes:
Absolutely. Yeah. So I think they do. So our clients, they hear stuff all the time, and most of them come to us and they’re like, “What do you think about X, Y, and Z?” But some of them are like, “This is what I want to do. Do it.” And it-
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly. Or they’re six months into SEO and they’re like, “It’s not really working, and I just saw this thing about how I can drive leads on Facebook. I think I’m good.” And we’re like “Calm down.” So I love your point earlier. We’re like, “Get the SEO in place. Let that be the wind in your sails. And then you can test these other things, but you’ve already got that base in place to capture those leads when someone wants to get in touch with you and then you can test out all those shiny objects.”
Matt Bertram:
Well, and what I would tell you too about getting someone to sign something like that, really what that’s a sign of is they don’t… Okay, if you’re a contractor and you’re listening to this, think about a client. Do you want the client and you become the order taker and you’re doing what the client said? If you’re building a roof or remodeling a house, you know best. You’re the expert. And if they’re telling you to do something, it could go really bad if you did exactly what they say because they don’t know what they’re talking about. So you really want to get out of the position of being an order taker in all industries. Now, if you’re peer-to-peer, that’s okay. Like, hey, let’s work together on this. Let’s figure this out together.
Certainly when I go into a new area or something new, I tell them, I say, “Look, I’m going to need you as much as you’re going to need me. We’re going to need to work on this. I don’t know everything.” I’m doing a workshop on Monday actually, and I said, “This is a knowledge transfer workshop.” And I said, “you got to teach me and I’ll come with some ideas, and then we’re going to collaborate on this together.” And there’s an understanding we’re doing this together, and I haven’t done this before.
Now, if I’ve done it before and I know what the right answer is, you need to maybe do some more authority building and be like, “Hey, here is what…” Because they don’t trust you enough to trust your word. So it’s providing them more experience or more case studies or third party testimonials to say, “Hey, I’m the expert in this.” And this goes to actually human dynamics, this goes like all industries, even the contractors. You want clients to be like, “Yes, I want to do what you think is best.” Those are the best clients and those are the clients you can help the most if you’re The right person.
So you need to convince them you’re the right person and you have the right expertise, and then figure out what their holdup is. Certainly chasing the shiny object is an issue. I would even tell you, we have great campaigns. Great campaigns that are working and have a great ROI. I have a supplement client that I actually got to talk to after this, and I’m like, the funnel is working. “No, we need to change it up.” “No, it’s working and you’re making a ton of money. It’s working. Let’s leave it alone!”
Amanda Joyce:
It’s not broken!
Matt Bertram:
“No, we need to build a new funnel.” And I’m like, “Why? Why do you need a new funnel? This funnel is making you a ton of money. If we want to build another one, fine, but let’s leave this one alone.” And that’s the conversation that I’m having.
Devon Hayes:
Oh my gosh.
Matt Bertram:
So it really depends.
Devon Hayes:
I was going to say, so with that, the last point I really, really want to get your take on and have you touch on is social media in terms of lead gen. We all agree it has a halo effect with the brand and brand recognition, but are people actively looking for an electrician on Facebook or things like that? I mean, there’s definitely a place for it, but I would love your opinion on, and like you mentioned earlier, only 10% of your organic posts are even getting seen. So in your opinion, should organic and paid social be your number one marketing strategy and the thing you spend the most time in? And I don’t know, maybe just your take on social media as a whole as it relates to lead gen.
Matt Bertram:
So first I’ll frame it up by saying, if someone’s an expert in digital marketing, it’s a lot like saying someone’s an expert like back in the day when you’d say they’re an IT professional. I know I was guilty of it too. Like, oh, they’re IT professional. They know everything there is to know about IT. They’re IT professionals so they can fix anything, hardware, software. Anything, anything, anything. You’re a IT professional, let me help you. I think that that digital agencies are guilty of that to a degree, and people view them as that. So there are so many subspecialties inside digital. Where someone’s coming from and their perspective, you want to take that into consideration with what they’re doing.
With that being said, I actually came onto EWR as a paid guy. And I got to see a lot of different industries and I got to see a lot of different data sets. And over everything, adex better than anything, organic search, SEO was by far hands down the best. Why? Because people are looking for what they need. Now, okay, touching on paid, if they’re a coupon hunter, if they want a deal or they need some of an emergency, emergency plumber, emergency air conditioning if you’re in the south, air conditioning broken or busted pipes or something like that, you do not care.
You have busted pipes and your house is flooding, you do not care. If you don’t have electricity or you don’t have air conditioning and you’re in Houston and it’s a hundred something degrees, you do not care. The first person to get there that says that they know how to fix it, I’ll take it, okay? Or I want a deal. And there’s data sets that show that there’s a very small overlap of people that are organically searching and people that are looking for paid ads. So you got to understand that when you’re advertising, and we didn’t really touch on that. If you are selling a big ticket item. I don’t know, a car, a pool, a house or whatever, people are going to do their research on you.
75%, I think, of the sales processes happening online in the marketing channel and you don’t even know before they call you and they’re saying, “Hey, I’m interested.” You don’t even know what’s happening. All that falls into website development, web design, SEO, CRO. And SEO is this term, even there’s SEO on social media. So to get to social media, there’s YouTube SEO, there’s LinkedIn SEO. I want to change the wording to more about, even my podcast, I wanted to talk more about algorithms and how the algorithms work. We do a lot of B2B stuff. Okay. I know exactly how the LinkedIn algorithm works. Do you think that that’s helpful when I’m trying to rank on LinkedIn?
I am learning and trying to figure out, and reading IP and all this kind of stuff on how Google is talking to LinkedIn, right? Google has a deal with WordPress, that’s why everything’s WordPress. They have a deal with WordPress that the index, WordPress faster, they’re making sure that they can read everything, they’re working together. So that’s why WordPress is preferential. So how all these platforms work together. Gary Vaynerchuk did say that the cheapest way or the most affordable way to build a brand is through social media. And if you’re talking about connecting with people and reaching people and all that, it is social media, but it’s paid social media. It’s paid. These platforms are free.
And how do they make their money? Advertising. So they want you to give them money, and they’ll help you show and target people, and it’s so powerful. It’s more powerful than anything ever. So again, it’s another tool in the tool belt, but think about it. Now, okay, Pinterest is interesting because people are like, “I like these shoes and these shoes and these shoes.” And if you’re selling shoes that are like that, you can go, “Hey, someone’s told the algorithm a hundred times they like these kind of shoes. Show them a shoe that looks like that.” That’s going to close a deal.
Now, if you think about… Snapchat’s doing really well, by the way. Snapchat is absolutely crushing. I don’t know if it’s how people are clicking. It costs a lot per CPM, but for cost per click, really absolutely crushing it and people are really communicating on that with people. And each platform is a different target set for different things on how to advertise. Also, by the way, you can run static ads on TikTok. You don’t have to run a video. You don’t have to try to… You could just be like, here’s a static ad. Show it on TikTok. There’s not a lot of ads on TikTok. TikTok does pretty well. But it’s like, what is your overall strategy? Where does it go? I don’t think you should be playing in the paid space if you can get there with SEO and AdWords. I just don’t, because people are on there searching for your specific thing. And if you show up and you have a good offer, why would you not do that?
Why would you try to get someone that’s looking at funny videos, try to get them to leave the website and go buy something else? That’s a lot more steps. And the data says you got to get them when they’re in the mode. So someone’s a buyer for whatever your product or service is, and then if they’re not in the mode for another month, you cannot sell them for the month. The window is closed until it opens back up. Everybody in Google’s in that mode to buy, so again, have a high converting website that tells your story, that communicates your brand, that’s saying all the things you want to say. And then, make it rank in Google. Make it show up in the search engines for what people are searching for, make sure you have an answer to the specific thing that people are looking for. And then, if it doesn’t make sense because there’s not a lot of volume for that keyword, run paid ads for it. SEO and SEM, so search engine marketing, look at them together. Does that make sense?
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.
Matt Bertram:
Look at them together as a left arm and a right arm. You need arms for different things. One arm, you can do most things, but it might be better to have both arms and have them working together. And that’s why a lot of the money’s spent on Google, because it makes so much sense. Okay, to talk about social a little bit differently, just to add a few things for you, guess what? I did interview one of the guys that wrote a lot of the code for Google. And he wouldn’t give me the exact answer on stuff-
Devon Hayes:
What? That’s shocking.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah, he wouldn’t give me the exact answer. And they even cautioned me. They’re like, “Matt, we know how you ask questions. You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” They told me all that and stuff. And I was like, “Okay, I’ll try.” And he had a little bit of tell when I knew what the answer was, but he was talking about, and this was years ago. This was when EAT was really big. Expertise, [inaudible 00:57:59], trust. How Google views brands. We all know Google likes brands. We know branded search terms. If you have more branded search terms, you’re going to have more domain authority like you’re a real company. You can get penalized if you just go after commercial keywords that are location-based navigational keywords. They want a certain amount of people searching for your brand and you want to have some brand equity. Google loves brands.
Well, guess what? Every time someone links to your site on social media, guess what happens? It creates a link. It’s a back link to your site. And now Facebook and Google hated each other and probably still do on some level, but they’ve figured out where they can talk to each other and Google can index Facebook. So Google, the whole reason they came up with Google Chrome and actually the mailbox and all that, and it’s all free and all that, is to just have you logged in all the time to know everything that you’re doing. It’s like total Big Brother, for advertising and probably nefarious purposes after that.
But for advertising purposes, that’s why it was created, to see what people are doing, because you’re on a search and you jump off, they want to see what else you’re doing. Well, Google and Facebook have made up and Google’s basically done a deal with LinkedIn and well, they own YouTube. And all these things of how people are interacting are fitting into social signals and they’re creating signals that are helping check a box in the algorithm, and that taken together in its entirety decides how you should rank. Because Google’s trying to figure out in the real world, are you the best at whatever you do? Plumbing or electrical or lawn mowing or whatever, are you the best? They want to try to create that online.
So awards and reviews and associations and speaking talks and press releases and local directories, all these things are trying to build that digital presence so that Google can actually map who’s the best because they want to serve the best absolute result to everyone else. And right now, I’ll give you one really quick story, maybe this would be a good thing to end on. But I had a client. Again, not a client any longer. COVID really changed a lot of stuff, but it was a MMA studio in Houston, and I helped them grow to multi-location. And they were spending a ton of money, and it was awesome. And it was fun and they actually made me fight them to get the accounts, because they heard I was a black belt when I was a kid and I was like, “This is not even fun.”
Devon Hayes:
Like, who am I jumping in with?
Matt Bertram:
But it was cool. It was cool. But why I say end on it is it’s all about your online presence but you can still… So there’s a company. I forget what the name of it is, but it’s a family that actually invented Jiujitsu, and they brought jiujitsu over here. I think it was Gracie family, came over here. And basically, what they asked me to do is “We want to outrank them for the word jiujitsu in Houston.” They were like, “We want to outrank them,” for the people that invented Jujitsu. And I was like, “Okay.” And we did it. We did it. That was whatever, four or five years ago. In another four or five years, I probably won’t be able to do it. You know what I mean? There was enough signals that I could create, there was enough things that we could create that their online presence to Google looked better than the Gracie Studios because they didn’t work on that, even though they had the name.
But now the AI and what’s going on offline are connecting going, these guys invented it. They’re the experts. It’s like Wikipedia. They should be number one. But because of all the signals and understanding SEO and checking all the boxes, I was able to outrank them for jiujitsu. And actually, we started ranking their site nationally and then I was like, “Y’all got to sell some stuff on your site,” and started getting into powder protein and all kind of stuff. But what I would tell you is the algorithm is really important and you need to understand what the algorithm is trying to do. And you need to help the algorithm by providing that information. And in summary, you need an agency that’s going to be a good agent for you, that understands your business, understands you, and understands search engine optimization and digital marketing to help you design the strategy that’s the winning strategy for you.
Because guess what? I at one point had, this is like seven or eight years ago. I had seven companies in Houston that all did remodeling. And you shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t do that, but I did it. And they all got mad at me and they’re like, “Well, you know so-and-so with Google and this,” and that and blah, blah, blah. And I said, “Your strategy is completely different than this company and what assets they have and the images and everything about all that stuff.” The fundamentals are the same, but the strategy is different. Does that make sense? So everybody has their unique way to reach the audience and what they’re building, and you need to find an expert that knows what they’re doing, and y’all have specialized in the space and people should seek you out and trust what you’re saying. And it should be like a layering process.
You should, okay, let’s make sure the website’s optimized. Okay, let’s do the SEO. Okay, let’s do remarketing or LSA ads. And then, okay, let’s do paid social. Let’s layer it on. Oh, let’s do a radio ad. I had a radio client that spent $20,000 on a radio placement and got zero leads because they didn’t have a landing page, they didn’t track anything. They didn’t know anything they’re doing. They went and did it without incorporating. All these things play together. And then they came back and were like, “Oh, well we did this and this happened.” I was like, “Oh my gosh.” And then I had a rush-
Amanda Joyce:
What you could have done with that 20K for them.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah. And they were like, “Well, we didn’t understand.” And so I think that there’s… And I wasn’t talking to the client as much, they had an account manager. They had grown a lot. They were trying new things. But as their digital strategist, as their marketing strategist, they should have came and said, “Hey, this is what we want to do. How do we incorporate it? Let’s build a landing page. Let’s have a tracking code. Maybe help us with some of the media buying.” Right?
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly. Or what are you doing that can work copacetically with it? Can you add a couple blogs that speak exactly to the message of that radio ad? You cannot overstate the importance of communicating everything you’re doing with your agency partner. Even if you’re trying something new. I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I just-
Matt Bertram:
It’s your partner. And that is the most important thing, is find somebody that you connect with, that you trust, that you believe is knowledgeable, that’s going to work hard for you, and invest in that relationship and grow together. And a lot of these SEO strategies can’t be done month to month. They take planning, they take strategy. And so, sitting down and figuring out where do you want to go and how do we want to get there, and then work the plan. Create a plan, work the plan. Don’t chase the next shiny object. So, I don’t know. That’s my advice.
Amanda Joyce:
Amazing.
Devon Hayes:
Brilliant and wonderful.
Amanda Joyce:
Thank you so much, Matt. We are so lucky to have this much of your time and our audience is so lucky as well to get to just hear your brilliance.
Matt Bertram:
Well, thank you. And I think y’all are doing some awesome stuff, so I’m happy to support you all. And hopefully this is the kind of content your audience wanted to hear. I love talking about this stuff.
Devon Hayes:
I love it too. I think it goes along with everything we say, but it’s really nice to have someone with your credentials and background really reinforce it. So I think this was tremendously just helpful and full of some really, really good, meaningful content. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge with us and your time.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Amanda Joyce:
That was today’s trade secret. Thanks for listening.
Devon Hayes:
Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.
Amanda Joyce:
Subscribe and don’t miss our next reveal.
Devon Hayes:
Until next time.
