 Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Tom Stewart here with the Liz Trotter. Hello, Liz. Hi, Tom. Hey, Al. And we have a special guest today, Ryan Null out of Phoenix. Hey, Ryan, how are you today? Doing well. Doing well. That's good as we can do, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ryan owns a house cleaning service in Phoenix called Tidy Casa. Yes, sir. He also has a background. He is a professional in the area of SEO. He did that back when he had a real job. He's really talking to us today and giving us a lot of insight from an insider's perspective. He can tell us how we can best use our time in marketing just in general. And how it's going to be over the course of town. Every day, Ryan. I do this every day. There's an echo. Oh, we're just going to pull up the Facebook Live and then I never have it muted in the right way. So here we go. Make it easy. Every day. Well, the day is out of the week. Hey, other handy stuff. OK. Before we get too deep into this, I'm going to do my obligatory sharing what's on our schedule for the rest of the week. Because if I don't, we just might not get around to it. I'm so proud of you for doing this. We get it right every once in a while. Yeah. So Ryan's with us today. We're going to do SEO for the win. What is that? Like Jeopardy? What game show is that for the win? Yeah. Sounds like Jeopardy now. Everybody FTW for the win. That was Hollywood Squares. That was Hollywood Squares. I've never really made it myself. You are really making it. You're the Hollywood Squares. I do know what that is. I didn't really watch it. But you are making a really good one. You didn't want to watch those old people talking about all the crazy stuff. Yeah. Hey, Leslie. More of a Bob Barker guy. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's a. I like Bob Barker. Price is right. Yeah, he did that up a while ago, right? He's still around. Yeah. I think so. He's not doing the show anymore. OK, so I was on Wheel of Fortune. So I'm a Pat Sejak fan. Oh, where are you? Was Pat Sejak on it when you were there? Or was it Chuck and Mary? Nope, it was Pat Sejak and Vanna White. So Vanna's been doing it. Vanna's probably still doing it, right? Y'all, she's doing it forever. Why does she look exactly the same as when I was on that show 30 years ago? Pat Sejak must have been. I mean, you know, Chuck Ruller, we did it for a while before Sejak came in. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh, good memory, Tom. But that really is so. They did it on TV when I was going to college. I'm pretty good. We can talk soap operas all day long. Oh, gosh. Let's not. Let's talk about what we're doing the rest of the week. Hey, everybody. Hey, Greg. We all know Matt Rick is Matt's going to join us tomorrow. We're going to get us all updated on what's happening with small business administration, PPP. And they've made, obviously, a bunch of changes there. So we're going to kind of take that around the horn. Who do we have Wednesday, Liz? Yusuf. So are you just afraid to say his name? I'm afraid. Yusuf is afraid. Memetoglub. Memetoglub. He runs a really large house cleaning service out of the Northern Virginia DC area, north of $5 million. Maid Bright, he's got several other businesses that he runs as well. One of the more successful entrepreneurs you're ever going to meet. And he's going to share his experiences in terms of what he's been dealing with over the last several months, in terms of how a really large cleaning service deals with this unprecedented event that we're dealing with, called COVID-19. Ryan, I don't know if you ever see many of these Facebook logs or not, but we're contractually obligated to get the word unprecedented in at least once every day. Good job, Tom. Nice and early. Checked off the list. Jen, Diana, and Emily are going to be with us Thursday. And they're going to be sharing with us how they've diversified their business. And this is something that they actually had done prior to COVID. They're in the pest control business as well as house cleaning. And they're going to share how being diversified has helped them through this unprecedented event. I'll keep that on account. Maybe use that later in the week. That's a Wheel of Fortune thing, right? On account of your gift certificate. How was it? Friday? We'll be on the rapid fire Q&A session. We have a really special, special guest this coming up Friday. You have a hint for us, Liz? I can't remember what it is. I do have one. I'll have to give it to you at the end, because I can't remember what it is. OK. Well, I'm sure it'll be good. Oh, I know what it is. I remember. So these are initials that are associated with this person, TMC. OK. I'm going to have to noodle over that one. Yeah. It's not her name initials, but these are initials that are associated with her name. Oh, OK. Oh, it's not. OK. All right. It's a good one. I was like, hmm, I know who it is, and I can't figure it out. I already know. Oh, look at this. OK, I get it. You got it? OK. Connection. That's a legit, legit. That's totally legit. I always try to sneak in something, you guys. It tells you a little bit about who they are, not just what they look like. All right, let's get to SEO, because we can run out of time quick with this. This is a big topic. I know we're going to have a ton of questions from people, too, Ryan. Cool. So how do we start out? When do should we be worried about SEO? Some of the things that people constantly worry about is, are these things? Like, what is SEO? Do I need it? Who does it for me? Can I do it myself? When do I start thinking about SEO? How do I know if it's working or not? Well, let me start just defining it. I know that we get confused between SEO and AdWords and to digital marketing in general. SEO is kind of a specific thing. What is it? Yeah, they definitely don't make it easy. And then with all the marketers throwing as many abbreviations as everything as they can, with the SEO and PPC and all this other stuff to make it twice as complicated as it needs to be. When I was working at a marketing consulting firm, we had a thing where almost everything had its own abbreviation. And my boss would start throwing them out, and then nobody would know. And we'd have to be like, oh, wait a minute. We're in the industry. You just made that up. Like, step back. What is that? That's not real. Yeah, that's not real. You're just making it up. So that happens quite a lot. So SEO is very specifically search engine optimization. And how I kind of like to break that down. At the end of the day, what you want to do with search engine optimization is you want to rank higher when somebody searches for you in Google. Somebody types in house cleaning in Google. You want to pop up towards the top of the list. The higher up you are, the better off you're going to be. And it does get very complicated. And when SEO first started years ago, when the first search engines came out, it was a lot more complicated. It was a lot easier to do. It was a lot cheaper to do. Now there's subcategories of SEO. So there's search engine optimization for organic SEO. And then there is local SEO, which is a whole different kind of thing, different ways to optimize. You're looking at different metrics. So yeah, it does tend to get a little complicated if you don't know what you're doing, which also leaves a lot of small businesses open and vulnerable, in my opinion, to being taken advantage of by these fast talking sales guys. And maybe they don't intend to do that. But it happens a lot. Well, we have two questions up already. Ryan, you haven't even started talking. We already had questions. I don't know if you can see the comments. They're usually on the right-hand side of your screen where it says private chat and live comment. Yeah, I'll go right up there. And the reason why these questions pop up is everybody feels the same way. It's like, we don't even know what it is. How do we know we're getting it? Is it working? And what's the budget stuff? So Lisa, I see Tom's got her questions up here. We've got two questions hanging here. One, what should we be looking for? And the other one is, what would we expect to pay? And what should we expect for the fee? Now, we can either talk about these now or we can set on these questions a little bit. And you might be answering the explanation, might be part of where you're going with us. What would you put more? No, actually, it's kind of leading into it. So I'm happy to kind of jump in. So one of the things, being an SEO person, somebody who had this experience, I was doing SEO for eight or nine years before I left my day job to do the cleaning business. I was working for everything from smaller or larger agencies working with smaller businesses. There's one called Voice Digital that I worked for. I was overseeing about 1,000 small business customers and helping manage their SEO. Moved on to another company called iCrossing where I went from 1,000 clients to just like one or two big ones. And I was working for Microsoft, Starwood Hotels, PetSmart during my time there. So I've seen the whole gamut of what a $200 SEO contract gets you and what a $100,000 SEO contract gets you. I was talking to one of my friends because this happens to me a lot of people just say, hey, I'm a little confused. Can I just think about redoing my website and I'll talk to you about this. And we talked for about two hours about his website and everything that he was doing with SEO. And I was showing him this huge list of like, your SEO person didn't do this and they didn't do this and I would have probably done it this way. And I'm gonna kind of all sort of wrapped up after two hours of talking. He was like, okay, so what did I get through that? And I kind of asked him like, okay, what are you paying? And he was paying about $2,000 a quarter. He's got a very different business from ours. He's got a retail type business, got seven locations. So seven locations, $2,000 a quarter is really affordable for SEO. And even though when we were looking at this we kind of saw there were tons of opportunities for improvement, he was kind of getting what he was paying for. And I think that that is really the thing that people miss a lot. You tend to think I'm gonna buy a thing. I'm gonna buy SEO as my thing. And if I can get it for cheaper I still get the SEO thing. So it's still gonna be good. And I bought the thing and I did it, you know. But it's not binary. It's not like buying a car or a widget or like an iPhone. You don't wanna just get it for as cheap as possible and you're gonna have it. There's a whole gamut. I would almost assume that if you're buying a local SEO package, it should be somewhere between $300 to $500 per location. If you're buying a month or a month, yeah. Yeah, every month. If you're buying an organic SEO package I wouldn't really expect anybody to see any results unless you're in the $1,000 to $2,000 a month range. And I've seen a lot of people that go and get these and you know, there's a lot of different factors. Nothing's black and white in SEO. That was one of the reasons these big companies would hire us to come in and talk was because, you know, they might know, here's this whole list of, you know, the new items that we're gonna work on but they don't know what the impact of that is on their website and it's different for everybody. So like we would look at, you know, a large website that had, you know, JavaScript footers or some weird technical thing that, you know, hurts its ability to transfer link juice. And this website, it's a really big deal and really bad. And on this website, they're doing it a little bit different. It's a little bit different scenario. So it doesn't really affect it as much. So everything's variable. And the reason I bring that up is because I was kind of saying, you know, 200 or 300 to 500 per location for local SEO. That's gonna be really different if you're in New York City versus, you know, North Platon, Nebraska or, you know, some other town that's got 50,000 people. If you're in a small town with less competition, you can almost get away with doing the bare minimum. And we're talking instead of spending $500 a month spending like $200 a year and see some really good results. So everything's variable. So where I usually tell people to start and my best kind of general advice is to put SEO on the back burner initially until you've sort of maxed out some other marketing channels. So for me, when I was getting started, Yelp is kind of becoming less prominent, less effective. But for me, when I first started, Yelp was a really big driver of my business. And I happened to find out about a year or two into that that apparently Scottsdale and Phoenix where my business is located is are like one of the biggest users of Yelp as a, you know, population. So turns out that that was a really good match for me. Might not be the same thing in Cincinnati, for example. But, you know, so I found that was the place where I got the cheapest return on my investment because I was just starting out. So I just doubled down on that, you know, avenue until you get to the point where you're kind of plateauing no matter how much more money or more time you put into, you know, in my case, my Yelp campaign, I wasn't getting anywhere further. And then I started pivoting that into, you know, okay, so I kind of maxed out this avenue. It's working really well. We're gonna kind of set this over here. We're still doing it, but it's on autopilot. And now I'm gonna start building out my Google paid campaigns. So paid advertising through Google can be a little bit more effective because it doesn't take as much time. It's a shorter tail to ROI. And that's one of the big challenges with SEO that a lot of people get impatient about. Like I straight up had a friend who was really trying to rank in SEO and he was so frustrated because he'd been doing it for three months and was spending all this money and he wasn't getting anywhere. But now, you know, whereas five years ago, we could take a website and rank it in a couple of days. Now it takes like north of 12 months to, you know, to really push the needle for SEO to get really, really good results. So that's kind of one of the reasons that I sort of advise push it off as long as you can until you get to the point where you've got the other marketing channels set up that are working for you. And you can have those sort of funness thing where you can put, you know, one or $2,000 a month into it until it starts to pay itself back. So you don't need the money. It's, you know, you've got the budget to lose and then you can kind of spend the time working on that and not worrying about it. Because that's how long it takes. There really isn't like the right answer, which is why there's so much confusion around SEO. You'll hear, I only spend $300 a month and my SEO guy is great. Yeah, well, you only have 50,000 people in your city and there's two competitors. That's why, right? Or I've been spending $800 a month and my SEO guy isn't doing anything. I can't get anywhere. Well, you live in Georgia and, you know, there's our Atlanta and there's like a million companies there, so. Yep, quite a lot, yeah. Go ahead, Ryan, what were you saying? That it happens a lot? Yeah, there's a lot of confusion around it and I see it all the time. People saying I've got, I've done $200 a month and, you know, we're doing great and other people that say I can't seem to spend enough to make this work, which makes it super confusing. Yeah. It's time part of it though. Like if you live in a market that's fairly competitive and if you say, okay, realistically, it might take a year or more to rank, to get, you know, like on the front page. Is there certain things that I could start doing today that maybe I'm not spending, you know, three grand a month, maybe I'm spending just part of that but that's really the stuff that needs to start happening now. So a year from now, I'm a lot closer to getting the results I'm looking for. Yeah, absolutely. So for almost everything that's on this call, I know a lot of us are, you know, local phone-based businesses. My first kind of suggestion, and this would even be something that if you're not focusing on SEO, you can still just implement and get started, is what I like to call local SEO. And I say what I like to call because I've seen a lot of people define it different but I kind of consider Google Maps to be my local SEO kind of box, right? And it's becoming more and more prominent, especially now when you search for something like home cleaning services or pest control, you see a nice little map three pack right on the top of the search results and that's where most people gonna click. They can see your reviews, they know, you know, they kind of have an idea, like, oh, this one's got a five star and so does this one, but this one's only got three reviews and it's got 250, so I'm gonna click on this one. Like, people like to engage with that because they get all the data that they want right up there. And most people are doing that on their phones now, which makes the map even that much more valuable. Yeah, and that's the other reason that SEO is getting harder and harder because if you're actually looking on your phone, so there's the two types of SEO, the local SEO and the organic. The organic rankings are gonna be the ones that are more expensive and more challenging to get and if you're on your phone, you gotta scroll like through three or four different screens before you can even see them. Like you see the Google ads and you see the map and then there's gonna be something else and then you're organic listing, right? So, you know, I always like people to focus on the organic or the Google Maps portion because it's cheaper, it's easier, it's a little bit more hands off and you can rank in there a little faster. Usually you can see results in about six months. One item. So that goes to your question, Ekaterina. So the six month thing, that is a real thing. Does a lot of people ask about that? And Brian's asking the top three things to focus on an SEO, so we just heard one. Yeah, so what I would do if I was starting fresh, you claim your Google My Business listing, so make sure you get that thing, get that claim, that's where Google sends you that postcard and you can build out your maps, your map pack listing. You wanna fill that thing out completely. You want your description in there, you want your, you know, a link to your website is crucial to have, you know, you wanna get a couple of reviews. You don't, two ranks, you don't need to have 200 reviews and it doesn't go off of the number of reviews. But what we've seen is if you have at least five, it tends to give a little bit more legitimacy and Google tends to rank those. Google will sometimes rank listings that have like two reviews. I've seen it happen, but more often than not, you wanna have at least five to 10. So get five to 10 reviews, people that you know, it could be your cousin, it could be, you know, your current customers, that's kind of the weight, the way I like to go is just asking customers to leave this review if they had any good experience. It's kind of a classic tactic. And then after that, you want to start building what are called citations. So a citation is anywhere your name, address and phone number appear online. So another fun, you know, SEO thing, NAP, N-A-P, name, address, phone number. You'll hear that a lot if you're talking to SEO people. So you want that name, address, phone number to appear as many places as you can online and to have it be consistent, like 100% consistent. So, you know, if you put a one in front of your phone number in this one and, you know, the person that I was talking to the other day that my friend who was on the phone with for two hours, one of the issues that he had was each one of his, his SEO company had built him citations but they had different names for each one. So his was, you know, the name of his business, Phoenix slash Arcadia, which is a part of town here in Phoenix. And then the next one was Phoenix hyphen Arcadia. So they were slightly different for each iteration which hurts the value of those, those citations. For is the more I see this information and the more consistent it is, the more I can assume that it's correct. So I'm gonna raise this one up and show it a little bit more. So an example of like a really powerful citation would be Yelp. Yelp is like one of the best citations you can get. It counts for a lot of points on your, you know, kind of SEO scale there. And that's, you know, pretty much the, kind of my go-to example because everyone's familiar with it. But that Yelp is just a, you know, fancy directory website. There are tons of these directory websites that you can take advantage of. And the cool thing is they're relatively cheap to make a lot of them. So make a lot of these listings. So where I usually point people to, especially when they're first getting started just because it's affordable and they do a lot of hand holding, the UI is really easy like anybody can go in like any small business owner and do it themselves. UI? Yes. User interface. It's just, it's an easy to use. My apologies. There I go, putting on my SEO hat. Confusing. That's okay, I got a sound cam. We've been there about 70 seconds without, you know, an abbreviation. So. It was time. Yeah. Unprecedented. Revealations. Good job. But the one I like is called, it's called Mozlocal. So what this company does, and there are other companies that do something similar is a lot of these directory sites use a common database called a directory aggregator. And what'll happen is with Mozlocal, they basically take your business information. They submit it to seven or eight of these directory aggregators and then all the other directories kind of grab that information, pull it into their system. So, you know, a more popular one would be something like Apple Maps. I believe Apple Maps gets a majority of their information from a company called Info Group. Nobody's ever heard of Info Group, except for people like me. But it's one of these aggregators that Mozlocal submits to. And, you know, just because when you're not Yelp or Google my business, business owners like us aren't gonna be motivated to go put their information on Apple Maps because it's not the first thing that they think about. It's maybe the 10th or 11th or 20th, you know, we never think about it because we've got to run a business, right? Ever, yeah. So Mozlocal helps with this because you can just submit your information in one place. I believe right now it costs about $120 a year. And then they take that information and distribute it. Right. It's really affordable. Yeah, and then what I've seen too from that, I think when I submitted my website, you know, when I was first doing it like, I don't know, five, six years ago, is I got about 150 citations from Mozlocal. It takes about three to four months for that information to get distributed to all the different directories. But that puts you, you know, legs ahead of everybody else who didn't do that. How do you know if you have these citations, Ryan? That is a little bit more complicated. Okay, never mind. Yeah. I'll just pull you out, I was just curious. Yeah, there's a couple of ways that I check. Mozlocal has a really nice tool where you can just kind of put in your address in the name of your business and it'll tell you if you've got the important things covered. That's probably the easiest. The way I do it is a little bit more, you know, using URL parameters and not URL parameters, search parameters, and yeah, it's not worth anybody knowing, really. So can you see what's on the screen here? We've got 129, 199 and 299. Yeah. What would you recommend, Ryan, for somebody starting out like, first you Google my business, then hire, maybe? Yeah, do Google my business, make sure it's linked to your website, make sure you've got your name, address, and phone over on your website and you talk about what you do on your website. I remember I had one client once that we couldn't figure out why they weren't ranking, we were doing a local SEO forum and we went to their website, they were like an Italian restaurant and the entire, like they had like 3,000 words written on their website, which is like, oh, this is great, like tons of content and then you start reading it and it's just about how like, oh, we were like three guys in a bar and then we were doing this and we decided we want to start this bar and it's like the whole history of why they started this bar. It doesn't say anything about what they serve, nothing about drinks or cocktails or happy hour or anything, it's just like a total ego run for this business owners. We had to go back to them and say, hey, look, like you guys sell pizza so you got to talk about pizza a little bit on your website. I always want to do it. Just make sure like your cleaning houses are doing pest control. You talk about that in actual text on your website, that's, it's a small thing, but it's a huge help. And then try to work with the product like Mozlocal. There are other companies that do this that you can search around for them. I'd be a little cheaper. I like Mozlocal because it's really easy to use in terms of which package. I mean, I would probably just start with the basic. I haven't actually looked at these though in quite a while. So I forget what's in each of them. But I remember the last time I had to pay for it again, I think I just did the basic package. We upgraded and we do the 2.99 a year. And this is per location. So for each branch, we do that. But the really cool thing about that, I'm not recommending or, you know, I don't know if you'd recommend if I do this, but it will take all your review sites and give you all of that feedback in one user interface, one screen. So you've got Google, you've got Facebook, any other place you're getting reviews. So you can respond to them. And if you've got multiple locations, they're all in one place. So if one person is like responding to reviews, and that's through this here. And, you know, you were talking about, you know, your local SEO. I'm getting a mixed message here. So actually, so, and that's my fault because I wasn't as familiar with what these all did, but that was going to be my next point is you want measuring key performance indicators. And it sounds like that's what this upgraded package does, right? It helps you keep track of your reviews, respond to those. So there's a management aspect there. It's really easy to respond to them. And from a local SEO standpoint, the map pack and so forth is responding to a review, a positive thing. Yeah. Yeah. That's another thing that I really like to do that. I see almost no room for me to do like ever is just responding to reviews. So one of my things that I do anytime I get a review, whether it's positive or negative, I make sure I respond to it with a keyword in there. So if you, you know, Google my company, Tidy Casa and just take a look at some of those reviews. I, every, you know, five star review that comes up and say, hey, thanks so much. I'm really glad you enjoyed your house cleaning, you know, we look forward to working with you again. Thanks so much. And I have something along those lines there. I'll even throw in an emoji here and there just to make it fun and try to make it seem natural. But, you know, don't shy away from responding to those. Like just, you don't think that the responding is only for negative reviews. You can also put keywords in there, which helps you. I read a study where a guy did this, maybe three or four years ago before I left my day job, working as an SEO was one of the things that we were kind of like talking about. And this really popular SEO blogger had gone out and found another business and started writing in the reviews and in responses to reviews. Like he had claimed a business that wasn't his and he was optimizing it as like a test. And the business owners had like no idea. It was really kind of funny. We didn't build any links. We didn't do anything else, except for respond to reviews with keywords in them. And they started ranking for the keyword that they were trying to get it ranked for. So good for this, we're not getting that help, but easy thing that anybody can do. All right, I should have a question now because I still am confused. So you were talking about my local and what I heard from you was hire this company and they will get you citations. And then I heard, sign up for this thing and you will do a lot of work. So are you doing the work? Or is that what I heard from Tom was if you sign up for it, you're the one that's gonna do the work. They will give you some information and you'll have reporting and you'll be able to respond. So I'm getting a mixed message. Who's doing the work with Mozlocal? You, the business owner or the company? So Mozlocal is gonna do the building you citations. That is definitely not something that a business owner wants to do. It's incredibly time consuming and not worth anybody's time. So the majority of what they do is getting you citations. Tom was saying that we have another feature that will help you manage your reviews. And I was just jumping on what he was saying in terms of that it's a really important thing to do to make sure you're responding and responding to the community. So there's no tool that's going to participate in the community for you. That's kind of your job as a business owner or that you can, you know, push it off to your manager maybe, but even where I am now with our 4.5 Managers running most of my day to day, I still get in there and respond to reviews. For me personally, I don't have as many locations to manage as Tom. I've only got two, but it's worth it just to have me logged in on my phone when something pops up. I just go in, hey, thanks so much. I really appreciate the review. Glad the home cleaning went well. And that helps with the SEO portion. So really Mozlocal is going to help you on both sides. They're going to do some of it, but it also makes it easy for you to do your part. And then the thing is, you know, when you're hiring an SEO company to do this, they're probably going to build just as many citations over a year and they're going to charge you $300 a month where Mozlocal, I think their top package is, was it $2.99 or something? Yeah, $900 a year. A year. The other thing is, so that reporting is really nice and important and you'd probably want to continue paying for that, but if you only wanted the citations, the other thing that I tell business owners is, Mozlocal will try to get you to pay for it every year. And they are still providing a service and making sure that your information stays consistent, which is part of the ranking process. But if you don't change anything, if you don't change your phone number or your address on your Google My Business page, there's really no point in going more than a year with Moz at that kind of base package. So without the reporting and the other stuff. So if you're just getting started, spend the 120, let it run for, you know, 11 months and then turn off the auto renew. You're going to be just as good in terms of SEO rankings. Okay. Okay, that's great. Tom, did you have a question? We talked about keywords. And sometimes I think that we maybe don't spend enough time really talking about what a keyword is, why it's important and what keywords should we be using? Like in the context of reviews, you know, I guess, Tidy Casa, thank you, Mrs. Jones. Tidy Casa appreciates, you know, has many happy house cleaning clients and pastel. You're kind of jamming them all in there. I mean, you could go as crazy as you want on that, right? Yeah, you can. For local SEO, you don't really have to. So you don't have to, you know, sneak the city name in there and it's not really necessary. But you want to get just sort of the root of that keyword. So for me, I'll use home cleaning, house cleaning, deep cleaning, spring cleaning. Glad your move out cleaning went well. That's usually what I say. Like, hey, glad your house cleaning went well. I mean, that's really all I need to get in there. When it comes to local, and this is kind of one of the things that I like about local SEO for small businesses, is you don't have to put as much thought into should I rank in Mesa or Phoenix or Scott said, these are all like cities within Phoenix metro area that are like touching, they're really close to each other. So it's sometimes confusing for a lot of businesses who are close to where I am to know which city to go after for their keywords. But with local SEO, it's gonna naturally build out a area for you that it's gonna target based on how many citations you have in reviews and keyword densities and all this other stuff. But the real important thing to know is you're gonna see naturally, you're gonna get way more customers close to where your headquarters is versus farther away because Google's doing that work for you. You don't need to put home cleaning in Phoenix to rank in Phoenix, just home cleaning as sort of the base keyword. Because Google knows where you are. Google knows where you are, they're gonna do that work for you. I mean, like the local SEO is you build the citations, you make sure everything's set up right. You know, you've got your Google My Business listing, it's built out, get your citations, and then you're pretty much good to let Google do most of the rest. We do have four things that I don't wanna lose here. Well, that's like, okay, we're gonna go for that. Let me just hit these real quick, make sure that we don't lose them. So Brian had asked for the top three things. We got two, we got Google My Business and then building the citations. And maybe you're gonna give us the third, but I'm just reminding us we don't wanna lose that. And then somebody asked about blogs, are they helpful? I thought maybe that's like a quick answer, maybe yes or no? No, not a quick answer. Okay, then go ahead and hold on and hold on for that. The reason why I was, we'll just flip right through them or at least take them. Say it again, Tom. I've got them all here. Let me just put them up and we can take them. Okay, sounds good. I like this because this always comes up. You know, people feel like they're spending a lot of money and they don't know what they're getting. And they just get a bill and you ask the question, you know, what's this $3,000 bill for? And it's like, well, we've explained it to you, but it's complicated. So I'm just trying to answer this. Yeah, so it's a great question. And I think the, I think the kind of to go after sort of the root of the question is, is it important to know how much time they're spending? If they're getting you results, for me in my business, I don't care. I just care about those key performance indicators. Once again, KPIs, unprecedented amount of acronyms here. I care about the KPIs. So that was kind of the next thing I sort of had on my list here to talk about was, you want to define those early. That can be something you talk to your SEO person about. I personally like to kind of pick my own because without defining them, this is another issue that you run into with SEOs and I'm guilty of doing this to customers as an SEO in the past. If you have enough data and SEOs are going to collect or they should be collecting as much data as possible. So they've got your Google search console, they've got your Google analytics, they've got your keyword rankings, they've got all this data so they can tell whatever story they want to. So you might go to them and say, what am I getting for this? And they'll say, oh, well, your keyword rankings are up even though your traffic's down. So we're doing a good job. Or they'll say, you know, your conversions are down, you're not making as much money, but hey, your site traffic's going up. So what I like to do is pick one or two things to focus on. My kind of go-to for SEO, for local business specifically is impressions. So if you log into your Google My Business account, which anybody should be able to do, if you've gone through the process of claiming your Google My Business, you can go in and see that. And just look at the impressions. Am I seeing more this month versus last month? I mean, there's nuances in there too, like seasonality and other things to keep into account. You know, if you have like a terrible hurricane, your numbers are probably going to be down because people aren't thinking about house cleaning or pest control when there's a hurricane. But you know, keeping that stuff in mind are your numbers up or down? The other thing to keep in mind is there's a certain point where SEO plateaus. You're spending a bunch of money and you're getting better and better and better and better and then you just kind of hit the market cap, no matter how much money you spend, you're not going to get any better, you're just in maintenance mode right now. And sometimes that's okay too, as long as the SEO services are paying for themselves. So at the end of the day, I don't know how to tell how much work your SEO person is doing, unless you're bringing them in-house, you're not really having them clock in and out. And you're probably not paying them by the hour unless you're doing one of these $100,000 SEO contracts like I used to do back in the day because we were selling consulting hours so we tracked everything. For most small businesses like us when you're paying one or two grand, you just got to focus on those key performance indicators that you, the things you want to measure like- Well, what are they Ryan? Like we've got impressions, that's one. What are the top three maybe? Google My Business Impressions is the number one, that's for the localization portion. If you're doing a SEO, you want to focus on Google Analytics or site traffic specifically from search engines. So that's another thing that people can do. It'll do really good and look at actually 1,000 things and like, oh, we got more people but they didn't come from search. So search engine traffic to the website specifically. And keyword rankings is another one. And the reason I throw keyword rankings there, so keyword rankings especially now are incredibly variable based on where you are geographically, whether you're on a mobile device versus the desktop, like these things change a lot but just keeping track of a general trend there can help paint a picture when things aren't going well. So it's probably not something that I would focus on a ton. I would focus on Google Analytics data and traffic more than anything. And then if you need to kind of go and look like at another metric, you want to be tracking keyword rankings. So if you're hiring an SEO, if they don't know how to do all this stuff or don't want to provide you with more, you'll go to more else. But so it sounds like really you don't need to know. So in the answer to Leslie's question, it doesn't really matter how much time or effort they're doing, just get these three keywords and we want to see those numbers moving, going up, up, up, up. And that goes to the thing we were talking about earlier that it takes time. So I said it takes about a year to really have some good results from SEO. You don't want to spend $2,000 a month for a year and be like, well, this guy didn't work out. So you want to keep track of that and you want to see movement. So we don't need to go from zero to 60 in a week, but we want to see if you have 100 visitors this month, I want to see 150 and then 200 and then 300. And usually there tends to be a J curve where it'll slowly rise and then it'll start shooting up. And that's kind of what you want to see. So even month over month, maybe it plateaus or it doesn't go up a ton that that can be okay for a month or two, but you want to sort of steadily see those numbers go up. So you just described, I guess what some people call like exponential growth. Is that what you would expect to see at some point when it? Yeah, I mean, it's not exponential to infinity, but it's usually exponential up until like a plateau where you've just sort of market saturation. There's no more human beings out there that are searching for this thing in your area that aren't finding you. It looks like nothing's happening and then you kind of get that hockey stick where it should grow. You should see steady growth. So it should never be completely flat, but there is a bit of a hockey stick. And that's because in organic SEO or in Google Maps, the first box is gonna get like 40% of the clicks. And I don't quote me on these numbers, I haven't looked at it in a long time, but it's something around this. It's like 40% get the first result gets clicked on, 20% of the second result, and then like 5% of the third. So there's disproportionately more traffic going to the first couple of rankings in any search result, which is why, you know, you'll see it kind of jump up and down or climb up that. So if I'm searching for an SEO company, does their ranking mean anything? Do I think that the SEO company that ranks at the top is the best? I mean, not always. It's a weird thing with SEO companies, but I find most of them do not do their own SEO. I think there's a general consensus in the industry. Like it's a good sign if they are, but I don't think it's a bad sign if they're not, especially for small businesses. If you're looking at an SEO company that is maybe two or three people, I probably wouldn't expect them to do any of their own SEO or do very limited SEO. I think they're new. So like if you had somebody like me who was coming off of working on, you know, as a consultant for one of these big companies, I still knew how to do SEO and I was really good at it, but I didn't have a company of my own that was ranking for anything at that time. What I would wanna see, and if you did wanna ask, you know, it's good to see some references. They should be able to point to one or two of their clients who are ranking. That's probably the bigger takeaway. I don't think I would go with a company that just has one or two people right now or doesn't have clients to show. So that would probably be more it. Just look for those referrals, just like, you know, looking for a lawyer. It's kind of like being in the house cleaning business if you're on home's dirty. Yeah, I almost never, I had intentionally leave my house a little dirty for demo cleaning. So, you know, people come over and it's like, wait, don't you own a cleaning business? It's like, yeah, but, you know, they're busy doing other stuff. They're working. They're making money cleaning my own house. Don't get high on your own supply. You know what I mean? All right, so I wanna get back to some of these questions here. Cause we, you know, we run out of time really fast here. So, is this a fast answer? Does the age of the website matter? The age of the website does matter, but not, I mean, everything matters a little bit, but it's all subjective, right? So yeah, other websites tend to rank a little bit better. There was a question up there about blogs, and I can answer that one really quick. Do help the more content you have about a subject on your website, the higher it's gonna rank or the overall authority of that website is gonna be built up. The long answer is writing a blog helps a little, writing a blog and promoting a blog helps a lot. So you really wanna spend about 40% of your time writing 60% of your time promoting and getting that blog out there, building backlinks to it. So yes, I actually have a friend, the only thing he does is he goes on help a reporter out to get backlinks and he writes blog posts and promotes them a lot in place, and that's the only thing he does for SEO and he ranks like nationally for like really big keywords. So yes, but most companies aren't spending that type of time or money on their blog, and if you're not, then I would almost say don't do it, I don't blog for my business. And most other standards of your competitors aren't you really don't have to. It can be really expensive for not a lot unless you're going like really, really big, so. Unless you're making the big commitment. Yeah, I mean, you really wanna be spending a lot on like really good content writers, really well researched articles and, you know, finding things that are, people are gonna link back to, you know, kind of link baby stuff and that can really help, but that's really, it's not an easy task. Okay, that's great information. Let's see, another one real quick. Okay, so you're getting back to Brian's question. He says his, he asked for the top three things that you would recommend. We have the Google My Business, then build the citations, and then kind of that whole getting reviews and all of that. I kind of really like small businesses to do it, even if you're not trying to do organic SEO or local SEO on a continuous basis. Like I say, you just started out, you just wanna put a little bit of money in here and then focus on it again later. Having an SEO person do a one-time on-site SEO service for your business can be very helpful. And that's basically gonna be when an SEO person is gonna go in, they're gonna update your model tags and your title tags and clean up the HTML, make your website run a little bit faster. I mean, the whole point of SEO is to optimize. That just means making a thing as useful as possible. So it can be really worth it to spend one or two grand to have a professional SEO come in and just do the on-site all the way through, clean everything up. And then- And what's that called? Why, and if I wanted to order that from somebody, what would I call it? One-time on-site. It would be on-site SEO. So I just need a one-time on-site SEO, a vector update. Cause what a lot of SEO companies will do is when you hire them for their organic SEO, and when you see somebody who is charging you $200 a month, that's probably all they're doing is they're doing a one-time on-site SEO thing because at $200 a month, they really can't spend any time on your project and still make money. Usually the way that the money works out in SEO, SEO people are relatively expensive. So for every like 100 bucks you're spending with them, they're gonna spend maybe 45 minutes or they could afford to spend 45 minutes on your project, but they're gonna try not to. That's why you don't really see results since you're at like a thousand or $2,000 a month. So get somebody to just kind of go through one time and do an on-site SEO audit to your website. That can be really helpful. Most SEOs will be able to know how to do this. Link building's a little trickier. I'd be a little pickier with that, but it can be good just have an SEO person, do some keyword research for you, update some things on your website and just kind of get it a little fine tune. And that'll also help your, that'll play into everything else you do. It'll help your local SEO. It'll help your social media posts that they're updating things right and adding Facebook tags to it. All these little things kind of play into everything else. So that's a pretty good thing to do is like a one-time clean up my website thing. So you're describing though, like it's an integrated system. You got to get your website right from a technical standpoint, the on-site, but then it kind of spawns out into this larger thing called digital marketing with your social media and your reviews and anything else that you can get to through a browser, I guess. Right, and it's a really good insight. And basically what Google's been really good at doing is taking a look at the internet and the websites that are out there and seeing which ones are the most useful and pulling all these different signals and ranking based on those. So if your website loads fast, it's not a huge signal for Google, but it's a signal. So two websites completely the same. If this one loads faster, it's gonna rank higher. Right, there are some reasons for that, but one of the things you see is if your website loads faster, you're gonna get less bounces. And that's just when somebody goes to your website, gets frustrated, it's loading too slow and then leaves, the less bounces you have, the more sales you're gonna have. So it's an SEO thing, but it's also a user interface thing. So that's gonna help your email campaign when you're sending them to your website landing page. They're not gonna bounce, they're gonna buy. So all these things kind of play together. Same thing with your Facebook page. There's social signals on there. People are interacting with it and those feed into Google as well. Like everything right now kind of feeds in and that's why SEO has gotten so expensive is because it's such a big hub, kind of touching a little bit of everything that Google looks at. So if I'm using Google or Facebook either one, I guess one thing that they both wanna do is make money off of me. They want me to click on stuff that makes them money. But secondly, it sounds like they're trying to help make it as productive and as enjoyable experience for me as possible. So they wanna give me quality content and they want it to be fast and they don't, you know, if it has broken links and stuff, they're less likely to send me to it. So that's where all the onsite, they're everything to do to make a better experience for people on our websites going to earnest points with Google. Right, and it all kind of plays in. Google's got two constituents, right? There's the business owners like us who are actually paying them money to advertise. But then if they, even if we pay them money, if the user who clicked on that ad has a bad experience, then they're gonna be less likely to continue using Google. So Google has to make both parties happy. And the best way to do that is they rank higher, whether it's, you know, Google paid ads or SEO, they're gonna rank higher the website that's easier to use, loads faster, makes more sense, you know, they take all these into account. Right, because they're constantly having a balance too. It's not going to be like one answer or the other, that makes sense. Oh, good, we got, I think we're getting up there. Take a question on Pay Per Click. Any feedback on companies who do SEO and want a certain commission for paid Google ads, meaning they want to get paid when you close the deal? Is that Pay Per Click? Is that what you use? Well, I think it paid Google ads as either like Google Guarantee or I think what I find out there is commission. So I think what it is is we're running Google ads and we pay a commission to people when they close deals for us. I don't know if Karen can give some. We're a little confused, Karen, give us a little bit more. Maybe you could pull up Leslie's question while we're waiting for Karen to give us a little bit more info, Karen. All right, my guy can't write great. So Leslie's saying that her, I'm assuming her web guy or SEO guy can't write great content and every time we're coming to the location, I have to write a bunch of content that is expected. It's a lot of work for me. I think there's a lot of work for me in time. Yeah, it's a challenge for a lot of SEOs too in that as an SEO person, I really know how to fix your website and make it load super fast and that's kind of what you want me to do but I don't necessarily know how to do about fixing roofs or repairing air conditioners. So am I gonna be the best person to write about that? And one of the biggest things with content like I was saying about the blogs earlier, you want it to be good quality content. If I'm going on WikiHow and just kind of copying those ideas on your website, it's not really gonna be great or super insightful type content. So that can be a challenge. That said, you don't have to write that. You can find somebody who is a good content writer and pay them to do that for you. That's probably what I would suggest. What I would kind of expect that experience to be like is just to have them interview you about this content that you're writing so you can provide them with some insights that are gonna be helpful and good quality and then they can kind of take that and turn it into the 500, 750 words that your SEO person is telling you. That's right. Whoever don't pay Google ads. It's very common that, I mean, I wouldn't consider this a commission but this is sort of the face structure that a lot of, a lot of marketing people use who are doing pay per click. I don't really have any opinions on it. I think 20% is actually pretty good. When I was working at Genet Local, we were charging 30 to 35%. And one of the things that you should see is with that professional managing your paid ads, the price per acquisition should go down. So if you did it on your own, it might cost you $120, $200 to get a new customer. And in the cleaning business, a really good lead, at least in my area, is around $40, $50. A great lead would be like $20 per lead. And when I say per lead, I mean, a person that lands on your web pages calls your phone, so you get a chance to close them, right? But if you're spending $1,000 a month and they're charging you $200, it's really not that bad a deal. And the reason that a lot of paid ad professionals do it this way is because it kind of scales. They can get paid more for the larger budgets because the larger budgets are more work. So if you're doing 10 grand in ad spend, they'll charge you two. It's not a bad deal. We're right up on the hour. We're out of time. You got 30 seconds. Chatbots, did they get this? Yeah, but yes, if you can figure out how to use it and make money off of it, but I haven't really found the application for cleaning. I think Tom probably knows more about this. I think we had some conversations about Chatbots at some point. Yeah. And the thinking is that more and more there's a preference for that as opposed to filling out lead capture forms and whatnot, but we'll save that for another day. Cleaning business today, if you haven't subscribed right here, it is just super, super easy. Email first name last name. You get our newsletter, which is coming out about every week now. And a lot of stuff happening in cleaning industry you wanna stay caught up with that. All of the links and resources that we share the smart business moves are in this link. And I just posted that in chat. We're pretty much good for today. Tomorrow, Matt, Rick will be with us. We're gonna be talking about PPP and SBA and EIDL and a whole other set of different acronyms. I'm pretty sure. I agree with Brian. But this was great information. You did an excellent job of making a really, really hard subject or confusing or convoluted subject seem really palatable. So you did a good job. I really appreciate it, Brian. I have a feeling we were just scratching the surface. We could probably do this for several more hours and hopefully you can come back soon and we can, huh? I'm there. Hey, thanks for having me on, guys. It's been great. It's always nice talking to everybody and just getting a nerd out about SEO. Like, all we're talking about is cleaning now. So it's fun for me. This was awesome. A new eye. I got a new acronym, UI. Your interface. Yeah, I like it. Thank you. Well, thanks, Brian. Hey, I think you're two more, five years term. Have a good one, everybody.