Speaker 1: 0:00

SEO is a necessary evil in today's SMB marketing mix. Those who ignore it are likely to be left in the dust by their competition. With that said, seo is also a very complex marketing tactic with an enormous amount of moving parts. So the question becomes less about if you should do SEO and more about how you should approach it. And to help me dive into this subject is my friend, damon Burton. Nearly 20 years ago, damon beat a billion dollar company by outranking their website on Google. Since then, he's authored a bestselling SEO book and built an international search engine marketing company that's worked with Tony Robbins, russell Brunson, nba teams, inc. 5000 companies and Shark Tank featured businesses. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Welcome to the show, damon. How are you doing today?

Speaker 2: 1:04

What's up, buzz? Good to see you again, excited to see all the cool stuff you've been up to and looking forward to chatting.

Speaker 1: 1:09

Awesome, yeah. So yeah, both of us have been doing some traveling. You're about to go where I just came back from, so I'm really excited for you. So today we're talking about SEO and you as the SEO nation and the SEO guru for guys like Tony Robbins and whatnot. As we said in the intro, you know when we were just for the list, so the listeners know we met in a mastermind of marketing firms specifically and we connected because we both love SEO and been in the business for quite a long time, and so I wanted to bring you on the show and talk about mindset around SEO, because I think it's pretty well understood that it's not a matter if you're going to do SEO, it's that when you're going to do SEO, if you really want to leverage visibility for your company, right.

Speaker 1: 2:01

But I think that there's a lot of confusion on how to approach SEO. Should we do SEO on our own? Can we do SEO on our own? Maybe we should just start there. If a small business let's say it is a B2B service based business, so I don't know a CPA firm, right, and they're like we want to be seen for people who are looking for our services on Google, right, and they're like okay, seo obviously is the answer, but should they be looking at ways that they implemented themselves? Is that the best way to look at it, or should they be looking at maybe bringing in a firm, and how should they do that?

Speaker 2: 2:40

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the topic of expectations is probably the most important thing to address when you start shopping on SEO, and it's actually the first thing that I point out when we chat with leads and things like that.

Speaker 2: 2:51

And we'll kind of walk through why. And so it's a great question, like if you have your own business or if you're a decision maker in a business, it is nearly logistically and financially impossible to do SEO good for cheaper than hiring an agency. So, you know, maybe if you're like a solopreneur and you also have availability of time to do some of the stuff, then that's the maybe area. But as soon as you end up having like a team and you're already juggling multiple hats, you know, here's why it's nearly impossible. Because you know the the high level. Everybody knows there's a ton that goes into seo. But you can kind of simplify it to. You have to have a technical person that's always touching technical things. You have to have a content person that's always researching who your avatar is, what their pain points are and writing about that stuff and that's. We could probably go even deeper on content later.

Speaker 2: 3:46

But one of the biggest problems is people write for the sake of writing instead of actually writing to solve problems. So you can write, it doesn't mean it's going to move the needle, so writing is a whole thing. And then there's the whole like do you do backlinks, do you do external credibility? Do you think things like that. So if you look at just the technical stuff, like an average account, depending on how big your website is, that's weeks of a full-time person, right? So if you already have your day-to-day stuff, where are you also going to find an extra eight hours a day to work on for the next couple weeks? And then that's just to start.

Speaker 2: 4:23

Then after that it's a reoccurring content machine so then who's perpetually going to be always the thought leader and bridging the gap between your customers pain points and the products and services you offer that solve those problems for them?

Speaker 1: 4:40

I love that, yeah, and I think that, like, the one of the things you said was you know, like just writing, like, oh, I've got all this content and I think that a lot of people don't realize.

Speaker 1: 4:51

I just had a client today asked.

Speaker 1: 4:53

He's like how do I know what keywords people are actually typing in to the Google to find my services Right?

Speaker 1: 5:04

And there's and, and you know, as we know, there's a lot of tools out there that can actually help us understand, um, what keywords and when we say keywords, those are the actual words that are being typed into Google specifically, like with hyphens and misspellings and all that other stuff and go okay, yeah, there's a lot of people searching for this versus what you think they are searching for, and there's no actual search volume. But then, so let's say that people know how to do that, right, and, um, keyword planners and there's a bunch of stuff that you can actually literally Google. How do I search or how do I figure out what keywords to use in SEO? You could easily do that, but a firm will know how to do those strategies. But when it comes to actually writing the content, is it valuable or should people think about the SEO actually writing the content, or are they going to be on the hook for creating the content that the SEO company is telling them needs to happen?

Speaker 2: 6:07

Ideally the agency does it for you and I'll go deeper on that. But I want to go back just briefly because, on the keyword thing, even in that example there are tons of great tools that are out there, but you still have to understand how to interpret it because, the, the. Probably one of the biggest creations of problems in the long term of an account is the trajectory from the beginning. So it's like you know, whatever those metaphors are about, like you know, a ship being slightly off and then like, and all of a sudden they're miles off their destination.

Speaker 2: 6:40

It's the same thing, right. Right, these tools can tell you like, yeah, people search these things, but that doesn't mean that that's the thing that supports your customers or your product and service. Right, and so you have to there's a whole other layer beyond what the data says, which is buyer intent right and that takes a manual review right so so you go through and you do that, and now we're in the content right, and so it's like your question of does the agency write it or does the agency advise you what to write.

Speaker 2: 7:10

I will tell you that I laugh because over the evolution. So I've had my agency for 17 years and in the infancy, when we were more of a budget provider, it was like okay, you know how do we make this as hands off for the customer? Or actually it was the other way around. It was like you know, the customer is the expert, right, they're the ones that sell the product and service. So how do we leverage their wisdom? Everybody's already busy. So I've gone through, I've gone through three evolutions of this question.

Speaker 2: 7:45

So in the infant, in the infancy, it was like the customer's the expert and if they write it, which means I don't, uh, it'll save them money and it'll be better because it came from the expert, right, it never happens exactly. So you might tell yourself, oh, I can write, and what's going to happen is you might write one piece of content before you hate it or never do it again, or say you're going to do it and the time you never find the time.

Speaker 2: 8:15

So then the next evolution was well, why don't we ask the customer, we again, you, you're the expert, tell us the cool stuff and then we'll go research it and then we'll write it for you. Well, it's the same fundamental problem You're tasking them with something to do when they don't have time. So ultimately, the agency, to do it consistently at scale, has to do it all. Now doesn't mean that the, the client, isn't involved, right, and so usually there's an onboarding call and you align with the, the avatar and figure out who the ideal buyer is.

Speaker 2: 8:51

The team agency goes okay, let's go find all the money. They do the research and then they bring it to the client, because you want the client involved or you, as the client, want to be involved and you want to make sure everybody's on the same page. And so then the agency does the heavy lifting. But you now know which direction the campaign's moving in. Then they take the keyword research and then they bridge the gap between buyer intent and they go okay, let's go find out the things that the ideal buyer is already asking. Search engines.

Speaker 1: 9:17

Mm, hmm.

Speaker 2: 9:18

So that's the intent thing. Are you writing for the sake of writing, or are you writing to attract a buyer Right? So then you map that out. So then now everybody's on the same page. Yay, we know where the money is. Yay, we know the top person to write about. Now the agency can write about it. And usually the next question that follows after that is well, how do I trust somebody to write about my very special thing?

Speaker 1: 9:38

Nobody knows.

Speaker 2: 9:40

Nobody knows about this as well as I do.

Speaker 1: 9:45

My personal approach, my bespoke outlook on what I do. Yes, I am the expert.

Speaker 2: 9:53

Or even on an extreme end, because of an industry that may have liabilities or technicalities, like a doctor or an attorney. It makes sense why you had to have that question, but there's a big difference between writing based on knowledge and writing based on an intent to attract a buyer right so a great example would be like I would bore to death my seo audience if I talked about all the knowledge things that go behind SEO.

Speaker 2: 10:23

So a doctor doesn't need to get on there and talk about how they use the scalpel and do all the incisions and all this like they don't care Right. And so you, you do know infinitely more than the agency in a certain scope, but you also don't know what the customer needs, that the data is revealed and the tools that the agency has. You also don't understand marketing and the buyer intent, and so there's different approaches to how you present the content, and ideally, you're very intentional with the content to solve a problem, to attract a buyer, and you're not just writing for the sake of writing.

Speaker 1: 10:59

I love it and I think that the biggest thing is about intent. Like there's four main intents of a search right, and I want to I think that's important for the listener to understand that I akin the four intents almost like a sales funnel, right, and if you're not familiar with the sales funnels, it's the top is where people have. They might be either pain aware, but they're not solution aware and they're just kind of in the information. And so when we look at the four intents, we have information, we have navigation, commercial and transactional. And if you take that, you can actually literally go down the sales funnel of uh interest or, I'm sorry, informational, um research, right Down to shopping interest, understand your uh problem aware into transactional Like I looking for somebody to buy, right, and then navigational I know who I'm looking to buy, I'm I'm actually trying to get ahold of that person or arrive at their location, right.

Speaker 1: 12:03

And when we're talking about the content, you know what. What Damon's talking about is literally understanding the client value journey and understanding like why would somebody, why, why are they specifically putting in certain keywords? That dictates where they're at in their buying journey. And everybody has a buying journey like this and some people have to do a lot of research and other people are like I got a pain, I just need a solution, and you have to meet them at each of those places so that you can attract those people into your funnel. So when, when we talked about uh later, earlier, you were talking about the ongoing creation of content, are you talking about going back to the content you created, say maybe a year ago, and refreshing it or making it better or building upon it, or are you talking about literally creating new content consistently?

Speaker 2: 13:00

new content consistently. Yeah, I'm. I mean, there's a lot of um. There's value in stability in a website, so there's value in having your historical content, as long as it's still relevant, staying as the authority that it is, and so a lot of times seos will go in and touch everything right and they'll.

Speaker 2: 13:24

They'll try to fix what isn't broken. There are. There are some circumstances where maybe you have like a top 10 list of 2024 and so then next year it makes sense to make 2025. But generally speaking, like if you're, if your content solves the problem, it solves the problem.

Speaker 2: 13:40

Like you can't solve it more and so why touch it more and so a big part of seo is do you communicate that you're an authority, and so what we're looking at is the overall credibility of the website, and so it's not just one single optimized piece of content there might be one that drives more traffic than the other, but it's because it gets leverage from the overall credibility of the website too. So when you're a topical authority, then Google starts to give you the benefit on how things position, on all the other pieces of content so yeah, like you have to continue to educate search engines and your audience as to why you're the authority in the industry that you're in.

Speaker 1: 14:21

Gotcha. And so I always hear like, well, there's only so much I can write about, or anybody could write about, my, my industry, like how? What do you say to people who are like, um, we're going to do SEO for a year because I know it's going to take a long time, but once you've done it and you've made the, you've solved all the problems my clients will ever have. Why would you need to write anymore? What do you say to those people? People have that mindset. How do you help them through, break through that misnomer?

Speaker 2: 14:49

Yeah, it's a fair point and a fair question, and usually it's just a difference in understanding of what the overall goals and opportunities are, because, just because there is truth to exhausting a topic, right, I mean like if you're working on, we'll just pick a random industry. You know, maybe you're in roofing, right.

Speaker 1: 15:10

That's a good one, Like how many types of roofs are there right?

Speaker 2: 15:14

Yeah, like, how many different ways are you going to talk about doing a roof, and so there can be logistically limited things, like there's only so many ways you do the thing and so what? What you, what your opportunity is, is that there's a couple of opportunities in ongoing content. One is that your competition doesn't stop Right and so you have a shelf life to the credibility of the content you put out there.

Speaker 2: 15:41

And so what's nice about SEO is is it's not like a switch flips like paid ads, like if you turn off paid ads, you just turn off paid ads and your lead flow is done.

Speaker 1: 15:50

With.

Speaker 2: 15:50

SEO, you could walk away from it, and it'll probably take at least several weeks, if not several months, before you start to notice a significant decrease in some sort of visibility on some of the targets. But the longer that gap is and not continuing to educate and express your authority then the more opportunity you give the competition to catch up and close the gap, the head start that you have on them, and so it's not that your site lost credibility, it's that the other guys caught up right, and so that's part of it. Now the other thing you can do is like there might be one way to talk about a roof, but if you do seo properly, in the onboarding, what you look for is the quickest path to monetization, and so if your quickest path that, let's say, you're a roofing company well, you probably also offer soffit and fascia, but let's say roofing is where the money is at then you shouldn't dilute your efforts across you know the main moneymaker by giving equal efforts towards the smaller moneymakers.

Speaker 2: 16:52

So in the beginning, you should probably focus on roofing and get a monopoly on that.

Speaker 2: 16:56

And so what's nice is now that you have credibility. Now you're number one for roofing and Google says Buzz's website is the go-to site for all things comparable to roofing. Well, softenfacia is not too far off from a roofing service. So let's give Buzz the benefit of the doubt, because now he's talking about that stuff and people tend to like that, they tend to check out, they tend to stay long on his website, they tend to fill out a form, they tend to convert the more of those signals that you send Google look analytics isn't because google likes you.

Speaker 2: 17:27

They want your data. So when they look at the data and they go, people stay on your website longer. They fill out the forms that's a better answer, and if that's a better answer, that makes us google look better. So let's show that better answer to more people, and so it creates an opportunity to set yourself up, to show, to expand your targets.

Speaker 2: 17:44

So sure you may exhaust all the things you can say about roofing. There are ways you can, you know, go on tangents across it. Maybe they're less technical things about roofing and they're more about safety and security and protecting your family. There's different pathways. You can diversify your topics, but now you don't need to talk about it weekly. Maybe you just touch roofing once a month now. The the other three weeks you're talking about Sofit and Fascia. So, you can expand your monopoly in which you rank on Google.

Speaker 1: 18:12

I love it. So the last thing I want to talk about is AI, because now we have Gemini out there and all these other tools that basically we have AI as one of the results on a search engine result page, right, and it's up there really, really high. How are people gaming? How can people game the system or approach getting the AI to pay attention to them, because those are literally just the AI going. Hey, I found this piece of information I think is really relevant to the question you asked the search engine. I'm right on that, right.

Speaker 2: 18:55

Yeah, AI is just another search engine.

Speaker 1: 18:57

Right.

Speaker 2: 18:58

So, and in fact, it's probably even more dependent on search engines, because where do you think it got the data right? And so, if you think about the fundamentals of search, which are the three we talked about, which are your site structure, your site's content, your site's credibility, ai is generally using the same things, and so it might weigh them a little bit differently, it might pull from sources a little bit differently, but at the end of the day, it has the same variables to leverage.

Speaker 2: 19:26

So depending on which ai tool you're using, you know chat gpt, at least in its current instance, is largely retroactive to data and so it has to go.

Speaker 2: 19:38

What's already out there that I can connect the dots from, and AI tools from. Search engines like Google's AI has the benefit of leveraging Google's more fast real-time sets of data. And there was a great, a great article I read the other day. I don't remember who or where, but the takeaway was they were comparing three different AI tools. One of them was chat GPT, one was Google and one was some outlier. And what they did was they searched. Show me I don't remember who, we'll just say Damon. Show me Damon Burton's latest video. And ChatGPT found a video, but it was wrong. It wasn't the newest one, because ChatGPT is leveraging it's a giant database of historical information.

Speaker 2: 20:23

So it's not looking for new stuff it, it's a giant database of historical information. So it's not looking for new stuff, it's looking for old stuff. So it found a video, but the wrong one. The outlier couldn't find any video at all and Google found the right one.

Speaker 1: 20:32

Right, right.

Speaker 2: 20:34

So AI, I think, is largely, at least as of now, not so much a wave of change in the way search engines operate. It's a change in the user experience and how the information is displayed.