¶ Welcome to Revenue Roadmap
All right, welcome. Welcome, everyone. This is Revenue Roadmap, where we talk about driving revenue and increasing profits for local businesses.
¶ Meet the Experts: Anthony Carls and Casey Shea
I'm Anthony Carls, president of RocketClicks. And today I'm with Mr. Casey Shea. He is one of our marketing strategists here at RocketClicks. He's also one of our top SEOs and probably a resident expert at AI. So like you got you got you all getting a gift today. He's gonna be giving you guys some wisdom. But before we Get into that. I always drop a little fun question at the beginning that hopefully adds a little value.
And I don't tell her if you, if you've ever wondered, do they know what questions come in? They have no clue, but I love to see like how stressed they might be. So Casey's like, what the
I'm sweating already, but
¶ The Importance of Mental Challenges
Um, all right, Casey, what habits or routines do you follow to stay on top of your game? I don't know.
Ooh, and life. You know, this is gonna be an easy one just cause I like, I pound this into everybody,
I think, I figure this is like, this is easy, little stress, but it's like, this is.
So, so like today, everybody is really big into health, you know, like healthy body, working out your muscles, you know, like, so you can, you know, have prolonged happy life and whatnot. But a lot of people, they neglect the, like one of your biggest muscles, which is the brain continuously feeding it, like with whatever it is, challenges, problems, books, like you don't just need to like cram in books all the times, but you always have to have some kind of challenge.
Um, I always look at, you know, We're just primitive, you know, monkeys walking around. And it's like, what have we always done? Like, we've always faced challenges in order to get to where we're at. So we always have to continue to give ourselves challenge besides what we deal with that work
Love it. Love it. Love it. Yeah, there's a great book. Uh, I recently just read called peak and talk a lot about that actually how you can build more myelin and build bigger parts of your brain by just like continuing to get it out of homeostasis and learning new things. It's a, it's good. Love that.
helps with anxiety too. you
Awesome. All
¶ Introduction to SEO
right. So we're going to be talking about SEO today. We're going to be talking about why is SEO valuable. So Casey, super high level. should I do SEO? Why is it valuable? How should I think about its value? Where, where should I start?
¶ Why SEO is Valuable
know, high level, the biggest reason is because SEO is going to be evergreen. it's something that you, you nourish, you put in enough love and it's going to last. Um, you know, and it gets to that point where then it's just like maintaining. the other reason is because the digital landscape is constantly changing. And not only is the digital landscape changing, so are the new generations. So it's like this new generation X is just making me feel older and older every day.
But they also search for things differently. They look for things differently. They're going to click on things differently. So the way we market today is, you know, It's like drastically different than the way that we marketed 10 years ago, even so it's just always changing. It's doing it fast.
Nice. So how should we think about how should we think about its value? So let's, there's four, four things we want to talk about today. So let's, let's do an overview of those. And then let's, uh, let's talk a little bit about each one of those. What is, what makes SEO valuable?
¶ The Fixed Cost Advantage of SEO
Um, biggest thing that's gonna, you know, initially make it is it's got to fix costs. Um, there isn't gonna be any surprises. Something that.
A lot of times that you run into, you know, with, um, you know, running paid ads and things like that is like, you know, one month you could be spending a thousand dollars and then the next month it could double because of the competition, keyword targeting, you know, changes in, you know, the landscape, whatever it may be, where with SEO, like, it's a constant investment. Um, you look at it like you're investing in the stocks, you know, it's a, yeah.
The longer you let it go, uh, the bigger return that you're going to get from it.
It's a, it's a compounding effect to like, not only is it a fixed cost, but like I should, I'm like adding every month I'm adding to it. It's not like I'm spending a new 5, 000 if that's where I'm starting. And if I stopped spending that 5, 000, like all of it goes away. And paid media, if you turn the ads off, guess what? That the ads go off. If. On the, on the SEO, like if a budget gets tight, why, one of the reasons SEO is so valuable is A, it's a fixed cost, but B, it's an investment.
SEO is very much an investment and that fixed cost is a compounding annuity for you as you really invest it. And if you do it well, it can be a great engine for you. So, yeah, I would totally agree on the, on the fixed cost piece. So what, uh, the next, the next point we teach our team is how we think about, with small businesses as it pertains to when to do this.
¶ When to Start SEO for Your Business
So like, what's the, what's the right time to start SEO?
SEO is going to be the very first thing that you're going to need to implement onto, you know, your website, just because this is your foundation. Um, if you have a whole bunch of awesome paid ads that you're just dumping a whole bunch of money into, and the user clicks on that, spends that money and comes to your site. And it's just. Not what they were looking for. Then it's, you know, your leads are not going to be as high of quality.
Um, they're going to be less likely to convert and you're just going to be hemorrhaging money more than anything else. So you have to have that good footing to start with.
Yeah. Um, yeah, that's a great, like, like you said, if you're, if your first strategy is paid ads and it's not working, it's really hard to continue to get, get business to come because paid ads can get very expensive if the strategy isn't well, and if something changes in the marketplace, you got to adapt. And if you don't have the baseline of an organic strategy, that's really the support system underneath, like it can be, it can be tough trails.
We've seen that with a lot of, uh, a lot of businesses and clients that we work with to start.
Well, and the other aspect of it too, is like kind of going into one of the other steps that we always focus on is, is that trust element.
¶ Building Trust Through High Rankings
you know, touching on that newer generation, you know, like even my daughter, she'll, she'll tell me, she scrolls past all of the ads. She's like, I don't want to click on any of them, you know, and then she starts looking for what's familiar. What's popping up.
you're not popping up after those ads, then people are just going to think that you're some big corporate, uh, you know, business that's just dumping all kinds of money to, to stay at the top versus someone who is actually going to like, give you a nice quality product or service, you know,
Yeah. The what are like, how do you, how, what's a good way to think about that? So high, you know, high ranking sites, why are they, why are they perceived more trustworthy? What's the psychology there?
Um, the biggest reason is going to be, you know, if you're showing up at the top, Google understands you to be solving an issue that you're going to have a good experience, a good user experience, people are satisfied with the outcome that they have after visiting your site, and it also aligns with what it is that you're searching for to begin with. Whereas with a paid ad, it could be just targeting a specific word or something like that.
So it's like, there's there, it's less technical as far as like how it's evaluated and presented to the user when they find it. And then it's just, it comes down to familiarity. The more you're popping up, not as an ad, the more comfortable people are going to be with you. They're going to think, you know, you're the popular kid. They want to hang out with you.
I mean, another, another good way to think about it is, uh, Google, Google conditions us to, uh, through, through all of the data that they have typically when you're. When you're visiting those top organic search results, uh, you're, you're getting conditioned to believe those are going to solve your problem. And the reason you're getting conditioned to believe that is they actually do. That's why they have those spots.
Um, so inherently, like as we played with Google more and more, like, Credibility and trust is just something that happens because like that's what Google's taught us and all of their data suggests it's true. That's why they have 90 percent of the search market share and they're going through something every company doesn't really ever want to get into which is they've now created a monopoly because they're so good at what they do.
Good at manipulating search results and people so, you know Right, wrong, or indifferent. They've been great at what they've done. Um, and they can kind of teach us how to do things, uh, without our knowledge.
¶ Increasing Visibility with SEO
What about visibility? Like how does, how does SEO help a local business increase their visibility?
Oh man, huh? Visibility is it's everywhere. So just, just imagine like you've got this beautiful website, you know, you put in all this work, but it's not aligned with the way that Google perceives it, like say that Google, they can't crawl it. They can't understand what your website is about. You know, we run across businesses like this all the time, you know, the way that it's structured, it just, it can't understand what it is that they're selling.
So basically you just invested in this big giant billboard and you just shoved it in an alley. And then you're expecting people to find it. And every once in a while you get a drifter that goes down the alley and then it's like, all right, we got one lead guys. This is awesome. so that's the biggest aspect is like making sure that people can actually see what it is that you're doing and then it to them at the correct time as well.
Yeah, I think that's one that's, that's something that's super fascinating. There's often we'll, we'll run into an entrepreneur who just had their website redone and they're wondering why it's not working.
¶ SEO vs. Website Development
Building a website is very different than SEOing a website. It's like they are interrelated, but one is not the other. In both instances, like an SEO person might know how to code things, but they're not necessarily a web developer. Also a person that builds websites. May know some things about SEO, but they're like, very likely, not very good at SEO because that's not what they study and focus on. There's, there are two very different things.
I think that's, that's like an interesting nuance in our conversation that I just wanted to highlight. Cause you said, you said a couple of times, you said almost that a couple of times, and I just wanted to like, really put a point on it. Cause it's, it's very interesting. I think literally we just ran across this with a client that this is their exact story. Hey, we just had this website built and like, we're not getting any leads.
Yeah. That's what we should expect to do anything to SEO the website. No. What does that mean? That's your problem.
Yeah. Well, it's like, I always look at SEO. We're the bridge between the robots and the people. It's like, we interpret emotions to the robots and, you know, vice versa that element, you know, you're just, you're on page nine where you're never going to be found.
So yeah, I mean, SEO is super valuable. I think it's a, it's. It's, it's a complicated area because it intertwines with a lot of different things. You know, you mentioned UI, UX, you mentioned building websites. A lot of times SEO is confused, also confused with copywriting and content marketing, content, great content marketing. Parts of it are definitely part of SEO, but it starts from like all the way at the top of the five stages of awareness of unaware.
But it also goes through every single part of the one to many journey that the client will experience. All the way through the end of their service with a potential business. Right. So that's, that's an exit survey. That's a, would you review a survey? It's a, here's how we're continuing to talk, to operate in the market. And like, not all parts of those, not all parts of that content. Are you going to SEO? And, or would you want to, cause it doesn't make any sense.
So like SEO can get very complicated and convoluted, uh, by keeping it segmented and it's proper understanding of like, how do we get you visibility in content? Search engines and how do we, how do we build that annuity so that our business can grow? I think is a, it's very valuable. It's super interesting when, when a business owner really grasps that it's a very powerful
¶ The Evolving Landscape of SEO
asset.
Well, even now, nowadays, you know, like I touched on earlier, it's changing so quickly that it's, it's not even targeting search engines anymore. Um, you know, it's not search engine optimization. It's search everywhere optimization. So we are looking at different aspects of your business and trying to figure out how we can present that visibility to AI
Yeah.
because AI is going to operate entirely different than how Google is going to search for things. having that understanding where. You got this whole generation. They're not even using Google anymore. They're just going on chat GPT, you know, like, how are you going to show up for that and capture that audience
Right.
or SEO steps in?
That's awesome.
¶ Conclusion and Next Steps
Appreciate it, Casey. Any, uh, anything else to share before we wrap up about value of SEO?
Nope. It's just, uh, my heart and joy, you know, it's, it's that, that everlasting, you know, the more you put into it, the more you're going to get out of it. And it's, it's that foundational piece that I feel is missing in a lot of companies.
Appreciate it, sir. Look forward to talking next time. Next time when we, when we meet, we are going to be talking about all of the components of SEO at a super high level. So, you know, technical on page, different parts of content off page. So we're going to get into some more meaty stuff next time we meet. So I look forward to that. Appreciate you, sir.