Why Your Digital Marketing Isn't Working
Make it Loud Studios presents improving your digital marketing
John:with John and Cliff. Hi, I'm John. I'm Cliff. And we are with Make it Loud. We specialize in digital marketing for small and medium sized businesses of all time of all kinds.
John:And Cliff, how long have you been at this?
Cliff:It seems like about a thousand years.
John:It's not quite that long.
Cliff:No, sixteen?
John:Yeah. Longer. Is it? You've been sixteen,
Cliff:right? Yeah.
John:I'm 20. 20 years of this doing digital marketing. I started doing digital marketing when websites were new back in the the yellow
Cliff:pages were a thing.
John:Yeah they were. In fact we rescued a lot of people from the yellow pages back then. So we're starting a podcast here. We want to be able to bring value to you to help you understand how to go market your business. And we figured today that we would talk about why a lot of your digital marketing isn't working.
Cliff:Because a lot of it isn't.
John:A lot of it isn't. We see a lot of people we have a small business here in Beaufort Georgia. We have a storefront in fact people walk in and they come and consult with us. In fact, right near the cultural center of Beaufort. The Mall Of Georgia.
John:The Mall Of Georgia.
Cliff:I don't know about that. It's a center.
John:If you're, if you're nearby come come by and visit us. But we, we sit down with people we spend generally speaking about an hour to an hour and a half, with people, reviewing their digital marketing, their current digital marketing or assessing what they would go like to do. And Cliff, I would say what do you think the percentage is? I would say 75 percent?
Cliff:70 at least seventy, if not 80%, have had just horrific experiences with other either digital marketing nerds, SEO nerds. Just they've had a hard hard time finding people that'll do the right work.
John:It's really true. In fact, I would say rough roughly 75 of the people who walk through the door just out 3 to $5. Yeah. They've spent some money on a website and and it just hasn't hasn't they've either not started it, not finished it or and they're not taking calls anymore. And they're just out the money.
John:They're in Canada or India or some other place. Right. So the their their vendor is not trusted and they can't get their cash back. If it's search engine optimization, I'll tell you I think the percentage is higher. Yeah.
John:If you're paying somebody for SEO ridiculously laden with fraud. Most of the time when people come in through the door and I look at a site that's been SEO'd, I see no evidence of SEO on it at And
Cliff:we have secret ways to find out.
John:Not so secret.
Cliff:They're not so secret.
John:No. We'll
Cliff:teach you. But yeah. We find a lot of people that are paying for SEO. They've been paying an agency for a long time. And I look at the site and in five minutes I can tell if somebody's actively doing SEO or somebody's just, you know,
John:saying what they're Your title tag says home. That's a sign. Probably a sign. That's a sign. If somebody hasn't logged into your website in a while and you don't see any new content and you're not ranking.
John:Now if you're ranking and the content isn't new, hey, leave it.
Cliff:Right.
John:But if you're not ranking and you don't see any new content being delivered to your website, that's a real sure sign that you're paying for some search engine optimization that's just not working. Right. And that the person who's doing it is not really doing it at all.
Cliff:Yeah. And one of
John:the signs
Cliff:I see I'm sorry. One of the signs I see a lot is no Google Analytics. In order to attach Google Search Console, which is another helpful tool to for SEO nerds, you have to attach Google Analytics. And Google Analytics tells you things like how much traffic you're getting, where the traffic's coming from, what devices you're using. It It drowns you in data.
Cliff:Then a lot of it is helpful in terms of figuring out what you need to do. But if you don't have analytics attached to the site, how are you going to know how the site's performed? There's no tracking.
John:Really is tracking. It's like anything else in life. If you want to grow in the weight in the in the gym. Right. You know work on your diet you have to track and and analytics is the tracking version of of of the web world.
Cliff:Truly true. I'm one of the things I always say is what's observed and measured improves and if you're not attaching the basic standard tool for measuring your website's performance that to me is missing basic blocking and tackling of SEO and we see it all the time. We see meta descriptions that are just, you know, extensively too long or not at all or like you said, home on the home page.
John:Just don't stop. We have one poor lady that came in here. She was about $8,000 out of money. And when we looked at her website, she only had, by the way, what one page after spending six months with this other web development company. And when I looked at that one page which by the way was also unfinished.
Cliff:Yeah. That's a good sign.
John:All of the text was embedded in images. So it was a website zero Mhmm. Or an SEO zero when it comes to actually Google paying attention to the site. Not to mention ridiculously embarrassing to the client and money out the window.
Cliff:And just awful. And that's one thing that breaks our heart because by nature we want you know you to succeed. Our goal. We don't you know we can talk about metrics all day of success and that's fine and there are plenty of them to talk about then you should have key performance indicators but one of the biggest ones is is your phone ringing. And if that's not happening then nothing else really matters.
John:You can't find yourself at all in a basic search. You know you're not on page one. What's the percentage of people who when they're when they're actually searching for something out cliff actually go to page two?
Cliff:Pretty close to zero. The standard joke, which is so tired, is you can find Jimmy Hoffa on page two.
John:I didn't make it up. Jimmy Hoffa's family probably. Right. Yeah.
Cliff:I'm sorry. Apologize to everybody in the Hoffa family. But, yeah, it's it's just not happening. And, you know, we see the evidence of that and and our goal we're very aggressive. We take a very aggressive approach to SEO.
Cliff:Whereas some and this is a secret that a lot of SEO agencies won't tell you but they'll say oh we'll do SEO for x amount and x amount is too good to be true of course and they'll say yeah and they'll tell each other behind the scenes they'll never tell you this they'll say oh we're only gonna do x number of landing pages or x number of blog posts per month
John:that's Which could take you three years Oh
Cliff:yeah yeah or if if you ever get there we're way more aggressive than that we don't put any kind of you know Limit. Limit on pages we do because it depends on what you do in your industry. Mhmm. So that's another thing is people are paying for SEO in industries that are ridiculously competitive and it usually takes them about three to six months to realize that their SEO isn't working. And that's a scary thing when you're a business owner paying that kind of money and even if it's a little amount, you shouldn't be paying any for, you know, unless you see the clear cut evidence of what the agency's doing.
Cliff:And we're very transparent in that regard. Mhmm. It's like we're we're teachers by nature. Mhmm. So we wanna educate you.
Cliff:We wanna show you what we're doing because we're proud of it. You know?
John:One of the other things I see a lot of when people come in is they go, hey, I just have my website redesigned. I just paid for a website. I'd like to do search engine optimization. I'd like to market it. And I would say probably 50% of the time the website is either in the wrong platform and generally speaking most people who are aggressive in SEO are designing in WordPress.
John:And there's a reason for that. WordPress has tools we call them plugins but they're basically just apps like you would have for your telephone and they help you optimize your website for Google search that in such a way that would be really helpful. Those kinds of tools are not necessarily present in some of the DIY platforms. We're not gonna name them because there are so many of them but, and they're making improvements those kinds of things still you have some similar kinds of issues with them that the tools are not present to be able to go rank a site favorably. In fact the overwhelming majority of the time if somebody comes in either they've tried their own website or they've hired somebody who's done it in a DIY platform choose whichever one you like their search engine results really just stink.
John:And I had a friend come to me in fact even in the last week and said, Hey, you know what I got a flooring company and I just had my website redone and I'm paying for search engine optimization but I can't find myself and my phone is not ringing. So I took a look at the site, we checked the builder first and it was in a in a DIY platform and he's like, well why why isn't the SEO working? I go, well, first off you got home in the title tag. It's a
Cliff:There's your sign.
John:It's it's done in a in a platform that that really is meant for DIY kind of stuff. And and ultimately there's not enough content even on the website to rank it and no no shown effort at doing so. So I couldn't I couldn't find any evidence on his website and he's spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on this per month
Cliff:Mhmm.
John:With somebody and not getting a result. So there's there's ridiculous fraud in the industry. Some of the other things that we see all the time are websites that don't meet modern or current even standards. Occasionally we'll see websites that aren't mobile friendly which is a ridiculous problem as well. 60% of search is that correct?
John:It's done on mobile devices. You want to make sure that your website is mobile friendly. The other thing that that we see a lot of too is a website that is not is not designed appropriately for a specific industry. The one that comes to mind was one that showed and this gentleman paid an awful lot of money for this website. In fact, we knew the company that designed it and they spent time interviewing him and things like that.
John:And his website was done in earth tones and it had a video of him kinda in a swimsuit with a top.
Cliff:Was it a bikini?
John:It was god. No. No. No. No.
John:No. We don't want that. No. But showed showed him in a swimsuit and kinda hanging out in the boat somewhere, which is kinda the wrong message, by the way, if you wanna hire people or you want people to hire you for
Cliff:Don't put vacation pictures on there. Not not appropriate.
John:It was a video actually as well. Oh, okay. Worse. The menu was kind of on the side. So if you really wanted to read the menu, had to had to kinda do that.
John:It didn't work.
Cliff:So it was from early nineteen ninety?
John:You would think. But it wasn't. This was in the last ten years. This thing was was created. And they for the for the shots, they had his name and they had him dressed in all leather with a I'm serious you can't make this up with this this leather hat with a wide rim and dressed in all leather and we used to use this website actually for some of the training we used to do and say, okay, what I want you to is I'm gonna give you ten seconds.
John:I want you to look at the website and I want you to tell me what it's about. So I pull the the thing on the screen for ten seconds and give somebody an opportunity. Actually, give a crowd an opportunity to do it and they go, he's a comedian. Which it did kinda He's
Cliff:an explorer.
John:An explorer was the other one. They thought this guy was an explorer.
Cliff:He's Indiana Jones.
John:So in all actuality this guy sold insurance. Yeah. Know.
Cliff:So And not much of it at that point.
John:So color schemes matter, design matters, impression matters. And these are the kinds of things we spend an awful lot of time on at Make It Loud with respect to website design. Making sure that your your website meets industry standards.
Cliff:Right.
John:Should I tell the one about the the logo for the the vet?
Cliff:And that's gonna be it's gonna be me.
John:It is gonna hurt you. I know that. So I went into a vet one time and and I kind of did a visual assessment of the website and with the vet and and I said your color scheme needs to change. It was red and black. Go dogs.
John:Go dogs. That's why she had it. She had she had red and black. It was a she was a dogs fan. So I said you're basically a hospital for pets.
John:And red is Blood. And black is Death. So you're basically very subconsciously saying that your animals are coming here to die.
Cliff:Bring him bring him here to die. That's not
John:So we had that conversation. She quickly exited me from the the building. She fired us. She was she did. Well, we didn't get hired.
Cliff:Right. For that one. She fired us before ever hiring us. So This
John:is true.
Cliff:She didn't wanna But it's And I I do applaud the fact that she was sticking to her UGA guns.
John:Yeah. Whatever. But yeah. Know. She did have done better if she was from tech.
Cliff:For sure.
John:But you you really wanna have stuff that's that's color appropriate. Blues and greens would have been more appropriate. Blues are kind of stability and and health and green is life and these kinds of things. Believe it or not very very subconsciously but very really communicate things about your business as well. A lot of the sites we see just just do not meet industry standards even if they happen to be designed in the right platform.
Cliff:Right. And you brought up something a minute ago that I want to touch on. You know, we want to talk about web design and we want to make sure that you have the right website for your industry and and for what you do. But let's back up. In order to be on page one which is the core reason anybody does search engine optimization.
Cliff:You know, if you're not on page one, you're basically absent. You're missing. You're you're missing out a lot to the to the competitors that are are on page one. Because people are searching for what you do. So that's an important piece.
Cliff:And he he talked about the platform before. What's interesting about the platforms is you have the DIY platforms that are boxes. And in those boxes you you build out your pages and you put your content and the images and all that and remember for a website you have about six seconds to answer some basic questions. What can you do for me? Can I trust you?
Cliff:And what do I do next? Those are the core issues questions you have to answer and in order for anybody to proceed. So once you have that established, that that box, if you wanna step outside of the box in any way, shape, or form, or fashion, it's difficult do whereas WordPress is roughly 46% of all sites you click on.
John:I think you include the proprietary sites like right like you have companies that just sell chiropractic websites. Correct. If you include that it's over it's over half the websites on planet earth.
Cliff:That's a that's a good point. There are lot of folks out there that market and say, oh, we do, you know, websites for x y and z industry and some do a good job. A lot of them don't. So, there's that. They just say they do, you know, specialize in whatever.
Cliff:That's fine. But my point is is that when you got a when you have a box for a website, if you wanna step outside of it, it's very difficult to do. Whereas WordPress is a platform. And it allows you, like he said, to have apps and so forth to build out as far as you want, as much as you want and that gives you a lot more flexibility. That's why I I like working with WordPress more than other platforms.
Cliff:It's not to say I will
John:Not to mention the aesthetics are generally significantly better as well.
Cliff:For sure. For sure.
John:In in WordPress versus some of these DIY platforms too.
Cliff:Yeah. And there are also bigger platforms like we've got a client right now in big in big commerce and that client's killing it in terms of visibility for what they do. It it a lot of that depends on what your industry is and how competitive your industry is and
John:sometimes
Cliff:In
John:fact in fact there there may be some people who are who have a website maybe it's in WordPress or or not. And you're actually not a good candidate for search engine optimization. Correct. There there are some there are some people who it it just doesn't work for. We have different tools in in the box here.
John:Got social media marketing. We have Google paid ads as well. I'm convinced that even like for a search for like attorney in Atlanta Mhmm. That there are people paying good money for SEO. Maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Cliff:Tens of thousands for sure.
John:You know, absolutely. Oh, yeah. Per month. Per month. Yeah.
John:Correct. And who are still on page two or page three. Because it's so ridiculously competitive. It would take a team of people all their time to continue to optimize Yeah. Something like that because the competitiveness is so ridiculous.
Cliff:And a lot of people think we sacrifice chickens to get on page one now.
John:Mhmm. Attorneys Not recently. Attorneys? No. Well No.
Cliff:For a fast
John:food chicken. Did you have for lunch? Chicken. So
Cliff:maybe. Not that kind of chicken. But for attorneys in Atlanta, yeah, you're there's gonna be some sacrifice and it's usually financial. It's that's incredibly competitive.
John:Yeah. HVAC companies also ridiculously competitive.
Cliff:Yeah. I mean, we've been doing okay. Yeah. With that one. I mean, weight loss, you know, Viagra, we won't even touch.
Cliff:Realtors. Those are some industries that are just ridiculously competitive. So we'll we'll be honest with you about that and we'll tell you a point point blank right
John:up front. And there I mean it's the right tool for the right job. Sometimes Right. Sometimes search engine optimization is warranted and it can it can generally speak generally speaking for a larger search area be a little less expensive. Social media marketing also works very well.
John:By and large you know your 40 and over crowd is on Facebook and your 40 and under crowd is on Instagram. So they're both a part of meta and you advertise on those kinds of things and that can be really fantastic but not every service is is really good for for social media marketing. It doesn't search well. So if you're a locksmith and you lock your key out of your car your your keys out of your car, you're not going to Facebook to look up up the locksmiths. You're not?
John:No. I don't
Cliff:think so. Okay.
John:Fair enough. Did you do
Cliff:that? No.
John:Okay. Just checking.
Cliff:I haven't locked my myself out of my car recently.
John:Yeah. You don't wanna do that. Yeah. But, you know, then you wanna be in in Google in some way shape or form so that that narrows it down to either Google paid ads which will put you right at the top depending upon how much you pay or search engine optimization which puts you at the top of the organic section in Google which by the way is ridiculously more click than any of the other links on the page.
Cliff:Mhmm. And that's one of the point too is that there are a lot of digital marketing agencies who who custom or they don't have custom. They have these packages that they'll say, oh, well, you know, choose a, b, or c and that's it. I don't really subscribe to that at all because the issue there is that most businesses have factors that we need to consider in order to match the right digital marketing tools for the best return on investment. And that's one of the questions we always ask is, you know, what's your average customer worth?
Cliff:Because every digital marketing component needs to pay for itself. Otherwise, why do it? You know, you don't wanna you're not in the business of losing money. Nobody is. So, we have to match that.
John:And there are people we turn away. We sleep well at night. I tell people all the time and somebody comes in with an idea that wasn't doesn't work or isn't gonna make money or is ROI negative. Right. We just kinda turn them away.
John:We don't We're porn. Oh, Definitely. Yeah. We definitely turn those away too. Yeah.
John:It's kinda not who we are. Yeah. As a company
Cliff:You had one last week that came in.
John:Yeah. Was like, no. I don't think we're gonna go do that. No.
Cliff:And we we had one one run there where a couple months where we had like 10 people come into the shop and say, I want SEO and I'd say, great. Let's look at your site and as I looked at their site, I saw either design disasters, no kidding. I mean, some of them were truly disasters. One guy did backyard landscaping that was fantastic and he was getting like 10,000, per yard, I think back in years ago in California, whatever. He was getting ridiculous rates and his website was atrocious and I told him that.
Cliff:I said, look, it's not that I won't and he said you mean you won't take my money for SEO? And he said I said no I'm not going to take your money somebody will and they'll take a lot of it but the point is with this site you're going to be driving traffic to a site that's ugly and not conversion friendly, and you're just tossing your money out on the highway. And he got mad at me, but I I I think by the time he left, he understood what I was saying. He said, I'm just not willing to set your money on fire.
John:A good website and the right website is always the first step. Correct. Because there is so much money to be lost in digital marketing. So you can you can go we can go optimize a horrible website. Right.
John:Get you to the top of Google and either the the paid ads or in search engine optimization and all you're doing is driving people to your competitors. That's exactly They'll see the site and they'll go, yeah I ain't staying. So you're paying all this money for optimization and you have choices to make. You can either have a really good website and as these clients come and visit your website you can get a hundred leads or as these clients come to your website you can get two. Right.
John:So it you you're and and by and large the cost of a website is not so expensive compared to a couple of months two or three months worth of marketing. Very easy to pay for a site that way. You want to make sure that you you do these things the right way. You you get the website you need. We recommend a WordPress website by a developer who's got a track record of doing it whether it's us or not.
John:Find somebody who's been doing this for a while. I think in our particular County which is one of the most populous counties here in Georgia. I I think we're the oldest web web design company in the area. It's because you're old. That that's really true.
John:I'm older but man. Yeah.
Cliff:I mean that's just part of it. You're gonna
John:find somebody with some experience who's got a track record of doing this stuff. We got clients who just swear by our work and who are making money by our work and people ask all the time what do you do? It's really simple. We put food on the table for people. It really does come down to that.
John:We help a client make money. The client makes money brings home the bacon for for themselves and for employees and it it provides for people. It really is that serious an endeavor and we take it that seriously. Mhmm.
Cliff:So so go ahead. Them about the water guy. The water guy? Yeah. We just we recently did a website for a water restoration company.
John:Oh, yeah.
Cliff:And he had a site for how long? Years. Yeah. And That was
John:the one that was possessed.
Cliff:Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. And and it might have been actually. There was something
John:wrong with and he said the website was possessed. And I said, I've never seen one of those. Mhmm. We did an exorcism. Mhmm.
John:Didn't happen. Yeah. And we tried to rank it. Guess what? It was possessed.
Cliff:Happened. He was right. He didn't move. Yeah. It it was dead on arrival and we couldn't budge that thing.
Cliff:So we essentially built another one for him.
John:That we knew was not possessed.
Cliff:Correct. Yes. We'd have the holy water and everything. Did a little ceremony. And he started started ranking, and he called you to let
John:him Called me and said, you know what? And I don't know what you guys did Right. But I've got Chickens? Four no chickens. Well, that would be funny.
Cliff:They would.
John:Maybe they're floating in the water. Yeah. So he got four calls. The the first month he said, look, put me in front of people. I'll sell them.
John:Guess what he did? Four calls, sold all four, and as he's continued, he's been getting a call or two a week and the guy's staying busy after years of one paying for stuff he really shouldn't be paying for. Not having the results he needed and I if it's if it doesn't work we'll be the first to kind of pull the plug on it. Absolutely. So and your your money has to have a value to you and obviously it has value to us as well if you're paying us to go do the work.
John:But you're investing in your company and it's got to have a return for you and we insist on those kinds of things. But start with a website then sit down and get a consultation from whoever it might be to find the right tool for the right job. You want to make sure that you're spending your money wisely. That's another issue sometimes we have people doing social media marketing for stuff like locksmith which they shouldn't be doing and they've gotten bad advice on these kinds of things. So we will sit down with you and have a consultation.
John:Make sure you get that consultation with somebody. We'll spend an hour, hour and a half with a client, potential client to kind of review their goals to set up a strategy make sure we can use their website if we can't use their website to begin to to incorporate the website as part of the strategy and then kind of move from there and you have options and we lay them out. But we want to make sure that you're investing the the money in the right thing as well. So it's it's it's one thing to know that you're in the right you're in the right area of marketing instead of just going, oh, yeah. Well, I think that sounds like a good idea.
John:I need social media marketing. When people have a deficit or a vacuum of some sort in their business, they think, oh, well, they they just want whatever is shiny in front of them. But we we help change that to making sure the right thing is shiny.
Cliff:Yeah. And part of that conversation again goes back to ROI. We people, what's your average customer bring you? Once they give us that number, then, we work through and kind of reverse engineer what each marketing element needs to to accomplish in order to pay for itself because let's face it, all marketing is a trip to Vegas, Okay? It's true.
Cliff:It and what you're trying to do in these conversations is hedge your bets so that you win more than the house wins. And that's really the issue there. Mhmm. You know, for example, SEO. The average low average cost of SEO in across this country is about a thousand a month.
Cliff:Okay? So if you come in and you say, I want SEO, but your average customer only pays you 50 to a hundred bucks, you see what
John:Doesn't work so well. The math doesn't work.
Cliff:Yeah. You see how how much SEO has to bring you in order to pay for itself. But if you tell me your average customer's $2 and you're paying a thousand a month, then you start to see how SEO has to bring you one customer a month. How doable is that? Very.
Cliff:Okay? That's when you start realizing the the potential of how much money you're leaving on the table.
John:And that and that's also where we turn away work. Correct. So if somebody comes in the the the ones we get a lot are t shirt sites.
Cliff:Yeah.
John:Somebody somebody go, hey. Can you build me a t shirt site? Well, absolutely. I can build you a t shirt site. Well, I wanna be at the top of Google.
John:I'm out.
Cliff:And I wanna be sitting on the top of of of gold bullion. So you
John:you know, again, you do you do the math. It's a $20 shirt and they go, yeah, $20 shirt. That shirt cost you $10. Yeah. It's $5 to imprint it or embroider it embroider it or whatever that might be.
John:Right. Yeah. And then, you know, you got shipping on top of that and you you know, you might make a little money on shipping or not but your profit margin is about $5 a shirt and you go, well, how let's see. How many shirts do you need to sell to make $10?
Cliff:A buttload.
John:You know? It's a lot.
Cliff:A buttload.
John:It's a lot. So It's a measure. That's where we turn people away. It's if it's a bad idea, we just don't do it because we don't we don't sell disappointment. Yeah.
Cliff:That should be our new marketing slogan.
John:We don't instead of we get results, we don't sell disappointment. I like it. At least not intentionally.
Cliff:I wear that shirt. Would you really? Yeah. Put print that up. I'll buy that.
John:Deal. Instead of broadcasting your business to the world, we don't sell this
Cliff:We don't sell disappointment. We bring all your hopes and dreams to make them right. You know, try to make them true. No. It's funny.
John:If you have questions about what we do, feel free to reach out. You know, we're just starting to do some podcasting to help educate you and and and educate the world.
Cliff:Why should they reach out to us though?
John:Why not?
Cliff:Because well, one, we've been doing it for a long time. Two, we've
John:Back when you didn't have gray hair.
Cliff:Shut up. We we taught digital marketing skills for years to the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce. We've done lectures, workshops, elsewhere. Again, we love teaching this stuff. So we like we love doing it as well as teaching it.
Cliff:So that's part of who we are. And answering questions, love it.
John:Yeah. In fact, we we're willing to educate you kind of as much as when we sit down a consultation as much as you wanna be educated. Correct. Most people are just go do it.
Cliff:Yeah. Sacrifice the chickens and just put me on paper.
John:Can I install a water main to my house? Yes. Should I? No. Right.
John:And you you you get the freedom to just kinda go do what you do well and you'd leave the the marketing to us and that's what an awful lot of clients are are doing these days
Cliff:with us. So I've trained people to to do their own SEO. I've certainly trained my own staff. You know, we get results. That's what we're all about.
Cliff:Otherwise, we keep working till we get them.
John:Yep. A little bit about Make It Loud. Just so you know, we're starting out here. Make It Loud was started in 02/2004 in my basement. We just kinda kept growing.
John:And almost fourteen years ago, we moved into this space which is a storefront over on Georgia 20. Years? I know. Can you believe that? Yeah.
John:Four years old. You are. Yeah. But but we moved into this storefront so that we could kind of marry our expertise with good old fashioned relationship. In fact on our on our conference room wall it says you know relationship experience in technology and we kind of mean all of those things and are experts in those kinds of things with respect to marketing.
John:So we can help you. We're happy to sit down and have a telephone call with you or we do a lot of Zoom where we we meet people online these days as well. It's just as good as having somebody right in front of you.
Cliff:I joke about being a local throat to choke. And the one time I had a client who drove all the way over
John:Oh, he was pissed.
Cliff:From Six Flags. He was a pest control. He owned a pest control.
John:An hour and fifteen minutes away.
Cliff:At least on a good day. Otherwise, UPS could get here quicker. But Oh, okay. He he came screaming in. I was sitting up front.
Cliff:I saw his logo on his truck. I knew exactly who it was. Because I'd recently just given him his his ranking report. He came walking in and he goes, you Cliff? I got I stood up to agreement.
Cliff:You Cliff?
John:Did you say yes? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Cliff:I said yes. He goes, I need to talk to you about my SEO. And I was like, alright. Sit down. I have my laptop open and all that.
Cliff:And he said, I've had three calls this week saying they couldn't find me on on on, Google and I said, really? I said, so, alright. Let's try something. Give me a keyword and he gave me a keyword, page one. Give me another, page one.
Cliff:Give me another, page one. About 10 of those And we found him on page one for every keyword he gave me. In fact, in those days, multiple rankings were way more frequent and for cop for pest control Cobb County, he was eight out of 10 slots. And I looked at him at that point. Said, so how we doing?
Cliff:He goes, oh, you're doing good. You're doing good. I went I said, tell you what. If you can find anybody doing it better, go ahead and fire us and move along with them. He went, no.
Cliff:No. No.
John:Yep. That's what You guys are good. How do you think those people who sent emails actually found you? Exactly. It wasn't because you were buried on page 100.
Cliff:Correct. And I said to him, I said, you know, tell tell me more about these calls. And he said, yeah. They called me and said they couldn't find me on page one, and they could do SEO. And I went, so it was a sales call.
Cliff:He had never even considered it. He went, yeah. I went, that's the issue. Because they found you on page one and they knew you were optimizing your side, they they figured they could try to steal you away from us. And he goes, oh.
Cliff:And I said, here's what I want you to do. Next time they call you with that, ask them what search term did you use to find me? And just to see. And they'll go, oh oh, well, I don't have that information. Because they they don't.
Cliff:And it was funny because he he was as happy as he could be once he drove all the
John:way over here. And what that that actually brings up one other point before we kinda close it out. The people who are reaching out to you are generally not doing their work. So you're far better off to go find somebody local that you can sit down in front of at least on Zoom and have a conversation with than responding to somebody who might be calling you because there's an awful lot of that stuff out there. I get it.
John:They go, Hey, I can't find your website in Google. Really? Because it's on page one, number one in so many ridiculous searches. But we, again, if somebody's reaching out to you, wanna be skeptical of of what they're doing. We have about a a staff of 10.
John:Right? I think it is. I think there are 10 of us right No. Nine.
Cliff:I was about to say I can't
John:count that.
Cliff:You're the math genius. I know. But I'm the writer.
John:But again, I've only got Yeah. And we have nine people on staff right now. All of our our employees are are on our payroll. We don't outsource anything. That's something else you'll find with other agencies is they're outsourcing stuff to The Philippines Mexico or India.
John:India is another big one. So you'll find that stuff and and ultimately those kinds of of things generally don't work either. A lot of times. When you're when you're working with us, you're you're you're working with the people who are actually doing the work. So we have I I think we only have one person on staff who's been with us less than five years.
John:Mhmm. And the others are more in the five to thirteen years now. Cliff, you've on staff for since 02/2009. Mhmm. So so if you're looking for people or looking for somebody to help you out, we'd be happy to to consult with you and we can we can do it from anywhere in The United States with Zoom.
John:If not, go find somebody local. Go find somebody you can sit down with and have a conversation with who's gonna take your business seriously like we we take your business seriously. And and and and make sure that they understand and can tell you exactly what they're going to go do so that they have a strategy for you and can really help you select the marketing that you really need.
Cliff:That's one of my big pet peeves too is when people I had somebody tell me that I I didn't have a mind for SEO. Okay. I've I think I started it here, so I kinda think I do. And I've explained it to so many people that
John:Sixteen years later.
Cliff:Yeah. Right. I think I I think I might have an edge on it. But explaining it to people that aren't technical, it's not that hard to to explain and walk people through. So, that's a red flag to me when people are, you know, burying you with jargon and techno speak and techno babble and all that.
Cliff:It's it's pretty straightforward what it takes to rank a website. Now Google doesn't tell you exactly what it takes but if you've been around long enough and you've done it long enough, you have a good feel for what actually moves the meter and helps you climb to page one. So, you know, make sure you get somebody who will explain it in simple terms. Otherwise, don't trust me. Yep.
John:And our goal is to help broadcast you to the world and it's our tagline. Make it loud broadcasting your business to the world. You can reach us at makeitloud dot net online. You can take a look at our website or you can reach the office at (678) 325-4007. I'm johnmakeitloud dot net.
John:We'd be happy to, assist you if you happen to see this and, are looking for some guys who just do the work. That would would be us. And, we'll speak the truth to you even more. I hope you have a wonderful afternoon. Thanks for tuning in.
John:See you.
Voicover:Thank you for listening to the Improving Your Digital Marketing podcast by Make It Loud. Be sure to follow, subscribe, and download wherever you get your podcasts. To hear other episodes, visit www.makeitloud.net, and be sure to follow us on your favorite social media platform. The views, thoughts, and opinions of the guest on this podcast are their own. The information contained in this podcast is for general information purposes only and is not intended to be legal advice.
Voicover:The Improving Your Digital Marketing podcast is produced in studios in Atlanta, Georgia. No chickens were harmed in the making of this podcast.
