The Dark Side of Digital Marketing - S1E4
Make it Loud Studios presents improving your digital marketing with John and Cliff.
John:Now we're, we're gonna go do this. Cliffy, good to see you again. You're wearing the same shirt that you wore in the last podcast. Yes. Because we recorded it minutes ago.
John:We did. Yes. Happy fourth of July to you. Thank you. Even though it's not the fourth yet
Cliff:Nope.
John:It is only the third. The third and a half. Third and a half. Yes.
Cliff:And, you know, good luck to all you people out there that still have all ten fingers. Saturday, you may wake up differently.
John:Yeah. Well, hopefully we don't wanna wish that kinda evening. No. No.
Cliff:It's We
John:want everyone everybody to have ten fingers.
Cliff:We're in the South, though. Things happen naturally. Just it all begins with here, hold my beer.
John:It really does. We're here. Here's a gummy. I bet that's in your future for tomorrow.
Cliff:I I'm not I can't confirm or deny.
John:Would man, we can't we can't confirm or deny that. I understand that.
Cliff:Hold my beer and we'll see what happens.
John:Yeah. Sounds like a good time. Sure. You got some festivities going on for Not any I'm
Cliff:looking forward to. Let's say that out loud.
John:You really did. Oh, well. Sorry, dear. The good news is this podcast will be released after the fourth.
Cliff:Exactly. Your
John:guests aren't going to avoid you for tomorrow.
Cliff:That's exactly what's gonna happen.
John:Maybe we can send them the copy of the tape early.
Cliff:I might. Who knows? We'll see how it goes.
John:So, Cliffy, there are that's a that's a tough tough turn there.
Cliff:Yeah. Yeah. So Cliffy Tough segue.
John:So, Cliffy, there are there are lots of ways to lose money in digital marketing.
Cliff:Oh my god. Are we talking about that again? We are. I know. Well, I mean, here's the thing.
Cliff:75% what do you think? 75% of the people coming to our shop have been ripped off?
John:Yes. At least In fact in fact, that's why people come here. We have a we have a storefront for those of you that don't know. We're over on Georgia Highway 20, North Of Atlanta. We're here now.
John:I don't know I don't know that I've ever seen well, actually, back in the day, there was one other web design company.
Cliff:There was one.
John:Way down the street. Yeah. Start
Cliff:with the
John:next. Yeah. They, that's the only other web design company I've ever known to have a storefront other than ourselves.
Cliff:I walked into that one, and the guy came out barefoot. Really? He did. He was a little guy with a beard and he was barefoot. I'm like, I'm out.
Cliff:Yeah. I don't wanna see your feet.
John:Maybe he was grounding. Maybe. I don't know.
Cliff:He didn't
John:seem too grounded. He didn't seem too grounded, but
Cliff:He seemed pretty much floating around the atmosphere somewhere.
John:So so, yeah, about seventy five percent of the people who walk through the door have experienced some level of fraud in the industry.
Cliff:And, honestly, it pisses me off. I gotta say it that
John:It really does. I feel you. It's do you know why? I mean, at least for me, you see, my small business owners oftentimes are not just made of cash. Sure.
John:You know? Especially in this economy, the last four years or so, four and a half years.
Cliff:Yeah.
John:Just not a lot of money, extra money floating around. So when you entrust money to a digital marketing agency to go do something for you, and they just don't, That's sad.
Cliff:It's it does hurt my heart. It really does. And it makes me wanna do more for them, even though we're already very, very aggressive
John:Mhmm. In the
Cliff:way we approach, our our SEO, for instance. Mhmm. Certainly, web design, all of that. We wanna we wanna do right by people because
John:Absolutely.
Cliff:That's just good business.
John:Yep. Well, today, we wanna talk about fraud and how to lose money. We've talked about it from a a digital marketing perspective, investing in the wrong things. We Sure. We covered that already.
John:But there are other ways that digital marketing agencies tend towards fraud, and we wanna kinda at least alert you to these things so you know what to look for.
Cliff:Right. Right. Right. I mean, I remember when we were at the, networking at the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, a guy stood up and said, I'm gonna get you on page one, for $99, and
John:that's Please.
Cliff:I'm Page one of Google. Yeah. A buddy of mine leaned over and he goes, is that how it works? And I went, no. I just went, no.
Cliff:Mhmm. It was interesting because, I mean, we see people and that's a good tip right there, the starting tip. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. It really is. There's no maybe it is.
Cliff:It's absolutely too good to be true.
John:Yeah. I mean, so so much of the stuff you see and for us, you know, somebody walks through the door and and and we we've talked about this, you know, like, what does a website cost?
Cliff:Right.
John:And if you if you go to Google and you look at the paid ads, you think a website costs a $199. Yeah.
Cliff:Right. And it might, but it might have been built by a Labrador.
John:Or in another country Sure. With some guy under a desk. But Under a desk? Under a desk. That's where they keep them these days.
John:Country. So so you don't know what you're getting. And and most of the most of the time, those kinds of things just if you if you even get what's what you've been told you're trying to buy, it's gonna underperform on the other side of it as well anyhow. But but generally, you know, when when people walk through the door, they kinda don't have any concept of what a a website costs. So I will tell you the average person spends roughly between 32 and $3,500 on a on a website for a small business.
Cliff:For
John:us. For us.
Cliff:Yeah. I mean, the average around Atlanta is a lot higher now.
John:No question.
Cliff:Yeah. It starts with a a five page WordPress website for professionally designed around Atlanta. It's about 5 to $8,000.
John:And there are people down the street who we know and love and, you know, they want they want to talk to you for under 10. Right. And then and we've decided also that that people think a website costs what they first heard. Sure. So, you know, if somebody said, hey, you know, I just bought a website and it cost me $500.
John:Here you go. And they walk in and they say we tell them, hey, well, that's $3,200. They're like, oh my gosh. That's ridiculously expensive. Right.
John:And then if on the other side of that, they walked into one of the other agencies and talk to them first and it's $10,000 and I come in at 3,200, I'm the savior.
Cliff:Good.
John:So it's very hard for people even to have a a sense of of what things cost, much less what's going to to work. Right. So let's start here. Let's talk about websites first. Where's where's the fraud in websites?
Cliff:Well, a lot of people overpromise and under deliver. And I mean, when you're looking at a website for your business, you need to think in terms of good content as well as good design. There's a lot of folks out there, that make things pretty, but not functional. Mhmm. I would say a lot of DIY websites check the box for, you know, yes, we have a website.
John:Mhmm.
Cliff:Yes, we have website with content. But is it content that Google is really looking for? More often than not, not so much.
John:Well, I think I think you you you start there with the right point. And and as websites, and we see people come in with new websites, and sometimes they're pretty. Sure. But they're in the wrong platform.
Cliff:Yeah.
John:If you wanna go market your website and market aggressively, you don't wanna be in a DIY website platform.
Cliff:I had somebody recently who was, what did they do? I have to think about that. I wanna say landscaping, but I don't think that's right. They wanted SEO, and they had a GoDaddy website.
John:Mhmm.
Cliff:And I was even kinda shocked that that was still around. But and it was honestly Mhmm. The best GoDaddy website I've ever seen
John:Mhmm.
Cliff:From a pretty standpoint. Yeah. But and GoDaddy has a lot of good things going for it, but their websites, I've the ones I've tried to rank on Google have just not flown.
John:Yeah.
Cliff:I mean and and even in mildly competitive industries, not even
John:They just don't index well.
Cliff:They don't. And they don't rank well.
John:So if you don't need digital marketing I'm if you if you don't really need marketing, your website's never gonna be a marketing tool. Go go have one developed in a or go do one in a DIY platform. Or there are people out there who consider themselves real good and educated web developers who are doing websites in these DIY platforms because generally speaking, they're reasonably easy to use. Sure. Compared perhaps to to WordPress.
Cliff:You don't have to be a coder.
John:You don't have to be a coder. But they don't have the tools in them to go do digital marketing well. So so ultimately, that's that's one place of fraud. I mean, I've seen people spend a lot of money on DIY websites.
Cliff:Yep.
John:And it really is unfortunate when they come in and say, you know what? I'm ready to market my my business. I have my website created and here it is. And I go to built with and I look up the platform and it has your favorite DIY builder in there and I go, wah wah wah.
Cliff:Oh, yeah. The other way I see a lot of people get ripped off is Fiverr or just finding freelancer. And what's unfortunate is I mean and again, this is not a a statement against those platforms. You know, Fiverr is you can find
John:You you can find you can find people who don't do the work anywhere. Well, right.
Cliff:Yeah. And that's that's a great point. But that's where a lot of people come in and they go, I've paid blah blah blah, you know, thousands of dollars upfront, and they just ghosted me. And that we hear pretty
John:frequently. Typical story. Somebody walks through the door of the shop, and they've they're out 3 to $5,000 Yeah. And only have a actually, have nothing to show for it.
Cliff:What was that one woman who worked with a freelancer? What was the name of that company that had just like the homepage and wasn't finished?
John:Yes. We talked about that, I think, in the first podcast where we had a lady who was doing website and SEO with a company, and and ultimately, even the even the plan was wrong.
Cliff:Oh, yeah.
John:Bad. Bad plan. I think she had a home based business of some kind, and I'm trying interior design. Yeah.
Cliff:That's what it was. And
John:she had a
Cliff:a catering?
John:No. It wasn't catering. It was like a banquet. Yeah. It was catering or catering business or something like that.
John:Doing parties and things like that.
Cliff:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Right? And this web developer encouraged them to put both of those things on the same website, which was wrong. I mean, really bad advice. And then after six months, they'd only done a homepage, and the homepage was incomplete, did not have a logo, no additional pages on the website. And she's spending a thousand $1,500 a month on SEO on top of that
Cliff:Which was getting her nothing.
John:And the page had no text on it and what were little. Yeah. And what text was there was embedded in an image. And she talked to this lady and talked to her and talked to her and talked to her. And, again, out, I think, on the other end of it, like, 8 or $10,000 when she came to see us.
John:Wow.
Cliff:And by the
John:way Nothing to show for it. I mean, absolutely nothing.
Cliff:By the way, if you put text embedded in an image, Google can't see it, so therefore, they don't rank it. They don't even recognize it. And it's just
John:It's a it's a Useless. It's just a
Cliff:it's a
John:donut hole. It's an anchor boat anchor. So so that's that's generally what we see in websites and website design.
Cliff:Well, it's it's fun to say, and it there's some truth to it. We joke about being a local throat to choke for, you know, having a retail spot. And in, you know, sixteen years, I've had one guy come over from Six Flags to Yeah.
John:You were telling me about that.
Cliff:He was a pest control company, and we were doing SEO for him. We'd done the website, and I actually had just sent him a ranking report. So I knew his SEO was solid. He came flying in the parking lot. I was sitting in the lobby, He's a big old guy.
John:Mhmm.
Cliff:And I saw the logo on the truck. Rod. I'd never met him. Yeah. Rod.
Cliff:He came in and he goes, I'm here to talk about my SEO. I'm like, okay. So do you, Rod? He goes, yeah. I said, okay.
Cliff:Well, I'm Cliff. Sit down. And he said, I've gotten three calls saying that they couldn't find me on Google. And I went, okay. And I was immediately suspicious about this.
Cliff:I said, well, okay. Give me a keyword. He gives me a keyword. He's on page one. Give me another one.
Cliff:Blah blah blah. Page one. Page one. We were on page one for almost every keyword he he spit out, actually, all of them. And so I said, how are doing?
Cliff:He goes, oh, yeah. That's good. That's good. Turns out he was getting calls from other SEO companies to try and get him to do SEO with them by saying, hey. We're not we can't find you on Google.
Cliff:Well, I said, have you asked them what keyword they've used to find you? And he said, no. I didn't think to. I said, okay. So next time they call, ask that because you're clearly ranking very, very well.
Cliff:At that time, we could get multiple listings fairly easily, and he was on page one for pest control Cobb County in eight out of 10 spots.
John:Mhmm. So
Cliff:it was really well represented online. So that, you know, is another way that they'll try to get you. SEO companies, I'm gonna shift gears on you a little bit without you knowing it. One way SEO companies will, kinda hose you over, and they won't tell you this, is that, you know, SEO requires a lot of content. Tons.
Cliff:Tons. Yes. And so we again, I said we're very aggressive in that regard because we don't have any limits on the content, the number of pages we'll build, etcetera. And we we go all out, especially at first, to to get you there on page one. Mhmm.
Cliff:Well, a lot of companies will say they're aggressive, but they, behind the scenes, they'll say, well, let's just build five landing pages a month and call it. And so when they sit there and tell you to your face it takes three to six months to get results, and that does seem
John:That's because they're not doing the work upfront.
Cliff:Right. And and it does seem like almost every SEO nerd when you're asked, how long does SEO take to get results? They seem it all seems like we're contractually obligated to say, takes three to six months to get your result. Nonsense. It depends on the industry.
John:We've had we've had websites ranked in Weeks. A week.
Cliff:A week. Yes. We've had
John:we've had some coffee company. Right? He had
Cliff:That was crazy.
John:A $5,000 sale at, like, six days in.
Cliff:Yeah. You know? And he yeah. And he he tried to cancel on us. We're like, hold the phone.
Cliff:Let me show you some data.
John:By the way, you got a call for a $5,000 sale right there. Did you close that? Yeah. I did. Yeah.
John:Maybe SEO is working for you.
Cliff:Maybe I should stick with it a
John:little. Yeah. And And, actually, he tried to cancel it week one.
Cliff:He did. And we showed him some data on how the site was performing, and he was like, okay. Let's give it a little longer. And yeah. So, I mean, we have an ambulance company right now that was ranking on page one, almost within two weeks.
Cliff:We have a
John:Our clients have calls by kind of month and a half to two months. Oh, yeah. Easy.
Cliff:Yeah. I mean, and I tell people, I can tell within a month if your site's gonna behave and start climbing up the industry or, you know, ranking well. We have a roofing company that's ranking for emergency roof repair, in less than a month. Page one on almost every city. And he's got a lot of cities.
John:Yeah. But that's the thing. I mean, with SEOs, again, there's a I mean, our philosophy is a little bit different. We're we're kind of pouring everything in upfront, and we got a team of people who write content and we're they're educated and fast. Most of our staff have been with us for at least seven years.
John:So these guys know their stuff. We pour all of that in upfront because ultimately getting calls for the client so that they can pay back their SEO bill is kind of the priority. Right? Right. So you you wanna be able to go do that.
John:Most and again, SEO is a lot of work. We're talking about 1,400 words per page sometimes.
Cliff:Sometimes.
John:You know?
Cliff:Not always.
John:Not always. But but it's a lot of writing, and it's a lot of detail stuff and that information and all of that, and it takes time. And some SEO companies will will say, I'm only gonna build they put a lid on it without telling you. Right. So So I'm only gonna build x number of pages.
John:So if you got a service area that's the size of Atlanta and you need pages all over town and you build five a month, I mean, it it'd take you, you know, six months to get to all those smaller cities and and maybe longer even.
Cliff:Right. That terms SEO, which is already a probabilistic, that's a fun word, marketing element anyway. What I mean by that is that there's a it's it's all about probability. So the more I can put you consistently on page one, the more likely you are to get more clicks, the more likely you are to get more calls and conversions and customers and money. So I can't make people click, but if somebody has a, you know, a limit on the number of pages, then it turns it into an issue of luck getting those calls.
John:Right.
Cliff:So that's where we remove the luck aspect of it and increase the probabilities and get more calls for folks. So, but that's a big way that people, you know, cheat SEO agencies, cheat you out of that kind of stuff. It just drives me bonkers.
John:Pay per click is is not that dissimilar either. You know, it's very easy to to go sign up for paid ads and paid ads are quick, you know, sign up sign up today and list on Google tomorrow or next couple of days.
Cliff:Yep.
John:There's a ton of fraud in in paid advertising as well. Oftentimes, what an agency will do and again, it's a pain to switch agencies. Like switching in The calendar? It's like switching car insurance companies or or mortgage insurance companies. What a a pain to go do that.
John:In pay per click marketing, there's there's a ton of fraud as well. And it's not it's not easy to switch paid advertising companies. There's lot of kinda going back and forth between your old company and your new one to manage it all and who whose ads are they, and it can be a real pain to go do it. Kinda like switching your mortgage insurance company or
Cliff:car carrier.
John:Or phone carrier or mortgage or, you know, auto insurance company. You know, auto insurance companies are the only one of the few industries that that rewards you negatively for staying with them and not having any accidents. Your rates will go up. And then if you leave them and rejoin, you get a cheaper rate, which blows my mind. Ridiculous.
John:But what a a lot of advertising agencies will do for pay per click is they'll say, you know what? They'll run some numbers and they go, you know what? It's gonna cost you $3,000 a month to do Google paid ads. Right. You go, oh, okay.
John:Well, I can afford that. And you start forking out the cash. Yeah. Well, built into that one price are actually two fees. Yep.
John:So there's a fee to Google to pay for the actual advertising.
Cliff:Your ad spend.
John:Your ad spend. Correct. And by the way, this this works for Meta and Facebook, Instagram as well. Same strategy that these agencies use. So so they'll they'll there's an ad spend component and there's a management component.
John:So it costs the company time to go create ad, and it costs money to go do all of that. So so there's the the company's taking a share and Google's taking a share, the the the paid ad provider. So say, okay. One one price for all of it, $3,000. And you don't know how much money they're actually spending on your ads.
Cliff:Right.
John:And you don't know what your ad spend is. So what winds up happening, and I I've seen this before as well, they start high, and what they'll do is they'll take a lower management fee and have a higher ad spend. Mhmm. And then over time, they decrease the ad spend.
Cliff:Yep.
John:And they increase their their management fee. So they're taking a whole lot of money and spending very little money on ads. So over time, the ads underperform. Sure. And then you go, well, wait a minute.
John:I'm spending this money, and then they might go raise it up again. And they they lower it more quickly. So this way, you you just don't know how much money is actually going to Google or Facebook or Instagram, Meta.
Cliff:Right.
John:And and you start giving them more cash and that's a problem as well. Because they've only given you they've only given you one price. So the the the thing to do in a situation like that is you want to know specifically what is your management fee and what is your ad spend fee. Also built into that, I mean some agencies charge it like a percentage.
Cliff:A percentage of your ad spend, yeah.
John:So you have to you have to be aware of that too. It can be it can be very high. We charge a flat fee Yep. For our management fee. And your credit card bill will actually tell you we use your credit card in Google or Meta.
John:So your credit card tells you exactly what your spend is in in Facebook. So anyways, I you know, it's it's it's easy to lose money in in paid advertising as well because of those kinds of things. Percentages can be ridiculously high. One of the other things we found is that that Google themselves devalues ads over time.
Cliff:Yeah. I was gonna talk about that. So Go do that. If they're that that brings up a great point. So if if they're if, you know, doing the $3,000 a month thing and they're spending 2,500 on your ad spend and only taking 500 for the management fee over time, if they're taking more out of that $3, you're and your ads decline, you're they're they're shooting you in the foot.
John:And ads do decline in time. They do. It's this is not this is the you can run a pay per click campaign, set it and forget it. Right. Right?
John:Where you go and you you check the ad, you create the ad and just goes kinda set it in motion and let it do its thing. And and Google tends to give you a whole lot more love upfront
Cliff:It does.
John:Than it does in the end. And over time, if you track it yeah. If you if you track it without changing the ads, you find a decline in the ads for whatever reason.
Cliff:Remember remember the roofer we had who, we were doing SEO for. He hired us to do SEO. And over the course of doing some spot checks, I found he had Google Ads running. Well, turns out he had hired an agency to do ads for a thousand a month and forgot them. Not only did he set it and forget it, he's forgot he even dealt with the agency for five years.
Cliff:$80,000. Yeah. I mean
John:credit card. Didn't check his credit card bill.
Cliff:He didn't even bother. And he managed to lose that money without even noticing.
John:Mhmm. I
Cliff:think I would have noticed. I do. Mhmm. I'm pretty sure I would have.
John:I would have. 80,000. Yeah.
Cliff:Yeah. I would have been
John:Been a
Cliff:nice car. I would have just been homicidal. But yeah. So you you
John:can't you can't you can't do the set it and forget it if you're doing paid advertising.
Cliff:For any marketing, really. I I you just can't afford to do that.
John:You should have you should have somebody who's in there and doing a b testing on ads Yep. To see which ones are doing better and constantly coming up with a better cost per click.
Cliff:For sure. Yep. And and that counts for Meta and Google Ads anyway. So yeah. And Facebook, understand, has good AB testing tools.
Cliff:They do. So that's wonderful.
John:They do. You know?
Cliff:Yep. Using the algorithm on your to your credit in that regard.
John:One of the other things I you know, it's not necessarily fraud, but kind of a bad practice that we see a lot in digital marketing agencies is they put your domain name in their own account. Huge issue. So let's talk about that for a second. So a domain name is real it's digital real estate. So our our company owns probably a couple 100 domain names on the whole.
John:We spend money on it monthly. They're all registered in my account to my company name. You can do both in GoDaddy or whatever your domain So platform the company owns them. Now if you take the domain name and I I think web developers and digital marketing agencies are trying to be well meaning. And it's not actually, it's not just web developers and digital marketing agencies, but some of these other companies that kind of do marketing for you Yeah.
John:Will also when they they'll give you a website, but the only way it'll work is if you transfer the domain over to them. But you have to be You don't ever wanna do that.
Cliff:Never do that.
John:You don't ever wanna do that. You can set them up as a as a a technical adviser on an account or a technical administrator to be able to make changes to it, but you want to own that domain name and you want it in your account. Here's why. We had a client come in maybe a couple years ago. His name was Jim.
John:He's no longer with us. God rest his soul. But he had a web developer in in California who handled all of his digital marketing. 35 year old guy, two kids, wife went camping one weekend, went to the camp store to to go pick up some firewood, picked it up, went to the counter, and dropped to the floor dead on the floor. He the domain name was in in his GoDaddy account.
Cliff:Now the message there is don't go camping.
John:Well, no. That's not true. Camping's wonderful. But but he had he held the keys to everything.
Cliff:Yeah. That's all.
John:Now most most situations are not that drastic. Some a lot of people will go out of business. I mean, web we're, I think, the oldest company in our in our county, digital marketing agencies. And the number of digital marketing agencies or website development companies or whatever it might be that I've seen kind of come and go is a lot. Yep.
John:So if they own your domain name and three years down the road, you go, well, I need to make some changes to my domain. I've got a new website. And they go, oh, well, you know, my my my old web developer has the the domain name. And what if sometimes they're not cooperative? Right.
John:And there have been situations where it's taken us months to get control of a domain so we can just launch a website.
Cliff:Do we have to threaten violence?
John:We usually don't. Okay. Actually, we don't ever do that. But It's a thought. It it is a thought.
John:But if they're on the other side of the world, I don't wanna go I don't wanna travel that far for it. You know?
Cliff:Well, some So ready.
John:Might it might be. But but, you know, if if the domain name is not accessible to you, it's and and here's the thing. You can go back to the domain registrar and say, hey. I have this domain name. It can be pointed to your website.
John:You can have email accounts under this domain name.
Cliff:Right.
John:And when they go look at who legally owns it, it's your web guy. Yep. So if he's not interacting with you, he's not cooperating, whatever whatever it might be, guess what? You don't have any legal recourse even
Cliff:Your SOL.
John:And sometimes your credit card information is even in the you'll be paying for it.
Cliff:Oh, bonus.
John:And and if it's still legally registered to somebody else, it's legally registered to somebody else, and and getting it back is a problem. The and and to to make make make matters worse, sometimes you have to wind up doing a a, like, mid run domain change.
Cliff:It's
John:awful. So you've your business you've been in business for ten years and you've had the same domain, and you decide you want a new Yep. Website and you no longer have access to that domain, you have one choice. It's get a new domain. Start over.
John:Start over again with that website. So that means start over on your email accounts. Means start over on your business cards
Cliff:SEO.
John:On your brochures, on SEO, on absolutely everything. And and the length of time you've owned a domain matters. It's it's a it's part of the search engine algorithm for Google. So Google tends to favor businesses that have had a had a a domain registered with a solid website on it for more time. If you've got a a domain that's brand new, often tougher to go rank a website.
John:So if something if if you don't own your domain name, it's not in your account. There can you're gonna be significant problems down the road because, again, the domain name is your your companies or your digital real estate. Something you should own and you should manage in cooperation with your your web web company. But you want you wanna you wanna be able to own that. How do we deal with the domain names?
Cliff:Yeah.
John:Okay. Client always has the information.
Cliff:Right.
John:And we have redundant backups on all of that stuff if a client ever needs it. Sure. Also, in our our company, multiple people have access to those kinds of things. So something happened to me or happened to Cliff or the both of us were in air in an airplane and
Cliff:Don't wish that I mean.
John:Fell out of the sky.
Cliff:Or fell out of the airplane.
John:There are still people in our company who could who could assist in a situation like that.
Cliff:We'll buy domains for our customers, but it's in their
John:It's their it's in their own account
Cliff:And their own credit card.
John:And their own name, their own credit card. It is legally registered to them.
Cliff:We don't own it. And, you know, even when we build websites for people and, you know, we'll we'll be happy to train them on, you know, how to make edits and all that. I tell them point blank, look, any vendor, including us, you know, give us our own login. You have your login, keep your login for now and ever, and give any other third party vendor that needs to be in that website, their own log in just for security sake. Because if the relationship goes south, you can always go in and delete their user access and you keep yours.
Cliff:So
John:And the same is true of a website as well. Know? So if you wanna go do edits on a website, you won't have access to that website. You don't have to go back. That that can happen sometimes too.
John:We we have we'll have a client come in that has a WordPress website that's good enough to optimize. We say, okay. We'll need access to that website. And they go,
Cliff:rut rut. Yep. A lot of people don't know how to do that.
John:They don't.
Cliff:And we can walk them through that.
John:Worse yet they not not only how to do it, they don't they don't have a login credentials to the site. They don't have administrative access to it. Yeah. So they can't give it to us, and it it winds up being problematic too. So you wanna make sure that you have you have login access to your to your website.
John:You wanna make sure you have login access to your domain, and that's really under your control and hosting.
Cliff:Yeah. You gotta have access to your hosting too.
John:Yep.
Cliff:Because we can get in the website up through hosting. Yep. So that'll work. But, yeah, that's a big problem, you know, to own your own stuff. And people ask us that all the time.
Cliff:Do we own it? Do you do we does the customer own it? The customer owns it all a 100%. We don't wanna own any aspect of your business. We just wanna help you make money.
John:Yep. And there are some companies also who do graphic arts in terms of logos. Sure. And and they may do the logo and sell it to you and you paid for it, but they may still have rights to it and you have to buy back the rights for the logo. Yes.
John:It's bizarre.
Cliff:That's a nightmare.
John:It is really bizarre.
Cliff:I didn't know they kept that. Yeah. I didn't know that was a thing.
John:Yeah. It is a thing. So you gotta be careful in those kinds of situations to make sure you own everything you go invest in.
Cliff:Right. I'm just trying to think of the other ways that people get ripped off. Those are the biggies.
John:Those are the biggies right there.
Cliff:I mean, s e from an SEO standpoint, I mean, people well, under the three to six months for results umbrella, typically wait for three months before and that's when they realize, hey, I'm not getting any results here. So I think that's one of those things that I even tell people, look, you know, hold us all accountable, you know, show evidence, you know, and I'm I have no problem giving people evidence of not only the work that we do. I talk to people about how to how to understand how much work is going in in, you know, behind the scenes. You know, you you log in to your website. You see that you started with eight pages and now you see that you have, you know, 50 pages or a 100 pages or whatever.
Cliff:That's evidence that the SEO team is doing stuff. Look at your site and see about internal links and pages and, you know, videos or whatever. I mean, that's you should see your website evolve and change. And I tell people point blank once, you know, they hand me their website. I say, look, you know, if they want me to rank it, I say, understand that we're going to need to make changes to your site in order to improve your visibility.
Cliff:Nine times out of 10, they're like, have at it, you know? And I tell people, look, look over our shoulders if you want. That's fine. I want you to, you know, to see what we're doing in that regard. Anybody that hides any information, you need to be very wary of.
Cliff:I trained in martial arts and the place where I train, when I first started there six and a half years ago, he was working with a guy, a freelancer, who was charging him 500 a month for his website and for some minor email stuff, and that was it. Well, I kept telling him that's too much. You shouldn't pay that blah blah blah. We could do that for you cheaper, etcetera. Eventually, the guy that I trained with the most who's also into digital marketing and coding and all that, he he asked the guy for, Google Analytics.
John:And Oh, I remember this.
Cliff:Yeah. The guy said he he he basically hemmed and hawed, and, he'd been getting reports every month, but the guy had been creating the reports. He never saw or never had access to the raw data. So when he asked for the access to the raw data, the guy canceled the website, shut it completely down, and ghosted them from that point on. He and I worked together and put a a website up pretty quickly, and and now things are going swimmingly.
Cliff:But, if you ask for data and they don't give you the data or they hem and haw about that, that's a red flag in a big way.
John:There's actually a really good lesson in that as well. If you're if you have access to your domain and and things like that, and you've been involved with a prior web developer that maybe it didn't go so well Yeah. You don't generally wanna tell them you are doing a new website with a different agency until you wanna make the switch right away. Right. Right?
John:So you you go through this process of web development with the new company, and it's built out at a temporary link usually. Yeah. So you got access to this site, and it's just kinda ready to go and flip the switch. And then you go, hey. By the way, I'm switching I'm switching my websites.
John:So this way, something like that doesn't happen where they go get disgruntled, and we've had this happen like that
Cliff:Yeah.
John:Where somebody gets told upfront that they're they're going with a different agency. They get pissed and they shut everything down. And then you're without a website for a while and you're scrambling. If you do that at the end of the design process, he shuts the site down. You still got access to the domain name.
John:Okay. Flip. And here we go. Right? Right.
Cliff:You're good to go.
John:You wanna cancel hosting in that kind of situation too. We ought to talk about hosting as well.
Cliff:Do it. I do it.
John:Can be kinda fraudulent. Not all hosting is created equal.
Cliff:No. Some of it actually quite sucks.
John:Really does. One of the ranking factors in Google is site speed.
Cliff:Yep.
John:And there there there can be two issues here. One is the hosting itself can just be slow. Yeah. Second is you'll often find in design, this is this is where bad design comes in. If somebody's kind of new at website design, let's say a client gives us pictures from off their phone.
John:Pictures are like twelve and twenty megapixels. Now, if you're you're actually holding that up, you're talking about an image that literally is kinda like you had to print it out is this big.
Cliff:That's a little bigger than my phone.
John:It is. It can be it can be five, eight meg per Yeah. Per image. If you have
Cliff:have video, he held his arms out pretty wide.
John:Oh, they really are wide. But the I think these these images can be sizable. Sure. You know, five five or eight meg per image. And if if you don't resize the pictures down to the appropriate size Now the website will resize for you, but it'll take a big picture and scale it down.
John:But it's still a big picture in size. So you have to actually physically go take the image, run it through software, resize the image, and then upload it to the website so that your website doesn't drag ass when somebody goes and looks at it.
Cliff:Doing four g. Resizing images is not rocket surgery, but it's a
John:little It is low. It can be. And there are there are websites that do it for free online that that make it very, very easy if you need to go do something like that. But if you've got 10 of those images on a site or you have a gallery page, remember that everything gets loaded up on a page before the browser displays it. So the the bigger the file sizes, the the longer it takes, and that can impact a website when it when it it it displays on a browser.
Cliff:And that can bite you in in SEO as well. Because like you said, the technical aspects of there's three aspects of SEO, on page, off page, and technical SEO. And technical SEO means how does your site perform, in browsers, on the phone, because 63% of all searches are done on the phone. If your site doesn't load particularly well in under three seconds, actually, it's more like under two seconds now. That's a big ranking factor, and they're they're you're probably not gonna land on page one very easily.
John:And that can be and that can be bad site design. Right? That can be that can be people inexperienced with pictures or or video, having a video that doesn't come from someplace else like video that can Vimeo, that can be the issue. Or it can be hosting. Hosting, not all hosting companies give you fast speeds.
John:So, you know, you you know, we we sell we resell hosting for for $60 a month, make a little bit of money on it to pay for our time and maintenance and things like that. But it somebody sometimes the client will come and go, like, I can get hosting for $3.99. Yeah. You can. Okay.
John:And it generally just doesn't go well.
Cliff:And when it doesn't go well, they can't call us.
John:Oh, that being said, they're also hosting companies that sell digital marketing digital marketing as well. Use quotes on that. I did. Okay. Some of these some of these things fall in the just the category of snake oil.
John:I'm I'm aware of one company that sells a product. It's like traffic wizard or something something like that. They go, hey. We're gonna get you more traffic to your website. They sell it for $69 a month.
John:That much, What they do is they take out a Google Ads account for you.
Cliff:Oh, so
John:They put $39 in it, and they keep 30.
Cliff:Is that a day's worth of ads?
John:It's that's probably not two clicks.
Cliff:Yeah. Right.
John:So will it get you more traffic? Maybe three or four more clicks. If you're lucky. Yeah. So and again, it did yeah.
John:Well, they're not making much money on it. Oh, you wanna bet? Because the the bar is low. So, like, $69, somebody goes, oh, I can do that. And they pony it up and they put it on the put it on their credit card and they run it ad nauseam for the rest of their lives and forget about it.
John:And this company has taken in hundreds of thousands or or, you know, or millions perhaps clients that kinda do this at $30 a pop. Is that a revenue generator? Oh, yes. Sure. Over time because the sheer number they they actually have.
John:So you gotta be really careful about that. There's there's there's there's no magic bullet
Cliff:Right.
John:For digital marketing. You have to you have to remember that. You know, if somebody says to you, I can go do this for I'm gonna tell you is under a thousand dollars in digital marketing. That's probably the magic number.
Cliff:For what?
John:For paid any paid ads or SEO or paid ads or anything. The average the average cost of SEO is about a thousand dollars a month Local SEO. Per local SEO. Yeah.
Cliff:Generally
John:speaking, paid ads, we we have we call a pay to play number. Right? If you if you're not investing in most situations, if you're not investing a thousand dollars a month in ad spend, you're on page three. You might as well just throw the throw the
Cliff:money up
John:the window.
Cliff:That's useful. So But I mean, we what we tend to do is is it depends on the industry and the competitiveness of the industry. So, you know, if when you come in and talk to us or just call us or whatever, we'll be happy to, you know, tell you what an competitive budget would be because it's a change. I mean, that that septic guy, you know, that septic guy.
John:Yeah. We had a septic guy come in, and, we've done a site for him back in the early days. We were doing paid ads. And I can remember he he came in. He spent $1,800, and he did it for about a year and made all kinds of money.
John:He went from, like, one septic crew to eight Yeah. Overnight Exploded. Doing this. And it was it was good money for him. He's charging 8 or $10,000 to put in a septic tank.
John:He's spending $1,800 on marketing and he's making a mint. And he made enough money to shut down the company, which he did maybe a year or two later. Mhmm. Moved to some Caribbean island for a while. Yeah.
John:Divorced his wife and lived high on the hog Mhmm. In paradise for a couple of years, abandoned the business, and then came back. Yep. And said, hey, I wanna do my website again. I wanna do septic stuff.
John:And he married this woman who was just mean.
Cliff:Yeah. She was hateful.
John:She was hateful. Yeah. And and he said, well, here's my $1,800 and go, well, I'm sorry that doesn't work. Why not? Well, now people are spending $2,400 in paid ads.
John:It was 1,800. Now the the the right budget is 2,400. So I only wanna spend 1,800. And I'm like, well, it's not gonna
Cliff:Right.
John:It's not gonna make you money. Yeah. You know, you're not gonna get the same kind of calls. He's not I'm I'm 1,800 is all I got. That's what I wanna get to do.
John:I really don't wanna do this, I said. So no. No. No. I really want you to do it.
John:I don't wanna do it. I want you to do it. Alright. We'll do it. So after the first month and a half or so, he called me up and he says, this isn't working.
John:Why is it not working? Because I told you it wouldn't work. You were $1,800. Your competitors are at $2,400. That's the solution.
Cliff:And I you know what? I think that's a differentiator for us too because that's one of those that's a perfect example of we're gonna give you our best recommendation and our best feedback and our experience and our knowledge. But at the end of the day, you have to make the decisions whether you're gonna listen to us or do your own thing.
John:It's really true.
Cliff:When you do your own thing and it doesn't go well, you can't tell us that we didn't tell you ahead of time.
John:Yeah. I mean, you wanna shoot yourself in the foot and there are times clients will wanna go do something on their website. The the most common one is, you know, I want when I when I open up my website, I want music to play. No. You don't.
John:No. You don't. One, it's it's a negative ranking factor for Google. Yep. Two is is musical tastes are so varied.
John:So if you play country music on your website, somebody doesn't like country, you've you've already you've already got a ding against you because they're irritated when they hear country music. So it doesn't it doesn't work because personal music tastes are so are so varied. On top of that, it it hurts your message because by and large, people don't want websites to make noise, and they're looking for the volume button instead of reading your website.
Cliff:Right.
John:So if we tell you no, and not to mention it being copyright violation in most
Cliff:situations as well.
John:Do it anymore. We don't.
Cliff:Yeah. No. I I don't even know if we could. I think somebody asked for it recently, and we were like, yeah.
John:Can't do it. There there are actually, through the podcasting stuff, I've kinda learned it's possible, but it's ridiculously expensive to Yeah. No. To go and do that. But, yeah.
John:I mean, ultimately, we're gonna recommend this is not the way to go. But, I mean, it's your website. Sure. We're gonna we're gonna speak the truth to you. And if you wanna shoot yourself in the foot Yep.
John:I mean, that's that's kinda on you. But We we stop arguing. We yeah. At some point in time, you just go, okay. Well, here here's the best path.
John:And if you wanna go take this one, just know there are consequences and Yeah. Not my fault on the other end of
Cliff:it. Yeah. We recently had a guy that was a social club. Right? That's what it was.
Cliff:And he had all kinds of ideas about what he wanted, and almost every single one of them went it just flew in the face of good design.
John:Flew in the face
Cliff:of good design. Him, and at one point, he got frustrated with us and said, I don't wanna hear your feedback anymore. And we're like, okay. Tell us what you wanna do, and we'll do it. Nope.
Cliff:And, you know, I don't know if that site's doing
John:It's not. It's not even live. No. And there's no
Cliff:website there. Site. So I
John:think he abandoned the project completely.
Cliff:So Yeah. For whatever reason. But yeah. So, I mean, we'll you know? And and I think that's a I say that's a differentiator because there's a lot of companies out there who will just say, yes.
Cliff:Yes. Yes. Yes. You know, it's a great idea when it's not, and they won't tell you the truth. And that bothers me because I think, you know, a good relationships, of course, are founded in honesty and truth and all of that.
Cliff:And we can agree we can agree to disagree. That's fine because a lot of web design particularly is subjective. SEO is not as subjective by any stretch because I've been dealing with the the algorithm, you know, all the algorithms of Google for all this time, sneaking up on twenty years now. Whereas I don't expect anybody, you know, that isn't wrapping their head around on constant SEO stuff to understand all this stuff. That's fine.
Cliff:I'm happy to teach you as much as I can, but a lot of people just you know, you start talking about SEO and they glaze over and, you know, that I get that. It's boring stuff for a lot of people. But at the end of the day, it's something that's important because it can make you a lot of money. So that's know, you I'm gonna shoot straight with you and, you know, not try to sell you something that doesn't make sense. Mhmm.
Cliff:I know you like to say we don't sell disappointment, and we don't because we like to sleep well at night.
John:Absolutely. Last thought was this. If you, you know, if you're gonna go go to somebody and have a website design, look at their portfolio.
Cliff:Yeah.
John:Make sure that make sure make sure their websites meet design standards. Do little search on that before you go do it. Yeah. Because often, three quarters of the websites that we see clients bring in are not up to modern design standards.
Cliff:No. And and look for case studies. Ask them. What you know, tell me about a win. Tell me what you learned from a loss.
Cliff:You know, that kind of stuff. Interview them like you would anybody else you're gonna hire. Yep. You know? That's fine.
Cliff:I'm I never shy away from those kind of questions because I I invite them. I enjoy them. That's fine.
John:Find somebody who's been in it for a while. Yeah. You know? Although there's not a lot of longevity in our in our particular industry, I don't think. To find a a digital marketing agency that's been around for twenty years is pretty unusual.
Cliff:That is. And I listened to a webinar not too long ago, and she was presenting, and she's like, I've been doing SEO for seven years. I'm like, that's cute. And I mean,
John:you know Ask her what b b code is.
Cliff:Right. Yeah. For those of you who don't know, that's a very, very old thing in SEO and web design. So, yeah, I mean and I'm sure she
John:didn't even sure that ever worked. I don't know. I'm not either. Well, we did
Cliff:some backlinking with that crap, but in the in the days you could get away with it. But, but, you know, and she had some really good ideas. I'm not saying she wasn't smart enough or, you know, intelligent enough. She just, you know, it was just funny.
John:You want somebody with a track record of success. Yeah. The the the sadder part of digital marketing is that the the barrier to entry is low. So if you got a computer, you can kinda kinda do it.
Cliff:That's how I got it.
John:That's how I got into it also back when websites were new. But but actually actually having that equipment and and knowing what to do with it is are two entirely different things.
Cliff:For sure. So Yeah.
John:I think that's it, man.
Cliff:I don't think that's good enough. Yeah. I think their heads are full. We should stop talking.
John:They got they got deer in the
Cliff:Yes.
John:Deer in the headlights looks.
Cliff:I appreciate them holding their questions until after.
John:That's very good.
Cliff:Yeah. So call us, (678) 325-4007 or makeitloud.net.
John:Look us up. And if you have questions or need a consultation, again, we say all the time, consultations are free. We'd be happy to talk to you, whether you're local to the, Atlanta area. If you're if you're local, we'd love to meet you face to face. We try to make that a priority for all of our clients who would like to go do that.
John:If not, Zoom is our way to go do that, and we can we can work with you just as effectively if you're anywhere in the in The United States. So we'd be happy to
Cliff:With the magic of the Internet.
John:Yeah. Alright. Have a wonderful afternoon. Well,
Cliff:thank you. You too.
Voiceover: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
