Talking Local SEO and Drinking Whiskey With Michael Rayburn – Part 2

Michael: There’s so many nuances in our field that it’s really hard. If they just went straight out into the SEO field and they never worked under a company, the lack of experience is going to cost the business under time and money.

Jesse: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, jesse Dolan, here with part two of our two-part episode featuring Michael Rayburn. If you haven’t listened to part one yet, check it out. It’s the episode right before this. Michael was on our show a while back a few months ago, maybe episode 201. This is his second appearance technically third, I guess, for episodes but his second appearance on the show and we’re going to dive into some more SEO tips.

If you listen to episode, I should say the first part of this episode, part one. We start off we’re talking bourbon, we’re talking whiskey, we’re talking some stories. It’s pretty fun and then we start to get into some SEO. This episode is much more SEO driven talking about some things that used to work in SEO that maybe people think don’t now, but there’s still. You know, peel back some of the layers. There’s some tricks that still work. We talk about your GVP, strong signals on your GVP, what’s important, talking about your website as it relates to your GVP. Some other broad topics that apply to SEO definitely pack with some tips and tricks that you’re going to find actionable and some things you’re going to want to write down. So if you haven’t checked out part one, maybe listen to that. First. Check this out part two. I think you’re going to like it.

Here we go, michael Ribbon, all right, I got two more SEO-ish questions for you here, so this is very much going to be an opinion one here, but if you look at you know we’re kind of coming towards the end of 2023, getting in 2024, coming up. This is kind of a cheesy, cliche question. I almost hate to ask it, but I want to Number one thing to do for your GVP. Right, if somebody, whether they’re just starting out, maybe they’re kind of just a never, never land trying to get some rankings, what do you? What do you look at? If somebody’s like I need help, what do you look at right away? Or what’s your number one thing you might deploy? Do you throw some like fake traffic at it with CTR? Do you make sure their name doesn’t have their niche in it? What do you do? Or, if there’s a couple things to it, it doesn’t have to just be one.

Michael: So, I try to get them set on some type of review software so that way we can get some reviews flowing in. I want to get some of those user signals and with the light of the updates a lot of those reviews are just not going to stick anyway, so I want to get as many as we can coming.

Jesse: So you think that’s one of the number one things on a GVP like seriously, is getting reviews, which I don’t disagree with. I just a surprise by your answer.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And then I want to do some of the basic stuff right, like I want to get some of the citations going. I want to get like a couple press releases, you know, I want to get some backlinks going to the website, stuff like that. Yeah, we, there’s a young lady that I’m helping right now and she’s going to eventually build an agency, but she wanted to learn some of the SEO tactics first. I made her fix.

Well, we always do the on page of the website. That’s one of the first things we always address. And like in the first month, that guarantee, like it might not get addressed the first week, but in the first month that gets addressed every single time. And the reason is is that’s your first signal to Google, through things like your headers, that these are the most important things to us. Sure, so when you do that plus you do some of just your basics, just some simple things like citations, I like to throw a lot of them at them, like at Google right away. Like I want 400 live this month, the next two weeks go right.

And what was really cool is, granted, it’s a little bit of a smaller town in North Carolina, but it’s like legitimately 15 minutes outside of Charlotte, so it’s not. It’s still a suburb, so it’s not like like micro town by any measurement. But there’s this landscaping company and they weren’t showing up at all and in two weeks, from just doing an on page and rolling out 400 citations, they started really popping for up to a five mile radius for their long tail keywords. Nice, and it’s just from doing some of the things that nobody finds attractive, that says it doesn’t work right Like it legitimately. All she had done was the on page correctly and the directories 400 of them, not 400 like on Fiverr where you spend $85 and it’s 350 and you’re lucky if, like, 30 of them go live Right Like it was 400 live directories. We didn’t even build backlinks to it yet.

Jesse: Let’s just for everybody. If they don’t know, we’re throwing out citations. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about them somewhere in the last 200 episodes. But you’re talking what? Like your Yelpcom, your local Chamber of Commerce, right?

Michael: Yeah, your Manta, your buy local or buy to local, whatever it is, the you know, like all of those. But then there’s thousands of these sites, there’s thousands of them, and so you know to crank out 400 of them, I think she spent a total of a couple hundred bucks, like $200, with us to get us to do them, so that way they had all be live, which, truthfully, is a steal. Because you know you go to someplace like Yelp and then you rent them, or you go to what’s my call it, what’s my call it local, bright local and you know they want two $3 a piece for them, right? You know you go to White Spark. They definitely want $3 each. So you know to get them at 50 cents a piece and they’re all live. Truthfully, it’s a steal.

Jesse: And let me let me get your two cents on this to say if I say it wrong or if you want to elaborate the citations, You’re getting all these profiles on these call it third party websites, right, Not your website. But if you go back to original Google page rank and stuff you kind of mentioned it earlier with some of the GSA, like the more backlinks you had right, the cooler you were, that was a big authority signal and that’s when we put these citations out there. There’s more to it. But effectively we’re also building these backlinks that are out there these listings, the images, phone number, these different bits but it’s showing Google some of that same core, old school algorithm stuff like, hey, this company must be important, this entity must be popular. Look at all the shit that they got out there everywhere. A comment on that, if you could a little bit. And then B, you mentioned building backlinks to them. Could you maybe tell everybody what you mean there real quick?

Michael: Yeah. So first I have to comment on the fact that Google put out last week the fact that backlinks are no longer in their algorithm for ranking, and all period.

I read that I read that and I almost hit the floor laughing, right, because I’m like, well, that’s funny, because when I still build backlinks, like last week, I’m still showing the results and, according to Google, by the time they’ve told you this, this has been a thing for weeks, months sometimes, right. So I thought that was hysterical. I, you know it’s some of that misinformation that they think that these people are going to buy that they’re putting out, right.

Jesse: Right. It’ll be almost impossible for them to take that out. I’m not. I don’t develop their code, I don’t have access to their kernels and all this other. But like seriously, really backlinks don’t matter.

Michael: It has to matter because it’s going to at some point create a certain amount of traffic that flows through it Like it just has to matter.

Jesse: You can’t get away from it.

Michael: What you can do is you can declassify and say these are bad, this type of links are no longer valid for these type of niches. But you can’t just walk away from it. That’s just not a value, maybe, yeah.

That was very funny, anyways, I just wanted to throw that out there. So when people are reading this stuff, they understand that just because Google says something doesn’t necessarily make it true. So we have to always ask yourself, as an SEO or even as a business owner you should ask your SEO, what does that do? And if they can’t tell you, I’m not saying contact Jesse or myself, but what I’m telling you is that you should be contacting somebody else, and the reason for that is, like Jesse’s asking me what does a citation do? And he’s mentioning the fact of backlinks, and it is a backlink. It’s a very weak backlink for a lot of reasons, some of it being the fact that bazillion people put their information on there, and so we run into the problem that we talked about earlier, which was called link equity, and I’m not going to go over it again, but it’s the same problem.

It also runs into another second problem that press releases have that I’m not going to go super depth into is duplicate content and with Google having what they said, what I mentioned before that I’m not again not going to go in depth with about having indexing problems. When we look at all of that combined, then you start to understand why not all of those citations pop up. However, when we create, we also know it’s not necessarily that Google indexes them. That matters. What is that it goes into its overall algorithm, that a crawlet and indexed it in its system, that it counts for, not indexes it in its system that it actually shows in the search results.

So a citation it mentions the name, address, phone number, website information, but essentially it’s also a backlink. So it’s a backlink plus a quote, unquote mention of your business, and the reason why it affects the Google business profile is because it essentially is a trusted source from Google to say that real businesses get noticed and get listings within these set of websites. And so when you want Google to trust your business over somebody else’s to rise in the rankings, what happens is that you want many of these because it’s just more signals to show that you’re a better business and that more people want to go to you. It’s the same reason why I said that you want those reviews, because if you’re getting more reviews than your competitors, that means a lot of people are going there. Whether Google is taking notice or not.

And so that’s why it gives you that SEO reward Right.

Jesse: Stuff that’s hard to spoof. Let’s just say, right, maybe not impossible in some regards, but yeah, you’re just giving Google more of the signals that right now at least, it’s paying attention to. What was my second part, michael? Oh, building back links to citations. You kind of mentioned that super quick as a tactic, maybe a thing to do. What does that mean for people?

Michael: So it’s that whole link equity thing that we talked about with the press releases. What we want to do is since everybody lists their websites or their business information in them every time we add a new one in and a new one in and a new one in. It’s like the idea of we have a pie or a cake and we chop it up and give a piece out, but then at a certain point people keep coming up for it and there’s literally only crumbs left, right. So if we were to say, well, if a slice of this is two ounces, well, what happens if we actually just make the pie bigger, then at that point everybody gets to, you know, and every time we add more, every time we add another URL, we have backlinks to it it makes the pie bigger. It makes the pie bigger, right, and so it doesn’t. Then what starts to happen is at that point, you never run out of links and link equity.

You see what I’m saying, and so that’s why we we build the backlinks to the citations. That’s why we use GSA, for example, to do that, and I actually I set up a desktop computer that, even if it restarts, it’ll say you know what’s the code? That I have a setup so that way one of my BAs can actually just punch the code in and then it opens my computer up, and then he goes in there and that’s literally hard lined into our router, so that way it never there’s no issues with wifi or anything else, it’s just if people aren’t picking up, read between the lines there.

Jesse: That means it’s kind of important there with, with what you’re saying, a little bit of redundancy and access. So maybe, maybe take notes and tactics.

Michael: But Well, yeah, can you get a virtual? Think about this, like you’re going to pay for a wifi anyways, right. And you can go get a virtual machine and go spend $120 a month. Or you can go spend $1,500 if you do some shopping and you can get a computer, like I spent $1,500 on mine. I got four terabytes for my hard drive, I got 64 gigabytes of RAM and a pinium i9 processor, like you’re.

In my opinion, as far as a Windows computer is concerned, you’re not going to get a better one for that price. If I get anything that’s better than that, it’s going to go from $1,500 to $3,500. And the cool thing with that is is that’s $1,500. If I go get a virtual computer at $100, $150 a month, it’s only about 10 to 14 months, and this thing is paid for by that point that they can access at any given time. And now I’m not paying monthly on it, like it’ll last us probably three years. So even though I have to pay, even if I have to pay up front, the money savings is there, right, and I think that it doesn’t matter what we do. We always should try to find what we can afford to do that with. So that way we keep more later and that’s for any business, right, like it doesn’t matter what it is.

Jesse: Hey everyone, sorry to interrupt the episode here, but I wanted to share a review with you. If you haven’t left us a review yet for local SEO tactics, we would love to hear from you. This is how we know that the show is impacting you, that you’re getting good action items and that it’s making a difference. So if you’re so inclined, we would love to hear from you. Going out to local SEO tacticscom, click the button for reviews. From there you can jump off to Apple podcasts, google, facebook, wherever you want to leave review. We are very happy to receive it and when we do, we’ll read it on the show. So this one I have here today for this episode is from I’m going to spell the username, because I don’t even think it’s possible to pronounce this G-H-Y-F-F-H-Y-T-F. If that’s you. You know who I’m talking about.

Review says love this podcast. I work in SEO and this podcast is a great source of info. I’ll never truly know everything there is about SEO. However, local tactics help me stay up to date with the latest information about the industry. I highly recommend this podcast. Thanks for the great review. Yeah, what we’re trying to do is be able to provide some information for anyone on the earlier end of the scale and also for the more advanced right. Seo is always changing and we’re always learning and always sharing and we hope we can continue to do that with you. And, yeah, you can stay along on the journey with us and learn as we go as well. So really appreciate the review. For everybody else We’d love to hear from you as well. Local SEO tacticscom. Click the button for reviews. Thanks, yep, and then forego that subscription as well. So how much time do you have left, michael? We’re a little over an hour. Should we wrap this up? I got some other questions. None of them are super important.

Michael: No, you can ask me anything. I know you’re going to cut this up a little bit, so you can ask me anything you want to ask, brother.

Jesse: I’ve got one more, I’ve got one more here. I’ll ask you, and then we can wrap it up.

Michael: Even if it’s two, it doesn’t really matter because, like I said, I know you’ll cut a little bit and it’s not a big deal.

Jesse: It’s all good, and we may run this just as one full episode too. We’ll see what everybody thinks when it’s done. There’s a lot of good stuff that just kind of it’s good flow in here, right, so OK, so this is going to be an opinion one for you as well, and I’m not looking for you to throw anybody, any company or any tactics under the bus. But as far as like widespread popular, you can bash Google all you want here. But as far as widespread popular opinion goes, is there something out there and maybe, if we can stay in the GBP space, that’s cool, if not, whatever. Is there something out there that people hold as a truth, or just widespread popular opinion that you think is just trash, that you’d like to maybe tell them they need to look left on that instead of looking right, or something you disagree with? Could be something John Mueller says. Could be something, just again, people have as a truth. Is there anything that sticks in your craw in that regard?

Michael: There’s a couple of things.

Literally anything John Mueller says we think about 3%, right, so it’s like 3% truth, 97% complete bullshit. And if you don’t ever believe me, you can take what he says and then go cross-reference it through when Google releases the information on its patents that it’s actually received, and then see the difference of the two. Right, like, truthfully, one of the things that drives me the most crazy. I’ve talked about link equity a lot of times, right, and this goes for even in the local space. People still want to rank their websites, and they should. There’s some things that are done with that that I think that they shouldn’t do, and so one. Here’s a big tidbit, right, like. Here’s that serious nugget Local SEOs.

A lot of times, when they’re creating their location pages, they turn around and create all of them at one time, and you can create them, but they also publish them, which is inherently the wrong problem, and then they can’t understand why that they didn’t index. The reason they don’t index is something called crawl budget. And when you have a website that Google says I’m gonna come crawl it once every two weeks, right, because you don’t give me any information, like about every two weeks, you give me a new blog, so what starts to happen is you train the algorithm that to come crawl one, maybe two pages and that’s it. Well, you just drop 50 pages because you broke out every single city in a county like Township and they just don’t index because Google doesn’t have enough time. So it goes yep, there’s these pages and then if you go look like in your search console, it’ll say that they’re not indexed.

The correct way to do this is you can do more blogs to get them to start coming. So if you know it’s only producing one every two weeks, well, what you should do is be creating something every week and then create. Once you’ve done that for three weeks, then you come back and you create like two or three and then so maybe you do a blog and two location pages Right on, and then what happens is then you’ll be able to get indexed, right. So that’s one of the things that I see local SEOs do that drive me crazy. They’re like well, I just don’t understand, and it’s just because they don’t take the time to understand what’s happening in the big picture. They have to understand that even though Google has so much resources, it still is a finite amount.

Jesse: Yeah, and it’s still programmed right, they’re still it operates in a certain method, right?

Michael: So, yeah, right, I mean because they can’t just turn around and go well, we’re just going to index the whole entire like everything that’s growing on the internet, because in order to do that they probably would have. They’re a publicly traded company, so they literally and pardon my language but they’re held by the balls by Wall Street to make so much money and because of that they can’t. They have to really check what they spend money on because of profitability reasons. So, as great as it was to help them early on, it’s actually killing them right now, and so like those type of things drive me a lot crazy, and it’s just simple things of just paying attention, right, and then complete bullshit. People are still doing map pens, right.

They’re still doing map pens because they see them on Fiverr. I think maybe if people were to take the time to say, ok, it’s not really working like it used to, what else can we do to it? And then they were to put some links in there maybe some links to their websites, some share code, some long ugly map like URLs, I don’t know, just a whole bunch of stuff like that I could see maybe that that would have some type of effect.

But I think that yeah, but it’s not a silver bullet, like everybody thinks that it is, and it’s just not going to get you what you’re after. So it’s just a lot of things that used to work don’t necessarily work, but if we’re patient and we try to flip them and play with them a little bit, in the next couple of years it’ll work again. But as far as what works today, it’s just think like map pens. I guarantee if you go on Fiverr there’s people selling them Right.

Jesse: Well, I think, like a lot of the advice, the answers and the thoughts you’ve been sharing today and previous, yeah, we can get into some tactics, some manipulation, some trickery, but still a lot of it is rooted in what looks real, what looks legitimate, what’s stable, what’s not completely malicious or fake, where a lot of that stuff may have worked seven, eight, 10, 15 years ago I mean just the bottom of your page, white text, all your keywords, blah, blah, blah. But now still some of these things don’t work in masks like they did. But I think what you’re saying I’m rephrasing about pulling out some of the granular bits of why things worked and then, seeing the underlying tactics, you can still deploy them. Yeah, not as your secret sauce, but as one of the ingredients in your whole recipe.

Michael: Right, yeah, absolutely. You have to think about the fact that we’re what it is. I wouldn’t say my maps won’t work if you don’t manipulate it in certain ways, but I would say, if you try to use it the way that it did four years ago or five years ago, when it was really working, you’re just not going to see any results. I think that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you’re including, like the name, address, phone number, website and all kinds of different URLs within the website and things like that. I don’t think that that would necessarily be bad and I would actually probably encourage somebody to do that, only because it’s another Google property, right, you know what I mean, but I’m not trying to tell somebody that that’s what they should go out and do either. Right, meaning that it’s just another signal. It’s just, it’s one signal of the bazillion that you probably need, right, don’t put all of your weight into that and think, ok, I did that, so now it’s going to rank.

Jesse: Yep, that’s not one thing, it’s all the things that need to be done. It is.

Michael: But it should start, like, no matter what anybody says, it should always start pretty much on the website. You know, like, if you don’t do your, yeah, if you don’t do your, if you like, everything’s broken down by numbers, right. And meaning when, like, let’s say, you pull a grid and it’s red, to me what the signal is is that that means that Google has no concept of what your niche is. Yep, so if we’re looking at our website, that means that my blog post should be about my niche, sure. And then when I’m really zoomed in with the grids, if I get a little bit of green, it could be a four, that’s OK, we’re getting a little green right. Then now I can start talking a little bit about locations in my blogs, right, the proximity, right. So that way we can start to correlate the two problems of local, of what is it that you do and where are you Right.

Jesse: Oh, that’s good stuff.

Michael: Yeah, and so that’s where I would always start. I think that that’s the best place to start, because you have the most control at that point.

Jesse:Right, but it’s your stuff, you know, it’s your property, your entity, making sure the same message is on your GBP, is on your website to your point.

They need to know what you’re doing. I always I love using this example of a wedding band, right, like from Google’s standpoint. If I do a search for wedding band, do I mean this or do I mean a live band at my wedding? It’s easy for people to grasp that, like as a user with Google, like Google knowing what my intent is. But I always flip that around and kind of talk like what you are is as a web marketer. Now I have to make sure my intent is clear on my website that I’m either a live band or a jeweler and if I don’t have that content for for what it is that, the space I operate in and Google’s not gonna be aware of that, they can’t match me up, they can’t get a nice green grid for me or anything else. If they don’t understand what it is that I’m doing and you gotta you gotta say that you know, tell them that it has to do a lot with the full understanding.

Michael: And then, once you have a full understanding of what each of these pieces do, it’s about controlled information flow. You know, like when I said that is the one plus one equals two, and so does one plus one plus zero. Plus zero equals two. So many SEOs that I run into Will ask me for help on something and this happens on Facebook daily. I’ll say, hey, my GBP is not ranking for said keyword. I Look on their website and I’m like what’s not on there? Well, yeah, it is. It’s under this page over here. That’s great. That page is not in your GBP. The page that’s in your GBP.

It’s not listed.

Oh, it sounds simple when you put it together like that, but if you’re not paying attention or hearing it the right way, then you’re good so right, big, but it’s control, like we’ll put it in one of their headers and Magically, and you know, a week or two weeks, all of a sudden you see poof and it’s there and it’s like see, I tried to tell you it’s. You know that there’s a trickle down from the other pages, but you have to create a lot of content on those and you have to wait for two, sometimes three months to actually see it, versus when you see it on that page that, whatever the URL is. So if it’s whatever you know, websitecom, or Versus, if you have multiple locations, so it’s websitecom, forward slash location. Whatever that URL is, if it’s listed there, you see more growth on that profile.

Jesse: Right and you’re saying whatever the URL is. I just want to make clear for everybody Are you talking the URL that you’re linking from your GVP back to that website? Are you just talking whatever URL you’re focused on for your efforts here?

Michael: No, I’m talking about like when you say, when you go into your GVP and you say my website is and you put that link in there. That is the URL that I’m referring to. Yeah, because, like some people have, some people have multiple locations right, and so we know, and thank God, most people have adapted at this point. But you know, three years ago people were still trying to put like six locations on their home page and then they were wondering why they were getting suspended and everything else. Thank God today it’s not like that, but almost never.

Jesse: Know if you got out there too, but I said, mike, oh, like, so I didn’t call you much at all. If you rate, remind that, play back in slow mo. It’s all one word there if I say just as long as it comes through, at the end of the day we’re good. Gosh, michael. I think that. I think that’s pretty good. We’re almost hour and a half in plenty of good content. I think you shared a ton of great information with people and hopefully they got to know you a little bit better too on the front side of the conversation. I thought that was. That was kind of fun. Is there any Anything else you want to impart on people or any other things you want to drop before we wrap this up?

Michael: You know, I think that if you’re an agency, Really hone your skills like practice on your own profile stuff and if you’re a business owner, always try to reach out to Somebody’s that that’s in the top of the field, not Like I’m not trying to belittle somebody that’s been doing this for six months or seven months.

The only problem is is there’s so many nuances in our field that it’s really hard. If they just went straight out into the SEO field and they never worked under a company, the, the lack of experience is going to cost the business owner time and money and that they’re literally testing either you’re, they’re getting paid to test on your site and you’re just not yeah, you’re just not going to get the results you’re after. And you know you can lose money because you can always make more money, but you can never make back that time. So if you wasted six months Versus you know, an alpha or somebody that’s been doing this that’s an, a player for so long, they’re going to get you those results that you’re after and, more importantly, when you have those six months, even if it was 40 percent more in cost, you would be making money at this point instead of now I have. I’ve spent all that money plus all that time, and now I have to go hire somebody else.

Jesse: Do it all to the additional time you’re going to lose absolutely so.

Michael: It’s just, it’s hard. You know, I always tell the business owners that ultimately it falls under their shoulders that they hired, but it’s because they don’t know any better.

You know what I mean. Like they, they try to do what’s called cost analysis, and Nobody wants cost analysis done on their business, so they don’t want you to do it to their business, but they do it to other businesses and in doing so, what ends up happening is they hire these, these guys. They’d be like oh, it’s a young guy, he must know a lot about this stuff. And it’s like no, he watched 10 youtube videos. You’re about to get screwed right and and I don’t mean that like this to be like doom and gloom but you know, do a little bit of betting. Make sure that you you talk to somebody, make sure that they have some case studies involved, make sure that they have at least one video testimonial, so that way you’re getting somebody of some caliber. So that would be my biggest biggest tip for business owners that are listening to this.

Jesse: That’s great. We run into that all the time too, as I’m sure you do and anybody else who has a legitimate agency is. You’re always compared Somebody’s brother’s cousin, right, that knows this stuff and is young, and we’ll do it for 200 bucks, right? I like the way you said they’re great. Or have an Experimenting on your website.

Michael: How about overseas. Yeah, how about the overseas person for 300 bucks, right? I always start seeing that when I hear that and I’m like well, good luck with that, because even if they spend 200 dollars on the seo aspect of your site, they’re spending, it’s still 200 dollars, like that part doesn’t change. They have to make some profit. So if they profit 100 dollars, right, that’s great overseas. But even if they buy the labor, let’s say that it’s 400 dollars of us labor Compared to a thousand dollars where we’re at and then we’re spending six plus hundred. If I’m walking into your marketplace and you’re only spending two and I’m spending six, I’m gonna win every single day of the week, probably by month too.

Jesse: When it’s we compared a lot to. I mean, it’s a craft. You know, this is not Just some boilerplate thing, you know, for seo, um, it’s a, it’s a craft, and whether it be, you know, something getting done in your house or your vehicle, any other large expense for your personal life, just think about where you chase the cheapest person versus the best, and that’s what we talk about, that a lot with clients and with SEO too. Same thing as this isn’t something where you should make a decision saving a little bit on the front side. This is, to your point, about 6, 12, 18 months down the road. How is this working for you? For?

Michael: results and ROI. I study marketing probably more than most people in our space, and I study a lot of different things, whether it’s books like this, where it’s you know how to build a business and sell it for millions, or whether it’s something by Russell Brunson, or whether it’s Alex Hermose, or whether it’s like the old school copyright guys or whatever it is. I probably study and consume more information than majority of the people in our field. And what I will tell you that’s really interesting is when we’re thinking about business. To hire somebody that’s an A player on average costs 20 or 30% more than a B player. What’s really interesting? When you look at performance of an A player, they usually operate at 50 to 60% higher than a B player, so you’re literally getting your performance cheaper by hiring somebody that’s an A player. Right, and it’s just. It’s really interesting when you start laying all that out. It’s why, for agency owners, when I suggest you do your hires, I always suggest your initial hires are managers instead of employees.

Yes, it costs you more money up front, but it saves you a lot of time on the back end, because once you’ve trained your manager, when your manager then trains the rest of the employees as you hire them.

Jesse: Right, you scaled from day one effectively, right so?

Michael: Absolutely so. It’s the same type of mentality, it’s just you have to decide what it is that you want to do. Are you interested in how much money you can save on the front end? Be careful with that, because it’ll burn you on the back end.

Jesse: Yeah, true for so many things, not just SEO. Hey everyone, just a quick message about our free SEO audit tool on local SEO tacticscom. We’ll get right back to the show. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, go on out to local SEO tacticscom, slash free SEO audit, or look for the yellow button up in the top right corner, click that and it’s going to take just a couple seconds. You enter in the page that you want to optimize what you’re looking for the audit to score against, enter in that page, enter in the keyword you’re looking to get optimized for and enter in your email address, click the button and it’s going to take a few seconds, and then it’s going to send you off a PDF report via email. It’s a great report. It’s going to kind of give you an overall score of some vital SEO areas for that page and for your website at large. Even though it’s auditing this page, that’s going to tell you some of the good things that are happening, some of the bad things that are happening too, and give you basically a checklist of some things that you need to show up and what you can do to improve your SEO for that page, for that keyword that you’re auditing.

Now you can use this as many times as you want. You can do multiple keywords, multiple pages, multiple keywords on the same page. You can even use this to check against your competitors, right, if you want to do a little reverse engineering, see how they’re scoring for a certain keyword, what they may be doing good, that you’re not, and some things to improve there. So lots of different ways to use it, completely free. Again, go on at thelocalseotacticscom slash free SEO audit, or look for the yellow button in the top right corner of the website. All right, michael, let’s wrap it up. Let you get out of here and appreciate your time, your extended time, and this is fun. How should people contact you, michael, if they want to reach out to you and find you? What’s the best way?

Michael: Yeah, sure. So the best way, honestly, is my email. It’s Michael M-I-C-H-A-E-L at SEODCnet, notcom butnet. You can reach me that way. Jesse, you have my Facebook profile if you want to drop that in the description. That’s truthfully. Yeah, truthfully, that’s the absolute best way is Facebook. If I don’t respond right away, do know that sometimes it’s because it goes to spam and since that’s not my control, it’s just Facebook and I do get probably 50 messages plus a day on there. So every once in a while I do miss a message. So if you don’t hear something in 48 hours, message me again. It’s not that I’m being one way or the other.

It’s just, sometimes something gets overlooked. But those are the best ways, honestly. And then you know, if it’s something that we want to sit down and talk, then I’ll give you a Zoom link and schedule you, you know, with my calendar invite, then we’ll go from there. But those are the best ways, even if it’s just like hey, I’m having this problem, can you look at it? Or is my SEO doing a good job? Honestly, I’m happy to look. I don’t charge anything for that.

You know, I’m happy to take a peek at it because it’s a scenario of one of the things I think that makes us a little different. And I guarantee, jesse, you’re the same way, is it? An SEO is doing a good job? Like, like I said, I just signed 20 some profiles this week of new business, right, like I’m not hurting for business. So if your SEO is doing a good job, I’m going to tell you he’s doing a good job or she is doing a good job.

I’m not interested in poaching, so, yeah, yeah. So feel free to reach out to me. I’m always happy to look at it and see and you know, I might say, well, they’re doing a good job overall, but tell them they need to implement this also, because it’s the same thing of like, if they’re doing a good job overall, maybe they just missing something, so tell them, and then that business owner can continue that great relationship, instead of trying to steal them and then you know, over some little, which just doesn’t make any sense. I believe in karma and not to mention, I have to look at myself in the mirror at the end of the day, right?

Jesse: Well, and yeah, it’ll happen to you. If you’re doing it’s others, right? I mean just your karma right there. So you got to shoot the golden rule.

Michael: And, honestly, like I run ads and I do outreach and everything else, so I get plenty of leads. That’s not I have. There’s no shortage of leads for me, yeah. Honestly I came on the podcast because, truthfully, I like hanging out with you, jesse, right. And then we got to have some whiskey on top of it and it’s like, dude, sign me up Like I can’t wait. Great drive right there, isn’t it?

Yeah, you know, and then, so yeah, and honestly I mean I’d love to come hang out with you once every six or seven months and just catch up and talk about the latest whatever’s happening and you know hopefully next time we can talk about the Timberwolves season and how it’s going in the right direction for us.

Jesse: Fingers crossed, Give me 30, 45 days Now. Give me 45 to 60 days before we have that conversation. We’ll see.

Michael: So let’s do this. Why don’t we try to do something in like January, early February, like somewhere around that timeframe, um, and then we can talk. Or, worst case scenario, we can talk about how both of our seasons were absolutely trash at spring training. Just do it there. You know what I mean. Like it’s worst case scenario because the wizards like so they’re not. Like, truth be told, they’re not my favorite, favorite team, but I believe in you. Support what your local team is.

Jesse: Okay.

Michael: And because that’s where you live, so you should support your team. I think it’s important. Um, I had no problem with them releasing Beal, because Beal was gone half of the year, but then when they released Porzingis, I’m like you guys lost your damn minds. The dude, honestly, like 90% of the tip offs he tipped the ball to the team so you got first possession 90% of the time, because he’s so damn tall, he scored an average of like 27 points a game, right, yeah, and he had something like like 10 to 12 rebounds on average also. So okay, so he probably should get some more assists in there. So that way he’s just like elevates that player. But when you start stacking that and you’re like, and you’re going to trade that, no, that’s the shit you build on Like, you build around that, yeah.

Jesse: That was our Kevin Garnett right For for your 2010 and five 20 rebounds. I’m sorry. 20 points, 10 rebounds and then five assists, kevin.

Michael: Garnett was amazing. He’s a person you build a franchise around. Yeah.

Jesse: Now I’m just going to start crying, though. If we start talking, if we start talking that kind of stuff, I’m going to go down. Actually, I got a. I got a half a bottle of bourbon here. I’ll be in good shape.

Michael: So maybe we need to zoom and keep drinking, but you know, just saying.

Jesse: Well, on that note, let me know when your drunk SEO show kicks off too. Let me remind you on that.

Michael: So I need to start that sooner than later, so maybe you can be my first guest. How about that? Let’s do it.

Jesse: I’m going to two things Drinking bourbon and SEO. So you’re hitting. You’re hitting my stuff right there, michael.

Michael: Well, so I hope, and this is what I tell everybody, so everybody who’s a business owner I don’t care if you’re an SEO or business owner I want you to become an omnidimensional person, meaning I don’t want you to just become amazing at business, right. Like I want you to be a good family person. So for you, jesse, like I want to see that you’re a good dad, I want you to see a good spouse, a good son, everything else you know, a good person in your community that you’re, you help out, and I think it’s those type of people that are truly like the diamonds in the rough. And you know, if we can focus on that, that mentality. Like you had Nicole on and one of her favorite statements and I love Nicole to that, by the way Like she’s amazing, like there’s just no doubt about it, and the fact that you had her on and she wasn’t even SEO was even better.

But when we think about things, if she says how you do one thing is how you do everything, which I don’t completely agree with that to 100%. But what I will say is it’s not far off either. Right, and so, like how you are as a dad and a husband, and how you manage your company and your SEO and the like, you know you’re not going to do anything with the money and so you know the fact that you do this also, you know, speaks a lot because you’re trying to do something for the community at large. There’s a lot of value that happens with this, and if more people were to approach life that way, this world would be amazing, like it just it would be absolutely amazing.

Jesse: I can’t disagree with anything you’re saying there at all. And this is only a drink. A drink and a half into this is not right. We’re not cutting open the drain here.

Michael: This is real talk. What we need to do is chug another drink real fast and then we’ll just pause and then transition right into drunk. You know, drunk SEO.

Jesse: I’ve got a gala function to go to with my wife in a couple hours, so I I’d take you up on most nights, but not tonight, or I’m really going to be. I’ll be bidding on silent auctions. I don’t even know what they are at that point, so that’s okay, you know what you do. You just go sell more, just go sell more and all buff out.

It’s, it’s easy to do and you say it like that especially. Michael, thanks for spending your Friday with us here. Everybody should know too. This is later in the day, friday, just to be clear. This is not like a Monday morning recording, where we’re drinking bourbon just for whatever.

Michael: No, it’s not so we started. We started intentionally a little bit after three Eastern times, so that way it was already towards the end of my day.

Jesse: I did that on purpose, thanks for hanging out, good to catch up and looking forward to catch you in the next next episode. Michael, thanks, absolutely.

Michael: Yeah, and then, just for the record, we are going to do that, I’ll I’ll message you. We’ll start sometime next month. Watch for your messages.

Jesse: Sounds like fun to me. Come in. All right, sounds good. Thanks, brother. All right, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that. That wraps up our extended interview and time that we had with Michael Rayburn. It was a great chat. Got your drink, got to drink, I should say, some good bourbon. Looking forward to catching up with Michael next time. Hopefully, you all learn something from part one or part two of this episode. If you want to get ahold of Michael, you can find all of his contact information in the show notes. And, yeah, hope you enjoy this as much as I did and we’ll catch you in the next one, take care.