What Is The Business Owners Role For Successful SEO Implementation? – 164

Jesse Dolan: But still at that point, it doesn’t matter because it’s been done. Business is not going where you wanted it to go mentally. So as a business owner, come up with these things, everything else. But again, engage, share, communicate, hold people accountable. And your point of measuring is where the rubber really can meet the road on a lot of these things.

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m Jesse Dolan, here again today on this episode with Bob Brennan. How’s it going Bob?

Bob Brennan: Hi.

Jesse Dolan: Sue Ginsburg. Sue’s going to tee up a question and a topic for us here today, talking about SEO. And this one’s a little unique. Usually we’re talking about maybe a problem people have, right? Or something that’s tricky or some advice. Here we’re going to dive into a little bit of maybe some perspectives and roles and things like that with the business owner. So, Sue, why don’t you kick us off with setting the stage for the topic and all that? And let’s get into some SEOing here.

Sue Ginsburg: Sounds great. This question comes to us from two new clients, which I loved because it showed that they truly understood the collaborative nature of optimizing their SEO impact. Question is, what requirements do you have for us, the client. What will we need to provide to make your efforts successful? And, in other words, what is the business owner’s role in the successful SEO to attract more leads online? So for this one quarter of the day, talent wins games but teamwork and intelligence wins championships from somebody who has experienced a lot of championships, Michael Jordan.

Jesse Dolan: And he knows what he is talking about there.

Sue Ginsburg: That’s right. Didn’t he say, “There is no I in team.” Or something like that? Anyway, yes, he knows teamwork.

Jesse Dolan: Well, and I tell you too, I tried to have my son read some of his stuff and maybe he’s not the best role model in life in some areas, right? But from a mental preparation of your goals, you know what I mean? And that kind of stuff? And towards your statement there? He’s pretty dang good there. Right? So, that’s a good quote.

Sue Ginsburg: He does know how to win. Okay. So just a little marketing story to tee this up. Anybody who has worked with us knows that the business model that we have found works best is when our role is that of CEO SEO experts. And the client plays the role of expert on their business. Collaborating this way gets us the best results and worth sticking to it. A new client of ours, two new clients, and many others in the past have other players on their teams or may have other players who are working in different capacities on the website, whatever that may be. Which is fine as long as we’re all aware and can collaborate together.

Sue Ginsburg: In situations like this, what comes up for us is let’s just all hop on a call, say what our roles are, how that affects each other and what’s the best way for us to go forward and each do our own roles without hampering the others, whether that is making changes to the optimized pages that they don’t realize reduces the SEO impact, hiding pages that we’ve created, whatever. And what always works for us is let’s just all get together on a call or whatever, and talk about this so we understand and know what you need to tell us or what we need to tell you when’s done, et cetera, et cetera. The point being teamwork, no matter what your team is, in this case it’s colleagues who are also working on websites, not on our team. The more you work together, the better all of your impacts will be. And that’s what we’re trying to do in this discussion. Find how can we best work with the client, whether it’s the business owner or whoever on their team, so that we can maximize the impact that SEO can have.

Sue Ginsburg: So when two separate new clients recently asked this, I knew that it was a good question to discuss on lots of people’s minds. And I think something that we can all learn about and hear what you experts have to say on this. So, what do you think, what can you share?

Jesse Dolan: I think Bob, you are our resident business owner, right? In many ways. And I think you’re going to have a lot of good insights on this. There’s one thing I would chime in on the front side, which as a business owner out there listening, is broadly, and I’m sure Bob will get into some nuance here, but just to invest into this, right? I mean, be it time or money, right? You can’t just wave a wand and these people can do SEO and then you’re done. You have to be active, even if you’re just paying for people on your team to be active and do stuff, right? It’s something you’re going to engage in. You have to invest one way, shape or form. But, Bob, anything top of mind, and then just a free discussion on like Sue said, just distilling it down as a business owner. What’s your role and how can you advance SEO? Man, you’ve been that role for near 20 years. Right? So in addition to being on the SEO side of the fence, what are some thoughts coming to mind for everybody?

Bob Brennan: So I think the challenge with at least small business and maybe this goes on at the higher levels of CEO or what have you is the mental health. We go home at five o’clock. The business is still rolling around in our heads just before we fall asleep. So it’s almost like another child. So the point is is my mental health goes down when I’ve got anxiety over the direction of the business. As long as I’ve been in business, as long as I have a direction and if I’m failing or things that are working out the way they should, I don’t feel bad because I’m giving it my best shot and I know what the vision is. And then I just try and adjust or whatever the case is.

Bob Brennan: The point is as a business owner, CEO and whoever you’re working with, they’ve got to understand your vision. And then they’ve got to understand in detail what your highest priorities are. And then you need to be able to explain that to them. So your role is, let’s just say the printing business or print/repair business, we work with office equipment and things like that. If you tell people, “Hey, we just need more leads,” you’ve got to tell them what you want and what you don’t want. That’s just as important. So if you can tell them what you don’t want, sometimes they can help you in that. And then getting that mapped out, so month one, we do this, month two, this, month three and or quarter, however you’re going to map it out.

Bob Brennan: That’s huge. Because then they have a track to run on. And then you have also, you just them know, you hold them accountable. And it’s like, getting look, I need, Balabushka 5,000 repairs, on all these Balabushka 5,000 models. And I’m expecting by the end of the quarter to start seeing those kind of leads come in. Setting that expectation with the people that you’re working with, so they know, “Hey, we said and agreed upon this.” And if they’re not performing, just like an employee, you’re going to have to let them go. And that’s it. But you can’t do that unless you have a vision for where it is you’re going and you can map that vision and then get it down, perhaps in writing, so everybody is on and you can share that vision and those people that get it and they start clicking along on those tasks. Those are right and left hand people. If they don’t get it and they fail to do that, guess what? You got to get other team members that can help execute your vision.

Bob Brennan: So I know it’s broad and vague, but SEO people need that too. They need to know, what are the six or seven or eight keywords, or that along with the geographic areas of those keywords and your expectations and map that out. What I’ve witnessed in talking to other small business owners that are grappling with SEO is always the, “I think it’s working,” or, “Yeah, I don’t know if it’s working.” You know what I mean? And you should have these things dialed in in terms of expectations and metrics and if they give you, “Well, I don’t know.” And, “I think we can.” You know what I mean?

Bob Brennan: And just vague and there’s no confidence in that they can execute, I think you got to move on and you’ve got to set what those limits are. And then the other thing, too, is the content. Okay. Because you need just, right, to get good SEO. You got to have good content, that’s natural and works with the algorithms and is effective. And so it’s tough as a business owner to sit down, “Oh, I’m going to write an article.” Heck no. First of all, writing’s difficult for anybody, right? Even the best authors, it’s still very difficult, let alone for a business person that’s got to deal with payroll and you got to deal with customers and proposals. It’s the last thing you want to do is sit down and write a novel about content, type of a thing.

Bob Brennan: And I think that’s where some people can do it. I think that’s the exception to the rule, but for us, you’ve got to figure out a way to get what’s in your head for content out, to Google and the general public and figure out how you’re going to do that. And for me, the best way to do that is through a video like this, through a podcast, through the spoken word and let somebody else transcribe it and deal with it and edit it and everything else that goes with it. Because I just don’t have the time.

Jesse Dolan: I think there’s a good point you made there, which is just to peel back a few layers, you have to be directing the content, at least not micromanaging it, but leading the charge, where we go and what are we saying? Because as a business owner, CEO, I mean one of the roles is really leading the brand, being the face or the voice or top of funnel type stuff. And so you need to be engaged for where we’re going with the content. But to your point, you don’t have to maybe have the burden of being this content creator and writer and all that. Unless in your business, if that’s just inherent to who you are, the more power to you. You’re one of the small percentage of people, right? But for you, me, Sue, everybody else, general people that are knowledge about your business, that’s hard.

Jesse Dolan: And then, so don’t make that your obstacle or your hurdle that you have to write that content. Like you said, if you record it, or maybe you have somebody that is talented, that you just sit down for 20 minutes and just talk and they transcribe it or take the notes and things like that. And I know Sue, again, back to when we bring on new clients, we have an onboarding form. We have them fill out that would pull this from you, Bob. Right? If you’re a new client coming to us, a lot of questions and information, right? To force some thought exercises.

Jesse Dolan: And I think in that same way, if it’s, I don’t know, once a month, once a once quarter, whatever it is, if you’ve got a right hand gal or a right hand guy, that’s maybe good at creating that content or crafting words, let’s say, at the very least sit down, have a conversation with them for a half hour, about two or three topics and be, there’s my brain dump, right? About where we want to go. How we want to position it or a certain phrase to use. And you’ve now helped create that content, but you didn’t feel the pain of doing something you’re not good at, right?

Bob Brennan: Right. And if you’re not familiar, I’ll just use the Balabushka 5,000 model. If you’re not familiar with it, I mean, you generally are and you know you need to sell them, find that person that’s excited about it within your company, have them do the videos or write the content or whatever the case is. It’s not in people’s nature to want to do videos or want to do public speaking, right? It’s feared more than death, like Jerry Seinfeld, right? So I mean, people fear public speaking before death and it’s like, “You’re dead.”

Jesse Dolan: You don’t have to talk to anybody, though. So it’s great.

Bob Brennan: So, but okay. And I get it, it’s a struggle, but here’s the deal. We both know, and everybody knows, Google really isn’t interested in how good looking you are or whatever the case is. They need content. It’s a machine that has to be fed. You got to feed it. And so find somebody that is willing to at least talk on about it. If you got to get Dwight Troop to do it, just get Dwight to do it. It doesn’t matter. It just has to get done and your job is to direct them, like you were saying, and get that content out there and get it to your SEO experts so they can incorporate it into the SEO strategy.

Bob Brennan: But if you don’t have a vision and you’re stuck and you’re just, “I don’t know, I just need calls or whatever.” It may work, but I wouldn’t hold your hopes because it’s just, there’s got to be a strategy of what keywords you’re going to go after, the content, many other things that need to happen. And if you don’t have that and it’s vagaries and you’re just like, I just need the phone to ring. That’s a warning sign to me as we deal with clients that this isn’t going to be a long term client.

Jesse Dolan: So Bob, as you’re saying all that, for me, we talked on the front side about, as a business owner, you have to invest time, energy, money, all this, your team, yourself. But then everything you’re saying is really being engaged in the SEO, right? To your point there, you can’t just say I want leads. And again, wave that magic wand or assume people without any plan or context or goals, guidelines, all that stuff you’re talking about. You can’t have the success without that. You do have to be engaged. So I don’t know, depending on your business and your schedule, some time on a regular basis has to be involved with this.

Jesse Dolan: And then I think there is a second part of where this goes, because you’re saying all this, I very much am in the head space of, like with Sue, when we bring on a new client, a lot of this is initial front side conversations to launch SEO, to guide it, right? Establish it. But then fast forward, I’d like to throw this at you. Again, as a business owner, your role in SEO, things like that is, what if it works? Horrible problem, right? We are investing and engaging in SEO to grow the business. SEO is, when it’s working, a flywheel, a momentum, right? It’s not like paid ads where you turn it on and off and you’re showing up and now you’re not, because you’re paying or not. SEO is something we try to get to the top, stay at the top and then keep riding that wave. And you should get more and more business, ongoing, which is going to cause some problems as a business owner, right? Good problems, but still problems. You mentioned earlier, payroll and all this other stuff. Double the size of your business, you double all those problems, too.

Jesse Dolan: So throwing that out there to you again, in the context of business owner, helping with SEO, what’s your functions. Does anything come to mind as it’s working and you’re scaling your business now this next phase of SEO and business growth, what would you have to people to speak towards that end of it?

Bob Brennan: I think most business owners are daydreamers and ADD and stuff like that. And you have to focus that dream on what if? What if it grows? How are you going to deal with that? And that’s where, I wouldn’t plant that vision with your people before it happens. But as you see that trend start to go up, then you better get on your horse and start talking to your people and saying, “Okay, this is what I’m hoping will happen. I can’t guarantee it, but I’m spending money to make this happen.” And the last thing your employees want to do is work more, right? And I think we reached a point in our country right now, what I’m witnessing is people are frustrated. They’re tired. You’re either working extremely hard or you’re not working at all.

Bob Brennan: And if you’re not working at all, there’s probably some other issues. But my point is how do you support your team in that? Yeah, we’re going to get more work, but we’re going to get the kind of work that we want, right? Because that’s what I try to coach people in and then you better be ready to either pay them overtime or give them a piece of the action. It’s just my two cents so they’re happy about working harder, right? And willing to put in that extra effort. So everything that you need to support your business with that growth, you better start planning for and getting ready for. Or you’re just creating more headaches for yourself and for your people, so to speak.

Bob Brennan: I don’t know if that makes sense in terms of figuring out that crawl, walk, run type of a thing and being ready to have that walk, run phase figured out. So you can seamlessly take on that business. Is that something you need to worry about by day one? No. But you need to have that in the back of your head ready for growth, ready for scalability and then go from there.

Jesse Dolan: What’s your opinion about, so if we just think about, because we’ve seen this with a lot of clients over the years and plus your own business, if, let’s just say again, you’ve doubled your business, your SEO’s working, you’re bringing in the right leads, the targeted leads, like you were saying to your right, back to those front side discussions on via keywords or content. You’re putting the right lures in the water to catch the right fish, which is what you want. So you’re growing, you’re having more leads, more volume with the right types of calls, but handling the calls, converting that, right? You’re you doubled your leads, but your conversion dropped in half. You’re really not making any progress. Do you think most businesses are going to be poised to screwing some of that up as the wave comes in or what’s your thoughts towards protect them against that or being aware that, too?

Bob Brennan: Well, I think first of all, it’s normal, right? I mean, it’s just normal human deal. We’re not robots. So you’re going to have to coach them in scripting, handling those calls and building that in. So yeah, that’s a good point. You’ve got to be ready for that. You also have to be ready potentially to raise your prices. If you’ve done your business right on reviews, in my opinion, I sat down with somebody today, I’ll just tell you it was my son. And we went on Amazon and I said, “Look,” we’re into RC planes. I go, “See this propeller? It’s the same propeller as this guy’s. He’s got 553 reviews. He charges $15 for this propeller. See this one? It’s the same one. It’s got the same specs, everything. He charges $12.99. He’s got one review. Okay? So as you grow your business and you’ve got a crazy, at least a two to one or higher number of reviews, guess what you can do?”

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Bob Brennan: At least 10%. You can be 10% higher. Because people are going to go heck yeah, that’s what I want. Right?

Jesse Dolan: It’s trusted. I’ll pay my time. I’m not going to do this twice. Make a mistake the first time.

Bob Brennan: Right. We’re in a economy currently where there’s more money than there are goods. So people are chasing goods and services. So I’m not saying you just automatically do it, but try it, just see what happens. Keep raising the price until guess what? You’re not converting.

Jesse Dolan: Well, if you’re attracting the right clients through what we talked earlier, they should also be the ones that are, I value that 10% bump for the confidence. Whatever the reasons are, right? Hopefully the clients you’re attracting are willing to pay that for what you’re giving them, too. And you just have a better business overall, not just busier, right? But just better through and through.

Bob Brennan: And then spread the love, work with your employees and give everybody a piece of the action, but also explain to them that, guess what? We could charge five, 10% more because you guys have gotten the reviews. So now it’s time for everybody to get what’s coming. But obviously continue to provide great service. I mean, it doesn’t mean you just mail it in, but you get the idea. I mean, that’s the kind of, I think, the economy and times we’re in. Everybody’s worried about recession. I get that to some degree, but at least business to business, nobody is slowing down in the business to business piece. We may say a little bit on the retail, but it seems like business to business, everybody is more than busy.

Jesse Dolan: Hey everyone, just a quick message about our Free SEO Audit Tool on localseotactics.com and we’ll get right back to the show. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, go on out to localseotactics.com/freeseoaudit, or look for the yellow button up on the top, right corner, click that. And it’s going to take just a couple of 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 you 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 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.

Jesse Dolan: 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 to localseotactics.com/freeseoaudit, or look for the yellow button in the top, right corner of the website.

Jesse Dolan: I’ll throw in one thing, if you want to expand on it go right ahead, but I’m projecting for what I’ve seen working with you is, as a business owner, also closing the loop and relaying this stuff. You talk about scripting for call handling and stuff, right? And you’ve said this, and we’ve talked about this on many episodes and Sue, you brought this up, too, the voice of the customer, the voice of the client. But the things of, as you’re getting in more calls, listen to the questions or the problems or concerns they’re having and having a way for your team that’s dealing with the clients and the prospects, hearing the things to put them back on the front for SEO, whether it be going after a new keyword or a new product, people are asking for a certain thing. How do we relay this back to the front side, have a discussion on creating more content for it or putting out some FAQs to answer those questions on the front side?

Jesse Dolan: So now everybody’s calling, I’ve just seen you implement these things. I’ve seen you coach clients on these things. And then, like I said, we’ve talked a lot about it. And I think that, ultimately, does help drive a better business for you as the business owner to operate. But then back to me, if you will, on the SEO side, that’s where it gets really exciting. And just the quarter by quarter or every year, whatever this phasing, because SEO never stops. We know that. So when you start a new relationship with a client and an agency together, it’s natural to have these conversations. What would you say you do here? And what kind of business do you want and what kind of content? But then once you do that, and like you said earlier, you plot out these goals and maybe timelines, let’s say you hit that or close enough to it to be successful.

Jesse Dolan: Well then you got to do that again for next year or next quarter or next six months, whatever it is, what’s the new topic? What’s the new thing? And it’s this repetitive cycle that, I think, if you’re not prepared for that, as a business owner, again, it’s more of a linear path than a cycle and it fizzles out and maybe you think SEO didn’t work or your agency thinks you’re a horrible business owner and doesn’t want to work with you or whatever. There’s got to be a way for that to loop back around, engage your team. What are they hearing? Right? I think, just if it was you Bob, you’re still the filter for all that, or some higher levels are to disseminate all this and bring it together. You don’t want this free for all with 85 people in the kitchen trying to cook the meal together, that’s that’s going to be horrible.

Jesse Dolan: But, I think you just somehow to phrase it and project it, closing that loop once you’re scaling, once it’s working and you have some steam to go back to the beginning again, ask those questions, see if anything changes. And there’s always something new, always something new to add. So, anything else you want to add Bob again from business owner, your role and successful SEO with the asterisks of working with an agency or a team, not doing it all yourself. Anything else coming to mind you want to share?

Bob Brennan: No. Just try to stay engaged. Even if you’re delegating some of this to somebody, be involved in those meetings with the SEO agency, even for half the meeting. So you’re seeing things and then just make sure there’s a certain level of accountability for the results, that you can measure the results. And we’ve had, Jesse, you and I have had a lot of clients that, one of them actually confessed today that, who far outperforming their full-time marketing person in their company. And they’re a little threatened and they should be. They should know more about us, or not us, but marketing and their business and stuff, than we do. And we’re outperforming quite a bit, probably three or four to one.

Bob Brennan: And we don’t have benefits and we don’t have company cars and everything that goes with it. So stay engaged, make sure that you’re, again, if you’re delegating it, if it’s overwhelming, if it’s confusing, that’s okay. It’ll eventually all start to make sense where it’s performing and you’ll start to see the metrics and understand it. Is it the only thing you should obviously focus on in terms of marketing? No, but it’s a lot bigger stake for everybody than you realize.

Jesse Dolan: And it should have a permanent seat at your board table, if you will. Metaphorically speaking? SEOs not a thing you just sprinkle on once and move on. It’s part of your marketing going forward.

Bob Brennan: I would think if you’re over, I don’t know what the revenue model would be, but I would think if you’re over $2,000,000, you almost want to one point person, that’s all they’re doing. They’re either doing it themselves or they’re working with an agency and that’s literally all they’re in. So it’s my two cents.

Jesse Dolan: Or the bulk, vast bulk of our time, right, if they’re experimenting in something else, but that’s their core thing. I agree. I think that’s a pretty good number, too, from what we’ve seen at least.

Sue Ginsburg: So Bob, I want to step back and take this up to the 10,000 foot view. What we see with our clients all the time is the business owner that engages and is responsive with us when we’re asking them to review things or asking for input or content, whatever, helps keep our workflow going, which means they’re getting more optimization on a regular basis, getting more content added. And that impact is much stronger than the business owner who doesn’t provide content when we ask et cetera, et cetera. So it’s just really a question of, we’re asking you, the business owner, to help us help your business get more leads.

Jesse Dolan: Stay on the same page, right?

Bob Brennan: And that can be, it’s deep stuff. I mean, we don’t know what they’re struggling with, right? I mean, they might have other crises and stuff, but that also can be an indicator that they just don’t have a vision. So it doesn’t always mean that, obviously. I mean, again, life is what it is, but if they don’t have a vision for what’s coming down the pipe, it’s going to be hard for them to get excited about giving you content, right?

Sue Ginsburg: Make the time to do it.

Jesse Dolan: I think that does go back to the start of the whole investing into it, right? Again, if it’s your personal time or people on your staff or external agencies, whatever it is, and I’m not saying this as the person who’s trying to run an agency, providing SEO and selling SEO, but literally you just can’t view it as a one time thing. It has to be a seat at your table. So what percentage of money or time does it occupy from your budgets, in those respective buckets, that’s going to be dependent on your business? But, if you’re going to do SEO, you’re doing it going forward in some capacity. And I think that investment, to get over that generally speaking is probably the A-one hurdle. And then you have to do everything Bob is saying here, just now you’re engaged, now you’re planning, delegating, keeping it arms length where necessary so you’re not trying to be Superman or Superwoman, but you just got to stay in the mix and guide.

Bob Brennan: The key thing is measuring, right? Okay. So all those other things are the fun, I think, are the fun, fluffy things. It’s easy to fantasize and strategy and all this other stuff, but you’ve got to measure against that and then if it’s not working you’ve got to have the guts to say, “Stop, either it’s you or me.” And then start to explore and look elsewhere or whatever the case is. I’ve personally never had any, and this isn’t any slam on Facebook. I’ve never had success marketing on Facebook. I know there’s people that can do it and do it well. I haven’t found them yet, right? We’ll find them. But ultimately, and that would be true of some of the other social medias, but I’m not ignorant enough to think, okay, it just doesn’t work, but I’m not going to throw money at it until I know somebody can guarantee me results.

Sue Ginsburg: Smart.

Bob Brennan: And then I build on that, right? And that would be true of SEO. That’s just my two cents.

Jesse Dolan: Well, I think with that too, let’s just set guaranteeing of results. So in your mind you would have to have something established, right? And again, back to goals, a plan milestones, whatever. For me, that all fits in that same vein and to your point, Sue, paraphrasing. But if the business owner has these plans and goals, whether they’re robust or super simplistic, but isn’t communicating and sharing and we’re not collaborating with our SEO teams, you’re ultimately going to go in different directions, right? Bob, you may be waking up at night, 3:00 AM with this idea of a service or a product or a niche to get into. But if you’re not communicating that back to the SEO team, they’re just not going to hit those goals that you had in mind that you didn’t share with them either.

Jesse Dolan: But still at that point, it doesn’t matter because it’s been done. Business is not going where you wanted it to go mentally. So as a business owner, come up with these things, everything else. But again, engage, share, communicate, hold people accountable. And your point of measuring is where the rubber really can meet the road on a lot of these things. And measuring isn’t just how many leads, how many calls, how much revenue. It is also back to one of your original points of, these were the seven things we said we were going to do over the next 90 days. And we did three or five or measuring against your results and your goals too, right? Is a part of it we can’t forget about as well.

Jesse Dolan: And yeah, hopefully if you have the right team internally or externally, they’re making all this very easy for you, but you can’t be removed from it. Or if you are, as the owner, one of your top people needs to be taking your place then. Right? You as a person, as a piece on that game board, that peace can’t be removed, but maybe somebody else is controlling it.

Bob Brennan: And then don’t be neurotic obviously with your agencies. I mean, you can’t be changing your mind every five minutes, Jesse, you spend a lifetime doing it.

Jesse Dolan: This is great advice right there.

Bob Brennan: You spend a lifetime dealing with me. Wait, time out here. Squirrel! Just don’t be neurotic. Try to help, stay focused. But yes. Can you change it? Yes. But don’t go nuts with these poor people because they’ll get the job done, but just give them, stay on task, but don’t be switching the game every five minutes. It’s just not going to help anybody.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, it doesn’t work with organic SEO. If you want to do that on some paid ads and figure out that model. Great. Turn that baby on and off and test and chase those squirrels. But from the organic SEO side, you’re right. Those timelines don’t really match up.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Any closing thoughts Bob, from you or we’ll toss it back to Sue.

Bob Brennan: No, and I would just say, whoever’s the three people that are hearing this podcast, no, I’m just kidding. If you have any questions, reach out to me or Jess or Sue, Sue’s the point person, she’s going to definitely be able to help and reach out to me, too, if I need to help. But yeah, if any of this strikes you or if you have any specifics, let us know. I mean, we’d be more than happy to try to help you through whatever.

Jesse Dolan: I’d say too, if you’re, go ahead, Sue.

Sue Ginsburg: Bob, I think another, well you both made this point that I just wanted to make sure is communicated is, we keep talking about the business owner, but depending on the size of the business, it could be the Marketing Department or a point person in the Marketing Department. Whoever it is, we need collaboration with somebody who can provide us good content and be responsive to the things that we’re asking for.

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: And if you are, again, business owner or, Sue, Marketing Manager, like you’re saying, flip it around if your agency or your SEO’s internal/external are not asking for some of these things that we’re saying you should provide, right? If that other end of the spectrum isn’t happening or being challenged to you or asked or communicated, then you’ve got to problem that end, too. So hopefully this is as a business owner, your punch list. Here’s your punch list. Here’s the things you’ve got to do, but this does cut both ways. You should be able to see what we mean on the agency or the SEO person’s side, why they need these things. And if you’re not able to communicate those or have anybody receive this information from you or ask for it, then you’ve got a problem on that end that I would take a look at. And again, to Bob’s point, we’re here for questions or advice, or obviously for hire for any of this, too.

Jesse Dolan: All right, Sue. I think we gave the business owners and managers out there hopefully plenty to chew on and start to guide their business. Did you have any closing thoughts or wrap it up?

Sue Ginsburg: Jesse on the last point that you made, which is fabulous. It reminds me of a business owner who called recently and said they had been working with an SEO agency for two years and hadn’t seen any new content added to the website and they asked me if that was a normal pace. No. That is not a normal pace. I would start asking questions a lot sooner than two years into it.

Jesse Dolan: This doesn’t mean if you hire an SEO, they’re going to be article writers and creative writers, right? But they should have either initiated it or asked you, something on your website should be changing and modifying over the course of two years. That’s for sure. One way or the other.

Sue Ginsburg: Well, thanks for your good insights and information shared there. I think there’s a lot of good stuff in what you said. If you remember one thing and one thing only remember this. SEO is not something that happens by waving a magic wand. Optimizing your website to get found online and to track more leads, which is what SEO does, requires collaborating with your SEO resource. And as Bob said and emphasized, being engaged with the content that we need, whether it’s you, the business owner, or somebody in your Marketing Department, in order to get and keep your website optimized. We’re just asking you to play your role as the expert on your business so that we can play the role as the SEO experts.

Sue Ginsburg: And as Michael Jordan said, successful SEO requires teamwork and working that way you can win championships, which in the case of the business is attracting more leads and clients online. And that’s what we want to help you do. Going back to the court of the day, Michael Jordan didn’t exactly say successful SEO requires teamwork, but he would if he understood SEO. He said, “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships,” and that’s what we, at Intrycks want to help you do, doing it with SEO.

Jesse Dolan: Teamwork makes the dream work.

Sue Ginsburg: I like that.

Jesse Dolan: So where this wasn’t a direct question somebody sent in, still a question that we’ve encountered. And this came up on our onboarding these new clients. Hopefully helps some of you out there listening. If you do have a question on this topic that you’d like us to dive deeper on, any other topic related to SEO and digital marketing, we’d love to hear it from you. And we can talk about it here on the show and hopefully solve some problems for you and everybody else who didn’t ask that question, but is probably facing it. If you’ve got something in mind, please let us know, go on to localseotechs.com, scroll down to the bottom, click the button to submit a question. You can type it in and we’ll use it on the show. If you’re so inclined to call it in and leave it as a voice recording, we’d love to get that.

Jesse Dolan: We’ll play it on the show, give you the chance, do a little shout out, give it a little exposure to your business as well. And then we’ll also send you off either a free Intrycks t-shirt or a hat, which I am modeling here in the episode. And as we are having fun doing, we will point out it is a gray hat because we’re not black hat SEO. We’re not white hat SEO. We are smack in the middle of gray hat SEO, which by the way, anybody who’s doing SEO pretty much is, too because most SEO in general is technically against Google’s guidelines, which we’ve talked about before. So, either way, you want some free swag, we got a problem we can help you with, let’s get those two intersected. Go to localseotechs.com, dot at the bottom, submit a question. We’ll take it from there.

Jesse Dolan: Bob, thanks for all the amazing insight. Sue, thanks for the questions and the insight as well, as usual. Everybody else, thanks for tuning in.

Sue Ginsburg: See you.