Ep. #1073 - Turning SEO into Leads

Matt DeCoursey 0:01
And we’re back. We’re back for another episode of Startup Hustle, Matt DeCoursey. Here to have another conversation, I’m hoping helps your business grow. S E O, what does that search engine optimization. That’s what it actually stands for. But what it should stand for is something that puts leads traffic revenue, something into your pocket and your bank account. SEO is great when it turns into something useful. That’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode, which is powered by full scale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult and Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably and has the platform to help you manage that team. Visit full scale.io. To learn more. With me today, I’ve got Julian gold, and Julian is the CEO and founder of the gold the agency, you can go to Julian gold d.com. Don’t worry about trying to spell that just scroll on down to the shownotes. Click that link, you can get some perspective about what he does, you can click the FullScale.io link when you’re down there. Now Julian is actually from Manchester, England, but he’s calling from the other side of the planet straight out of Thailand today, Julian, Welcome to Startup Hustle.

Julian Goldie 1:12
Thanks for having me.

Matt DeCoursey 1:14
Yeah, I’m looking forward. I’m looking forward to this topic. It’s it’s interesting. And you know, before we get into into the meat and potatoes here, how about a little bit about your backstory?

Julian Goldie 1:26
Sure, yes. So for me, well, you know, I first got into SEO, because a few years ago, I graduated from uni and I was ready to start climbing the corporate ladder. The only problem was, I got fired from my first few jobs wasn’t a great start. So after that, I started looking for opportunities, and went out of my best friends to Thailand, for the first time ever in my life, I had a great holiday. But when we came back with a combination of the UK, food UK, wherever, if you know, you know, you know, fish and chips in England, I guess it gets pretty boring quickly. So after that, we have the holiday balloons big time, you might be saying, well, that’s a nice story. But what does that have to do with SEO? Well, after that point, we set it back to me said right, within one year, we want to be out back in Thailand, running the online business with the freedom to live and work anywhere in the world. And actually happened. And seven years later, I’ve got a link building agency, with over 50 people made made over two and a half million dollars for SEO, published a couple of best selling books, but one go on about my accomplishments too much.

Matt DeCoursey 2:41
Well, I mean, it’s important to know what what what we’re good at and what we’re not, you know, SEO has been, as is always a hot topic, it’s changed so much. And you know, before we hit record, I was telling Julian about a section I wrote in my book, million dollar bedroom about some SEO stuff we did. And this is like 2009 2010, we made a ton of money doing it. And then we didn’t make a ton of money doing it because Google dropped the hammer on us. And what was referred to as the Panda and Penguin updates, where we got punished not for one thing, but to and it just obliterated that website, it was never coming back. So you know, I did find that we felt a little better about it, because we had made a lot of money. But I’ll tell you, once you get something like that going when they snatch it away from you, it’s not a good feeling. So when we talk about SEO, man, there’s like so many different things like where do we start?

Julian Goldie 3:39
That’s it. I mean, for us the way that I usually explain it to people, you know, people, especially business owners looking for results. It’s a there are hundreds of ranking factors with Google, but you have to simplify and sort of look at what gets 80% of the results was 20% of the work. And when I look at it, it always comes down to three things, keywords, content, and backlinks. And I know as entrepreneurs like we always want to do more to solve a problem. And that means potentially more content, more links, more people more tender gourd is what schema blah, blah, blah. But actually, the formula is very simple if you stick to the elements that have the biggest impact.

Matt DeCoursey 4:21
Yeah, I agree, I found the same thing. And you know, one of the things I noticed is when and for those, I’m going to take this down to like, like below 101 level. When you build a webpage, there are a number of different things that are on the page that you see. And then there’s stuff on the page that you don’t see there’s just little things encoded, that helps a search engine or a crawler what goes around and find shit all over the internet. It helps you know what’s on the page. So you have like a page title, a page description, there’s like a couple key fields and I find that a lot of people really are just bad at even knowing that. Now there’s a lot of tools and stuff that go and things like WordPress and people are a lot better at Now, but if your page isn’t named appropriately, a search engine is gonna have a hard time finding it.

Julian Goldie 5:07
Absolutely, yeah, that’s the thing. And it’s the basics right? Getting the basics right, building your website on good foundations and going from there. And actually, like you say, these days, there are more tools than ever to help you rank like, I’m sure most business owners listening to this already know about chat, GBT is an AI tool that was released last month. But with tools like that, you can do amazing things with SEO. The almost feels like, you know, going back 10 years ago, back then you had a lot of you saw a lot more penalties, you had like manual action penalties, where Google would manually go through your site and review it now and manually. And if you’re doing something a bit cheeky or a bit naughty, that give you a Google slap. But these days, you don’t even hear about manual action penalties for five or 10 years. And then you’ve got the tools, it’s easier than ever to hire people online to do SEO for you. And all the information you need to learn how to rank is out there for free already, you just have to take action on it, right? You’ve got YouTube, you’ve got Amazon, for everything you need.

Matt DeCoursey 6:15
Yeah, and you’re talking about the content. I mean, keep in mind that so that I’m not trying to just shell for my book, million dollar battery. But I did put a section in there about some of these basic things. And I encourage people to think like a search engine, which is just basic kind of logic, right? And remember, a search engines job is to put the user out on the best info or experience possible. And that comes down to content. And, you know, when we go back to 2009, out, man, I’ll tell you, I remember building websites for myself and working on for other people. And I swear, creating the content for the website took longer than building the damn site. And you know, it’s a lot easier to do stuff like that, but you know, make your page experience good. And, and use and make it load fast. And these are basic things like these are this kind of on page optimization that includes things like title tags, the meta description, header tags, and that’s just a search engines know what they want. Now, with that, you mentioned your specialty is more along the lines of Link building is let’s, let’s let’s, you know the basics of that. And Google is obviously kind of that so that the founders of Google were research scientists, more or less, and they had to determine how does a page how does a page rank higher than another page? So being research scientists, they see, oh, well, all these articles have all these footnotes in the annotations and things and they must have a lot of street cred because of that. So when the the way the Google algorithm algorithm was originally built, had a term called PageRank, which wasn’t the page it was Larry, Larry, or pages that was named Larry, Larry, would rank it had a ranking based on like the authority of the links that were coming in. And some sites were more powerful than others, because they had more authority. They were they had more street cred. So links were the, you know, like the overall driver and a lot of that, and that still seems to be the case, it doesn’t seem like any of the things we’ve mentioned, or linked or linking has changed at all, though. There are different kinds of links, and some of them are actually kind of worthless, because they have a tag on them called nofollow.

Julian Goldie 8:32
Yeah, I mean, the way that I see it with Link Building to really simplify it, Google’s kind of like a voting system. And the more backlinks here, aka votes, which is just the literally the clickable text from one website to another. So when you click the link, and it takes you to another page, these are like votes to say that your content is good, and the more backlinks here, and the more relevant and authoritative those links are, the higher you’re going to rank on Google. So quite often, the solution is just to get more backlinks that are higher quality, and that will lead to higher rankings. And these days, if you google anything, you see the top ranking sites usually have the most backlinks, typically they have the best content as well. But backlinks are a huge influence. And I know, a few years ago now, a Tresidder hrs.com, they did a case study of over 1 billion websites. And they found that 91% of those websites got zero traffic. So all that time the site spent creating content hiring writers publishing content was totally wasted. Because no one ever saw that content. They didn’t build links to him. I think this is where most people fall down with SEO. Like it’s very easy to publish content. But it’s hard to get the backlinks and most people just publish and pray and hope their content is going to rank It actually requires a lot more than that. And you’ve got to promote it and build links to it.

Matt DeCoursey 10:05
Well, I was gonna say something because you mentioned, it’s easy to say that you’re like, Yeah, you know, you write content, you publish the page, you get all these legs. Well, that but the one thing that you said in there, you said, h ref. So H refs is, is a site, it’s a tool that a lot of people use to see who’s linking and just kind of, I don’t know, it gives you a lot of content suggestions. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there. It’s a pretty common tool for most people that are search engine marketers, but you said something in there, you said 1 billion. There are a billion websites out there people. What are you doing? Yeah, so this is I mean, no competition, right? Julian, there’s only a billion people in line. Now, they’re not all in your line. But man, there’s just like an endless sea of content. So what are you going to do to stand out and what you’re gonna, what you’re gonna go with it? Now you talk about the everything that we’re leading into here? We’re talking about SEO and turning that into leads like, well, there’s a lot of different ways you can I mean, a lead can be defined as a lot of different things in business, like for my business, it’s someone that goes to FullScale.io, and fills out our hire developers form, so our system can match them up with available people. For us. That’s, that’s our, that’s our, that’s our internet conversion past that. It’s kind of up to us as humans to figure that out. But that’s the metric we look at. I think you need to start by defining what you’re actually trying to do with your page or your site. And I’m never Well, I used to be surprised. I’m not any more at how many businesses are bad at kind of understanding what they’re trying to do. Because Are you just, I mean, if you’re just trying to write a blog, so people come and read it. Okay, good for you. That’s pretty easy. And you can look at how many people come to the page and how many people stay. But I mean, shouldn’t we give a little bit of strategy and credence to what we’re trying to accomplish? Before we get into our SEO strategy?

Julian Goldie 11:58
Absolutely. Like, it’s all good and well getting the traffic. But if you can’t convert it into either leads, customers or revenue, then what’s the point? Right, like, it’s the same. What SEO does is it solves the problem of getting traffic getting leads, and no matter what anyone tells you getting traffic to an internet business is really hard. So SEO is really powerful for that. But at the same time, if your website is not set up to convert that traffic into either leads or sales, then you’re gonna have a tough time. And, and one of the most important parts of SEO is keyword research. And it’s really figuring out right, what are people typing into Google? Can I realistically rank for that? But not only can I rank for it? Is it going to convert into sales, or leads or you know, at least opt ins onto my email list that you can convert later into sales? You would hold

Matt DeCoursey 12:55
an example, let’s use an example real quick to link because this, I think you’re really on the gold here. And sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. But But I think this is important for listeners, because people go and they build a new site or a new page, and they have unrealistic expectations about what their SEO can do. And like say they sell blue jeans, right? People have been selling Bluejeans on the internet since the internet came out. And there are big players and big brands and sites and pages that have a shit ton of links already going to them. That might not be a realistic term now. And one of the things that when I mentioned in 2010, I was in the ticketing business then. And we managed to rank number one for the term Justin Bieber tickets, which was really hard. It was really hard right? Now, we didn’t do that. We didn’t do that. ethically. I’m very open about that. We did that through what are called black hat tactics, which were building links a lot of links from a lot of places that were later frowned upon. But you look at something like the term Justin Bieber tickets, it was the How would if you came and told me you’re like, hey, I want to build a page, I want to build a site and I need to rank number one for Justin Bieber tickets, I’d be like, Get out of my office, you don’t have a chance.

Julian Goldie 14:18
Money for you? That’s a question did not

Matt DeCoursey 14:20
know it’s funny. It’s funny, because that that kid didn’t do a tour the whole time. We were ranked number one. I actually wrote about it in the book, because that was before cloud servers. And I was worried because we were making a lot of money from the site. And I was worried that if Bieber announced a tour, it would crash our site for days and it probably would have because that was back when that would happen you know regularly and you’d you’d listen to like radio talk show hosts and be like, we’re not gonna say the website because we don’t want to crash the server. But that was a real thing. So yeah, but no, I didn’t get I got a ton of traffic from it, which probably brought attention to the site can First in the browser history, but no, that wasn’t a that wasn’t. That wasn’t a real revenue generator for us. But it could have been still hard to get number one on that.

Julian Goldie 15:10
Yeah, can imagine this only become more competitive now? Oh, yeah. Use those black hat tactics as well.

Matt DeCoursey 15:18
Yeah, there was a thing out at the time, I don’t know if so there’s Paul and Angela links. And they would give you a packet every month. So you pay like 50 bucks or something. And you’d get at the first of the month, you’d get a new, you get a new set of of websites that you could go in and what they were, they were all profile links. So you could go to like Carrie Underwood’s fan club site and set up an account, and you’d have a little bio page and it would say about me, and you just put three links on it. There were like Justin Bieber tickets, Justin Bieber concert, it’s something else. And yeah, and we and so that is an example of Blackhat tactics. And that’s the kind of shit that Google drops the hammer on and doesn’t want you to do that. I remember another thing during the time JC Penney’s, who was a major retailer in the US was paying college kids to insert to publish articles on their.edu sites. And they have links going back. And that was a manual penalty that Google found out about and penalize them hard. They went from number one for blue jeans. That’s why I use that as an example to like, page 100. And it was so impactful, the penalty that the stock price of JC Penney’s went down 50% in a day, because they weren’t getting all that free traffic anymore. And that was majorly impactful. But that was an example of like cheating, it used to be a lot, I mean, there was a lot of shit you could do back then that

Julian Goldie 16:49
you can get away with so much back then that’s the thing.

Matt DeCoursey 16:52
Well, you can also get penalized for it too. And you still can. But like I said, we did really well on the front side of the penalty. And then I went from like getting hundreds of 1000s of visits a day to none, over a 10 day period, not none. But I mean, it was nominal, like I went from like, like a five and six digit organic traffic number to almost nothing in a week and a half.

Julian Goldie 17:18
Or the interesting thing with SEO as well. And let you say with that company that lost 50% of the share price, because it was getting so much traffic previously for free. Which is crazy, because normally to get traffic to get a lot of traffic like that at scale that converts, if you wanted to do it through ads, you’re constantly worrying about budgets, getting your accounts banned, say on Facebook or AdWords, you might have a media buyer that’s causing all sorts of problems, or it’s difficult to manage or it’s not performing their job. And these things take up like 20 30% of your mental energy as a business owner plus, it eats into your profit margins, right. Whereas when you start getting that free traffic from SEO, and it’s driven 24 hours a day, even if you switch the ads off, you’ve still got traffic coming to your site, all of a sudden, that’s a massive competitive advantage. And your profit margins are way higher than most people.

Matt DeCoursey 18:19
Well, the thing is, is with that penalty that didn’t just affect JC Penney, that those things trickle across an entire site. So you can you can have like, and that’s one of the things that I think is, is important when we talk about SEO and into leads and and you know, you want to work with rep people that have a reputable long term outlook for your site and your brand. Because I’m telling you, once you once you get that stain of the penalty like that, that particular website, we ended up just shutting it down later. Because the it’d be once that penalty was out, there was nothing we could do. We cleaned up the mess. We had duplicate content, we had bad links, we have everything. It was just like, I mean, we just turned it off. But you know, there are people that run into that, that sometimes will hire SEO agencies or they use they just don’t really know they get a little I think they get a little greedy. When you talk about link building and how that’s changed Google. I mean, one of the penalties that I don’t even know what penalty we got, we were doing everything you weren’t supposed to do, like and so so when it comes to backlink building, how do you get these links to land and you know, I want you to answer that question, but let me do some work for myself. Real quick. I want to remind everyone that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is brought to you by full scale.io hire developers, testers leaders do it quickly and affordably full scale.io Okay, so building backlinks isn’t easy. I get about 15 emails a day from people that want to publish something on One of my blogs or something? I don’t know, dude, I can’t I get so many of them. I don’t pay attention to them because they’re just annoying. I’m sure someone goes for those. And maybe that’s just a numbers game. But how do I get how do I go about getting a high quality backlink?

Julian Goldie 20:18
Yeah, I mean, the first thing to say is isn’t easy. Right? So, I would say valuable. Yeah. I mean, 65% of marketers struggle with Link Building and say it’s the hardest part of SEO it’s is the biggest this a Big Daddy Kane of SEO now? I don’t know what that really means. But I wanted to use it today. So job completed. But uh,

Matt DeCoursey 20:42
basically, Big Daddy Kane reference was that yeah,

Julian Goldie 20:45
that was a big difference. Yeah.

Matt DeCoursey 20:49
I’m old enough to have less than two Big Daddy Kane, like when he was like an emerging artists. So yeah, I feel your person.

Julian Goldie 20:58
Keep going. So with link building, the way that you want to get backlinks, and this is what works for us is that we do outreach. And that sounds fancy, but always doing is just reaching out to other websites and asking them to lead to us via cold email. And to do that, you just need a list of websites you want to back and from. Typically, what we do is we just steal links from our competitors websites. So we look at our competitors, see who’s linked to them, chances are they’ve linked to our competitors. They’ll link to us too. If they’ve linked to our clients, competitors, then they’ll link to our clients as well. And then what we’ll do is we’ll run our outreach campaign, send a ton of emails, and it is a numbers game, like I say, because there’s so many people doing it. But the website is set will add link typically reply and say, right, sure, we can build a link to your site. But obviously, it’s going to cost more time to go into the site to add your link, after change some content, how much you’re going to pay me. And you just pay the bribe. And then you get the backlinks. And I think in the SEO industry, we pretend like it’s this big, dark secret. And link building. It’s this really technical complicated thing. But actually, it’s not it’s just

Matt DeCoursey 22:21
a broad though you to refer to that as abroad, that’s you’re gonna cover my costs.

Julian Goldie 22:26
Yeah, I mean, it depends which way you look at it. But I mean, that’s just the way that

Matt DeCoursey 22:30
I say on the broad thing, I could go either way I could go, I could argue on both sides, I do a red team or Blue Team on that. But But with that, like, here’s the thing, if you want people to help you, you need to make it easy for people to help you. I’d say that a lot. I know that sounds like a really general statement. But you’re right, like if you want to link on my site. So you know that that’s where a lot of the approach comes, they’ll offer to write an article, which you know, what that might be value, if it’s a good article that might be value for your site. And with that, I want to put a link in it. Okay, that’s fair. And if you just want a link somewhere, so that’s the ones I get as they pick articles of mine. So the full scale.io blog has, I don’t know, 800 900 articles that we’ve written over the last five years, I get probably 100,000 visits a month from it. Get a lot of traffic from that. I mean, I’m still an SEO guy at heart. I don’t I don’t get down into the weeds as much like with the link building and other other things. But yeah, so the reach out or find an article, they just like, hey, will you link to me on this now? Oh, man, because there’s one more thing for me to do. Yeah, and here’s the thing, the $20 that you’re offering me, also not worth my time. So you got to find a way to get that happy medium, but I’m not opposed to the to the transactional nature of it, because time is money. And like I said, I mean, that’s fair. I think for me, it’s the sloppy approach. I get really, really poorly written emails that are offering to write an article for my site. In exchange for a link. I’m like, you can’t even write an email. I want you to write an article in my blog.

Julian Goldie 24:12
So that’s cool for me. Yeah.

Matt DeCoursey 24:15
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you can post it Well, yeah. So okay, so when were you mentioned there’s like, hundreds. So you talked about turning Well, okay. So we’re back into SEO and turning that into leads. I’m going to talk about landing pages and that experience for a little bit, because I think that a lot of people get really focused on, okay, whether it’s SEO or CPC ads, or whatever, if you drive someone to a dogshit page, they’re gonna leave. Right? And so you can do a great job of driving traffic and a terrible job of generating leads or creating a good user experience. When am I right about that?

Julian Goldie 24:53
100% That’s it. You’ve got to set up your website for conversions. You need a solid funnel in place and Whatever type of traffic you get into your website, it doesn’t matter if your website is not set up to convert, right? So, and that is a big learning curve in itself, because it’s not just having a lot of good business, or have you got a decent amount of traffic, it’s Deena how to quickly turn that traffic, and you only get a few seconds really, to take that person from cold traffic into a lead or a sale. And, and that requires a lot of time and a lot of refining. It’s a certain skill, right?

Matt DeCoursey 25:30
Yeah, and I like to say this is easy to remember people I say lead with the need. Okay. So like when I, if, for example, once again, I saw, we sell software developed technical services. So a landing page for us might be hire expert developers quickly and affordably. Okay, because that’ll be right at the top. And that might get your attention. Now, you may have pages that are, for example, one of the things we’re kind of rolling out is we’re expanding our content across our website to have pages that are more specific to specific types of technology. PHP developers, so my header should be higher, higher vetted PHP developers, right? And you know, you can be be hyper specific about that, if there’s a problem you solve, put it at the top, I think people try to use too many words. You know, like, look, we’re in this, like Tic toxified culture, I spent my morning creating 23 second videos, you know, and and I used to have to make them 23 minutes. So I’m okay with that. But keep in mind, like, like Julian said, you have a moment, you have a moment, like how many think put yours empathize, put yourself in your own shoes. And I had like what I call the flashcard test, where you just kind of flash a card and then turn it back, like do that with your own page, like, look at it for two seconds, and then say, What do you remember? What do you take from this page? Show it to someone else? And like, so you got to put that up top? Yeah, like a lot of people are picking on funnel tactics these days, because some of them are a little tired, but I still think they work. You know, your goal is to get people to move forward and a process. So make that process as short as possible.

Julian Goldie 27:22
Absolutely, that’s it, you’ve got to lay say, a great headline helps, first of all, benefit driven. And then you’ve got the basics of conversion rate optimization, right? So for example, optimizing your page, see what everything above the fold, like the main offer above the fold. And even the design itself can make a huge difference, right? Like, we’ve tested designs on the same page, we have a free book funnel on our website. And I think originally when I created that page, a couple of years ago, it was getting like a five or 10% opt in rate. After just tweaking and testing it every single day for about a month. Eventually, we got to a 40% opt in rate. And the beauty of that is like once it’s set up, even two or three years later, it’s still converting at the same amount.

Matt DeCoursey 28:13
What kind of changes did you make? Like what did you find that were obvious? I’ll go first. Really loud, obnoxious colors that aren’t easy on the eyes. Now a great landing page?

Julian Goldie 28:26
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I will say My website is orange. So I don’t know. But one thing I will say is like, it looks clean. It looks clean when people go on. So that depends

Matt DeCoursey 28:38
on what you sell. But yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s kind of crazy with it. What what? So what did you change or improve over the over the iteration period that led to years of evergreen success? And by the way, I want to keep that word evergreen, you get some pages that do well, and then you get them set up. These are digital assets, that you should continue to improve and shine and polish over time. But they they are assets, they’re going to drive leads and you know, so I’m curious to hear what what you what you did not well, and then later did well?

Julian Goldie 29:11
Yeah, absolutely. So like I say it’s an asset. And it’s a system once it’s set up, and then you can keep improving it from there. But for us, like I set up a video on there that was just kept tweaking the scripts on that. Changing the headline made a big difference, adding more social proof to the page. And originally, it was quite a long page.

Matt DeCoursey 29:36
So let’s define social proof for everyone by giving an example.

Julian Goldie 29:40
Yes, so if I remember correctly, it was a couple of years ago when I created that page, but it’s just like a few testimonials from previous clients talking about my link building expertise. And yeah, that made a big difference. Definitely. And then, like the way that the page is designed As the main offer is above the fold, select the video, the download button, the headline, the sub header and the description are all above the fold. So you don’t have to do any scrolling as soon as you go on the page.

Matt DeCoursey 30:16
About above the fold, so where I like to define things, because I think not everyone’s experience with a lot of the stuff that lessons but above the fold is what you see on the page without needing to scroll. It’s the equivalent of the top half of a folded newspaper is where that term came from. So you can they don’t put the headline at the bottom of the front page is the point on the newspaper. Do people still read newspapers? Or I feel like there’s a there’s a 21 year old hopeful entrepreneur. There’s an 18 year old hopeful entrepreneur out there that listens regularly, it’s going What the fuck is a newspaper? Matt? So

Julian Goldie 30:54
yeah, is that something to do with tick tock?

Matt DeCoursey 30:57
Yes, it is. I think it is. Maybe that’s what I’ll do a tick tock. After about I’ll just read the newspaper to people. I’m sure that’ll be a big hit. Yeah, yeah, there was one thing you mentioned. And that’s a video, you know, videos, videos, the thing, there’s people that will watch your video that won’t read a word on your page. I think you got to have both?

Julian Goldie 31:18
Absolutely. Yeah. If you’re good on camera, and that makes a big difference. So if you’ve got a professional setup, makes a huge difference in how you perceive. You know, if you’ve got

Matt DeCoursey 31:30
no I agree, professional camera. For those of you listening, if you’re hearing crazy things in my speaker, my house is under construction right now. So I’m battling with my mute button. I apologize if that’s, that’s distracting. But yeah, go ahead.

Julian Goldie 31:46
And then also, you’ve got the front of the offer, right? So you’ve got the landing page, or the copy people see on that, then also, you’ve got the back end, which is what happens after people opt in. And it’s a full system, right? So for us, it wasn’t just about, okay, it’s great to get 40% opt in rate on that book page. But it doesn’t matter if you don’t convert those leads in sales at some point, right? So for us straight after someone opts in for that book, they get directed to booking a sales call with us. And if even if they don’t take the office straightaway, then they get emails every single day after that, leading them to different pieces of content. And eventually, they’ll convert we’ve had some clients, for example of Facebook ads, who they signed up three months ago. And then three months later, they put in a $4,000 offer, with us monthly, so so as long as you nurture those leads, and you keep them warm, then eventually they’ll convert into sales. If you have a good funnel.

Matt DeCoursey 32:54
Yeah, I want to talk about I think people get the funnel wrong to a lot of you know, I’m not a big fan of the like just general contact form that some people will get, and then they and then they start sending out emails afterward trying to get people to come back to the site. Like remember, they’re the best time to get info action, anything from a web site visitor as while they’re already there. And there are adequate tools out there for you to put all that stuff on the page, you know, I’m the founder of giga book.com, we make an embeddable booking widget. So like if your goal is to have an appointment, embed an appointment option in there, you know, like some people, like I said, they’ll go try to collect these contact forms and then they entered this nurture campaign are trying to get people to come in. Look, you’re just I’m just telling you, you’re gonna have more success. If you put everything on there. It’s like, Hey, I’m already here. So I get the Full Scale site. For us I mentioned our win as is. So we have to have in order to give someone a possible solution, or ability to enter the portal that our prospects and clients can use to find talent, we have to ask some questions, it takes under two minutes that used to take five minutes we trimmed it down and trimmed it down and trimmed it down. Now at the very end of that process, because most of those people are interested in creating it and talking to someone about what we do we have the very last step and said hey, why you’re here let’s schedule a time to call all of our good leads do that. And that shortened our sales cycle tremendously and it just removed less stuff because why collect all that information and then just start emailing someone to set up a time to do it all when it’s there. And that’s you know, and once again, the less steps the higher your success rate is, this is not my opinion. This is kind of business science facts at this point. That’s why Amazon is such a monster on the internet with a one touch my, you know, that’s that’s it. So the more steps the And when you get into like a lot of steps, your success rates and conversion and true conversion rates plummet, like if they even exist at any point, what just one more step, just one extra step can can make a huge difference.

Julian Goldie 35:13
Yeah, that makes sense in as well, just from your perspective as a business owner, like, if you have a complicated funnel, it’s going to be such a mess to actually control it. And you’re going to make mistakes along the way, and it’s gonna get very complicated and messy. The best funnels are the simplest ones, right? Yeah, yeah.

Matt DeCoursey 35:31
So let’s talk as we’re running out of time here, and I don’t want to skip over local SEO, because I think when it comes to leads, especially for small local businesses, like Full Scale is an international company, I can serve as people that are all over so like, I local Google listing doesn’t do a whole lot of good for me outside of my hometown. But I think that this is something that for a ton of local small businesses, they need to do a better job without I’m just talking about like the Maps listing, you need to you need your business needs to be able to found be found on Google. And with that, when you go in to fill that out, you need to fill up all the spots that they give you. Some people will just put their info in, they put their business, their address and their phone number. They don’t put any pictures. They don’t put any descriptions. They don’t add, like if Google is giving you an option to fill something out on those, fill it out. If you have an empty spot, go figure out how to get something and put it back in. Because I’ll tell you right now, Google doesn’t like incomplete listings on that stuff. But as local SEO and those like, I don’t know, man, you put something in you want to find something that’s near you, this can be a huge driver, and that’s free.

Julian Goldie 36:44
And usually less competition. Yeah, that’s definitely not competing with a billion websites.

Matt DeCoursey 36:51
Yeah. And that’s I mean, and that’s, I mean, that’s, that’s the whole purpose of of a lot of that. But yeah, have you had any do you have do you? Do you mess with that at all?

Julian Goldie 37:01
So we don’t set up Google Maps listings, we do have some clients who are localized, and they have regional stores everywhere, all at especially in the US. And the link building strategy still works really well. We’ve tested it in terms of doing outreach for local plants, they still get really good rankings with that. But my own experience, I did actually set up a Google Maps listing for my friend back home in England. He’s a tree surgeon, and literally within a few hours and setting that up, he was ranking for a tree surgeon in Lancaster. It’s crazy how it works.

Matt DeCoursey 37:40
Yeah, like I said, for smaller, localized businesses, that I mean, that’s a key ingredient that’s free that can any there’s, there’s I mean, there’s if that’s also an important thing, because there’s probably a lot of businesses without that. I don’t know, it’s a big driver. It’s a big driver, and it’s free. You don’t want to you don’t want to look over that. Okay, so as we, as we, you know, end our app, our time here, like, and we look back at like SEO and leads, I mean, what are some of the things like if you have to give a rapid fire minute summary of we talked about a lot of stuff, what where does someone listening start, like, where do I start? What are the most important things and what can I maybe leave for later?

Julian Goldie 38:24
Sure. So especially when it comes to SEO, Don’t over complicate it, simplify, focus on the three things that make the biggest biggest difference, which are keywords, content, and backlinks. And particularly backlinks doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge. It just requires you to send a few cold emails to the websites you want to backlink from. And if you do that, you’ll be ahead of 65% of marketers, and 91% of websites. And you get high rankings. And from there, it’s just a case of setting up a good funnel that converts and optimizing it to drive more leads and sales.

Matt DeCoursey 39:08
Once again, with me today is Julian Goldie, there’s a link to Julian’s website in the shownotes go down there and give it a click. Finding people that can help you do this stuff and get it done correctly and quickly is so much easier than going out there and trying to do it yourself. It really is there’s I don’t know there’s things that work and there’s things that don’t this is a while I think in conclusion for me I look back at SEO which I’ve been a part of for 15 years now. There’s so much stuff that’s just exactly it feels exactly the same as it was 15 years ago and then there’s things that have evolved and changed and mainly for the good you know there’s the cutting down on exploitive tactics but really in the end I mean the the main stuff you know you have a properly named page have good content on IT Optimize the page, like don’t have a slow aspx page, No one sits around and waits for that Google doesn’t like it either. You know, content creation, be creative, do something to stand out people, no one wants to go to your boring web page. No, I think so many people are almost too obsessed with being professional. Be a real person. Like often, authenticity is trading at an all time high right now, folks, and I think that you’ll find that if you’re authentic in your approach to your business, and you and especially if you have the kind of business where your clients feel like they relate to you be yourself, just be yourself, you know, and not everyone’s gonna like, yeah, it’s okay, I got over that, like, a long time ago, look at the local stuff. If you don’t feel comfortable with the technical side, reach out to someone like Julian get some help. And then just, I mean, I think just, I want to, I think the key ingredient is try to cultivate and grow digital assets. You know, like, in order to do that, you’re gonna need to use Google Analytics or some other things to figure out where your traffic’s coming from where you’re getting conversions. But those are your most valuable pages. Like I mentioned, having 900 blog articles, there’s about 30 of them that give us 80% Of all the traffic, and we go and that’s normal, that’s normal. So we go back and improve them and we’ve made some, you know, videos about that pages topic and then go back and put those in and, you know, you see those conversion rates and traffic click up and remember, search engines are a business. So I’m a big believer of it’s easy to and I use YouTube all I want to, I like Google to see me using their other products. And I think they like that on their pages. So you know, if I make a video, I’ll go put it on YouTube. Even if I’m not planning on getting a ton of visits@youtube.com I’m dead on my page and end up doing better. Anyway, it’s it’s a big world out there, folks. I hope I hope you build the links that you’re looking for. Julian, thanks for joining me today.

Julian Goldie 42:03
Thanks very much.