Internet Marketing ROI - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 35

Episode33 min2009-11-06

SEO delivers strong ROI when the average customer value exceeds the monthly optimization cost, but businesses must first track conversions, price services correctly, and prepare their website to convert traffic before investing.

Cover art for Internet Marketing ROI - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 35
Key takeaways
Just because you're doing SEO, maybe you're having a professional company like eWebStyle do it or you're doing it yourself, that doesn't mean you can't, you can stop doing all other marketing.

About this episode

We discuss how to hide text on your webpage. We also discuss Internet Marketing and ROI AKA Return on Investment. We give some specific examples on calculating ROI and making sure you get the best out of your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Find our facebook page at www.e-webstyle.com/facebook. Internet Marketing Dallas. You can now watch our podcasts live on Fridays mornings 9:15CST here

Questions this episode answers

How do I calculate ROI for SEO services?

Start by finding the average value of a new customer, then compare that to the monthly SEO cost. The hosts use a kitchen remodeler example where an average job is $5,000 and SEO costs $400 a month, making the investment clearly worthwhile if even one customer is gained.

What happens if Google finds hidden text on my website?

According to the hosts, Google will ban the site from its index. Hidden text can be created using CSS styling or by making text the same color as the background, and Google may use dedicated bots to find it. Losing indexing means losing all organic traffic.

Is there a penalty for duplicate content in Google?

A Google engineer the hosts reference stated there is no formal penalty, but duplicate pages are simply not included in the index. If two pages differ only by a city name, Google may show one but exclude the other, limiting reach for both targeted locations.

In their words

If I bring you one customer, that's $5,000. You know, you got to pay your employees. You got to do this, but that's $5,000 in revenue. You only know how much profit that is. But I could assume that it's going to bring you more than $400 worth of profit or more than the cost of your optimization.

Paul Hanson

There is no penalty for duplicate text. We just won't include you in our index.

Host

I'll tell you what you need to hear, not really what you want to hear.

Paul Hanson
Terms defined in this episode
Hidden text
Text made invisible to users but readable by search engines, achieved through CSS styling or matching text color to background color. Google can ban sites caught using it.
Duplicate content
Pages or text that are identical or nearly identical across a site or across the web. Google excludes duplicated pages from its index rather than ranking them.
ROI (Return on Investment)
A measure of whether money spent on SEO or other marketing generates more revenue or profit than it costs, calculated by comparing average customer value to monthly service cost.
Content spinning
Rewriting existing content so it is unique enough to avoid being flagged as duplicate, while still covering the same subject matter.
Read the full transcript (6,253 words · 31 min read)

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO eWebStyle podcast number 35. Number 35. Hey, welcome back. Thanks for joining us for number 35 of our 35th fun-filled edition. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, the sales manager of eWebStyle. You like that? I slipped in the number in the whole thing there. Yeah, you kind of threw me off there. Well, as always, we like to cover a little bit about what we did last time. Last time, we talked about Texas Orthopedics. We did some analysis on them. We were going through, we're actually going to finish that today because we have two more points of the seven points of SEO fundamentals and how they relate to TOSM.org. So we'll do that. Go back and listen to that podcast. It's great. We actually answered two questions last time. Nate Dogg. Nate, D-O-double-G. We answered his question, and it was a great question. They were actually kind of similar. Those are also Joe Orsak's question. Remember, Joe, we interviewed with ImprovedMyCreditUSA.com, and Joe just had a couple of follow-up questions, and so we answered those, and those were really good. So go back and listen to Podcast 34 to get all that exciting information. News for the day. What's in the news today? Let's start with the balloon. Go, Falcon, go! Go, or hide, Falcon, hide! Or learn how to interview on national TV. Yeah, no, lie, Falcon, lie. There you go. Yeah, lie, Falcon, lie. That's good. Yeah, so this is the big balloon chase across Colorado, I think it was. So what was that, a Mylar balloon or something? It had to be made out of Mylar. Yeah. It looked like it, or foil. Yeah, and then I even saw, you didn't see, I saw a video of it taking off, and the dad was all distraught because the mom wasn't holding the tether like she was supposed to. And then later, apparently, they were supposed to have learned from the other kids that the one kid, Falcon, had

actually, who names their kid Falcon? Oh, his name is Falcon? Yes. I thought that was the name of the thing. That's a kid's name. Oh, man, that's terrible. Unless you're listening and your name is Falcon, then that's cool because you listen to the podcast. In case you're not following this, some family created a homemade balloon aircraft and released that bad boy on purpose. And then called 911 and said their son was in it. So there's one interview after the fact, right? So the balloon crashes. You know, and you're right, we have to be mindful of this because, you know, this has made major news here in the U.S. I don't know how prevalent it got outside the U.S. Nobody cares. And a lot of our listeners are actually outside the U.S. We found a website, a Russian website, the other day. We were having, like, Google Translate to figure out, are they saying good things about our podcast? Are they saying bad things? That was cool, though. We found one of our podcasts on a Russian website about internet marketing, maybe? Yeah. I don't know. And we didn't put it there. Yeah. Yeah, because we don't type or speak Russian. Yeah, that's right. So thanks, Russia. Go Russia. Thanks, we appreciate it. Yeah, so this balloon, it finally landed. And after it took off, they called 911 and said, we think our son is inside of it. The balloon, you know, so this is like, they've got, you know, the Navy, they've got NASA involved because this thing's floating at, like, 2,000 feet. It finally lands and there's no boy in it. And my first thought was, oh, my God, the boy fell out. Yeah, that's what I would think. Well, it turns out the boy was actually hiding in the attic. Hiding in the attic. Then in a national interview, they ask him, so did you hear him calling and, you know, your parents calling your name and why didn't you come out? And the kid goes, because you guys, you told me it

was for the show. Oh, busted. All your 6-year-old tells the whole world that this was a stunt. Man. Good job, idiot. That's crazy. That's pretty funny. And this is not like a hot air balloon. This is like a flying saucer. Looking helium balloon. Yeah, helium balloon. And it looks kind of like a flying saucer and it's all silver. It looks really kind of funny. And there are already T-shirts out. The T-shirts are like, go Falcon go or hide Falcon hide. Anyway, that's crazy. The other thing that was big this week is Rush Limbaugh and his bid to be an NFL, at least part owner of an NFL football team. And then being chased off by Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and then apparently Sheila Jackson Lee thought the appropriate place to talk about Rush Limbaugh and his political positions, which she knows nothing about because she knows nothing. Yeah. About anything. Well, Sheila Jackson Lee is our local congresswoman in the city of Houston. This is a woman who will actually phone up the organizer of a funeral and ask to speak at the funeral. Oh, wow. She does that. Not the family. Not the family. Well, I mean, she'll talk to the family because they're usually the organizer, but so she'll go and speak at funerals. Wow. Yeah. She's like... Shameless self-promoter. And none too bright. Oh, my God. Anyway, so she's a congresswoman on the floor in our congress. She interrupts the discussion for health care and says, I just want to point out that Rush Limbaugh, despite what he says on his program, is not the kind of person that we want to own an NFL team. Who cares? Well, everything he says on his program is like, that's who he is. Yeah. That is his public persona. So it actually should be because of everything he says on his program, you either want or don't want him. Yeah. And everyone who says anything bad about Rush, in fact, there was one guy who wrote just this scathing article. All his liberal friends

had told him all this unbelievable stuff that Rush had done, and he wrote this horrible article, and two weeks later apologized. Oh, I didn't know that. Because he actually felt guilty. He listened to the program and realized that all the liberal stuff his friends were telling him and all this horrible stuff had nothing to do with what Rush does on air. So he's got such a negative bend that, from the liberal side, people don't listen to him. They just assume he's bad. Yeah, and that's true. But, I mean, why do some research? I mean, seriously, that takes the fun out of it. You just say whatever comes to mind, and then you apologize for it later. There was one guy who wrote some articles about Rush in this episode, with relation to this particular story, and his source was Wikipedia. Oh, yeah. You told me about that. Are you kidding me? I mean, this is like CNN. Why don't you ask a buddy? Yeah. That's about his credit. Let's ask a friend and quote your friend. You know, there is a better one. Mom. Oh, yeah. My mom told me. Dude, argue with that. That's like the irrefutable source. That's true. You can't argue with that. You can just fight about it. Like, dude, you're telling me my mom's a liar? And then it gets into Yo Mama, and Bigger Than a House, and blah, blah, blah. So, all right. Here we go. So, TOSM.org. This is a website. It's one of our new clients. We're working on them. We haven't actually really started the SEO, because we're doing, you know, if you listen to our podcast, you know we're not just about getting tons of traffic to your website. We're actually about having your website prepared to convert traffic before people get to your website. And so, that's what we're working on first with TOSM.org. What we've started off, we've talked about in the last two podcasts, backlinks, quality site content, good title tags, no JavaScript for content, no frames, and now we're going

to talk about no hidden text. And just to reiterate this, we've got this information from turnerdow.com. He's got an article on SEO fundamentals. We just wanted to change it up. Our fundamentals may be slightly different than somebody else's fundamentals. So, there you go. So, what's first? No hidden text. I think everybody should understand by now, you shouldn't hide text. But I think there could be some people who might be hiding text that just don't know that they're hiding text. Like, the questions that we got last week, I think those, I mean, they obviously knew, okay, is this hiding text? Well, let's be honest. What they knew was, it feels wrong, it feels deceptive. Is Google going to catch me? I mean, that's kind of what the questions were. So, you can go back to our last podcast, number 34, and check that out. And the short answer is, eventually, Google will check you, catch you. And when they do, they just ban your site. That's simple. Easy solution. We'll just ban them. Yeah. Which sucks for you, because now you have no traffic. And so, there are a couple ways to do hidden text. Again, if you look, like last time, you can hear that one of them is with the Cascade style sheets. You can adjust images and text to hide them. That was the Kay Bailey Hutchinson. They were using the CSS. They also used that. Yeah. What was it? Why do we have knees? Why do we have knees? Hidden that in their text behind it. If that sounds intriguing, you need to go back to one of our podcasts, the one on Kay Bailey Hutchinson. I don't know what number that is. Well, you know what? You just need to go listen to all of our podcasts. Listen to all of them all over again. By the way, since we're kind of on our podcasts, you can find us on Facebook. And the easiest way to get to our Facebook page is to go to ewebstyle.com slash Facebook. That will immediately

forward you to our Facebook page. Please become a fan. You can also find us on Twitter, twitter.com slash ewebstyle, and go there for our latest in terms of when our podcasts are up. On Facebook, become a fan because we're going to be making special offers on Facebook from time to time. They're going to be really powerful offers, and by powerful, I mean lots of deep discounts. That's where we're going to offer our deep discounts. So join up, follow us. So get your stalk on, everybody. Stalk us on Facebook and Twitter. Keep sending emails from the U.S. and around the world to podcast at e-webstyle.com. Stay in contact. Stay stalking. Keep your stalker hat on. Keep your stalk on. Get your stalk on. Get your stalk on. So yeah, no hidden text. Cascade style sheets is one way to do that. Another way is, and this is kind of the more typical, is to just kind of have a white background and then change the text to white. And then, of course, white text on a white background would be invisible text. That sounds to me like the one thing that everybody thinks of and like the one thing that Google knows you're going to do. To me, it sounds like the easiest thing to get caught for is using a text color the same color as your background. Yeah. And I don't know if Google has, you know, my kind of theory is maybe Google, and this may be published. If anybody knows, please let us know. Google may have one or two bots out there that are actually specifically looking for hidden text. And so when they find it, they kind of flag it. If somebody looks at it, they ban it, you know, so just don't get caught doing that. Don't do that, especially with, you know, when your business, when you start driving a lot of traffic, you start converting a lot of traffic, you're generating significant income. The last thing you want to do is kind of build up a business

and then have it all go away because Google bans you because you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing. So the short answer, well, I guess the answer, no hidden text. No hidden text. The next one on this list is no duplicate text. And we've talked about this a little bit. Where are some, Paul, kind of off the top of your head, where are some places that you might find duplicate text or some reasons you might kind of naturally put duplicate text on your website? Maybe, here's one example that comes to mind. Let's say if I'm trying to target different cities. One website I know of in particular, you're targeting, let's say you're doing search engine optimization and you want to be found in Houston and Dallas. So you create two separate pages and then you replace Houston on one page and Dallas on the other page. That can be found as duplicate text. Your intentions are good because you're looking for traffic from Houston and also from Dallas, but Google can see that everything else is the same except the word Houston and Dallas. That'd be an example of duplicate text. So then we get into, okay, is there actually a duplicate text penalty or is there not a duplicate text penalty? You know, this is kind of, and we watched a video on this, and I think we talked about it in the podcast, and here's what the guy, one of the engineers from Google says, there is no penalty for duplicate text. We just won't include you in our index. And I'm like, well, I mean, it's not like you're going to give me 20 lashes for duplicates. I mean, that's a pretty significant penalty keeping me out of your index. So what I think he meant is that the duplicated text is not included in the index. So here's another example that would be kind of, the example you gave, great example, it's all on-site. So it's Dallas and Houston, and it's Joe the plumber who happens to have his uncle,

Joe, in the other city, so he's trying to market both at the same time. The other example is, let's say you're a product sales website. One of our clients, they sell phone systems. So they sell, there's a phone system out there called an ESI phone system, and when that new phone system comes out, they go out and they grab the product page and they copy it to their website. That is duplicate content. It's exactly the same as over there. So Google is going to see, okay, we've got this primary content, and in a sense, for our client action communications, that duplicate content is penalized, if you will. If they just duplicate on the same page, so Joe the plumber, if Joe the plumber Houston comes up, okay, that will come up, but it won't display the Dallas because it's duplicate content. And the vice versa, if you did a search in Dallas, the Dallas version may come up, but it won't show the Houston page because it's duplicate content. Remember, in the old days of search engines, you could do a search, and everything on the first page or half of them could be the exact same page, the exact same content, and you realize, okay, well, this sucks. This is not good. And it did. For Google, Google saw that. It sucked. It wasn't good for their clients, so they made changes, and they kind of get rid of duplicate content. So if you're going to have a product page and you're going to copy the product from the manufacturer, copy that page, and usually the manufacturer's okay with that, it's just not good for you. You need to rework that text. Spend some time and go through and change every sentence. Reword it. Maybe throw in some new sentences. Pull out a sentence, whatever. Make sure that it is no longer duplicate content in order for that page to be effective for you from a search engine perspective. I like how you said, spend some time. That's like the key phrase. You know,

there really is no shortcut to SEO. You're going to have to invest in your website. Don't take the shortcut. Don't copy content because you can get caught, and it's not good for your business. So invest the time to do it the right way. So don't copy your competitors or your buddies. You know, everyone uses someone else's website, I guess, as a guideline, but you want to have your own content. Right. And, again, yeah, you can use the content from another website as the guide, but you've got to rewrite it. You can spin it, I guess. Yeah, that's great. That's the term that I've been hearing over the past however long. Spin it. I need to hire somebody to spin some articles. Yeah, spin some articles, spin some content, but have it unique. Well, you know, now that we're talking about time, we decided we were going to talk in this podcast about something that's pretty important and probably pretty salient to everybody out there. However, whenever I notice, whenever I lean back, my voice gets so, I've got to be careful. Remind me. Don't talk when you're back there. Don't lean back. That song, lean back. I was just thinking that, too. Lean back. All right. So, and that's ROI, return on investment, for those of you who have not heard that phrase, ROI, return on investment. And, you know, we are talking about spending time. You know, we've always said we've got a podcast that says getting on the first page of Google is easy, and we've proofed it. We've done it. Go back and listen to that podcast. It's actually easy. It's not rocket science. When you get into more challenging terms, it is time-consuming, right? You need to spend time, and you need to spend effort, and it does need to be reasonably intelligent effort. That's what we're here to do for you, or that's what you're going to have to do. And so you're wondering, maybe you're wondering, you know, I'd love to be on the first page of Google, but

I'm busy running my business, or I'm busy sending out products, or I'm busy hiring people, or, you know, you just don't know where you should be spending your time. And you're wondering, you know, is it worth, I know it's some effort, is it worth the effort? And if you're going to do it yourself, you've got two things of effort. You have, first, you've got to build the knowledge, you've got to gather and garner the knowledge so that you know how to do it, and then you've got to spend the time doing it. And you're wondering, okay, so how do I know if there's any value in that? And you can come to a company like ours where we're reasonably priced, and you can understand our pricing structure pretty quickly. Give us a call, or better yet, you can get a free website analysis. The way you do that is you go to e-webstyle.com. It's still free, right? Yes, it's definitely still free. e-webstyle.com. And then when you get to that homepage, click SEO, and you'll see at the very top, there's a free analysis. You can call us, and we'll get started on that. Or a little bit farther down in that paragraph is a click here, and there's a form, and you can fill out the form. Include your domain name, of course, and we'll do a free analysis. So there are companies like us. There's other companies that do search engine optimization. There are other companies that are quite talented at what they do. They have little different perspectives. They may or may not have a podcast, though. But we do. We do. And that's all that matters. Yeah. So we're known throughout the world for what we do. So now, how do I decide if I'm going to invest in this company? I know, let's say the SEO monthly cost is, I don't know, $400. Okay. Let's just say it's $400 a month. How do I know if I should be spending that? Well, I think that's a great question. I like

that. And I think everyone should ask this question. And here's, when I'm sitting with a client, there's a couple questions that I'll ask. What is the value of an average customer to you, or the average value of a customer to your business? What do you sell the most? And what makes you the most money? Well, you ask those next two questions because sometimes they don't know. They don't know the answer to the first question. Almost every time they don't know. And then they typically do know what they sell the most of. And they typically do know what they make the most money on. And they just don't know if the average client is, you know, 10 of the most, which doesn't make me as much, and one of the most. So you go into that next step. And if you listen to our podcast, those are the fundamental questions that we ask about getting to know a business. So, yeah. So you ask those questions. Yeah. And so I'm out, okay, what is your value of an average client? Let's say he's a contractor and he's going to build a kitchen remodeling. You know, kitchen, if you've had your kitchen remodeled, you know, it's going to take you probably five to 10 grand to get it done. So the average, let's say we'll take that load number. The average value for, you know, John Doe kitchen remodeler.com is $5,000. And he's on the fence kind of, yeah, I don't know if I want to spend this kind of money. So, and this is what I say. Okay, well, Mr. Customer, if I bring you one customer, that's $5,000. You know, you got to pay your employees. You got to do this, but that's $5,000 in revenue. You only know how much profit that is. But I could assume that it's going to bring you more than $400 worth of profit or more than the cost of your optimization. So this, in this situation, okay, this is an easy example. This is a no-brainer. And I

don't like to use that word, but this is an easy decision. Right. It makes sense for your business. Marketing yourself brings in more money. As long as it brings in more money than it costs, that's a simple decision. You should do that. And everyone should do this. You should always, okay, you should know, if you're a business owner, you should know what is the value of an average customer to me? What is an average customer to you? Is it someone that buys, you know, spends a large dollar amount? Or is it someone that comes in, spends a little bit, but stays with you and repeatedly spends money with you, a repeat customer? Because those are very valuable. Yeah. Because that, you know, the value in the first month may be, you know, $100. But if you know that your typical customer comes back two months later and spends and gives you another $100 for a profit, and then three months later, another $100, you can say over a year, each new client has XYZ value. There you go. So it's pretty easy. Perfect example. The, we had a website analysis for, and I think it was contracthire.co.uk is a, they're, they're an Audi, the largest and oldest Audi leasing company. Yeah. Brand dealer in the UK. Awesome guys. I'll talk to them every so often. Great guys over there doing some awesome SEO. If they get a client, that one client leases an Audi and they lease it every single month. So that represents a repeat customer, I guess. And maybe the guy doesn't come and lease four or five Audis, but he's going to pay that every single month. So, hey, that makes sense. We got another request from Jeff Hobbs over at Monterey Catering. He's a catering company. Most likely, if they're going to do a wedding catering for a company, they're probably not going to get married again anytime soon. So that's probably a one-time hit for that company. But they could bring friends, family, and maybe hand out business cards at

that particular event. Which could bring in more business. So it is highly probable in the example of catering that each client you get has more value than the value you make in that particular job. Oh, yeah. And we're not necessarily asking, hey, we don't necessarily need to stretch. I mean, the services are so cost affordable that you don't need to stretch those examples. And it's good to point out, hey, you know, when you're there, you better have business cards. You better be handing those out. You better be schmoozing with people who happen to be around the catering table and doing great customer service so that when you need somebody. And I like how you say that because, you know, we talk SEO a lot here. And I mean, this is all we talk is SEO, SEO, bring more business, put you on the first page of Google. And you said this in a previous podcast. Just because you're doing SEO, maybe you're having a professional company like eWebStyle do it or you're doing it yourself, that doesn't mean you can't, you can stop doing all other marketing. You still need to be out there, you know, shaking hands, handing out business cards, you know, doing other forms of advertising. You should be everywhere. If you have an unlimited budget, you should be everywhere. You know, it's rare that I run into somebody or I don't really run into people with unlimited budgets. Or they never admit to it. Yeah, there you go. At least they don't tell me because I'll get in that pocket. Get your wallet. That is your job. You got an unlimited budget, man. Don't ever talk to me. If you have an unlimited budget, give us a call because we know where to spend it. Yeah, but you should always be doing other things to help your SEO. And that's the great thing about it. Every other form of marketing you could do will complement your search engine optimization. Yep. And vice versa. I mean, it goes both ways. Yeah. I

mean, if you have a Yellow Pages ad, okay, you should always have your website in it. But the first thing someone's going to do, let me Google it. Look at their website. Let me look at their website. If I meet someone on the street and I'm possibly interested in doing business with them, hey, give me your business card. What's your website? Everyone's going to go look at your website. So, I mean, SEO is important, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't invest time doing other things. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, one of the other perspectives, maybe another way to ask the question is, how many customers, if I put my website on the first page of Google for a certain number of key terms, how many customers do I believe I could get out of that? And is it enough customers to pay for the cost of doing it? And that's a great question. And that's something I ask to, I ask to, I try to ask to everyone. I can't, I won't lie and say I do ask everybody. And the answer I usually get is, you know, I don't really know. I'm like, well, okay, well, how many people, how many phone calls does it take for you to get a customer? I mean, you should know that. How many clicks to your website does it take for you to get a customer? You know, I don't really know. Well, hey, okay, well, let's start looking at it, Mr. Customer. You invested in this website. You invest money every month to get it hosted. So rather than just throwing that money down the drain just to have a website, let's actually make it work for you. Let's investigate it. Let's track it. Let's see if you get 100 new clicks per month. Are you asking them, how did you find us? A search engine? Somebody tell you about us? How many of those 100 clicks call you? Of those people who are calling you, how many of those are becoming a customer? These

are things you should track. If you're not tracking it, start. If you don't want to do it, call us. We'll do it for you. I mean, these are very, very important things that everyone should be doing. I guess not, I'm kind of getting away from SEO more into ROI, but, I mean, this is why you do search engine optimization. And I think it's also why you want to work with us, because we don't stop at search engine optimization. We really do want to understand your business. We really do, here at eWebstyle, have the capability. We're all entrepreneurs here. We have the capability to understand what your business does, how it works, how it generates profit, and how we can best use the technologies at our disposal to help your business. And when I say technologies, we're talking, you know, do you just need a simple, what we call business card website, which is one pager? Do you need a brochure website, which is a five pager? Do you need a full e-commerce website, which is, you know, depending on how many products you have, maybe, and if you only have one product, maybe you still need a full e-commerce website. We can actually, also, we have companies whose entire business runs on software that we write. Now, the website's done. Here's another technology. Search engine optimization. What's going to be the value to your company, to being on the first page of Google, for the terms you want it to be? So when somebody goes to Google and they type something in particular, and you know that key phrase best for your business, when they type it and you show up, what's the value in that? You know, how many click-throughs are you going to get? And let's go one step, let's take it back to the web design. If they do click-through to your website, because we've had clients, specifically the tattoo removal, we were convinced, you know, her competitor was on the first page also. We knew we could get her on the

first page, because she wasn't there yet, and our argument was, look, if we get you on the first page, people doing any sort of research are going to click you and your competitor, and your competitor website's rocks, and yours sucks. You need to redo your website, so that even when we get you on the first page of Google, you end up converting customers, you end up, you know, gaining business, because your website's good enough. So, you know, all of these things fold in together, and we really, I think we really have a really nice team here, you know, there are other SEO companies, we know of SEO companies that that's all they do. They're good at it, they're great at it, you might have some communication issues with them, it might go smoothly, but you're really looking for that kind of thing. You're a company who is able to, again, understand your business, work with your business, and apply all the technologies that are at anyone's disposal best to your business. I like you brought that tattoo removal lady up, because this kind of leans into ROI. When we talked to this woman, you know, she wanted SEO. When we were trying to talk return on investment, her price point was so low that we had to say, hey, we're going to recommend that you make some adjustments to your price point, because it's going to take you, I'll throw out a random number. Let's say she took, it cost $10 to get a tattoo removed, and I just threw that out there. You know, it was going to take like 40 to 50 new customers every single month to get that done, and I'd say for the most part, if you get one, you get your tattoo removed, you probably don't need to go back, and it was a one-time payment. You probably don't need to go back unless you have multiple tattoos. So I said, hey, you know, let's, this is, you're going to have to make some adjustments for, to make this

make sense for your business in terms of your return on investment. Well, and the other thing is, is, you know, we end up kind of advising, you know, is it worth being in business? If you're only charging $10, is it worth you being in business, and are you charging what the market will bear, right? And this was such a generous lady. If somebody came in, and they were about to go into, you know, some particular case. Oh, yeah, like a guy looking for a job, used to be in a gang, and didn't really have the money, but, you know, was trying to go on a job interview, and had tattoos on his face, you know, and so she kind of helped him out, and I'm like, hey, that's awesome. That's great. Those are great, some great testimonials. So she had a great heart. So I think that great heart had kind of not allowed her to charge the pricing that she, that the market would bear, and by not charging the price the market would bear, then, you know, SEO services at that price point were not right for her. I mean, really. It didn't really make sense. You know, we're, we'd love her to raise her price so that she can afford SEO, and if she's comfortable where she is, then she shouldn't do SEO. Yeah. Right, there's a great example. Yeah. It's not going to work. We're not going to be able to give you 400 customers a month. Exactly. That's just not going to happen. And like you're saying, the market was, they were charging double and triple what she was charging. And per visit. Right. And she was one-time flat fee, and they're charging double and triple for two and three visits per visit. And I'm like, wow. I mean, hey, it's great. I think a quick... Too bad I don't have any tattoos to get rid of, because I found the cheapest one in the country. Tell me about it. I need to go get one just so I can

get it removed. And that's a great example of, really think about your ROI, and is this going to make me money? Is this an intelligent business decision for me right now? And it may not be. So you might have to make some adjustments. And not every SEO company is going to tell you that. I'll tell you what you need to hear, not really what you want to hear. Yeah, that's true. Well, look at that. Our podcast is over. Time's up. We've got a little bit extra. Thank you guys so much again, here in the U.S. and around the world, for listening. We really appreciate you guys. Remember, send us an email. Send us some questions if you've got any good questions and any comments. I think I said something today that I didn't know if it was true or not about Google, maybe having specific bots out there looking for duplicate content. Maybe that's true, or maybe they just... Somebody knows that out there somewhere. Yeah, or maybe they just rely on people reporting duplicate content, somebody competitor or whatever. But yeah, keep the emails coming. That's podcast at e-webstyle.com. Again, if you guys are listening to this podcast... Wait, I know you are. Yeah. And you appreciate any of this information, please go to iTunes, create a little account, and submit a review about us, because we're trying to get some legitimate, positive reviews about us. You know, if they're a little negative, don't bother. Hey, just lie. You know, lie to you. I tell people that all the time. Hey, if you don't like it, just lie to me. It's all good. So do that for us, please. And until our next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now.

This episode answers

Matthew Bertram, host of The Best SEO Podcast
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint

Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG® (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.

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