Revenue, some people don’t get it
Been having another great week for clients this week which is fantastic. Had to turn a potential one down though as they were fixated on what “SEO” meant to them. We treat SEO differently and as a means to an end for our client’s revenue goals. It’s not a strategy employed by other agencies but it’s working pretty well so far.
What I learned
- Why you should look at your site differently
- Don’t get fixated on “SEO”
- Why a better site means more traffic
- Fix the basics
- How we measure SEO
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. How’re you going? I have lots of things to talk about this week, so many things. But I just thought I’d just focus more on the great success that our clients are having, simply because we’re looking at things differently. And you can too as a retailer; you can just look at your site differently. And sadly I had to turn a retailer down this week from coming on board with us, because they weren’t ready. And we know when they’re not ready. And what we do doesn’t work if the business owner is not ready. And the sort of warning bells that we hear from clients are, “We’ve had a lot of bad experiences before, with SEO and everything else.” And it’s like, “Yes, we do SEO, but it’s not what you think.”
SEO for the greater good
The reason that we do SEO is to make the ads work better, and to make the sales work better, and to make the users buy from you more frequently. Sure it’s about traffic and those sorts of things, but the skills, as we’ve said before, around the UX and making the site better for the users. And if you have a better site for the user, Google is going to send you more traffic. That includes things like brand and all those sorts of things.
So I’ve had two clients this week, no three now, reach out and say, “We’ve just had a record month. This is awesome. Thank you.” And when that happens, that makes it all worthwhile, that’s why you do what you do. It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. I mean, the money’s nice as well, don’t get me wrong. But if you didn’t have that, it’s like, yeah, you need that little bit of joy and momentum to know that you’re actually impacting people’s lives with the work that you do. And it’s difficult because we’re doing things differently to every other agency I know basically. And someone did say all year now we’re doing similar things. And we think what that client needs is a better of shade of green.
And I said, yeah, but the page is taking 10 seconds to load. I don’t think the green is going to make that much of a difference. Because a lot of people aren’t even seeing that shade of green, right? So this is where the thinking is with a lot of agencies out there. And that’s fine. That’s cool if it’s working for their clients. But for our clients, I want to make more money. And the ways that we do that is looking at the site and making it work better, simple as that, SEO, ads, UX. And a lot of people think that, “Oh, Jim, you’re making this stuff up. That’s impossible. Those numbers can’t be real.” Well, here’s another one. What’s this? $200 less last 30 days, year over year. We’ve spent $200 less and we’ve made an extra $102,000. That’s a good return, right?
Why we don’t clip the ticket
So it’s not BS, but the reason you don’t see that a lot is because a lot of the agencies, and I’m not saying this is the only reason why. I don’t know about the agency was handling this account either. But a lot of agencies will work based on, as I said last week, clipping the ticket. What’s the size of the budget? Okay. We’ll take 10% of that. 15% of that, whatever it is. But I’ve never done that because there’s no incentive for us to make those things work better and just didn’t feel right for me to work that way with the client. And it was interesting someone said this during the week, which really rang true to me. So Matt Allen tweeted out, “Creating a category is hard work.” And I would definitely agree because when I turn that client down, I asked him one of the things that was a trigger for me to go, okay, you’re not ready, was, “How much money do you want to make?”
He said, “I don’t have a number in mind. I know how SEO works. And I know that there were things ways to measure SEO.” I’m thinking not the way we measure it. In fact, the only measure that counts for us is are we hitting the client revenue goals? Client sets the goals. One client beginning of this year said to me, “I think we should grow by 20%.” Well, they’re growing by more than that. I knew they would, but I’m not going to tell them. I’m not going to set the bar too high for me either, because there are variables that you don’t know. But when you look at the data, you think, well, that should be doing a lot more than what it is right now. And that’s the way that we look at things and we’re constantly talking to the clients. And someone else said to me, “Hit me up on LinkedIn. We help agencies scale and all those sorts of things.” It’s like, we’re not interested in scaling. We’ve got other ways of scaling. We’ve got other projects that are scaling, but the agency side of things, it works much better we find if we are senior consultants working one on one with our clients and helping drive their business. So with us, you’re not going to be going a low level. We’re not a large agency, right? So COVID has changed us a lot as it has many businesses. As I said it would at the start of this in that it’s made us refocus what we do now that we’re all working remotely and how we do it. And we’ve got better during that period and the results are just showing it. And some of the clients, one of the clients that’s had a record month is this month, he had to pause with us.
He basically almost flat lined in revenue back in March and April, but now it’s gone bang and he’s back up there. So I guess the message here is that there’s not a lot that I can say here publicly to retailers without giving a lot of competitive advantage away. But if you are a retailer and you are interested in finding out more about this, I’m happy to do some sort of, dare I say webinar or what’s working for you. What’s a Facebook group even. But it would be for retailers more so than say lead gen sites at this stage, if I was going to do something like that, because it would have more value for retailers.
If you are interested in doing something like that, let me know. I’ll talk to the team, we’ll put something together. Hopefully that’s helpful and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
