SEO Deep Dive Into GSC & SEO Ethics With Matt Mellinger

Matt Mellinger, co-founder of SEOgets and Local SEO Partners, discusses his experience as both an agency owner and a software developer. He emphasizes the importance of synergy between the two roles and the value of community in the SEO industry.

Matt explains the concept and features of SEO Gets, a search console super tool that helps SEOs discover trends, issues, and opportunities. He also highlights the limitations of Google Search Console data and the need for a holistic approach to SEO that considers both technical and design aspects.

In this conversation, Matt and Jeremy discuss the challenges of finding legitimate SEO consultants and agencies. They highlight the importance of setting proper expectations, effective communication, and creating standard operating procedures (SEO SOPs) for client onboarding. Matt emphasizes the need to focus on solving the client's pain points, such as increasing revenue and generating more inbound leads.

They also touch on the benefits of niching down into specific industries and understanding the client's business model. Matt shares his top three action items for onboarding new local SEO clients: setting expectations, communication, and implementing SOPs.

Takeaways

• The interplay between being an agency owner and a software developer can be beneficial, as it allows for the integration of tools and services.
• The SEO community is highly connected and loves sharing knowledge and tools.
• SEOgets is a search console super tool that helps SEOs discover trends, issues, and opportunities.
• Google Search Console data has limitations, such as anonymized queries and inconsistencies in export data.
• A holistic approach to SEO, considering both technical and design aspects, is crucial for success. Set proper expectations with clients to avoid misunderstandings and ensure a successful working relationship.
• Effective communication is key in client management and building trust.
• Creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) helps ensure consistency and prevents important tasks from being overlooked.
• Focus on solving the client's pain points, such as increasing revenue and generating more inbound leads.
• Niching down into specific industries allows for better understanding of client needs and more effective marketing strategies.
• Understanding the client's business model and metrics, such as lifetime value of customers, is crucial for providing valuable SEO services.
• Building a lifestyle business focused on integrity and doing right by clients can lead to long-term success and satisfaction.
  
  00:00
  Introduction and Background
  03:11
  The Value of Networking in the SEO Community
  08:42
  Understanding the Limitations of Google Search Console Data
  13:33
  The Importance of a Holistic Approach to SEO
  18:25
  Balancing Technical SEO and Design for Optimal Results
  25:08
  Finding Legitimate SEO Consultants and Agencies
  30:15
  Challenges and Scams in the SEO Industry
  36:14
  Niche Down and Understand Industry-Specific Needs
  40:32
  Solving Client Pain Points for Revenue Growth
  43:48
  Setting Expectations and Effective Communication
  45:34
  Building a Lifestyle Business with Integrity

Transcript

Jeremy Rivera (00:01.13)
Welcome to the Unscripted SEO Podcast. I'm your host, Jeremy Rivera of SEO Arcade, and we're here with Matt Mellinger, the co -founder of SEO Gets and co -founder of another agency. What is the name of that agency? So, jumping right into it.

Matt (00:15.167)
Local SEO Partners

Jeremy Rivera (00:20.934)
What's it like being both an agency owner and also trying to get your own SEO software off the ground at the same time? Are there synergies or is it really pulling two carts with different courses?

Matt (00:37.635)
Yeah, it's been interesting because I've been dealing with the shiny object syndrome since I've been an entrepreneur seven years ago where it's like, software, agency, I could do this, or could do podcasts, or I could do all these things. And so one of the things that I've been really working on focusing on is, like you said, synergy of the work that you're doing to compound them.

So when I joined SEO Gets as a co -founder, I had already had the agency for probably two years. We're a small boutique agency that only does local SEO for home remodeling SMBs for example. And so when I found the tool, it was in beta and I wanted to like, I loved the tool. was planning on having a developer friend build something similar to it myself.

And then when I found it, like, man, I should just go and acquire this tool. gives us a head start. And reached out to the developer, And he was like, no, I don't want to sell it. I was like, man, really, like, I'm doing a lot of networking in the SEO world, right? The SEO community as a whole is, I mean, there's buckets of people,

it's very connected, whether you're white hat, black hat, somewhere in between agency owner, consultant, affiliate, like there's all these different like types of buckets, but there's very much community, a community and a network of SEOs. And cause they love sharing, they love sharing what they're doing, how well they're doing, not normally how bad they're doing. But they love bragging about the SEO they've done. They love sharing tools. I think that's something with our industry is like, check out this new tool I found.

What about Ahrefs versus SEMrush? What about this versus that? And so when I offered to buy it from Ghee, he said, no, I was like, well, would you be interested in partnering where I'll be in charge of growth and product development?

Matt (02:31.469)
because I'm going to use it for my agency. And then you just focus on that on the development side because he had a couple other SaaS companies as well. But none of them were targeting SEOs. And so when I joined, was so the synergy has been great. There are definitely some aspects of like it's very much what a Venn diagram where there's a big overlap between the two. Because again, I'm using it for my agency. I use a tool every day where it's like man,

you know, I could really use this feature to make my job easier. And so I'm like, hey, Guy, can you go build this and...

Jeremy Rivera (03:07.925)
Yeah.

Matt (03:09.039)
And the best part, I mean, I think we talked about it, but I've had so many people like, hey, can we have this feature? like, we're working on it right now because I wanted that feature. And so it just worked really well because you have an SEO leading the product development that uses it every day, that understands how SEOs think, that understands content optimization, reporting, client management, all of these different aspects. And so we're definitely building it in kind of the two buckets where

There's going to be opportunity for content optimization. But then we're also working on the consulting agency side where it's reporting or basically communication. So trying to fix those two buckets. we mostly have a lot of our big, ideal customer profile I thought originally was just going to be agencies and consultants, which that's how it was to begin with.

But we have recently had a lot of in -house SEOs with large sites.

Jeremy Rivera (04:10.811)
third group of... It occurred to me, like jumped right into saying SEO gets, assuming people know what it is or what it does. Just give me a quick recap to explain what would you say you do here with SEO gets. Like I know what it is you do, but just kind of explain real fast like what the concept is and what the software does.

Matt (04:12.439)
Right.

Matt (04:25.944)
Yeah.

Matt (04:34.134)
Yeah, so search console.

Matt (05:06.497)
remove those limitations, we're trying to build tools that make it faster and easier for you to discover trends, issues, opportunities, things like that. So it's basically a search console super tool as of right now. And there's opportunity later for some really cool upgrades to it where we might bring

self storage so that you can extend the storage past 16 months. We kind of talked about that. There's email reporting. So there's things outside of it that just add to it, but it's at a core. It's a Search Console API wrapper that does a really good job of bringing value to SEOs. Yeah, go.

Jeremy Rivera (05:49.452)
Yeah, I love how on the primary dashboard you can pull in, it's unlimited, right? Like you can connect it to multiple different GSC profiles. Because as like I'm a freelance SEO and I've got an agency and they've got a profile which has 15 clients of which I'm working on three, then I've got my own three sites and then another different email. you can, once you get a subscription, you can actually have a dashboard that is connected to multiple different

IDs and Gmail's and pull in those APIs to a single dashboard so you have a sorted list of multiple different sites and all of those are showing in little charts and then you can click into those to get more into those metrics. And I love the smoothing of the data so it's not just a spiky daily, it can be weekly or monthly. I gotta say like that's almost like 99 % of why I'm paying for it and why I'm convincing all my clients to pay for it.

is just that data smoothing, but also it kind of dovetails a lot with just good best practices in SEO. one, know AJ Cohn, as far back as 2010, was talking about the power of thinking not of an individual keyword. It used to be like, oh hey, what is the keyword we're targeting for this one page? And now it's more of like, okay, what is the

conceptual concept and what are the co -occurring terms and phrases in this cluster around it. But then you got to figure out a way, okay, well, what's some centralized way to create a cluster either in terms of how this page, this set of pages that are relevant to it, or on the other side, a keyword cluster in terms of all of these words that I want to track. I want to see how are we performing with, you know,

cow milkers. There's all kinds of different, there's commercial cow milkers, there's residential, it's all over the place. So you kind of have that keyword phrase and it pulls that in. I like that the tool supports that approach.

Jeremy Rivera (08:05.332)
And it kind of bypasses some of the problems with third party data, like, know, Ahrefs is constantly scraping, you know, they've got one of the biggest databases now, aside from Google, as terms of indexes and superpower and computing, but they still aren't going to find all of the terms and phrases because niche and branded phrases aren't going to show up in those third party tools. There's no reason to. But what are some of the

Limitations you see in terms of Google Search Console data either being limited being inaccurate I have my own opinions on it, but obviously you're making a tool powered by this data So what are the top three data problems that people? Either going to have to come up, you know deal with or be aware with to properly use a

Matt (08:59.791)
Yeah, so we're actually, as we speak, Ben, who's kind of my right -hand man, is compiling the data for a case study on this, which has actually been really intriguing. I've already been digging into some of the data. But everyone knows that Search Console is not perfect, especially with the term that they call anonymized queries. And so say you have a website that over the past three months on the top chart says it's got 3 ,000 clicks. We'll make it simple, 1 ,000 clicks, right?

And what we've seen is that when you export the queries, so below it will show all the queries that have ranked under that time. What we've seen is when you export those queries, it only shows you, and the data ranges anywhere between, I think it's 5 % for like a very low site, we had like 100 clicks, to up to like 70 % of those clicks.

What we have discovered recently, actually just to in the study and I didn't even realize this until we just did this, if you look at the page level, it shows you 100 % of the clicks almost every time, which I didn't realize that. So going back to topic clusters and looking at it holistically, if you're trying to locate where the clicks are coming

you want more accuracy, you need to go to the page level, which most people don't. Most people go to the queries and they sort by queries and they do everything on the query level, but you're playing with a hitting game. With that being said, the hitting game is consistent. so when measurement marketing, one of, I mean years ago when I went to a digital marketer conference,

back when they were the big dog. I don't if they still, I don't listen to anymore, but there was a speaker in measurement marketing, I forget his name, but head guy, the way, I'm an analyst at heart. I love analyzing numbers, looking for patterns, trends, anomalies, opportunities. That's why SEO gets it so powerful. He talked about not looking at exact numbers. The only numbers that you can really look at that are exact for KPIs are two things, leads and revenue.

Matt (11:13.647)
Right? It's how much money has hit my bank account and how many contacts have I received? Because those are the only two numbers I can accurately like say it's been 50 leads and we've made $1 million in revenue. Like those are exact numbers. But whenever you're tracking things with GA4, plausible, GSC, any A -Trust is even worse. And we're actually in the study, we're comparing.

Jeremy Rivera (11:14.448)
Right.

Matt (11:38.351)
what Ahrefs said we did to what we actually did alongside the export. The study is gonna be really fascinating. Hopefully we'll have it out in the next week or so. I have been fascinated, like the whole thing with like 100 % of the click data is in the page level on exports. And we actually had one that doesn't make sense. The impressions that we exported on the 12 month level was 150 % of what

the impressions said on the chart above. That makes no sense to me because it was, it only happened once. But the fact that that was even possible, like I triple checked it. And I'm like, for this one site, there was like 26 million impressions over a 12 month period. When I exported the data, the pages showed when you added up the columns, the column, it was 46 million impressions total. I'm like, what happened to the other 15 million?

Jeremy Rivera (12:11.787)
Okay, okay, yeah.

Matt (12:35.183)
And I guess the thing is with SEO Gantz or with GA4 Plausible, which we did track how many total clicks does it say over this time period against Plausible, and it was like between a 90 to 95 % accuracy comparing the two. And so the point of it is to say is that numbers tell a story.

The whole point of analytics and optimization is to understand the story and to then make decisions based off of those. Like if I told you number 10, what is that? Without context, that means nothing. It could be 10%. It could be 10 million, or it could just be 10, 10 clicks, 10 impressions, 10. It needs a story behind it. And so what the whole goal of analytics and search console is, not to worry or focus about, oh, I got 10 clicks, or I got 100 clicks.

The whole thing is like patterns and trends. Is this page moving in the upward direction in the way that it should? Did this page go up and then drop hard? Well, what happened at this point? I just hopped off a call with a guy who runs a cleaning company in Seattle and his chart's going like this, his chart's going like this, his chart's going this, and then boom, just fell out of nowhere, like just dropped. And.

SEO Gits has the feature to create annotations. And so when I looked in to his annotations, he added local schema to all of his pages on that day. long story short is the local schema for he created city pages for a bunch of different cities, but he copied the same local schema for his main city on all of them. And basically all of his pages disappeared because there's conflicting data between the schema and the on -page SEO.

Jeremy Rivera (14:25.493)
Yeah.

Matt (14:26.127)
And so what we just did is we changed all the schema. He just re -indexed them and we're gonna give it about a week. But it was a very clear like, add it, right. And we'll see. Again, SEO is experimenting. I was shocked at how, like very consistent upward trend did one thing on the day and literally within 24 hours saw the impact. And so it's like, it's the same thing with the disavow files. Like that's a controversial subject right now.

Jeremy Rivera (14:37.483)
I'll see.

Matt (14:54.827)
I've had experiences disavowing and it's worked fantastically. And then you have Cyrus who disavowed his entire link profile and nothing happened. so it's like studying and testing is, is, is what I love doing. but again, that's based off of targets and understanding. Like you said, instead of focused on the exact seed keyword or this one keyword, which is important, you need to have a focal point that you're putting in your title tag and your meta tag and things like that. But think of it holistically as a customer, instead

Jeremy Rivera (15:02.473)
Yeah.

Matt (15:23.661)
more semantically, like trying to combine the two. But normally if you focus on the customer, the semantic part comes. Like if you're truly trying to build something that solves that issue and the intent, semantics normally will come organically because you're talking about the subject well.

Jeremy Rivera (15:41.662)
Yeah, like you're solving for the intent of the end person at the, know, who is your ideal audience, customer, client, you know, thinking through and having those real conversations with your salesperson, having a real conversation with a couple of clients, having a real conversation with customer support of like, what, what is causing a problem? What do they not know that they need to know and getting that answer back and turning it into, okay, well that means on the sales

itself if they keep asking about the size of it what are the dimensions and they ask that every time then you should put the dimensions up onto it or for the love of God what is the pricing of this thing like I I do not understand

Matt (16:19.832)
Right.

Matt (16:24.428)
Yes, prices start at X price.

Jeremy Rivera (16:28.396)
Yeah, I do not understand SaaS software, project managers and leaders and sales teams who want their people to come in blind, know, and unqualified and take a demo. We're not even going to suggest like, okay, is this a $10 thing or a $10 ,000 thing? Like you can't find out until you do a demo. Come on to our demo. We're certainly not going to hit you with a stick. And then I'm going to hit you with a stick. It's a very

Matt (16:47.48)
We all

Jeremy Rivera (16:58.352)
you stick. But it's about solving for intent. I think you're right there is that like those two paths of like becoming obsessed with tools and models that can help automate and come up with these semantic relationships between words.

almost feels like an over -reliance on certain tools or paths to do it with to avoid like don't be you know an over -introvert in SEO. Sometimes you gotta like talk to people to try to get these things lined up better.

Matt (17:36.505)
Yeah, and I'm not saying those tools aren't helpful. Those tools, often are just people also ask, like, what are the questions that I wouldn't think of to answer that need to be answered on these pages? But again, that's kind of looking at it holistically. I'm not saying...

Matt (17:53.783)
And I say all this and there's people crushing out there with just semantics, semantical SEO. And it's like, sure, it works. It does work. like, Kyle Roof has proved that Google can't read and that it looks at semantics and entity or correlations and like, I definitely agree. But again, there is that balance between, and I think one of the interesting things with SEOs is we're normally more technical minded or like statistical, analytical, whereas like you have a lot of people that are just web

Jeremy Rivera (17:58.643)
Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (18:20.597)
Mm

Matt (18:23.719)
and developers that are more design heavy, right? So they're much heavier on like making it look beautiful and creating these flows and all these things. And it's like the key is both. I lean more to the, like I've seen so many high performing sites. I mean, what was ClickFunnels for how many years? Like the ugliest sites that people made so much money on and it converted so well. And so there's kind of this thing of like,

Jeremy Rivera (18:27.274)
Yeah.

Matt (18:51.595)
there's an ego battle with design. And I would almost say like the other side is that like the technical side is normally backed more by data. Like we need this many words. Like I know it doesn't look as great. I know that internally linking seems kind of weird in the anchor text as opposed to like beautiful buttons with cards that save you more. But statistically, the pages that do well have these things. So do you want to make money or do you want to look good?

Jeremy Rivera (19:18.1)
Yeah.

Matt (19:19.31)
Bradley Benner always says that, he's like, do you want a pretty sight or a performing sight? Because what do you want?

Jeremy Rivera (19:26.634)
Yeah, and then you have developers who create a single page application, JavaScript type site, and they have a beautiful button, but it's just a button. It's not actually an Ahrefs link that leads to another page that can be indexed. It's all a single page. You click the button, you interact. okay, that's great. But then you try to crawl it. You're like, did I check the no index? No, okay, it's not the no index. I can't crawl the site. What is, okay, there are no links on this site. There's one.

page on this site despite like I clicked all these buttons that go to these things but no sometimes you have a developer who thinks it's incredible for you to use angular for your front end or your website

Matt (19:56.751)
Thanks.

Jeremy Rivera (20:11.446)
doesn't always translate to the best SEO outcome. So, you know, we gotta balance each other out. There's different skill sets out there. There's the developers who can frankly do amazing things on the code in the backend and take data and make it, you know, queryable, efficient, run quickly and do really cool stuff. But we gotta work together because there's some, like if it doesn't resolve at a URL that can be indexed by Google,

matter if it does really cool stuff if nobody can find it. You know, so it's a marriage of skill sets.

Matt (20:43.266)
Yeah. Yep.

Matt (20:48.653)
Yeah, no, I definitely agree. It's a balance. And again, so it's like, it's just the compromise aspect. And then how far can you compromise? Again, can you compromise where you don't have an h1 tag? No, you should never compromise there. You should always have an h1 tag. Like, that's just, those are the basics. But like, you'd be shocked at how many people are like, well, in this template, the design looked weird with h1 tag. So therefore, I don't know how to style it. And I'm like, what? No, you h1.

Jeremy Rivera (21:16.095)
just change the CSS file and make the H1 the same size as the text. Like, it's not rocket surgery, but it can be. Yeah.

Matt (21:17.741)
Just, yeah, right, yeah. But some people can't do that. Like, yeah, some business owners that are using like the Wix or the drag and drop builders that aren't built, weren't, weren't, they're getting better, but that weren't originally built for SEO. Like for the longest time, and actually I'm curious if it's changed. I haven't looked in forever, but Wix used to not be responsive. So.

Jeremy Rivera (21:33.833)
Right. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (21:43.38)
It is, is now. I will give Morty Oberstein, mucho credit for many layers of having a panel of SEOs, bringing people in, having a very smart team to try to.

Matt (21:55.183)
pain Google.

Jeremy Rivera (21:58.728)
improve their platform. So I will give them props. I've almost made a Wix site for a client. I hesitate. I balked at the last second, but I no longer say immediate veto, immediate let's get it out of there. So they're rising in my estimation. Morty, if you're listening, sorry. I think you're doing a great job.

Matt (22:11.913)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Matt (22:21.431)
Yeah, what I'm saying is they have dramatically improved over the last few years. again, it used to be one those things that if you had a Wix site, you knew that they weren't considering SEO at all, because again, some of the most basic things were like missing.

Jeremy Rivera (22:24.864)
Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (22:34.42)
Yeah, now it's a like GoDaddy site builder. You're like, okay, you don't care. You don't have the suite. But it's almost like you don't know what you don't know. And I feel a steep sympathy for so many of the small business owners, and I'm sure on your agency side, you run into this as well,

Matt (22:37.644)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't. Yep.

Jeremy Rivera (22:57.9)
You know, they work hard, they wake up at 6 o 'clock to get their asphalt equipment on the scene and they do incredible work all the time, but they just don't know what they don't know when it comes to websites and you know, this web portal or whatever seemed like a good solution at the time and just don't know what they could be doing. You know, like I just checked in the asphalt maintenance niche in this region and literally one in 20 of asphalt contractors even have a website. Most of them have maybe a Facebook page, maybe a Google business profile that might have a phone number. Like they've got a name, maybe a phone number, maybe a Facebook page or something, but 1 in 20 actually has a legitimate, even has a legitimate website, and that legitimate website is legitimately terrible. And it has like two backlinks, and they're ranking number one because they're the only,

Matt (23:52.003)
Yes. No. I snow cut, yeah. Yeah. Yep, exactly, yeah. And that's the thing with a lot of areas. mean.

Jeremy Rivera (23:57.662)
In the kingdom of the blind, the one -eyed man is king, you know?

Matt (24:08.587)
If you come in with just an exact match domain, no backlinks, no citations, and you just build a proper structured site with on -page SEO with an exact match domain, you can beat most of the local people on the local level. Again, not talking metropolitan cities that are big, but...

I mean even there I've done some exact match domain tests and just it's like how did I I don't have any I've done it's a one -page site with good on page and it's ranking number one for the key term and it's like this doesn't make any sense except it's very semantically clear about what they do and where they do

Jeremy Rivera (24:49.708)
That's always my go -to. I've done 100, 200, 300 SEO audits. When I sit down with them for that discovery, it's always a question of what would you say you do here, and did you actually say it in text that Google can read on your site?

Matt (25:07.896)
Yep.

Jeremy Rivera (25:08.459)
It's like one in 10 at best has actually said what they do. Like there was one guy that, the best at, we excel at customer service and we'll deliver your product as fast as possible. like, what do you do? Like, oh, we do a restaurant rebranding and redesigns for Red Robin and other chain restaurants. I'm like, you never said restaurant, you never said redesign. You said, you're the fastest delivery, best customer service and you're

Matt (25:32.642)
You're

Matt (25:36.333)
Yep.

Jeremy Rivera (25:38.366)
pictures are all over the place. Like I couldn't tell if you were a restaurant chain or like, you know, you're taking pictures of things. sometimes for these small business owners, it's a matter of stepping back and saying, I don't know what I don't know and finding, you know, a person to trust. And I think that's something we have to address as an industry is taking responsibility for the snake oil salesman in the 1900s.

Matt (25:43.49)
Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (26:08.289)
work here is that literally were snake oil and they really did work but it's the guys that sell snake oil that it's not snake oil it's castor oil and what's the advice for small businesses who want to you know find somebody legit like what are the signals that a consultant or an agency is going to do legit work

Matt (26:34.031)
So that's a, I love this topic because I detest a lot of our agent, our industry because I've personally.

I don't know the amount of times that I've talked to someone that has been flat out scammed by SEOs because they say it's such a churn and burn industry where agencies that have so many clients, they say as long as we keep them for 12 months and we can replace them within that 12 months by a new client, it doesn't matter if we don't do anything because they're going to churn anyway. We don't get results, it doesn't matter. And we just keep telling them, no, it just needs another six months. I have had, I mean within the last probably six months, five or six people that have come to me

that have paid for SEO retainers anywhere between 500 bucks to three grand per month. And I'm not kidding when I say that they didn't have meta descriptions, they didn't have proper title tags. There was a case that the site wasn't even being indexed. They had a robots TXT. And I'm like, you're paying an SEO company and your site isn't even indexed. Like you can't get more like

Jeremy Rivera (27:40.191)
Yep.

Jeremy Rivera (27:43.807)
fundamentally flood. Yeah.

Matt (27:44.183)
I'd scummy of the like, I want to use stronger words. I'm not going to, but like that pisses me off because it is small business owners that they're targeting. My dad was a victim of that. He was like, I asked, okay, can we get the search console analytics for the past six months of your work? This was back before I even knew SEO and I even knew what's like, can I get anything? He's like, we don't have that. I was like, then how are you knowing what's working?

Jeremy Rivera (27:54.559)
Yeah.

Matt (28:13.718)
Well, we had a data about, I'm like, okay, I'm about to punch this guy. Like I'm sitting across the table wanting to punch this SEO guy because it was very clear that they, there was, yeah, I'm not even gonna get into it obviously it's my dad. He owns a business, small business owner. He doesn't know the difference. That pisses me off. He's taking advantage of family. Like, and you're lying, you're gaslighting to their face. Like that's the issue is that because they don't understand

You can use jargon to be like, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, sure, I guess. But why aren't I getting calls? Well, excuse, blah, whatever. answer your question, rambling on, it is a heated subject for me. It pisses me off. A, if we're going to hire, if you're a small business owner listening or recommendation, there's really two things. Give me a phone number or an email.

or contact information of someone that you have helped that has gotten results that I can talk to. If you can give me two or three of those, even better, give me one. I want to talk to them and I want to ask, do these people help you and what? And that's going to be the best thing rather than like if they can't do that for you, run. The second thing is

you should understand the basics. We are going to be targeting this general group of keywords. When you type this keyword in, you don't appear. Within six to 12 months, we should be appearing on the first few pages of that, if not number one spot. If that doesn't happen and you don't get calls, fire them. Move on. Again, I had a...

timber framing company that we ended up bringing on that was hired, they used someone for I think eight or nine months when they came to us and they're like, we just, ah, he seems like he's doing stuff, but we don't know. And they sent over his reporting. And I'm not kidding when the first two months was the same line regurgitated in like 20 different ways. I think we talked about this. It was like a high school report where it's like a word count. It was like set up reporting, make sure.

Jeremy Rivera (30:26.862)
Yeah, Yeah, I set up tracking tracking and then I tracked reporting then made sure that tracking gave in and then double check the tracking reporting and generated.

Matt (30:34.59)
It's

Matt (30:39.311)
And then aligned tracking with what we're doing. And it's like, so you didn't do anything. You put a script on and you didn't do anything. And within six months, we have been able to increase their traffic, I think by like 60%, which has been a significant increase in revenue, which that's the metric that ultimately matters, right? We kind of talked about driving clicks to a site. If I'm driving clicks from India to a local business that sells burgers,

Jeremy Rivera (30:44.202)
Hahaha.

Matt (31:09.302)
I could drive a million clicks and is that going to have any impact on the business? Zero. Unless you're running at like display hats, then you're rich. But that's a whole different conversation. Like you're not doing

Jeremy Rivera (31:09.343)
not your soul.

Jeremy Rivera (31:19.635)
Yeah, it's a different model and there are, you you do have to account for that in many of these conversations of like, as an SEO, we need to do more work to better understand client business models.

You know, this came up in, you know, Jonas Sickler's interview, talked about it with Mark Preston, who is the former host of this podcast about, you know, he transitioned entirely from being an SEO to being more, more of a business consultant who does and understands SEO, and approaches it as, you know, part of the overall business model and scheme. So understanding what is the business, you know, how long does it take

you to take a lead and convert it to the customer. Like what is your lifetime value? You know, because if you're if you're short -sightedly looking at, know, oh, I need to spend this much money and get in one e -commerce conversion and it's worth $10, you just left. OK, well, it might be $10, but is this a type of e -commerce product where there's they come back in a month and they there's either maybe not a

Matt (32:33.816)
Subscription or whatever.

Jeremy Rivera (32:37.741)
subscription, but they end up like, what is the total lifetime value for clients? Like, do you, are you tracking that? Do they have that information and can create a profile and tell you what is the lifetime value of a customer versus the upfront sign up, you know, and as a SaaS owner, you know, there's a huge difference between somebody signing up for a free trial and like, oh yeah, I got, I got tons of conversions. I have like an 8%, a 15 % conversion rate on my site. Like,

Matt (33:07.692)
How many are paid?

Jeremy Rivera (33:07.724)
Okay, well, those are... Okay, first 18 % of how much.

Like how many clicks of 18 % of 100 is not very much. That's one and a half. And then if your conversion rate of those 18 is one in 18, then you've got point 18 conversion out of that of like somebody giving you money. you know, understanding and taking it to those next steps. You know, there was a whole conversation I had when I was with Tap Clicks as a software company. They use

Matt (33:19.278)
10 clicks, 10 clicks. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (33:45.429)
marketing qualified leads and unqualified leads as their terminology. I'm like, okay, I have to unsolve. Like, what do you mean by MQL, SQL? What is this terminology and what does it mean for like actual revenue? Why do you put these in these different buckets? Why are you calling them, you know, unqualified leads versus qualified leads? And does that, is that a measurable difference in the amount of people you're able to close?

or like how does that impact your workflow and when some people come from the SEO channel in different ways are they all falling into one of those two buckets or is there a crossover? How are you measuring that and what are the OKRs that you're proposing to the CEO that you're going to hit in the next six months, quarter, year, two quarters? Like what is, how are you getting budget for your team?

is a conversation that many SEOs aren't even close to prepared to have.

Matt (34:51.309)
Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that comes from the benefit, and I'm a big advocate and I'm working on this in our agent, ourself, is niching down into industries because the more you start to repeat the

you understand not only your clients better. So what are the pain points of a roofer compared to an e -commerce store? Like one might be warehouse logistics and one might be answering the phone. Like those are like you get to know your customer pain points avatars better, but then you also get to know their customers better. So like if I'm selling to pet food and I'm selling mobile bartending like

understanding the pain points of what is that someone that's looking for mobile bartending want they want to make sure that there's a guarantee that there's a liquor license and all of these things that Okay, well that's been added on this one site and if I have another client I know that there's gonna be similarities there So the more you can stay in the same vertical the more you can learn and test things across one

Try it to a second, see if it's repeatable. And if it's repeatable, then you understand that, hey, I just helped two clients, but now I can compound that same information across 10. You can't do that when you're across all these different verticals.

Jeremy Rivera (36:08.618)
Yeah, that's a challenge that, know, the jack of all trades, master of none, but also a bit of the curse of, you know, a freelance SEO consultant. And, you know, a lead comes across and says, hey, I'm in the poop scooping industry. Can you help me?

It's hard. Am I going to niche down and be the poop scooper SEO? Maybe, maybe not. But no, I can tell you there is. There's a lot more pet waste management companies out there. They have their own conference. And I spoke at it. They're very polite people.

Matt (36:33.646)
There's probably a market for

Jeremy Rivera (36:53.152)
But it's just an example of like, there are these really obscure niches, just pointing out that as of, you know, an agency or an SEO, it can be hard to like, hard to niche down because you have to turn down business sometimes if it's too far afield. that's...

That's a hard thing to do when you're trying to pay the bills. Turning down things and opportunities is something we, any small business owner needs to always get better at. But definitely, I know, I've said yes to new clients and projects that were...

not the greatest fit or I tried to make them a great fit and ended up with a

wild expectations, you know, owner of like, yeah, we're gonna moonshot, we're gonna like make million dollars right away. And then like the pressure's on like every second, okay, Jeremy, like you made like four changes to the Metatop, what was the difference? You know, like, but then there's also like, you know, the completely hands off side of it. Like, can I, with the budget that you're giving me, actually deliver on this? And that comes back to, again, you know, understanding their revenue model and coming up

Matt (38:00.556)
Yeah, exactly.

Jeremy Rivera (38:15.533)
a return on investment for SEO that is attainable. How did you quantify with your clients some of the intangible?

or the non -revenue benefits of SEO. So the example for this that comes to mind is like if you decrease the amount of customer support tickets by actually optimizing their knowledge base and organizing it, getting the rank and getting traffic flowing to it, surfacing that those help tickets and problems onto the site decreases, you know, support tickets by 50%. You just saved $40 ,000 on support costs. Is that something you regularly do or is

like what are some other buckets extra benefits that can be presented as a value return but isn't necessarily directly a dollar amount.

Matt (39:14.07)
Yeah, so I mean, good practices, FAQs on pages that a lot of people don't do, which ultimately is qualifying leads better oftentimes. And so that's something that's like, again, that's an intangible improvement that good SEO does. You should also be improving the conversion rate. You should be trying to stop the leaky bucket. But I think for me, when it comes to SEO, the main...

When someone comes to me to ask for SEO help, their main mental problem isn't ticket support or it's not conversion rate or it's not qualifying leads better, even though those are all problems that need to be solved and are helped. Normally their pain point is I need more revenue. Nine times out of 10, I'm probably higher than that.

Almost every time it's, want more revenue. I need more consistent revenue. I need more inbound leads. And so you can talk about those other things, but what I've learned in marketing, because I had a background in marketing, is that you don't want to focus on things that aren't the pain point for them. You need to press into the pain point issues. And so there are other benefits to a lot of things, but you get someone to purchase because you're solving their pain point, not because you're helping them in areas that they don't think they need help. And

And so no, I don't focus that normally on conversations, though it could be mentioned. I'm focused more on, hey, if you spend this much money in this timeframe and I can get you a 10, if I put $1 and you get $10 back, would you be interested in doing that? Yes. Okay, then nothing else matters. Ultimately, I'm going to help solve those problems because that's just to get good faith. And again, the more successful a business gets, if I qualify more leads, I improve their ticket support.

I do all these things, they're gonna be more profitable. If a company is more profitable, are they more likely to keep me on longer? Yes. So it's a win -win. I'd never think it's gonna be a detriment, but no, it's just not something I would ever consider bringing up because I'm focused on one thing. Again, business owners are already distracted with a thousand things on their plate, especially if they're owner -operators. Again, I'm a local SEO, so a lot of them are owner -operators, right? So

Jeremy Rivera (41:10.589)
Yeah.

Matt (41:32.181)
in the weeds and they're trying to grow the business at the same time. And so I can't be talking to them about all these different things. Is number going up or down? I could care less. Is phone ringing or not? Like dumb it down in a good way, not like they're dumb, but simplify it. Simplify it so that they have to focus on two numbers. We do more reporting and I'm testing on how much... I found the most difficult clients are the ones that actually want the nerdy details.

Jeremy Rivera (41:49.3)
Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (42:01.525)
Mm

Matt (42:01.962)
because they think they know SEO sometimes. Sometimes not. And it's more work trying to report accurately those information that you want. And here's the thing. I understand wanting to have a pulse on the understanding of how SEO is going. It makes total sense. But at the same time, I want to focus on building and growing. And I think it's the balance between am I getting scammed?

versus not getting scammed. And one of the ways that they can do that is through reporting, accurate communication of what's happening. But like when I go to order a burger at McDonald's, I'm not like, how do you make the burger? can I know all the details and ingredients in that burger? No, you order the burger and they give it to you and you eat it. You're paying for the end product. If I'm selling SEO, the end product is a growth in traffic that

Jeremy Rivera (42:51.433)
Right. Yeah.

Matt (42:59.687)
for leads that increases revenue. Ultimately, that's the thing I'm responsible for. If you don't have that in a timeframe that I tell you, then you should return it like you would a burger. The burger is not good, right? But it's not like, is this real meat? Like why eat there? Like if that's, it, go make your own burger at home if you're concerned about that. And some people do and some people do their own SEO and that's great. But if you're coming to outsource it and trust someone, trust them.

Jeremy Rivera (43:11.81)
Fair enough.

Matt (43:29.638)
In that area, but it's a balance. It's client management. That's why people don't like that's why people love the rank and rent over the agency model in a lot of ways because it's Leveraged they're not concerned about pleasing the client. They're just able to a lot of SEOs or introverts They don't want to deal with humans. They just want to go build a bunch of spammy backlinks and rank sites and make money like at the end of the day and so There's a balance to those with running an agency for

Jeremy Rivera (43:52.554)
Right.

Jeremy Rivera (43:58.517)
So in wrapping up, what's your top action item? You're onboarding a new client. What are the top three things that you're making sure they do? And let's narrow it down. You're specializing in local SEO. So let's say, what are the top three action item things that you always do when you onboard new local SEO clients?

Matt (44:20.853)
One is set expectations. I've failed in that in the past, and if you don't set proper expectations, it's just a pain. You're setting yourself up for failure. They may think that you can rank for things that you can't, and vice versa. They don't know timeframes. don't know it like. So set expectations properly. Realistically, but second part is communication. You can have

Be doing a terrible job in communicating well and they will probably feel more secure than if you're doing a great job and not communicating at all and It's true. Like it's weird But communication is key. And then third thing is SOPs as much as I'm Unorganized in myself the agency I've been working on building SOPs and so that every single time checklist

Jeremy Rivera (44:57.737)
Yeah.

Matt (45:12.278)
are these things done? Because if I'm just relying on my brain and as a consultant or as an agency, it's like, we did this and then we should do this next and then, this popped up, let's go do this instead of just saying, we know you need to build the citations, you need to get the optimized pages, you need to get the website built, you need to do this, this and this. And then once that's done, then you need to start doing this. It's a repeatable process. And so when you don't have that documented, you forget things.

Jeremy Rivera (45:35.264)
Yeah.

Matt (45:39.02)
we forgot to do the schema. It's not a big, huge deal, but it's important. It should be done. It's not hard. It should be on the list of things to do. Do we set up Bing? that's a, I forgot about Bing. Who thinks about Bing? Set it up. Like it should just be part of that process that every time it gets happen, it happens. And so those are the three stages that have really helped the client management. We have a really good retention rate. We also have a small amount of clients. And so it's easier for us to.

Jeremy Rivera (45:43.179)
Sure.

Matt (46:07.245)
to handle a little bit more personal. The other thing that, this is more just a personal thing, is I'm building for lifestyle business right now, as opposed to scaling. I don't need a million dollar agency or more. I wanna pay the bills consistently with good clients that have a win -win solution for a long time. That's what I want.

Jeremy Rivera (46:14.879)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (46:29.088)
Yeah, I've really seen the difference between a leadership or management that's focused on, is our cash cow and we're going to make as much money as possible out of it versus management that's looking, we're a lifestyle company. So when I first came onto Raven Tools,

You know, they were very big, you know, 10, 15 years ago and the founders, there are three founders and they were super focused and super clear, hey, this is a lifestyle company. We could make a ton more money off of this. Um, but we want to provide a good product and have a good team that's having a lot of fun and we're going to build really weird, awesome stuff. And, um, you know, they ended up selling, know, splitting up and selling it to a third party company who just treated it as a cash cow and they slash the staff to half. They slash the.

the staff to a quarter and then they had to hire me back on because they lost so much institutional knowledge that their cash cow was starting to wither on the vine. And so you have a mentality of a displaced corporate leadership who's looking at these numbers and like, my gosh, we're spending so much

human resources for Raven Tools, but they're only this much percentage of our profit, we need to reduce staffing costs. like, okay, but the staffing costs in that fantastic customer support that you just outsourced to Columbia, well, they're taking three or four times as long to provide one quarter of the actual support. So you just tripled your churn rate. So you just shot yourself in the foot. Oh, you want to increase the price because you haven't done that for 10 years on the platform? Okay.

Yes, you made more money in the six months, but you lost your big agencies who were happy with it. They went somewhere else. And now the next year you've handicapped your potential revenue because you drove everybody away on a temporary price increase. it's definitely important to know for yourself. Like, are you setting yourself up with a lifestyle company as a freelance consultant? Are you part of an agency

Jeremy Rivera (48:38.861)
going to try to provide a lifestyle type business environment or is it all margins push turn and burn which I think societally is probably you know like the two sides of humanity you know like let's do something awesome let's pay each other well and then you have the uber growth minded and whatever it takes to accomplish the goal is what it happens and if you end up you know churning through

potential Amazon worker in the southern portion of the United States, that's what happens because we need these margins.

Matt (49:14.467)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's an inch in. Again, people make money, a lot of money both ways. And if that's the end goal, then there's different. But again, I look at businesses more than just making money from my worldview. Again, my ultimate goal is to be honest, have integrity to do right by others. There's definitely a ethical...

reason for me to do work. And so that's, it's not just to make money. Business, like, I believe that there's more to life than just money. yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (49:53.395)
Yeah, that makes sense. wrapping up, just tell people where we can find you. If they want to have conversations, are you on Twitter or on LinkedIn more? What are you up to?

Matt (50:05.714)
Mostly on Twitter. Also email me at matt at seogets .com anytime. Check out the tool. Let us know what we can build. Again, we have a lot of stuff coming. It's a lot of fun doing a lot of case studies. And if you have questions on the local SEO level, feel free to reach out. I'd love to take a peek at anyone that has local SEO. I just love local SEO from an analytical standpoint.

Jeremy Rivera (50:31.588)
Thanks so much for being a guest. See you next time.

Matt (50:34.296)
All right, thanks, Jerry.