January 8, 2025 • 44 mins
Get ready to master your digital marketing budget with insights from Mike Shaug, founder and CEO of Premier Online Marketing. Learn how to reverse engineer your traffic needs from lead generation goals and why too much traffic is never a problem. From understanding your sales targets to dissecting competitors' spending through Google Ads' auction insights, Mike provides a treasure trove of strategies to ensure informed budgeting decisions that drive growth and stability in an ever-competitive landscape.
Explore the untapped potential of organic traffic as we uncover why it's often more rewarding than paid options. Frequent Google algorithm changes might be daunting, but staying updated is crucial to maintaining those high conversion rates and avoiding revenue fluctuations. With new players like Gemini and ChatGPT entering the arena, flexibility in your digital marketing strategy is no longer optional. Learn how to leverage SEO and content updates to maintain a steady stream of organic traffic, while also preparing for when paid media needs to take the spotlight.
The digital landscape is shifting, and so should your approach. Discover the importance of diversifying beyond Google, with platforms like Bing and Microsoft gaining prominence. Learn how to mitigate risks associated with website migrations during mergers and acquisitions, and understand why a first-mover advantage on emerging platforms could be your secret weapon. Mike also shares why video marketing should be on your radar and how businesses can utilize it effectively without competing for viral fame. This episode is your guide to staying ahead in the dynamic world of digital marketing.
Premier Online Marketing helps businesses grow through smart SEO, content, and search strategies. Learn more at www.premieronlinemarketing.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello and welcome back to the Palmcast Yep.
This is your favorite digitalmarketing podcast, focused
solely on local lead generationinsights and strategies.
Well, you know it.
Your search for the currentdigital marketing tips and
tactics the best place for that?
Well, you've already found it,so your search is over.
Thanks for tuning in.
(00:21):
I want to get to it right now.
As always, almost always, Ihave the founder and CEO of
Premier Online Marketing, mikeSchaug.
Mike, how are you today?
I'm good, sean.
How are you doing?
Good to be here?
I'm good, I'm good.
We are getting into that holidayseason when we're recording
this episode, and it's just thattime of year where I think half
(00:47):
of the people out there arejust they love this time of year
and half of the people justdon't love this time of year,
for whatever reason.
I happen to love it, it's agreat time of year.
I think it's a really good timefor conversations like the one
we're going to have today, where, if you are thinking about how
your budgets should look foroptimizing digital spend going
(01:09):
into the new year, because we'regetting close to a brand new
year, 2025.
Well, this is a great episodeto tune into.
So I don't really want to spendtoo much time beating around
the bush.
I really want to start byasking you.
The first thing is what aresome of the things that you
would say a business should bemaybe asking themselves as they
(01:34):
consider what budgets should belooking like?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Perhaps it's a compare and contrast, but as
they go into a new year,Absolutely yeah, and I had the
(02:06):
idea for this podcast themebecause I just got through
budgeting season for all of ourcustomers.
So, unfortunately, thisinformation for the next year
and essentially it becomes kindof an exercise of determining
what are the needs of thebusiness from a traffic or lead
standpoint and you try to workbackwards from the lead.
Obviously, we're a leadgeneration company so we can
drive traffic and leads.
We can't close them for thecustomer.
So you want to reverse engineeryour traffic needs from that
(02:28):
lead to close rate and basicallythe number of leads that you're
going to need.
You should base it on what yougot basically year to date or
over the last 12 months, and Inever hear from most of my
clients that they're getting toomuch traffic or too many weeks.
I literally have actually neverheard that once in my life.
(02:50):
So when you're thinking aboutbudgets for the next year,
especially as it relates todigital marketing, you need to
look at SEO, ppc, social, paidorganic efforts, content
planning.
I need to kind of evaluate whatis the level of traffic that I
need relative to where I'm atright now, if you budget for
2025 with the same budget thatyou have in 2024, and you're
(03:14):
hoping that things are going toget cheaper or you're going to
get smarter or more efficientwith your budget.
You're probably not going tohave the results that you want.
So the first question is isyour business stabilized,
basically on track for hittinggoal?
Like, how far away are you frombusiness stability?
Are you 15% of?
If you got 15% more traffic,would you be there?
(03:34):
Or more sales, would you bethere?
And then you can reverseengineer from there.
Um, yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
I think that's a really important point because I
mean, you and I have seen thisactually before where a business
doesn't really even understandwhat their current sales targets
are and if the trafficnecessary to support that is
(04:04):
doing its job.
And so when you talk aboutstabilizing, I think it's really
critical for businesses toconsider the fact that if you
just throw numbers out there,hoping that it's going to work,
without saying, well, ourtargets right now have been at X
and our traffic that hassupported that has been Y, you
(04:28):
then can actually start to makesome decisions around what it
might look like to increase thattraffic and what might need to
be done to increase that trafficto see those sales targets
actually grow the way you want.
But you got to have a baseline.
So I think that's really reallysmart.
The way you want, but you gotto have a baseline, so I think
that's really really smart, Very, very smart.
(04:53):
Curious to know your thoughtson if impression share is
important, especially relativeto maybe the other businesses in
your market.
Like, do you have thoughts onthat?
Speaker 2 (05:02):
For PPC.
It's definitely a veryimportant metric in the mix.
Ultimately, the number onemetric is how far is the gap
between the sales that I want tohave and where I want to be, or
where I am and where mycompetitors are.
So let's say you have insightinto how a competing dealership
or business is doing and they'reselling, say, 30% more cars
(05:23):
than you is doing and they'reselling, say, 30% more cars than
you.
That's a really interestingthing to look into.
I would 100% recommend doing aSWOT analysis on the SEO side to
see how many keywords are theyranking for relative to us, and
that'll let you know a littlebit about what you need to do on
the content and SEO side.
But on the PPC side, Google willjust tell you what your
impression share is relative tospecific competitors in your
(05:46):
market.
And if you have an impressionshare that is, let's say, you
know, 10% or less, and yourcompetitor is taking 25% of the
impression share market, thenthat is, that's telling you that
they're basically spending, youknow, probably 2.5 X your
budget.
So if you're hoping to, sobasically, if you're planning
(06:08):
specifically with specificcompetitors in mind and trying
to beat specific competitors,the best place to go look is
your auction insights reportswithin Google ads and it'll tell
you what keywords.
Uh, or well, it'll tell youwhat your overlap rate is, what
the top of page rate is on thekeywords that you have in your
account, or well, it'll tell youwhat your overlap rate is, what
the top of page rate is on thekeywords that you have in your
account.
So, um, it's only going to talkabout the keywords that you
(06:31):
have in your account.
If they have other keywords,that are, you know they have
more expansive keyword liststhan you.
You're not going to get anydata on that, so just know that
you're getting.
You're only seeing a piece ofthe puzzle when you look at that
report, but it's really reallytelling when, if there's a big
discrepancy between your top ofpage rate and your competitors,
(06:52):
that means that they're spendingsubstantially more than you,
and you need to evaluate that inyour paid media strategy.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
That's an excellent tip.
Excellent tip, as if I shouldbe surprised.
That's all you do, is you?
Just, you step up to the plateand you always, always, always
deliver like that.
That's such a great tip.
Okay, well, we, inpre-conversation leading up to
the episode, you had mentionedsomething that I really am not
familiar with.
These terms flighted versusflat budgets.
(07:21):
And I know the audience willdefinitely love to hear your
thoughts on flighted versus flatbudgets.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
A flat budget is pretty straightforward.
It's let's say, I have $15,000a month to spend.
It's going to be flatthroughout the year.
A flighted budget is basicallyincreases and decreases, with
your customers looking for you.
So, let's say, a great examplewould be the automotive industry
(07:48):
, and power automotive andapartment industry actually have
very similar seasonality.
It starts to peak up rightaround tax season, really
increases over summer and thencrashes down in the fall.
For both industries, october,november and February are the
(08:08):
worst months.
So, with that in mind, do youwant to just take your budget
and spread it evenly across allof those months?
From our point of view, theanswer to that is no, because if
you have, let's say, 100% to150% more people searching for
what you're having to sellduring some period of the year,
(08:29):
that means that your cost peracquiring those customers is
going to go lower, whereas ifyou have a flat budget, let's
say in July and it's the same inNovember, your cost per lead is
actually going to go up inNovember, and you should expect
it to, because the same amountof people are in market looking
for the same customers, and whenthere are far fewer of them,
(08:51):
then that makes it a lot moreexpensive for you to acquire
those customers.
So if I could plan everyone'sbudget from now on until the end
of time, I would definitelyrecommend substantial
increasements to spend in thepeak months of the year and then
also decreases when you areless likely to move.
(09:11):
You know, let's say, whenyou're less likely to move a
customer into a you know Montanaapartment or even Denver places
that are cold, you know, theyjust tend, there tends to be
less business during that timeof year substantially.
So you want to make sure thatyou're spending your customer
during the time where there aremore customers to go after.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Uh, that's one of the most honest answers that you
have thoughts as well on intimes of inflation right and
budgeting for inflation.
I'd love for you to share aboutyour thoughts there as well.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, I mean Google generally increases CPCs by you
know, eight to sometimes 25%year over year and it changes by
vertical.
It doesn't just move up all atthe same time but in your
vertical you will see CPCincreases.
I remember back in the day whenif we saw a $1 cost per click,
(10:30):
that was terribly moronic andwasteful.
Now I would.
I would be very happy to get a$1 CPC in some of the verticals
that we serve.
So you need to plan for budgetincreases and I guess this would
be more for the stabilizedbusiness where you're kind of in
a good spot, you are selling,kind of on track with where you
(10:52):
want to be, for your paid mediaor SEO channels.
But you also need to account forthe fact that your channels are
going to get more expensive.
So if you want the exact sameamount of traffic through paid
channels anyway, there is goingto be a little bit of an
increase in CPC.
So just make sure that you'replanning for that, otherwise you
will see less traffic year overyear and you'll think you're
(11:13):
doing something wrong.
But really what's changing isthe industry.
More competitors are cominginto the market, more people are
doing it themselves and settingall their keywords to max
clicks and broad match andyou're competing with those
people now.
So there are a lot of reasonswhy CPCs go up year over year,
but what is a fact is that theydo so from a Google ads or paid
(11:36):
media standpoint.
You absolutely need to countfor that in your budget planning
as well.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I've heard you also talk about the necessity for
budget to be, I guess, somethingthat you consider relative to
algorithm updates as well, and Idon't know that.
I've heard a lot of people talkabout that, but it makes a lot
of sense.
So I'd like you to share alittle bit about your thoughts
on budgeting regarding algorithmupdates.
(12:03):
There certainly are at least ahandful that happen every year.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, actually we just had a big one, a couple of
big ones, that just went downand Google actually didn't have
like recommendations.
It was just like this ishappening and it happened and
now you have less traffic.
There's nothing to fix, butthis is something that changed
and the reality of the situationis, if you're getting thousands
of visits organically, you needto treat those like diamonds.
(12:31):
They're so valuable.
Organic traffic is morevaluable than paid traffic.
I hate to say that as a paidmedia guy.
It just converts at a higherrate.
If you think about your averagesearch auction, google says
that somewhere from 10% to 15%of people click on ads at any
given time, meaning that 85% to95% of the people don't trust
(12:55):
paid media results.
If you ask your parents, wheredo you click, a lot of my mom
will say I don't click on theads and she doesn't have a
reason for doing it.
She just mistrusts it.
So the reality is that Googleis a for-profit company and they
make money when you click onads and they don't make money
(13:16):
when you don't.
So they have a vested interestin decreasing the amount of
organic traffic that you aregetting year over year If you
are not actively investing inyour SEO.
If you are not making revisionsto basically every page, at
least little revisions tocontent, if you're not comparing
how your website is rankingrelative to the cohort of
(13:38):
competitors that you areevaluating in your market, then
you are going to lose organictraffic, and it's not that
you're doing anything wrong.
There are plenty of businessesthat don't change services, like
dog groomers, for instance, ordentists.
Their services are the samePlumbers.
Why would they need to updatetheir service offering A roofer
(14:02):
is a roofer.
They'll come and let you knowwhat it's going to cost in
person.
A lot of these businesses don'tlist pricing anyway, but the
content of their websites doesneed to change if they want to
stay ahead of new competitors.
So you just have to have anunderstanding that, despite even
your best efforts, there willbe an algo update at some point
(14:24):
where you will lose like 15 or20% of your traffic and you will
feel that, as you know, manytens of thousands of dollars of
lost revenue and it just wentaway, and people will discredit,
they'll kindredit.
It's almost like being in arecession where you just have
less of quality leads than youhad before.
So, with that being said,especially within the automotive
(14:47):
industry, you can definitelycount on this.
You should absolutely have alittle bit of reserve budget or
understand that you need to havesome budget flexibility to
account for situations where youlose some organic traffic,
especially if you're not doingSEO.
So SEO is really important.
Insurance it's definitelysomething that you should have
in your budgets for sure, but ifyou don't, you need to plan for
(15:12):
the fluctuations that you'regoing to see in that area.
And the other factor, too, issearch engines are changing
massively.
Gemini has tried to do a wholebunch of stuff to change its
search engine.
Chatgpt just launched theirsearch engine within the tool.
You've got Perplexity.
You have a lot of people thatare going after this monopoly on
(15:33):
Ted Blue links.
So you absolutely need tounderstand that you need to have
flexibility.
Paid is always going to be there.
That's kind of the best jobsecurity, I think.
I think there will always beads, similarly to how we have it
now with search and sponsoredadvertising.
(15:54):
Seo is going to changemassively and it has been an
incredibly reliable channel thatpeople take for granted.
But I think that very heavilyin 2025, especially as AI agents
and technology kind of makes itworks its way through search
engines and how we getinformation.
You can account for a lot ofvolatility in your organic
(16:16):
traffic and you need toabsolutely plan for that.
If you're not doing SEO, youshould, and if you don't have
the budget for it, just knowthat your quick lever to relieve
the pain is going to be paidmedia, and obviously that lines
up beautifully with the profitinterests of Google and every
search engine.
But you just need to understandthat at some point that could
(16:37):
happen hopefully not during peakseason, but it's very hard to
predict algorithm updates.
There are usually four to sixfairly meaningful ones every
single year.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah, I think that's really, really important.
That's what you're sharingthere, I think, is really kind
of an advanced tip.
There aren't a lot of peoplethat account for algorithm
updates throughout the year andwhat that can really mean.
And, as you're talking aboutthis from the organic side and
the SEO side, I think there's alot of people that are.
You know, if you've only beenin, you know, a marketing role
(17:10):
for the last year or two, maybefive years, but really you could
say this, going back to peoplethat are um 10 years in, if if
that's still the depth of yourexperience you you maybe don't
consider the fact that whenGoogle first came to market, um,
there was no advertisingplatform.
There are a lot of people thatdon't understand they they come
(17:31):
into it in the last 10, 15 yearsand they think, oh well,
there's two sides of the coin.
Right, there's the paid side,there's the organic side.
But it is so fascinating to meto think about how Google
operates today and you're one ofthe, I think, foremost experts
(17:51):
in understanding both sides ofthat coin and, as it relates to
search engines, but certainlywith Google having such market
share that they have, it'sfascinating to me that there are
a lot of people that are tryingto make smart marketing
decisions on behalf of theircompanies.
Or maybe they're a really smallbusiness and they don't even
have a marketing team.
That's just the business ownerhim or herself trying to figure
(18:14):
these things out.
This is why I love the type oftips and advice that you give on
this podcast, because I thinkit's really important.
There are a lot of SMBs, thereare a lot of SaaS companies and
big tech companies and fortune500 companies that don't think
through all of this becausethere's they're.
They're too busy trying tochase a minuscule attribution
(18:35):
that really doesn't matter.
It's so insignificant.
It's like vanity andperformance related looking
metrics that are like, don'tlook at here, because we want
you to look at how all thisstuff looks.
So I love that you share tipslike this.
I think it's really important.
I know that the people thatconsume this content are also
benefiting from it greatlybenefiting from it greatly.
(18:56):
I do want to ask you also, onthis topic of budgeting into the
new year what about the websiteor the brand itself and when
those things migrate?
Because a lot of people don'tthink about some of those
consequences and I know you'vegot thoughts there, so tell me a
little bit about what you thinkaround budgeting relative to
(19:17):
your website brand andmigrations of those.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Yeah well, m&a has kind of been slowed down in all
the verticals we serve for thelast couple of years, with
interest rates being what theyare, but it's projected to go
back up, which means that a lotof customers, whether they're
wealth management companies orroll ups, they're going to buy
dealerships, they're going tobuy apartment buildings and
(19:41):
they're going to arbitrarilychange them to a new name, just
so it's different than the oldname, or they'll change it to
roll up under a mothership brandand something that you really
have to be mindful of whenyou're acquiring an asset or
you're working with a businessthat has been newly acquired.
They want to change the name ormaybe they just want to improve
(20:05):
the website.
Same name, new website.
You want to make sure that thatagain, because organic traffic
is very precious and very hardto replace that you plan that
extremely well, meaning that ifyou have pages that are ranking
for specific keywords, you wantto look at those pages and make
sure that the content, the URLstructure, everything is
(20:26):
replicated on the new website,whether it's under the new name.
Worse, the absolute minimum islike three or one redirects and
making sure that you have aredirect strategy in place.
But what I see most of the timeis a buy-sell happens.
The people that we're workingwith are newly made aware that
(20:48):
because the NDA period has ended, hey, we're going to get this
new asset.
It was apartment community Aand we're going to change it to
apartment community B andthey're leasing really well.
Their projections are awesomeand we already went ahead and
made the name change.
We bought this domain thatdoesn't have the geographic
(21:11):
location in the URL, which isdefinitely an SEO hack that
works and just you know, keeprunning it.
It was doing really well.
So they'll make all thosechanges.
Their organic traffic willdisappear and because there's
not really a strongunderstanding of how important
organic traffic is and how it isthe most important traffic
source and everything that youdo kind of influences organic
(21:34):
traffic, they'll lose a lot ofit.
And then all of a suddenthey're like well, what the hell
?
You know the website's waybetter.
Our website is so much nicerthan the other website.
Why do we have less leads butthey have less traffic?
Because the website migrationwas not handled well.
Now I could go into a wholepodcast for just website
(21:55):
migrations and bring the SEOteam in how to talk about how to
tackle that perfectly.
But even with the best team,sometimes the CMS options are
not really great.
I actually were working with aclient right now that was doing
really well on dealercom'splatform, of all things.
They migrated to anotherplatform that was supposedly way
(22:15):
better and their organictraffic dropped in half.
And unfortunately unfortunatelyand hopefully.
If you're listening to this andyou have this come up, you just
need to understand that toGoogle, legacy does matter.
Just having a new website forthe appearance, the aesthetic of
(22:36):
it, without the SEO taken intoconsideration, could be a
massive, multimillion dollarmistake, million dollar mistake.
And if, no matter what, we'rechanging websites, we're getting
off of one platform going toanother, obviously you want to
consider all the things that youcan control to make that
transition as seamless aspossible, and you're also going
(22:57):
to even need to understand thatunder the most perfect
circumstances, you're going tolose probably 20 to 30% of that
traffic, no matter what.
So you're going to need to planfor 30% of that traffic, no
matter what.
So you're going to need to planfor that.
If you have a website migrationor new website, you need to plan
for several monthspost-transition where you are
(23:17):
going to have to increase yourtraffic from other sources.
Obviously, paid is the easiestway to do that.
You can also get ahead of itwith really good SEO planning.
But a new website to Google isgoing to have an organic setback
and you're going to have anadjustment period that you're
going to have to account for.
We have seen website migrationswhere it just goes up and
(23:38):
things are just great, butthat's probably been about 10%
of the time.
90% of the time, even whenmigrating from a crappy platform
to a new, better one, there'san adjustment period, usually
four months or so, where trafficdrops about 20% and it's from a
really high converting source.
(23:58):
So you need to offset that bymore than the amount of traffic
you lost, because you need tounderstand that organic traffic
converts three times better thanpaid media.
So if you're offsetting a 20%traffic drop with paid media,
it's going to have to be morethan a 20% increase to your
budget.
You're going to actually haveto look at the amount of traffic
that you were getting andprobably double it to be
somewhere in the sameneighborhood for a little while,
(24:20):
and then obviously you can goback down.
But SEO is really important andit's people just kind of think
that organic traffic is a given.
It's not.
It's incredibly competitive andit's the most important channel
.
For sure that most of ourclients are not super.
They're not super dialed intohow important it is necessarily.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Imagine, regardless of whether you're choosing a diy
self-serve website platform andyou're going to switch yourself
you're really small business oryou know you and I have a lot
of experience in the automotiveindustry.
Imagine if the automotiveindustry website provider, as
part of their sales pitch, hadto disclose yes, we're amazing,
we're awesome.
When you switch over, you'regoing to have probably a 20 to
(25:05):
30, if not more percent decreasefor potentially at least a
quarter.
Yeah, by the way, it doesn'tmatter whether you choose us or
anybody else.
If you're intent on switching,you should be also doing this
(25:28):
protection package around yourinvestments, like you're talking
about right now, whether it'sgoing into 2025 or it could be
any time during the year thatyou're going to make that change
.
That's going to be catastrophicif you don't have also this
protection plan of making surethat you build up this traffic
so that it accounts for the factthat you're going to have a dip
(25:48):
before you return to greatness.
That's another really great tip.
I know that maybe in years past,you and I both would probably
want to be able to say put allyour eggs or do most of your
investment in Google, obviouslyfrom a market share perspective,
and there's always been, Ithink, really good reason to
(26:12):
have at least some budget thatyou're allocating in the
Microsoft ad platform, andprobably there's probably a a
good argument or case to be madefor even paid social in a lot
of examples.
I want to hear your thoughts onthat.
Around the Microsoft ad piece,I'm not asking you to say
(26:34):
anything that's particularlymaybe negative or shade towards
Google, but I really know,because we've had conversations
about it before, about how thisis really important to actually
be thinking about these thingsand it's not just from a hey,
don't use Google all the time.
There is actually a lot ofthings to consider, um in making
those decisions.
(26:54):
So for for, it doesn't matterif you're a car dealer or any
business.
If we're thinking about 2025,how would you be telling them to
consider budget as it relatesto Microsoft ads versus Google,
or maybe all of it to?
Speaker 2 (27:06):
consider budget as it relates to Microsoft ads versus
Google, or maybe all of it.
Yeah Well, I mean, obviouslyGoogle has had, and still
continues to have, the vastmajority of search volume and as
long as that's the case, mostof your budget should be there.
However, it is totally underattack from every side and, in
(27:27):
our opinion, google is nothandling it well.
To be honest with you, I thinkthat there's real credible
threats that if people continueto have better experiences in
other places to find informationwhether it's Perplexity or
ChatGPT or Bing or Edge orwhatever they're going to
(27:49):
continue to bleed traffic andmost of our clients probably
have under 20% of the searchvolume for whatever their
category is in, whatever marketthey're in.
So the fact that all of theseother challenging platforms have
north of 10% right now meansyou could never spend another
dollar with Google and get thesame amount of traffic on all
(28:11):
these other channels.
I will say that Google doesconvert better than some other
channels, but we are seeingcomparable performance in
Microsoft and I do think thatMicrosoft is the really most
formidable challenger right now.
Obviously, they're getting aton of data through ChatGPT.
I believe that ChatGPT searchis kind of powered by Bing, ads
(28:35):
or Edge.
So when it becomes addressablethrough that medium, you're
going to want to be there, but Iwould really say as an agency,
it doesn't benefit us to steerpeople to other platforms,
because those are more platformsthat my team have to manage, a
lot more oversight for billing.
(28:56):
There's just nothing butdownsides with being
multi-omni-channel for thebusiness side and it's a
headache for everyone else.
However, you don't want to bethe last mover or you want to be
the first mover to anotherplatform when you see it on the
rise and, frankly, google hasnot responded well to AI at all.
(29:17):
So I 100% am steering all ofour customers to definitely Bing
, but to other channels as well.
If TikTok is not going to getkicked out of the country, then
you should use it.
I think that the fear,uncertainty and doubt that the
government put around Bing sorry, not around Bing, but TikTok
and them getting kicked out ofthe country that made millions,
(29:39):
billions of dollars more forGoogle and for the other
platforms that weren't going toget ousted, but that doesn't
appear to be happening.
So you need to look at all ofthe channels where you have been
relying on getting business andyou need to look at expanding
them, because there are a lot ofother places where your dollars
can be well spent.
The worst thing that couldhappen would you'd see some
(30:03):
seismic change in Google searchand the 10 blue link monopoly is
shaky and, let's say, googleloses 20% of their market share
to these challenging platforms.
That would be a massive loss oftraffic, organically from a
paid standpoint, and sure youcan make it up by spending more.
(30:24):
But I think the more efficientoption will be to actually
strategically choose a couple ofother platforms to invest in.
I like Google.
I think Google is going to bethe best place to spend most of
your money for the next coupleyears, for sure.
But I also think that being ads, or Microsoft ads with their
their search network, isdefinitely a very important
(30:47):
channel and you shouldabsolutely allocate a small
portion of your budget there,maybe 15% of your monthly
allocation to start and thenkind of go from there based on
performance.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I think it's great that you're so transparent about
topics like this, because it'sI mean, if you, if you even
consider your podcast, thepodcast, the content that you
make here, it's it's meant tohave the long form version to
where people can consume itwherever they are listening to
it right now, wherever ifthey've decided that they want
to see the video version of it.
(31:19):
But you've consciously decidedthat you know that this is
valuable and it goes beyond justone particular channel.
You can use a podcast like thisto make content for your
YouTube audience, for yourLinkedIn audience, for if your
company is going to be usingTikTok, instagram, facebook,
every single platform but thosedecisions are made based on,
(31:41):
well, where's the targetaudience for your business?
And so you're doing thingsyourself at Premier Online
Marketing that you could tellany business that you also work
with or would like to endeavorto work with in the future that
you're doing the same thingsthat you would tell them to be
doing around the diversificationand being first in places where
(32:03):
you see the rise of newplatforms that could be
beneficial to your business.
I think that's really, reallycritical.
I've got a couple more things Iwant to ask you in this episode.
One is around creative planning, and I touched on this just
here in the last couple ofthings that I mentioned around
you know kind of rise of thingslike video Not that it's new,
(32:23):
it's not new but it just seemsto continue to open more
people's eyes and realize thatis such a um, uh, it's a
conversation starter.
It's one of the easiest andbest places to get someone's
attention, um, which you have tohave before you can build trust
with audiences.
And so I'd love to get yourthoughts here, as we kind of
wind down in the last couple ofquestions, first around your
(32:45):
thoughts around creativeplanning relative to budgeting
into a new year.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah, I think I mean, for forever, video has been the
number one medium.
If you think about, you know,instagram, facebook, people
taking video selfies ofthemselves, or or video
testimonials, or like all kindsof stuff, and then obviously you
have like televisionadvertising, ott, all of that
(33:10):
stuff, I think the biggestbarrier for a lot of businesses
is the ability to create, orjust the frank fact that nobody
has planned or budgeted forcreating, quality video footage
that you can use on, likeYouTube ads or Hulu ads or
something like that, but that ischanging, and there are
(33:30):
definitely a lot of great toolsthat will help you create great
video with limited resources.
But even that, that being said,that is an option and that's a
good option.
It's better than notparticipating in video marketing
.
I would say, though, that, likeyou should absolutely plan for
especially new business venturesthat don't have video, you
(33:53):
should plan to do some qualityvideo for your business YouTube
alone, through custom intentaudiences, where you can
basically target people onYouTube that just searched what
your top you were, your topkeywords.
You know, it's just such agreat way to get in front of
people.
I always, when I think aboutlike impression quality um,
(34:13):
think about like the impressionquality of a search ad on Google
.
It's like a bunch of texts.
It takes your brain a lot oftime to digest it.
You have to choose to read itall.
Most people don't.
They just scroll on and go onWord of Work.
Look at a banner ad thatinterrupts you when you're on a
news site or something like that.
(34:35):
A video is.
You expect to see anadvertisement if you're on TV,
so it's expected, which is good.
It is definitely intrusive, butyou expect it.
But the impression quality isawesome.
You can convey so much morethrough a video than you can
through text or an image, so itjust makes a much better link
(34:57):
with your target prospects.
And video for the longest timewas kind of limited by the
targeting options that you had,and that's no longer the case.
So you now have the ability totarget people extremely
precisely based on keywords.
That they did, that they justsearched.
So that just makes video reallyimportant.
And the barrier has always beencreative.
(35:18):
So businesses that choose notto invest in their creative and
choose not to invest in Googleare going to be missing out on a
lot of great traffic and a lotof great connections that they
could be making for theirbusiness, so for all businesses
that we work with, we definitelyare nudging them to allocate
some of their media spend forvideo, but obviously to
(35:41):
development of the assets.
They need to take advantage ofthis because it's so important.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
I just want to piggyback on that because I
think, once again, really verygood insight, and I know that
there are a lot of businessesthis doesn't it's not exclusive,
just B2B, but there are a lotof businesses that will talk
themselves out of video creationbecause they are fixated on
comparing themselves againstinfluencers or celebrities or
(36:10):
rock stars and, like, I'm nevergoing to go viral and I just
think it's really important.
I say this a lot, especially inbusiness, it isn't how many,
that's so important, it's who,and so when you're making that
content, the who becomes yourdriving factor.
(36:31):
Who are you making it for?
And that might be that you have62 people that watch the video,
but all 62 of them are likelypeople that you really wanted to
see that content.
So don't get hung up andcertainly don't stop yourself
altogether by thinking well,we're never going to have a
video that has millions andmillions of views.
(36:53):
If you do, that's nothing wrongwith that either.
If you go viral for some reason, hey great.
But the fact is is that the whothat you're making your content
for is far more important thanhow many people are seeing it.
Don't fixate on that, becauseit oftentimes stops people dead
in their tracks and they won'teven do it.
Well, I got one more.
We were talking about this alittle bit Just to know if you
(37:15):
have some, maybe some closingthoughts around SEO or content
planning, obviously part of thisbeing video, but maybe um, kind
of your your final thoughts onSEO and content planning as it
would relate to budgeting foryour new year.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, I think it's.
Uh, I think defending yourwhatever traffic you have gained
organically should be a toppriority.
Um, even if your trafficdoesn't increase year over year,
that's better than having lesstraffic and it's worth every
penny to defend it and invest init.
But yeah, obviously, for SEO,you want to plan for
(37:53):
re-optimization of all of yourcore pages, meaning adding new
text to those pages if you'renot ranking in the position you
want to rank for.
So I think a really goodexercise for all business owners
to go through, regardless ofindustry, is to take your
website and look at who you'recompeting with, not based on
your opinion of who yourcompetitor is.
(38:15):
Oftentimes we'll talk todealerships or apartment owners
and they'll say, well, myproduct is like this other
building 20 miles away, it'sanother luxury, high rise or
whatever, but really who theircompetitor is is, if you're in a
five mile radius of thebusiness and you search for the
keyword that matters to you,who's showing up.
(38:37):
Those are your digitalcompetitors and you need to
evaluate from an SEO and a paidmedia standpoint.
How are you stacking up againstthese guys?
Are they outranking you all thetime?
Are they outranking you in themap pack and the search engine
results or just the map pack andnot the search engine results,
and you need to reverse engineerboth the local SEO listings or
(38:59):
map pack and then also thesearch results.
So typically, what we see ismost of our customers or I think
all customers just want to kindof think of SEO as a one and
done.
We set it up, we hit the pages,we have the visibility that we
want and then we stop.
We don't want to mess with it.
Unfortunately, all of yourcompetitors are going to be
developing content.
(39:20):
A lot of them are going to beadopting new website platforms
that might be better than yoursor faster, and you have to
evaluate what you're going to dothis next year from a content
and SEO perspective, and whatyou definitely need to invest in
is beefing up, extending theword count, improving your
keyword optimization on all ofyour core pages, and you also
(39:43):
need to evaluate all thekeywords that you want to show
up for.
What's really funny for ussometimes is we'll have a
customer come to us and saythey'll have like 300 words that
they want to show up for andthey have a five-page website.
It's literally impossible torank for all of those keywords
when you have so few pages.
So part of the contentdevelopment needs to be looking
(40:05):
at where do we want to expandinto these other keywords that
totally make sense for ourbusiness, but we don't show up
for them anywhere not on anypage of Google and you need to
create those pages and createthat content.
So you should be looking fortwo different types of content
projects.
You should be looking atexpanding into new pages that
(40:26):
you don't currently have contentfor, and then you also need to
look at your core pages.
What are we ranking for?
How do we strengthen ourrankings for that?
Oftentimes, content length isnot long enough.
Frankly and I know that lengthis kind of an arbitrary
description for content, but itabsolutely matters.
If you have 50 to 150 words onthe page optimized for your
(40:51):
target user, and your competitorhas 500 to 1000 words kind of
work throughout their page thatare supporting the keywords they
want to rank for, they're goingto outrank you and that will
happen the vast majority of thetime.
There are other factors, likebacklinks, but oftentimes
content is not deep enough orit's not long enough.
It's not well optimized.
So even if you're rankingreally well right now, you need
(41:14):
to look at all of yourcompetitors and you need to see
what you can do to improve youron-page copy.
The other thing that I thinkabout with content is you want
to front load it as much of itas possible.
If you identify, say, five pagesthat you need to develop, I
would recommend developing themall in January so you have
(41:34):
something to work with a fewmonths later.
Seo is really slow, so I reallylike to have content done.
You know a lot of it up frontso we can kind of tweak, uh with
based based on where you knowkeyword rankings land.
You're always going to have todo more work to the first draft
and what you don't want to do,or what's less ideal, is if you
(41:56):
stretch out all your contentprojects over the year because
you need to add a few months uhmonths after you post that
content, to when you'll actuallystart to see the result in
keyword visibility and traffic.
Yeah, that's kind of my thoughton SEO and budget planning.
Look at what your competitorsare doing, see who's ranking in
positions that you don't want toand kind of understand why.
(42:19):
Work with an SEO provider tohelp you understand that and
then develop the resources tocompete.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Fantastic insights.
Great.
If this were a test, you'd begetting an A plus.
As always, mike.
This is where we'll park thisepisode.
Ladies and gentlemen, we alwaysappreciate your comments and
questions, so feel free to share, because your feedback helps us
deliver more relevant episodes.
If you're not following MikeSchogg on LinkedIn, well, you're
(42:50):
doing yourself a disservice,because he posts content there.
He's a great person to benetworked with, to learn far
more than he just shares on hispodcast, so make sure you do
that.
No-transcript.
(43:15):
Thanks, sean.
Thanks.
Hello and welcome back to the Palmcast Yep.
This is your favorite digitalmarketing podcast, focused
solely on local lead generationinsights and strategies.
Well, you know it.
Your search for the currentdigital marketing tips and
tactics the best place for that?
Well, you've already found it,so your search is over.
Thanks for tuning in.
(00:21):
I want to get to it right now.
As always, almost always, Ihave the founder and CEO of
Premier Online Marketing, mikeSchaug.
Mike, how are you today?
I'm good, sean.
How are you doing?
Good to be here?
I'm good, I'm good.
We are getting into that holidayseason when we're recording
this episode, and it's just thattime of year where I think half
(00:47):
of the people out there arejust they love this time of year
and half of the people justdon't love this time of year,
for whatever reason.
I happen to love it, it's agreat time of year.
I think it's a really good timefor conversations like the one
we're going to have today, where, if you are thinking about how
your budgets should look foroptimizing digital spend going
(01:09):
into the new year, because we'regetting close to a brand new
year, 2025.
Well, this is a great episodeto tune into.
So I don't really want to spendtoo much time beating around
the bush.
I really want to start byasking you.
The first thing is what aresome of the things that you
would say a business should bemaybe asking themselves as they
(01:34):
consider what budgets should belooking like?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Perhaps it's a compare and contrast, but as
they go into a new year,Absolutely yeah, and I had the
(02:06):
idea for this podcast themebecause I just got through
budgeting season for all of ourcustomers.
So, unfortunately, thisinformation for the next year
and essentially it becomes kindof an exercise of determining
what are the needs of thebusiness from a traffic or lead
standpoint and you try to workbackwards from the lead.
Obviously, we're a leadgeneration company so we can
drive traffic and leads.
We can't close them for thecustomer.
So you want to reverse engineeryour traffic needs from that
(02:28):
lead to close rate and basicallythe number of leads that you're
going to need.
You should base it on what yougot basically year to date or
over the last 12 months, and Inever hear from most of my
clients that they're getting toomuch traffic or too many weeks.
I literally have actually neverheard that once in my life.
(02:50):
So when you're thinking aboutbudgets for the next year,
especially as it relates todigital marketing, you need to
look at SEO, ppc, social, paidorganic efforts, content
planning.
I need to kind of evaluate whatis the level of traffic that I
need relative to where I'm atright now, if you budget for
2025 with the same budget thatyou have in 2024, and you're
(03:14):
hoping that things are going toget cheaper or you're going to
get smarter or more efficientwith your budget.
You're probably not going tohave the results that you want.
So the first question is isyour business stabilized,
basically on track for hittinggoal?
Like, how far away are you frombusiness stability?
Are you 15% of?
If you got 15% more traffic,would you be there?
(03:34):
Or more sales, would you bethere?
And then you can reverseengineer from there.
Um, yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
I think that's a really important point because I
mean, you and I have seen thisactually before where a business
doesn't really even understandwhat their current sales targets
are and if the trafficnecessary to support that is
(04:04):
doing its job.
And so when you talk aboutstabilizing, I think it's really
critical for businesses toconsider the fact that if you
just throw numbers out there,hoping that it's going to work,
without saying, well, ourtargets right now have been at X
and our traffic that hassupported that has been Y, you
(04:28):
then can actually start to makesome decisions around what it
might look like to increase thattraffic and what might need to
be done to increase that trafficto see those sales targets
actually grow the way you want.
But you got to have a baseline.
So I think that's really reallysmart.
The way you want, but you gotto have a baseline, so I think
that's really really smart, Very, very smart.
(04:53):
Curious to know your thoughtson if impression share is
important, especially relativeto maybe the other businesses in
your market.
Like, do you have thoughts onthat?
Speaker 2 (05:02):
For PPC.
It's definitely a veryimportant metric in the mix.
Ultimately, the number onemetric is how far is the gap
between the sales that I want tohave and where I want to be, or
where I am and where mycompetitors are.
So let's say you have insightinto how a competing dealership
or business is doing and they'reselling, say, 30% more cars
(05:23):
than you is doing and they'reselling, say, 30% more cars than
you.
That's a really interestingthing to look into.
I would 100% recommend doing aSWOT analysis on the SEO side to
see how many keywords are theyranking for relative to us, and
that'll let you know a littlebit about what you need to do on
the content and SEO side.
But on the PPC side, Google willjust tell you what your
impression share is relative tospecific competitors in your
(05:46):
market.
And if you have an impressionshare that is, let's say, you
know, 10% or less, and yourcompetitor is taking 25% of the
impression share market, thenthat is, that's telling you that
they're basically spending, youknow, probably 2.5 X your
budget.
So if you're hoping to, sobasically, if you're planning
(06:08):
specifically with specificcompetitors in mind and trying
to beat specific competitors,the best place to go look is
your auction insights reportswithin Google ads and it'll tell
you what keywords.
Uh, or well, it'll tell youwhat your overlap rate is, what
the top of page rate is on thekeywords that you have in your
account, or well, it'll tell youwhat your overlap rate is, what
the top of page rate is on thekeywords that you have in your
account.
So, um, it's only going to talkabout the keywords that you
(06:31):
have in your account.
If they have other keywords,that are, you know they have
more expansive keyword liststhan you.
You're not going to get anydata on that, so just know that
you're getting.
You're only seeing a piece ofthe puzzle when you look at that
report, but it's really reallytelling when, if there's a big
discrepancy between your top ofpage rate and your competitors,
(06:52):
that means that they're spendingsubstantially more than you,
and you need to evaluate that inyour paid media strategy.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
That's an excellent tip.
Excellent tip, as if I shouldbe surprised.
That's all you do, is you?
Just, you step up to the plateand you always, always, always
deliver like that.
That's such a great tip.
Okay, well, we, inpre-conversation leading up to
the episode, you had mentionedsomething that I really am not
familiar with.
These terms flighted versusflat budgets.
(07:21):
And I know the audience willdefinitely love to hear your
thoughts on flighted versus flatbudgets.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
A flat budget is pretty straightforward.
It's let's say, I have $15,000a month to spend.
It's going to be flatthroughout the year.
A flighted budget is basicallyincreases and decreases, with
your customers looking for you.
So, let's say, a great examplewould be the automotive industry
(07:48):
, and power automotive andapartment industry actually have
very similar seasonality.
It starts to peak up rightaround tax season, really
increases over summer and thencrashes down in the fall.
For both industries, october,november and February are the
(08:08):
worst months.
So, with that in mind, do youwant to just take your budget
and spread it evenly across allof those months?
From our point of view, theanswer to that is no, because if
you have, let's say, 100% to150% more people searching for
what you're having to sellduring some period of the year,
(08:29):
that means that your cost peracquiring those customers is
going to go lower, whereas ifyou have a flat budget, let's
say in July and it's the same inNovember, your cost per lead is
actually going to go up inNovember, and you should expect
it to, because the same amountof people are in market looking
for the same customers, and whenthere are far fewer of them,
(08:51):
then that makes it a lot moreexpensive for you to acquire
those customers.
So if I could plan everyone'sbudget from now on until the end
of time, I would definitelyrecommend substantial
increasements to spend in thepeak months of the year and then
also decreases when you areless likely to move.
(09:11):
You know, let's say, whenyou're less likely to move a
customer into a you know Montanaapartment or even Denver places
that are cold, you know, theyjust tend, there tends to be
less business during that timeof year substantially.
So you want to make sure thatyou're spending your customer
during the time where there aremore customers to go after.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Uh, that's one of the most honest answers that you
have thoughts as well on intimes of inflation right and
budgeting for inflation.
I'd love for you to share aboutyour thoughts there as well.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, I mean Google generally increases CPCs by you
know, eight to sometimes 25%year over year and it changes by
vertical.
It doesn't just move up all atthe same time but in your
vertical you will see CPCincreases.
I remember back in the day whenif we saw a $1 cost per click,
(10:30):
that was terribly moronic andwasteful.
Now I would.
I would be very happy to get a$1 CPC in some of the verticals
that we serve.
So you need to plan for budgetincreases and I guess this would
be more for the stabilizedbusiness where you're kind of in
a good spot, you are selling,kind of on track with where you
(10:52):
want to be, for your paid mediaor SEO channels.
But you also need to account forthe fact that your channels are
going to get more expensive.
So if you want the exact sameamount of traffic through paid
channels anyway, there is goingto be a little bit of an
increase in CPC.
So just make sure that you'replanning for that, otherwise you
will see less traffic year overyear and you'll think you're
(11:13):
doing something wrong.
But really what's changing isthe industry.
More competitors are cominginto the market, more people are
doing it themselves and settingall their keywords to max
clicks and broad match andyou're competing with those
people now.
So there are a lot of reasonswhy CPCs go up year over year,
but what is a fact is that theydo so from a Google ads or paid
(11:36):
media standpoint.
You absolutely need to countfor that in your budget planning
as well.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I've heard you also talk about the necessity for
budget to be, I guess, somethingthat you consider relative to
algorithm updates as well, and Idon't know that.
I've heard a lot of people talkabout that, but it makes a lot
of sense.
So I'd like you to share alittle bit about your thoughts
on budgeting regarding algorithmupdates.
(12:03):
There certainly are at least ahandful that happen every year.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, actually we just had a big one, a couple of
big ones, that just went downand Google actually didn't have
like recommendations.
It was just like this ishappening and it happened and
now you have less traffic.
There's nothing to fix, butthis is something that changed
and the reality of the situationis, if you're getting thousands
of visits organically, you needto treat those like diamonds.
(12:31):
They're so valuable.
Organic traffic is morevaluable than paid traffic.
I hate to say that as a paidmedia guy.
It just converts at a higherrate.
If you think about your averagesearch auction, google says
that somewhere from 10% to 15%of people click on ads at any
given time, meaning that 85% to95% of the people don't trust
(12:55):
paid media results.
If you ask your parents, wheredo you click, a lot of my mom
will say I don't click on theads and she doesn't have a
reason for doing it.
She just mistrusts it.
So the reality is that Googleis a for-profit company and they
make money when you click onads and they don't make money
(13:16):
when you don't.
So they have a vested interestin decreasing the amount of
organic traffic that you aregetting year over year If you
are not actively investing inyour SEO.
If you are not making revisionsto basically every page, at
least little revisions tocontent, if you're not comparing
how your website is rankingrelative to the cohort of
(13:38):
competitors that you areevaluating in your market, then
you are going to lose organictraffic, and it's not that
you're doing anything wrong.
There are plenty of businessesthat don't change services, like
dog groomers, for instance, ordentists.
Their services are the samePlumbers.
Why would they need to updatetheir service offering A roofer
(14:02):
is a roofer.
They'll come and let you knowwhat it's going to cost in
person.
A lot of these businesses don'tlist pricing anyway, but the
content of their websites doesneed to change if they want to
stay ahead of new competitors.
So you just have to have anunderstanding that, despite even
your best efforts, there willbe an algo update at some point
(14:24):
where you will lose like 15 or20% of your traffic and you will
feel that, as you know, manytens of thousands of dollars of
lost revenue and it just wentaway, and people will discredit,
they'll kindredit.
It's almost like being in arecession where you just have
less of quality leads than youhad before.
So, with that being said,especially within the automotive
(14:47):
industry, you can definitelycount on this.
You should absolutely have alittle bit of reserve budget or
understand that you need to havesome budget flexibility to
account for situations where youlose some organic traffic,
especially if you're not doingSEO.
So SEO is really important.
Insurance it's definitelysomething that you should have
in your budgets for sure, but ifyou don't, you need to plan for
(15:12):
the fluctuations that you'regoing to see in that area.
And the other factor, too, issearch engines are changing
massively.
Gemini has tried to do a wholebunch of stuff to change its
search engine.
Chatgpt just launched theirsearch engine within the tool.
You've got Perplexity.
You have a lot of people thatare going after this monopoly on
(15:33):
Ted Blue links.
So you absolutely need tounderstand that you need to have
flexibility.
Paid is always going to be there.
That's kind of the best jobsecurity, I think.
I think there will always beads, similarly to how we have it
now with search and sponsoredadvertising.
(15:54):
Seo is going to changemassively and it has been an
incredibly reliable channel thatpeople take for granted.
But I think that very heavilyin 2025, especially as AI agents
and technology kind of makes itworks its way through search
engines and how we getinformation.
You can account for a lot ofvolatility in your organic
(16:16):
traffic and you need toabsolutely plan for that.
If you're not doing SEO, youshould, and if you don't have
the budget for it, just knowthat your quick lever to relieve
the pain is going to be paidmedia, and obviously that lines
up beautifully with the profitinterests of Google and every
search engine.
But you just need to understandthat at some point that could
(16:37):
happen hopefully not during peakseason, but it's very hard to
predict algorithm updates.
There are usually four to sixfairly meaningful ones every
single year.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah, I think that's really, really important.
That's what you're sharingthere, I think, is really kind
of an advanced tip.
There aren't a lot of peoplethat account for algorithm
updates throughout the year andwhat that can really mean.
And, as you're talking aboutthis from the organic side and
the SEO side, I think there's alot of people that are.
You know, if you've only beenin, you know, a marketing role
(17:10):
for the last year or two, maybefive years, but really you could
say this, going back to peoplethat are um 10 years in, if if
that's still the depth of yourexperience you you maybe don't
consider the fact that whenGoogle first came to market, um,
there was no advertisingplatform.
There are a lot of people thatdon't understand they they come
(17:31):
into it in the last 10, 15 yearsand they think, oh well,
there's two sides of the coin.
Right, there's the paid side,there's the organic side.
But it is so fascinating to meto think about how Google
operates today and you're one ofthe, I think, foremost experts
(17:51):
in understanding both sides ofthat coin and, as it relates to
search engines, but certainlywith Google having such market
share that they have, it'sfascinating to me that there are
a lot of people that are tryingto make smart marketing
decisions on behalf of theircompanies.
Or maybe they're a really smallbusiness and they don't even
have a marketing team.
That's just the business ownerhim or herself trying to figure
(18:14):
these things out.
This is why I love the type oftips and advice that you give on
this podcast, because I thinkit's really important.
There are a lot of SMBs, thereare a lot of SaaS companies and
big tech companies and fortune500 companies that don't think
through all of this becausethere's they're.
They're too busy trying tochase a minuscule attribution
(18:35):
that really doesn't matter.
It's so insignificant.
It's like vanity andperformance related looking
metrics that are like, don'tlook at here, because we want
you to look at how all thisstuff looks.
So I love that you share tipslike this.
I think it's really important.
I know that the people thatconsume this content are also
benefiting from it greatlybenefiting from it greatly.
(18:56):
I do want to ask you also, onthis topic of budgeting into the
new year what about the websiteor the brand itself and when
those things migrate?
Because a lot of people don'tthink about some of those
consequences and I know you'vegot thoughts there, so tell me a
little bit about what you thinkaround budgeting relative to
(19:17):
your website brand andmigrations of those.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Yeah well, m&a has kind of been slowed down in all
the verticals we serve for thelast couple of years, with
interest rates being what theyare, but it's projected to go
back up, which means that a lotof customers, whether they're
wealth management companies orroll ups, they're going to buy
dealerships, they're going tobuy apartment buildings and
(19:41):
they're going to arbitrarilychange them to a new name, just
so it's different than the oldname, or they'll change it to
roll up under a mothership brandand something that you really
have to be mindful of whenyou're acquiring an asset or
you're working with a businessthat has been newly acquired.
They want to change the name ormaybe they just want to improve
(20:05):
the website.
Same name, new website.
You want to make sure that thatagain, because organic traffic
is very precious and very hardto replace that you plan that
extremely well, meaning that ifyou have pages that are ranking
for specific keywords, you wantto look at those pages and make
sure that the content, the URLstructure, everything is
(20:26):
replicated on the new website,whether it's under the new name.
Worse, the absolute minimum islike three or one redirects and
making sure that you have aredirect strategy in place.
But what I see most of the timeis a buy-sell happens.
The people that we're workingwith are newly made aware that
(20:48):
because the NDA period has ended, hey, we're going to get this
new asset.
It was apartment community Aand we're going to change it to
apartment community B andthey're leasing really well.
Their projections are awesomeand we already went ahead and
made the name change.
We bought this domain thatdoesn't have the geographic
(21:11):
location in the URL, which isdefinitely an SEO hack that
works and just you know, keeprunning it.
It was doing really well.
So they'll make all thosechanges.
Their organic traffic willdisappear and because there's
not really a strongunderstanding of how important
organic traffic is and how it isthe most important traffic
source and everything that youdo kind of influences organic
(21:34):
traffic, they'll lose a lot ofit.
And then all of a suddenthey're like well, what the hell
?
You know the website's waybetter.
Our website is so much nicerthan the other website.
Why do we have less leads butthey have less traffic?
Because the website migrationwas not handled well.
Now I could go into a wholepodcast for just website
(21:55):
migrations and bring the SEOteam in how to talk about how to
tackle that perfectly.
But even with the best team,sometimes the CMS options are
not really great.
I actually were working with aclient right now that was doing
really well on dealercom'splatform, of all things.
They migrated to anotherplatform that was supposedly way
(22:15):
better and their organictraffic dropped in half.
And unfortunately unfortunatelyand hopefully.
If you're listening to this andyou have this come up, you just
need to understand that toGoogle, legacy does matter.
Just having a new website forthe appearance, the aesthetic of
(22:36):
it, without the SEO taken intoconsideration, could be a
massive, multimillion dollarmistake, million dollar mistake.
And if, no matter what, we'rechanging websites, we're getting
off of one platform going toanother, obviously you want to
consider all the things that youcan control to make that
transition as seamless aspossible, and you're also going
(22:57):
to even need to understand thatunder the most perfect
circumstances, you're going tolose probably 20 to 30% of that
traffic, no matter what.
So you're going to need to planfor 30% of that traffic, no
matter what.
So you're going to need to planfor that.
If you have a website migrationor new website, you need to plan
for several monthspost-transition where you are
(23:17):
going to have to increase yourtraffic from other sources.
Obviously, paid is the easiestway to do that.
You can also get ahead of itwith really good SEO planning.
But a new website to Google isgoing to have an organic setback
and you're going to have anadjustment period that you're
going to have to account for.
We have seen website migrationswhere it just goes up and
(23:38):
things are just great, butthat's probably been about 10%
of the time.
90% of the time, even whenmigrating from a crappy platform
to a new, better one, there'san adjustment period, usually
four months or so, where trafficdrops about 20% and it's from a
really high converting source.
(23:58):
So you need to offset that bymore than the amount of traffic
you lost, because you need tounderstand that organic traffic
converts three times better thanpaid media.
So if you're offsetting a 20%traffic drop with paid media,
it's going to have to be morethan a 20% increase to your
budget.
You're going to actually haveto look at the amount of traffic
that you were getting andprobably double it to be
somewhere in the sameneighborhood for a little while,
(24:20):
and then obviously you can goback down.
But SEO is really important andit's people just kind of think
that organic traffic is a given.
It's not.
It's incredibly competitive andit's the most important channel
.
For sure that most of ourclients are not super.
They're not super dialed intohow important it is necessarily.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Imagine, regardless of whether you're choosing a diy
self-serve website platform andyou're going to switch yourself
you're really small business oryou know you and I have a lot
of experience in the automotiveindustry.
Imagine if the automotiveindustry website provider, as
part of their sales pitch, hadto disclose yes, we're amazing,
we're awesome.
When you switch over, you'regoing to have probably a 20 to
(25:05):
30, if not more percent decreasefor potentially at least a
quarter.
Yeah, by the way, it doesn'tmatter whether you choose us or
anybody else.
If you're intent on switching,you should be also doing this
(25:28):
protection package around yourinvestments, like you're talking
about right now, whether it'sgoing into 2025 or it could be
any time during the year thatyou're going to make that change
.
That's going to be catastrophicif you don't have also this
protection plan of making surethat you build up this traffic
so that it accounts for the factthat you're going to have a dip
(25:48):
before you return to greatness.
That's another really great tip.
I know that maybe in years past,you and I both would probably
want to be able to say put allyour eggs or do most of your
investment in Google, obviouslyfrom a market share perspective,
and there's always been, Ithink, really good reason to
(26:12):
have at least some budget thatyou're allocating in the
Microsoft ad platform, andprobably there's probably a a
good argument or case to be madefor even paid social in a lot
of examples.
I want to hear your thoughts onthat.
Around the Microsoft ad piece,I'm not asking you to say
(26:34):
anything that's particularlymaybe negative or shade towards
Google, but I really know,because we've had conversations
about it before, about how thisis really important to actually
be thinking about these thingsand it's not just from a hey,
don't use Google all the time.
There is actually a lot ofthings to consider, um in making
those decisions.
(26:54):
So for for, it doesn't matterif you're a car dealer or any
business.
If we're thinking about 2025,how would you be telling them to
consider budget as it relatesto Microsoft ads versus Google,
or maybe all of it to?
Speaker 2 (27:06):
consider budget as it relates to Microsoft ads versus
Google, or maybe all of it.
Yeah Well, I mean, obviouslyGoogle has had, and still
continues to have, the vastmajority of search volume and as
long as that's the case, mostof your budget should be there.
However, it is totally underattack from every side and, in
(27:27):
our opinion, google is nothandling it well.
To be honest with you, I thinkthat there's real credible
threats that if people continueto have better experiences in
other places to find informationwhether it's Perplexity or
ChatGPT or Bing or Edge orwhatever they're going to
(27:49):
continue to bleed traffic andmost of our clients probably
have under 20% of the searchvolume for whatever their
category is in, whatever marketthey're in.
So the fact that all of theseother challenging platforms have
north of 10% right now meansyou could never spend another
dollar with Google and get thesame amount of traffic on all
(28:11):
these other channels.
I will say that Google doesconvert better than some other
channels, but we are seeingcomparable performance in
Microsoft and I do think thatMicrosoft is the really most
formidable challenger right now.
Obviously, they're getting aton of data through ChatGPT.
I believe that ChatGPT searchis kind of powered by Bing, ads
(28:35):
or Edge.
So when it becomes addressablethrough that medium, you're
going to want to be there, but Iwould really say as an agency,
it doesn't benefit us to steerpeople to other platforms,
because those are more platformsthat my team have to manage, a
lot more oversight for billing.
(28:56):
There's just nothing butdownsides with being
multi-omni-channel for thebusiness side and it's a
headache for everyone else.
However, you don't want to bethe last mover or you want to be
the first mover to anotherplatform when you see it on the
rise and, frankly, google hasnot responded well to AI at all.
(29:17):
So I 100% am steering all ofour customers to definitely Bing
, but to other channels as well.
If TikTok is not going to getkicked out of the country, then
you should use it.
I think that the fear,uncertainty and doubt that the
government put around Bing sorry, not around Bing, but TikTok
and them getting kicked out ofthe country that made millions,
(29:39):
billions of dollars more forGoogle and for the other
platforms that weren't going toget ousted, but that doesn't
appear to be happening.
So you need to look at all ofthe channels where you have been
relying on getting business andyou need to look at expanding
them, because there are a lot ofother places where your dollars
can be well spent.
The worst thing that couldhappen would you'd see some
(30:03):
seismic change in Google searchand the 10 blue link monopoly is
shaky and, let's say, googleloses 20% of their market share
to these challenging platforms.
That would be a massive loss oftraffic, organically from a
paid standpoint, and sure youcan make it up by spending more.
(30:24):
But I think the more efficientoption will be to actually
strategically choose a couple ofother platforms to invest in.
I like Google.
I think Google is going to bethe best place to spend most of
your money for the next coupleyears, for sure.
But I also think that being ads, or Microsoft ads with their
their search network, isdefinitely a very important
(30:47):
channel and you shouldabsolutely allocate a small
portion of your budget there,maybe 15% of your monthly
allocation to start and thenkind of go from there based on
performance.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I think it's great that you're so transparent about
topics like this, because it'sI mean, if you, if you even
consider your podcast, thepodcast, the content that you
make here, it's it's meant tohave the long form version to
where people can consume itwherever they are listening to
it right now, wherever ifthey've decided that they want
to see the video version of it.
(31:19):
But you've consciously decidedthat you know that this is
valuable and it goes beyond justone particular channel.
You can use a podcast like thisto make content for your
YouTube audience, for yourLinkedIn audience, for if your
company is going to be usingTikTok, instagram, facebook,
every single platform but thosedecisions are made based on,
(31:41):
well, where's the targetaudience for your business?
And so you're doing thingsyourself at Premier Online
Marketing that you could tellany business that you also work
with or would like to endeavorto work with in the future that
you're doing the same thingsthat you would tell them to be
doing around the diversificationand being first in places where
(32:03):
you see the rise of newplatforms that could be
beneficial to your business.
I think that's really, reallycritical.
I've got a couple more things Iwant to ask you in this episode.
One is around creative planning, and I touched on this just
here in the last couple ofthings that I mentioned around
you know kind of rise of thingslike video Not that it's new,
(32:23):
it's not new but it just seemsto continue to open more
people's eyes and realize thatis such a um, uh, it's a
conversation starter.
It's one of the easiest andbest places to get someone's
attention, um, which you have tohave before you can build trust
with audiences.
And so I'd love to get yourthoughts here, as we kind of
wind down in the last couple ofquestions, first around your
(32:45):
thoughts around creativeplanning relative to budgeting
into a new year.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah, I think I mean, for forever, video has been the
number one medium.
If you think about, you know,instagram, facebook, people
taking video selfies ofthemselves, or or video
testimonials, or like all kindsof stuff, and then obviously you
have like televisionadvertising, ott, all of that
(33:10):
stuff, I think the biggestbarrier for a lot of businesses
is the ability to create, orjust the frank fact that nobody
has planned or budgeted forcreating, quality video footage
that you can use on, likeYouTube ads or Hulu ads or
something like that, but that ischanging, and there are
(33:30):
definitely a lot of great toolsthat will help you create great
video with limited resources.
But even that, that being said,that is an option and that's a
good option.
It's better than notparticipating in video marketing
.
I would say, though, that, likeyou should absolutely plan for
especially new business venturesthat don't have video, you
(33:53):
should plan to do some qualityvideo for your business YouTube
alone, through custom intentaudiences, where you can
basically target people onYouTube that just searched what
your top you were, your topkeywords.
You know, it's just such agreat way to get in front of
people.
I always, when I think aboutlike impression quality um,
(34:13):
think about like the impressionquality of a search ad on Google
.
It's like a bunch of texts.
It takes your brain a lot oftime to digest it.
You have to choose to read itall.
Most people don't.
They just scroll on and go onWord of Work.
Look at a banner ad thatinterrupts you when you're on a
news site or something like that.
(34:35):
A video is.
You expect to see anadvertisement if you're on TV,
so it's expected, which is good.
It is definitely intrusive, butyou expect it.
But the impression quality isawesome.
You can convey so much morethrough a video than you can
through text or an image, so itjust makes a much better link
(34:57):
with your target prospects.
And video for the longest timewas kind of limited by the
targeting options that you had,and that's no longer the case.
So you now have the ability totarget people extremely
precisely based on keywords.
That they did, that they justsearched.
So that just makes video reallyimportant.
And the barrier has always beencreative.
(35:18):
So businesses that choose notto invest in their creative and
choose not to invest in Googleare going to be missing out on a
lot of great traffic and a lotof great connections that they
could be making for theirbusiness, so for all businesses
that we work with, we definitelyare nudging them to allocate
some of their media spend forvideo, but obviously to
(35:41):
development of the assets.
They need to take advantage ofthis because it's so important.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
I just want to piggyback on that because I
think, once again, really verygood insight, and I know that
there are a lot of businessesthis doesn't it's not exclusive,
just B2B, but there are a lotof businesses that will talk
themselves out of video creationbecause they are fixated on
comparing themselves againstinfluencers or celebrities or
(36:10):
rock stars and, like, I'm nevergoing to go viral and I just
think it's really important.
I say this a lot, especially inbusiness, it isn't how many,
that's so important, it's who,and so when you're making that
content, the who becomes yourdriving factor.
(36:31):
Who are you making it for?
And that might be that you have62 people that watch the video,
but all 62 of them are likelypeople that you really wanted to
see that content.
So don't get hung up andcertainly don't stop yourself
altogether by thinking well,we're never going to have a
video that has millions andmillions of views.
(36:53):
If you do, that's nothing wrongwith that either.
If you go viral for some reason, hey great.
But the fact is is that the whothat you're making your content
for is far more important thanhow many people are seeing it.
Don't fixate on that, becauseit oftentimes stops people dead
in their tracks and they won'teven do it.
Well, I got one more.
We were talking about this alittle bit Just to know if you
(37:15):
have some, maybe some closingthoughts around SEO or content
planning, obviously part of thisbeing video, but maybe um, kind
of your your final thoughts onSEO and content planning as it
would relate to budgeting foryour new year.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, I think it's.
Uh, I think defending yourwhatever traffic you have gained
organically should be a toppriority.
Um, even if your trafficdoesn't increase year over year,
that's better than having lesstraffic and it's worth every
penny to defend it and invest init.
But yeah, obviously, for SEO,you want to plan for
(37:53):
re-optimization of all of yourcore pages, meaning adding new
text to those pages if you'renot ranking in the position you
want to rank for.
So I think a really goodexercise for all business owners
to go through, regardless ofindustry, is to take your
website and look at who you'recompeting with, not based on
your opinion of who yourcompetitor is.
(38:15):
Oftentimes we'll talk todealerships or apartment owners
and they'll say, well, myproduct is like this other
building 20 miles away, it'sanother luxury, high rise or
whatever, but really who theircompetitor is is, if you're in a
five mile radius of thebusiness and you search for the
keyword that matters to you,who's showing up.
(38:37):
Those are your digitalcompetitors and you need to
evaluate from an SEO and a paidmedia standpoint.
How are you stacking up againstthese guys?
Are they outranking you all thetime?
Are they outranking you in themap pack and the search engine
results or just the map pack andnot the search engine results,
and you need to reverse engineerboth the local SEO listings or
(38:59):
map pack and then also thesearch results.
So typically, what we see ismost of our customers or I think
all customers just want to kindof think of SEO as a one and
done.
We set it up, we hit the pages,we have the visibility that we
want and then we stop.
We don't want to mess with it.
Unfortunately, all of yourcompetitors are going to be
developing content.
(39:20):
A lot of them are going to beadopting new website platforms
that might be better than yoursor faster, and you have to
evaluate what you're going to dothis next year from a content
and SEO perspective, and whatyou definitely need to invest in
is beefing up, extending theword count, improving your
keyword optimization on all ofyour core pages, and you also
(39:43):
need to evaluate all thekeywords that you want to show
up for.
What's really funny for ussometimes is we'll have a
customer come to us and saythey'll have like 300 words that
they want to show up for andthey have a five-page website.
It's literally impossible torank for all of those keywords
when you have so few pages.
So part of the contentdevelopment needs to be looking
(40:05):
at where do we want to expandinto these other keywords that
totally make sense for ourbusiness, but we don't show up
for them anywhere not on anypage of Google and you need to
create those pages and createthat content.
So you should be looking fortwo different types of content
projects.
You should be looking atexpanding into new pages that
(40:26):
you don't currently have contentfor, and then you also need to
look at your core pages.
What are we ranking for?
How do we strengthen ourrankings for that?
Oftentimes, content length isnot long enough.
Frankly and I know that lengthis kind of an arbitrary
description for content, but itabsolutely matters.
If you have 50 to 150 words onthe page optimized for your
(40:51):
target user, and your competitorhas 500 to 1000 words kind of
work throughout their page thatare supporting the keywords they
want to rank for, they're goingto outrank you and that will
happen the vast majority of thetime.
There are other factors, likebacklinks, but oftentimes
content is not deep enough orit's not long enough.
It's not well optimized.
So even if you're rankingreally well right now, you need
(41:14):
to look at all of yourcompetitors and you need to see
what you can do to improve youron-page copy.
The other thing that I thinkabout with content is you want
to front load it as much of itas possible.
If you identify, say, five pagesthat you need to develop, I
would recommend developing themall in January so you have
(41:34):
something to work with a fewmonths later.
Seo is really slow, so I reallylike to have content done.
You know a lot of it up frontso we can kind of tweak, uh with
based based on where you knowkeyword rankings land.
You're always going to have todo more work to the first draft
and what you don't want to do,or what's less ideal, is if you
(41:56):
stretch out all your contentprojects over the year because
you need to add a few months uhmonths after you post that
content, to when you'll actuallystart to see the result in
keyword visibility and traffic.
Yeah, that's kind of my thoughton SEO and budget planning.
Look at what your competitorsare doing, see who's ranking in
positions that you don't want toand kind of understand why.
(42:19):
Work with an SEO provider tohelp you understand that and
then develop the resources tocompete.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Fantastic insights.
Great.
If this were a test, you'd begetting an A plus.
As always, mike.
This is where we'll park thisepisode.
Ladies and gentlemen, we alwaysappreciate your comments and
questions, so feel free to share, because your feedback helps us
deliver more relevant episodes.
If you're not following MikeSchogg on LinkedIn, well, you're
(42:50):
doing yourself a disservice,because he posts content there.
He's a great person to benetworked with, to learn far
more than he just shares on hispodcast, so make sure you do
that.
No-transcript.
(43:15):
Thanks, sean.
Thanks.
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