October 15, 2025 • 29 mins
In this episode of Over The Bull, Ken shares a cautionary tale about a client whose digital marketing was a ticking time bomb. Multiple Google Analytics accounts, unvetted conversions, toxic backlinks, and AI-generated content without any real E-E-A-T left her data useless — and her ad spend wasted. What started as a “smooth” agency pitch ended in a complete reboot. Ken breaks down what went wrong, how to spot the red flags, and why charisma should never replace competence.
To learn how Integris Design can support your business with strategic design and marketing, schedule a consultation at IntegrisDesign.com.
Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.
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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:02):
You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut
through marketing noise.
Here's your host, Ken Carroll.
SPEAKER_01 (00:09):
A Google disaster on this episode of Over the Bull.
Thank you so much for attending.
My name is Ken Carroll, and I amco-founder of Integris Design
based out of Asheville.
And I want to share a story withyou this week about a new client
we've gotten and the absolutedisaster that we're trying to
(00:30):
untangle.
I really don't like having todeal with stuff like this
because you kind of have toreport the truth in order to
move forward and set the properexpectation.
From a five-mile view, here'swhat happened.
They were working with anotherlocal entity to manage their SEO
(00:55):
and their Google Ads and I'mguessing some of the website
stuff.
And the problem is that none ofit, and I mean none of it, was
run correctly.
(01:33):
So first, the client is anamazing person.
Uh absolutely loved allcommunications.
Uh I've already seen a ton ofgrace from this particular uh
person, and it's just been anexceptional beginning.
Um so that's our client.
Now, our client, this client,found us because her current
(01:58):
plan was not working.
A matter of fact, she had fallenoff on a lot of organic
placement, her traffic hadfallen off, and the number of
leads that she was getting wasalso falling off.
Now, she came to us, she foundus, you know, on the internet,
and so that's her.
(02:18):
Now, the person she was workingwith, I've had run-ins with this
person, and I'm gonna tell you,nice charismatic guy.
I mean, really, really nicecharismatic guy.
Um, I have no reason not to, youknow, like the guy personally.
Uh now I don't know him a lot.
I ran into him probably everybit of, you know, three or four
(02:42):
times in eight years.
And um, when I first met him,years and years ago, I remember
talking to him, and I don'tremember how he got connected,
but we met at a littlerestaurant off Westgate, and we
were talking about search engineoptimization, and I remember
some of the comments he made,and it kind of made me cringe,
(03:04):
to be honest.
He talked about how heshortcutted search engine
optimization, and I never reallylike it when someone says they
can do a little bit of work andkeep charging people money every
month.
Um, that just don't set wellwith me.
Um, but I remember him doingthat, but it was not really a
(03:24):
thing where I don't I don't getin other agencies' business.
I may ask them questions and tryto plant a seed that maybe they
should do things different, butuh I normally don't dive that
deep with them.
Um then what happened was I wasinvited to a uh one of these one
of these little groups, youknow, where businesses get
(03:46):
together and it's got, you know,one plumber, one electrician,
one roofer, one inspector, youknow, stuff like that.
And I was invited to go there,and uh, of course I flubbed it
up.
I mean, you get there, you don'tknow anybody, and they say,
okay, stand up and give a30-second presentation about
what you do.
(04:06):
And all I could do is thinkabout the guy who was leading
the meeting, which was this guyI met eight years ago, and
thinking, oh my gosh, our wholebusiness is built on the idea of
not doing the things that he wasdoing.
And uh, so I flubbed through itand uh, you know, I managed to
get you know halfway through it.
(04:26):
But the guy came across reallysmooth in there.
He he it was really well done.
And afterwards, you know, Isaid, Well, I'm I'm not gonna
join the group because weoverlap.
Um, but I really appreciate youletting me, you know, come in
and sit in one time.
And he invited me to go part ofsome kind of little thing he's
organizing and uh all theseother things, which I really
(04:49):
wasn't that interested in it.
We're just too busy.
I don't have time for thatstuff.
And um anyway, I left, and thatwas pretty much that.
But I remember thinking, wow, II bet he's really evolved, you
know, between now and then.
And yeah, I just thought it wasnice.
Now he did give me a flag,another flag, when I left, and I
(05:10):
just kind of brushed it off.
But one thing he talked aboutwas how he was running behind on
all of his work, and he had sixor seven search engine
optimization clients, and he wasgoing to rattle off some
automated blogs, and he kind oflaughed about it, about getting
back and doing that in arelatively short period of time.
(05:30):
And I remember going, okay,well, I, you know, he's a
competitor too, so obviously I'mnot going to correct him on his
poor practices, but he was doingit because it was an easy way
for him to generate blogarticles and make it look like
he was doing more work than hewasn't.
Okay, let's let's just call itwhat it is.
Uh, but again, really nice guy.
(05:51):
So, you know, you can kind ofsee where you know, I don't want
no harm to come to him.
Well, this person came from him,and after her business is
starting to tank, her ads aren'tworking, and I really didn't
know that that was him untilafter um we got to a certain
point with this person.
(06:12):
And, you know, the one thing sheemphasized was working with
local people.
She's your local, right?
And I'm like, yeah, local.
And and I'm a little still alittle fuzzy because she is a
new client as far as what waswhat was going on that wasn't
local.
Like this guy's local.
And I did notice that there wasa a user inside the website, and
(06:37):
he was not local.
You could tell by the name, thisguy wasn't local.
So that got me kind of thinking,okay, this particular guy who
comes across really smooth isprobably subcontracting a lot of
work out overseas.
Of course, that's a bad flag,too.
Um, because when you're workingin SEO, you gotta understand
(07:02):
that your business is trying tobuild credibility.
You're not trying to tricksearch engines.
And a lot of these services,when you buy them wholesale,
their goal is to trick searchengines, to trick things like
Google into thinking that you'remore valuable than you are.
And that is absolutely one wayto have your marketing effort
(07:28):
blow up in your face.
Period.
There's no questions.
Uh, it's not funny, it's notsomething you need to joke about
or you know, flippantly brushoff.
This is a very serious situationif you own a business.
And um, so a lot of these, a lotof these outsourcing companies,
what they'll do are do thingslike build links to websites,
(07:49):
and they use toxic links, orthey use low-value links, or
they use things like privateblog networks to build links to
artificially inflate thecredibility of a company.
And then the problem is, issearch engines like Google are
incredibly intelligent.
And when they catch that, theycan tank your business
(08:10):
instantly.
It just takes a simple algorithmadjustment.
And and so I saw that, and so myjob obviously is to create a
plan and untangle everythingthat is going on that's wrong
and try to figure things out.
So I spent, you know, um, Idon't know, probably eight to
(08:33):
ten hours building a custommarketing uh proposal, and I
wanted to really go into detail.
So I look at competitors, I lookat independent data, I look at
what I can extract from whatthey've given me to build like a
plan.
And I remembered we had aconversation at one point, and
(08:54):
it was about her Google ads.
Okay, so let's let's breakthings up into multiple pieces,
and let's talk about how thisperfect storm happened with this
really charismatic marketing guywho's local, uh, his outsource
uh procedure, his blog writingprocedure, and his strategy
(09:16):
absolutely just blew up, okay.
So let's take each one of theseGoogle Ads.
Okay, but he was running GoogleAds.
Now, the thing about a Google adis you need to understand that
conversions are the biggestthing you could track in Google
(09:39):
Ads.
So the first thing you want todo is, well, what conversions
are important?
Phone calls, completing forms,booking online, uh signing up
for something, buying something.
What are we trying toaccomplish?
Now, once you determine thoseconversions, you go through a
series of technical steps to getthem implemented, and then you
(10:03):
test them to make sure thatthey're working.
If you don't do those steps,then what you run into is you
typically run into a situationwhere the data is skewed, and it
may tell you that a hundredmeaningful actions happened, and
maybe it was only 10 meaningfulactions that happened, or maybe
(10:26):
no meaningful actions, or maybemore than that.
Unless you set it up correctlytechnically, you simply don't
know how many meaningfulconversions you get.
And so any adjustments that youmake on those campaigns is all
skewed, messed up, and not goingthe way that it should go.
(10:47):
So when I first looked at herGoogle Ads campaign, I saw some
stuff that was just not right.
The way the campaigns were setup within the Google Ads
account, the way the locationswere set up, the lack of
maintenance that was set up, um,just so many flags going on,
(11:09):
except for one thing.
It had a great conversion rate.
And I was going, well, thatthat's interesting.
And I thought, well, maybe it'snot a very competitive field.
Um, maybe whatever.
And so I looked at it becausethe first time I looked at it, I
was still in the preliminaryevaluation phase, and I didn't
(11:31):
ask for all the assets yet.
And so we had a conversation,and I said, well, the
conversions look really good,but the rest of this looks odd.
And I said, you know, some ofthis works and some of it's not,
but you know, we want to becareful how we kind of break
this thing down given theconversion rates and how they
(11:53):
look.
And, you know, so we had severalconversations, and I went back
and, you know, really starteddigging into it after she signed
up.
And I asked for her uh GoogleAnalytics account.
Now, the reason that I did wasthe conversions, those
meaningful actions that have tobe set up technically correct,
(12:16):
were pinned in a GoogleAnalytics account.
Well, she shared an account withme, and this account had none of
those things set up, which meansuh something's amiss somewhere
because it's recording someconversion somehow, somehow.
So I cross-reference accountnumbers, and Google Ads was
(12:39):
running one account and she hadaccess to another account.
Now, if you if you get into theidea of running multiple Google
Ads accounts on one website,you'll see that this can be
extremely problematic.
So immediately a flag went off,and I'm like, oh man, how do I
(13:01):
untangle this?
Because I normally don't seethat kind of mistake perpetuated
for a long period of time,especially if someone's a
digital marketing uh person whoreally digs into that stuff.
And uh so I was like, well, letme let me go see if I can figure
out what's going on here.
So I asked a client if she hadanother Google Analytics
(13:24):
account, and she didn't.
So then I reached out to thecharismatic guy.
And I told her, I said, youknow, I like the guy, I don't
mind reaching out.
He seems like an upright, youknow, uh an upright guy.
Um I said, let me just reachout.
So I reached out to him and Iasked him if he had access to
another Google Analyticsaccount, the one that's attached
(13:45):
to Google Ads that he's beenrunning for quite some time.
And uh he said that I had accessto everything he had access to.
And I'm like, okay, so you neverquantified that those
conversions were actuallyworking.
And, you know, he told me hedidn't.
And then I said, well, you know,I can't really use any of your
(14:06):
data because I can't really thatthis is bad.
You know, I can't use any of thedata that this client has been
spending with you forever howlong, because we don't know if
we can trust the informationthat Google is reporting,
especially given there aremultiple analytics accounts, and
now we don't even know if theconversions are even set up
(14:28):
correctly to begin with.
And so keep in mind that ifyou're spending, you know, uh
any amount of money in a monthand you're not understanding the
data and the conversions, well,you're just kind of throwing
part of your money away, if notall of your money away.
So I wrote him and he wrote meback, and it was kind of this
(14:50):
cryptic email.
And it's so strange because somepeople, when they present
themselves publicly, but thenyou know, you ask a question,
you can kind of see a responseand you kind of can see into it
a little bit.
And his response was that he wasbartering part of the work.
Um, it wasn't um something thathe was doing, he was kind of
(15:12):
doing it as a favor.
And I just I didn't like thatanswer because she's still
spending money, regardless, withyou.
And if you're taking it on, thenyou got to kind of shoot
straight with where that's at.
Uh, not that people don't makemistakes.
They do.
People make mistakes.
It's not that that doesn'thappen, but it's like when it's,
(15:34):
you know, on this scale for thislength of time, the client's
business is hurting that much.
Um I just found that verydisappointing, I guess.
So I told him uh back and forthin emails I'd have to uh let the
client know the truth.
And I said, I gotta, I'm gonnainclude you on it so you know
what I tell the client, becauseI felt that was the ethical
(15:56):
thing to do.
And so I wrote them both andbasically said it's not a
technical error.
It was a user error by yourprevious management company who
was running your Google Ads.
And um the next day, uh, whichis today, I spent about two and
a half hours compositing a plan,determining what would work and
(16:17):
what wouldn't work.
And I'm scrapping it.
I'm scrapping the Google Adsaccount, I'm scrapping the
analytics accounts, um, and I'mgonna boot up a brand new one
and just keep those forhistorical reference.
I don't trust what's been done.
And that's really sad when youtake an account and you pick
something up like that becauseyou know how much time or how
(16:41):
much money that client put intoit.
And uh to break the news likethat's uh really tough.
But then you've got the idea oftwo analytics accounts.
Now, keep in mind, I talked toher because one thing that I had
said was because he he didn'twrite me immediately on at one
occasion.
And uh I had one client thatcame to me prior to her, and it
(17:06):
was also one of his previousclients.
And I told her, I said, well,maybe he thinks I'm trying to
take his clients because I didsee him again, you know, a
couple months ago, blah, blah,blah.
And uh she said, no, she goes,I've been telling him some time
that our our our leads andeverything have been going the
wrong way, and I'm probablygonna have to look in other
directions for some help.
And so that was even a littlemore disturbing because the idea
(17:31):
that, you know, there'scomplaints going on, but yet it
wasn't like starting at squareone.
Are the conversions trackingcorrectly?
Are they set up?
You know, um, what's going onwith the with the actual
maintenance of these ads?
You know, do we need to do alittle more diving and and kind
(17:52):
of really look into it?
And then maybe we need to checkit.
And if you check your trackingcode on a website, it'll tell
you if there's multipleanalytics accounts attached.
So that part didn't set wellwith me.
Um, but it it was part of theequation.
Um, and you know, obviously, youknow, uh our job is to just try
(18:14):
to fix things and not not reallyuh police the uh the world, uh,
but is to help the client get onthe right track as quick as we
can.
So we're dumping all that.
Well, the other part of theequation is the SEO.
She said that her visibility hasdropped off, and she said that
there were a lot of issues withthat part of her campaign.
(18:38):
Well, when you go back and lookat it, and she she had already
picked up on this, I really likeher investigative and her
intelligence.
Really, it's just awesome.
Um but what what I saw was thatthere were a lot of what we call
toxic backlinks.
So remember, when you do searchengine optimization, it's all
(19:03):
about building credibility.
That's that's the whole idea ofdoing search engine
optimization.
Again, it's not to trick searchengines.
Well, when you see a high volumeof toxic links going into a
website, typically what that is,is you are, as a company, if
you're a marketing company,you're paying someone to build
(19:26):
these links.
And then what happens is they gothe more the better.
You don't know what you'regetting into when you hire uh
these uh offshore companies, andthen they just start piling up
backlinks because they think themore the better.
Or they run something called aprivate blog network where they
try to hide from Google the factthat they own a bunch of
(19:49):
high-ranking websites, and thenthey use that to artificially
bolster a business's businessup.
By the way, all these thingshave really potentially bad
consequences when you do it, oryou get caught up in it.
You know, uh just saying youdidn't know is sometimes not
going to be good enough becauseit's kind of like you're caught
(20:11):
at the scene of a crime and uhyou know you're you're gonna be
questioned, and you may just getyou know uh picked up in the in
the uh insanity of the situationor whatever.
So all these things can happenuh when you start offshoring
some of this work orshortcutting it or trying to
trick Google or things likethat.
(20:32):
It's just horrible.
So there are these toxicbacklinks.
Okay, so toxic backlinks um canhave an opposite effect on your
search engine optimization, justlike trying to use um uh over
AI, uh overly created AIcontent.
(20:54):
So using like things like umChat GPT or some of these other
AI models to generate blogcontent and just chuck it up on
a website negates what we knowas EEAT principles, which I've
given a lot of information onthat in previous podcasts.
And so it's not reallyauthoritative original content,
(21:17):
and Google really doesn't likepeople doing that.
And so the problem that you havewhen that kind of content's
created, so now you've got kindof this um blather content that
doesn't that doesn't have enoughauthority to do well, combined
(21:37):
with a bunch of bad backlinks,combined with multiple Google
Analytics accounts, combinedwith a lot of other factors, and
so now you've got the perfectstorm where organically the
website is suffering, paid ads,the website is suffering, and
then the website itself is indisrepair, and so technically
(22:00):
it's suffering too.
And so it's kind of like um, ifif you don't take care of your
health and all of a sudden allyour numbers are going in the
wrong direction, they'llcascade.
You know, that's why you seesomeone who has one thing,
they'll get something else, andthen they'll have something
else.
It's because they didn'tmaintain their health um uh over
(22:24):
a period of time.
And so that's exactly whathappened in this situation.
So when it comes to yourbusiness, you can learn a lot of
valuable lessons from thissituation.
Number one is my goodness, becareful who you trust.
I mean, that's the biggest thingI could say.
(22:46):
After listening to this personkind of on the room in this
small business group, and theway that he talked and presented
himself, you would have thoughtthis guy was incredible.
Um, but then when you look atthe work, you go, wow, that's
not that incredible.
(23:07):
And um, you know, we all have,all of us agencies, we have a
desire to want to please theclient.
But if you try to shortcut itand you and you try to use
hyperbole to sell services, oryou oversell what can be done,
or you don't know what can bedone, or you try to sell
services, you don't have abusiness selling, um, all those
(23:30):
things can hurt you as the ownerof a business.
And unfortunately, even though Ilike the guy, just evaluating
this website, I have someserious question marks.
Now, um, I think um, you know,as far as you go, you that just
means you've got to be careful.
Okay, you obviously don't wantto outsource to other countries.
(23:53):
You don't want to build awebsite yourself.
We've covered that time and timeagain.
Do not do these things.
They're tempting, but do not dothem.
Um you need to hire aprofessional and someone that
you can trust and someone thatyou can sit down with and talk
to, and someone that's going togive you good answers.
(24:14):
Now, unfortunately, in his case,I believe this guy could own the
room.
I believe that he could, Ibelieve he could handle it.
And I believe that he could leadon situations a lot longer than
they need to be let on.
And so how to get around that, II don't know other than to just
say, be careful.
Um, the other thing is is keepin mind that if your data is not
(24:38):
accurate and you're not triplechecking your data or validating
or have someone validate yourdata data from uh Google Ads,
then you can run into problemswhere the data that you're
paying good money for on aregular basis is so skewed that
once someone who picks it up whoknows what they're doing,
(25:00):
they're going to tell you theydon't want to use that data
because it can't be trusted.
Or we have to make a decisionwhere we're kind of throwing
darts on a dartboard guessingwhich parts of the data we can
trust or not trust.
The other thing that's importantis you want to make sure that
you do have access to theanalytics account, you know,
(25:22):
whatever your trackingmechanisms are, you want to make
sure that you do have access toit.
And then you can kind of seethat's right or wrong.
Now, if you if you get all thatstuff in place, then you're
going to be a lot better offbecause I would have loved to
have had, you know, years ofdata to go back through to parse
(25:43):
it.
I'd love to have years of data,even if it wasn't well
maintained, but it was accurate,that would have still been
something.
But I got poorly maintained uhenvironment combined with a
poorly set up campaign with datathat's abstract and nothing is
useful.
And you don't want to findyourself in that position.
(26:06):
So you want you want to makesure that you're you are working
with people that um know whatthey're doing.
Um, fortunately, I feel reallygood about this client's
campaign.
I feel really good about her.
I'm really sorry she's she'sgone through the situation that
she's gone through.
Um now, well, I guess one morepoint.
(26:28):
Let me talk about this for asecond.
I don't like being the personbetween or the tattletale.
I don't want to be that guy.
But here was where I was in myposition.
When I was looking at the dataand I saw it was wrong, and I
told him that I had tocommunicate that to the client.
(26:48):
You could imagine that if theclient had certain belief
systems around what was beingdone and they were not true, you
can imagine how bad that wouldhurt a new relationship with
that client.
And so it left me in a positionwhere I had to be honest and
objective with the client tostate the facts as they are,
(27:10):
while at the same time beingprepared to take on this task
and being able to makeadjustments in the proposal that
I gave in order to make surethat I can do the best job
possible for this particularclient.
And so that's uh that's youknow, the hard part is getting
(27:32):
in the middle of that, because Idon't want to be in the middle
of it.
Um, but at the same time, Idon't want to adopt a program
that is out there based onmisconceptions.
So uh that's a challenge, that'sa real challenge to get in
between that.
And if you think about it, asthe owner of a business, if you
have certain people that youbelieve are telling you one
(27:55):
thing and you have somebody elsetelling you something different,
and then you've got to figureout which person's telling you
the truth.
Now, luckily, I come with data,I just come with numbers, and
that normally solves theproblem.
But sometimes you get into thesehe said, she said things, and
you may lean toward a personthat you may like more or you
(28:16):
have more history with, but theycould be absolutely um in the
wrong 100%.
And so you've got to be carefulhow you do this kind of stuff.
Okay, um, I think that's all I'mgoing to talk about today
because it's really been uhheavy on my mind this week.
And uh I just really hope thatuh you take this to heart and
(28:39):
hope that you can use this tobetter yourself, better your
business, watch out for thetrappings, watch out for the
smooth talker, watch out for thestuff that may sound good, but
it's not good, and move forwardand to the best and the most
success to you.
Until next time we talk.
SPEAKER_00 (28:57):
Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you
by Integrist Design, a fullservice design and marketing
agency out of Asheville, NorthCarolina.
Until next time.
You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut
through marketing noise.
Here's your host, Ken Carroll.
SPEAKER_01 (00:09):
A Google disaster on this episode of Over the Bull.
Thank you so much for attending.
My name is Ken Carroll, and I amco-founder of Integris Design
based out of Asheville.
And I want to share a story withyou this week about a new client
we've gotten and the absolutedisaster that we're trying to
(00:30):
untangle.
I really don't like having todeal with stuff like this
because you kind of have toreport the truth in order to
move forward and set the properexpectation.
From a five-mile view, here'swhat happened.
They were working with anotherlocal entity to manage their SEO
(00:55):
and their Google Ads and I'mguessing some of the website
stuff.
And the problem is that none ofit, and I mean none of it, was
run correctly.
(01:33):
So first, the client is anamazing person.
Uh absolutely loved allcommunications.
Uh I've already seen a ton ofgrace from this particular uh
person, and it's just been anexceptional beginning.
Um so that's our client.
Now, our client, this client,found us because her current
(01:58):
plan was not working.
A matter of fact, she had fallenoff on a lot of organic
placement, her traffic hadfallen off, and the number of
leads that she was getting wasalso falling off.
Now, she came to us, she foundus, you know, on the internet,
and so that's her.
(02:18):
Now, the person she was workingwith, I've had run-ins with this
person, and I'm gonna tell you,nice charismatic guy.
I mean, really, really nicecharismatic guy.
Um, I have no reason not to, youknow, like the guy personally.
Uh now I don't know him a lot.
I ran into him probably everybit of, you know, three or four
(02:42):
times in eight years.
And um, when I first met him,years and years ago, I remember
talking to him, and I don'tremember how he got connected,
but we met at a littlerestaurant off Westgate, and we
were talking about search engineoptimization, and I remember
some of the comments he made,and it kind of made me cringe,
(03:04):
to be honest.
He talked about how heshortcutted search engine
optimization, and I never reallylike it when someone says they
can do a little bit of work andkeep charging people money every
month.
Um, that just don't set wellwith me.
Um, but I remember him doingthat, but it was not really a
(03:24):
thing where I don't I don't getin other agencies' business.
I may ask them questions and tryto plant a seed that maybe they
should do things different, butuh I normally don't dive that
deep with them.
Um then what happened was I wasinvited to a uh one of these one
of these little groups, youknow, where businesses get
(03:46):
together and it's got, you know,one plumber, one electrician,
one roofer, one inspector, youknow, stuff like that.
And I was invited to go there,and uh, of course I flubbed it
up.
I mean, you get there, you don'tknow anybody, and they say,
okay, stand up and give a30-second presentation about
what you do.
(04:06):
And all I could do is thinkabout the guy who was leading
the meeting, which was this guyI met eight years ago, and
thinking, oh my gosh, our wholebusiness is built on the idea of
not doing the things that he wasdoing.
And uh, so I flubbed through itand uh, you know, I managed to
get you know halfway through it.
(04:26):
But the guy came across reallysmooth in there.
He he it was really well done.
And afterwards, you know, Isaid, Well, I'm I'm not gonna
join the group because weoverlap.
Um, but I really appreciate youletting me, you know, come in
and sit in one time.
And he invited me to go part ofsome kind of little thing he's
organizing and uh all theseother things, which I really
(04:49):
wasn't that interested in it.
We're just too busy.
I don't have time for thatstuff.
And um anyway, I left, and thatwas pretty much that.
But I remember thinking, wow, II bet he's really evolved, you
know, between now and then.
And yeah, I just thought it wasnice.
Now he did give me a flag,another flag, when I left, and I
(05:10):
just kind of brushed it off.
But one thing he talked aboutwas how he was running behind on
all of his work, and he had sixor seven search engine
optimization clients, and he wasgoing to rattle off some
automated blogs, and he kind oflaughed about it, about getting
back and doing that in arelatively short period of time.
(05:30):
And I remember going, okay,well, I, you know, he's a
competitor too, so obviously I'mnot going to correct him on his
poor practices, but he was doingit because it was an easy way
for him to generate blogarticles and make it look like
he was doing more work than hewasn't.
Okay, let's let's just call itwhat it is.
Uh, but again, really nice guy.
(05:51):
So, you know, you can kind ofsee where you know, I don't want
no harm to come to him.
Well, this person came from him,and after her business is
starting to tank, her ads aren'tworking, and I really didn't
know that that was him untilafter um we got to a certain
point with this person.
(06:12):
And, you know, the one thing sheemphasized was working with
local people.
She's your local, right?
And I'm like, yeah, local.
And and I'm a little still alittle fuzzy because she is a
new client as far as what waswhat was going on that wasn't
local.
Like this guy's local.
And I did notice that there wasa a user inside the website, and
(06:37):
he was not local.
You could tell by the name, thisguy wasn't local.
So that got me kind of thinking,okay, this particular guy who
comes across really smooth isprobably subcontracting a lot of
work out overseas.
Of course, that's a bad flag,too.
Um, because when you're workingin SEO, you gotta understand
(07:02):
that your business is trying tobuild credibility.
You're not trying to tricksearch engines.
And a lot of these services,when you buy them wholesale,
their goal is to trick searchengines, to trick things like
Google into thinking that you'remore valuable than you are.
And that is absolutely one wayto have your marketing effort
(07:28):
blow up in your face.
Period.
There's no questions.
Uh, it's not funny, it's notsomething you need to joke about
or you know, flippantly brushoff.
This is a very serious situationif you own a business.
And um, so a lot of these, a lotof these outsourcing companies,
what they'll do are do thingslike build links to websites,
(07:49):
and they use toxic links, orthey use low-value links, or
they use things like privateblog networks to build links to
artificially inflate thecredibility of a company.
And then the problem is, issearch engines like Google are
incredibly intelligent.
And when they catch that, theycan tank your business
(08:10):
instantly.
It just takes a simple algorithmadjustment.
And and so I saw that, and so myjob obviously is to create a
plan and untangle everythingthat is going on that's wrong
and try to figure things out.
So I spent, you know, um, Idon't know, probably eight to
(08:33):
ten hours building a custommarketing uh proposal, and I
wanted to really go into detail.
So I look at competitors, I lookat independent data, I look at
what I can extract from whatthey've given me to build like a
plan.
And I remembered we had aconversation at one point, and
(08:54):
it was about her Google ads.
Okay, so let's let's breakthings up into multiple pieces,
and let's talk about how thisperfect storm happened with this
really charismatic marketing guywho's local, uh, his outsource
uh procedure, his blog writingprocedure, and his strategy
(09:16):
absolutely just blew up, okay.
So let's take each one of theseGoogle Ads.
Okay, but he was running GoogleAds.
Now, the thing about a Google adis you need to understand that
conversions are the biggestthing you could track in Google
(09:39):
Ads.
So the first thing you want todo is, well, what conversions
are important?
Phone calls, completing forms,booking online, uh signing up
for something, buying something.
What are we trying toaccomplish?
Now, once you determine thoseconversions, you go through a
series of technical steps to getthem implemented, and then you
(10:03):
test them to make sure thatthey're working.
If you don't do those steps,then what you run into is you
typically run into a situationwhere the data is skewed, and it
may tell you that a hundredmeaningful actions happened, and
maybe it was only 10 meaningfulactions that happened, or maybe
(10:26):
no meaningful actions, or maybemore than that.
Unless you set it up correctlytechnically, you simply don't
know how many meaningfulconversions you get.
And so any adjustments that youmake on those campaigns is all
skewed, messed up, and not goingthe way that it should go.
(10:47):
So when I first looked at herGoogle Ads campaign, I saw some
stuff that was just not right.
The way the campaigns were setup within the Google Ads
account, the way the locationswere set up, the lack of
maintenance that was set up, um,just so many flags going on,
(11:09):
except for one thing.
It had a great conversion rate.
And I was going, well, thatthat's interesting.
And I thought, well, maybe it'snot a very competitive field.
Um, maybe whatever.
And so I looked at it becausethe first time I looked at it, I
was still in the preliminaryevaluation phase, and I didn't
(11:31):
ask for all the assets yet.
And so we had a conversation,and I said, well, the
conversions look really good,but the rest of this looks odd.
And I said, you know, some ofthis works and some of it's not,
but you know, we want to becareful how we kind of break
this thing down given theconversion rates and how they
(11:53):
look.
And, you know, so we had severalconversations, and I went back
and, you know, really starteddigging into it after she signed
up.
And I asked for her uh GoogleAnalytics account.
Now, the reason that I did wasthe conversions, those
meaningful actions that have tobe set up technically correct,
(12:16):
were pinned in a GoogleAnalytics account.
Well, she shared an account withme, and this account had none of
those things set up, which meansuh something's amiss somewhere
because it's recording someconversion somehow, somehow.
So I cross-reference accountnumbers, and Google Ads was
(12:39):
running one account and she hadaccess to another account.
Now, if you if you get into theidea of running multiple Google
Ads accounts on one website,you'll see that this can be
extremely problematic.
So immediately a flag went off,and I'm like, oh man, how do I
(13:01):
untangle this?
Because I normally don't seethat kind of mistake perpetuated
for a long period of time,especially if someone's a
digital marketing uh person whoreally digs into that stuff.
And uh so I was like, well, letme let me go see if I can figure
out what's going on here.
So I asked a client if she hadanother Google Analytics
(13:24):
account, and she didn't.
So then I reached out to thecharismatic guy.
And I told her, I said, youknow, I like the guy, I don't
mind reaching out.
He seems like an upright, youknow, uh an upright guy.
Um I said, let me just reachout.
So I reached out to him and Iasked him if he had access to
another Google Analyticsaccount, the one that's attached
(13:45):
to Google Ads that he's beenrunning for quite some time.
And uh he said that I had accessto everything he had access to.
And I'm like, okay, so you neverquantified that those
conversions were actuallyworking.
And, you know, he told me hedidn't.
And then I said, well, you know,I can't really use any of your
(14:06):
data because I can't really thatthis is bad.
You know, I can't use any of thedata that this client has been
spending with you forever howlong, because we don't know if
we can trust the informationthat Google is reporting,
especially given there aremultiple analytics accounts, and
now we don't even know if theconversions are even set up
(14:28):
correctly to begin with.
And so keep in mind that ifyou're spending, you know, uh
any amount of money in a monthand you're not understanding the
data and the conversions, well,you're just kind of throwing
part of your money away, if notall of your money away.
So I wrote him and he wrote meback, and it was kind of this
(14:50):
cryptic email.
And it's so strange because somepeople, when they present
themselves publicly, but thenyou know, you ask a question,
you can kind of see a responseand you kind of can see into it
a little bit.
And his response was that he wasbartering part of the work.
Um, it wasn't um something thathe was doing, he was kind of
(15:12):
doing it as a favor.
And I just I didn't like thatanswer because she's still
spending money, regardless, withyou.
And if you're taking it on, thenyou got to kind of shoot
straight with where that's at.
Uh, not that people don't makemistakes.
They do.
People make mistakes.
It's not that that doesn'thappen, but it's like when it's,
(15:34):
you know, on this scale for thislength of time, the client's
business is hurting that much.
Um I just found that verydisappointing, I guess.
So I told him uh back and forthin emails I'd have to uh let the
client know the truth.
And I said, I gotta, I'm gonnainclude you on it so you know
what I tell the client, becauseI felt that was the ethical
(15:56):
thing to do.
And so I wrote them both andbasically said it's not a
technical error.
It was a user error by yourprevious management company who
was running your Google Ads.
And um the next day, uh, whichis today, I spent about two and
a half hours compositing a plan,determining what would work and
(16:17):
what wouldn't work.
And I'm scrapping it.
I'm scrapping the Google Adsaccount, I'm scrapping the
analytics accounts, um, and I'mgonna boot up a brand new one
and just keep those forhistorical reference.
I don't trust what's been done.
And that's really sad when youtake an account and you pick
something up like that becauseyou know how much time or how
(16:41):
much money that client put intoit.
And uh to break the news likethat's uh really tough.
But then you've got the idea oftwo analytics accounts.
Now, keep in mind, I talked toher because one thing that I had
said was because he he didn'twrite me immediately on at one
occasion.
And uh I had one client thatcame to me prior to her, and it
(17:06):
was also one of his previousclients.
And I told her, I said, well,maybe he thinks I'm trying to
take his clients because I didsee him again, you know, a
couple months ago, blah, blah,blah.
And uh she said, no, she goes,I've been telling him some time
that our our our leads andeverything have been going the
wrong way, and I'm probablygonna have to look in other
directions for some help.
And so that was even a littlemore disturbing because the idea
(17:31):
that, you know, there'scomplaints going on, but yet it
wasn't like starting at squareone.
Are the conversions trackingcorrectly?
Are they set up?
You know, um, what's going onwith the with the actual
maintenance of these ads?
You know, do we need to do alittle more diving and and kind
(17:52):
of really look into it?
And then maybe we need to checkit.
And if you check your trackingcode on a website, it'll tell
you if there's multipleanalytics accounts attached.
So that part didn't set wellwith me.
Um, but it it was part of theequation.
Um, and you know, obviously, youknow, uh our job is to just try
(18:14):
to fix things and not not reallyuh police the uh the world, uh,
but is to help the client get onthe right track as quick as we
can.
So we're dumping all that.
Well, the other part of theequation is the SEO.
She said that her visibility hasdropped off, and she said that
there were a lot of issues withthat part of her campaign.
(18:38):
Well, when you go back and lookat it, and she she had already
picked up on this, I really likeher investigative and her
intelligence.
Really, it's just awesome.
Um but what what I saw was thatthere were a lot of what we call
toxic backlinks.
So remember, when you do searchengine optimization, it's all
(19:03):
about building credibility.
That's that's the whole idea ofdoing search engine
optimization.
Again, it's not to trick searchengines.
Well, when you see a high volumeof toxic links going into a
website, typically what that is,is you are, as a company, if
you're a marketing company,you're paying someone to build
(19:26):
these links.
And then what happens is they gothe more the better.
You don't know what you'regetting into when you hire uh
these uh offshore companies, andthen they just start piling up
backlinks because they think themore the better.
Or they run something called aprivate blog network where they
try to hide from Google the factthat they own a bunch of
(19:49):
high-ranking websites, and thenthey use that to artificially
bolster a business's businessup.
By the way, all these thingshave really potentially bad
consequences when you do it, oryou get caught up in it.
You know, uh just saying youdidn't know is sometimes not
going to be good enough becauseit's kind of like you're caught
(20:11):
at the scene of a crime and uhyou know you're you're gonna be
questioned, and you may just getyou know uh picked up in the in
the uh insanity of the situationor whatever.
So all these things can happenuh when you start offshoring
some of this work orshortcutting it or trying to
trick Google or things likethat.
(20:32):
It's just horrible.
So there are these toxicbacklinks.
Okay, so toxic backlinks um canhave an opposite effect on your
search engine optimization, justlike trying to use um uh over
AI, uh overly created AIcontent.
(20:54):
So using like things like umChat GPT or some of these other
AI models to generate blogcontent and just chuck it up on
a website negates what we knowas EEAT principles, which I've
given a lot of information onthat in previous podcasts.
And so it's not reallyauthoritative original content,
(21:17):
and Google really doesn't likepeople doing that.
And so the problem that you havewhen that kind of content's
created, so now you've got kindof this um blather content that
doesn't that doesn't have enoughauthority to do well, combined
(21:37):
with a bunch of bad backlinks,combined with multiple Google
Analytics accounts, combinedwith a lot of other factors, and
so now you've got the perfectstorm where organically the
website is suffering, paid ads,the website is suffering, and
then the website itself is indisrepair, and so technically
(22:00):
it's suffering too.
And so it's kind of like um, ifif you don't take care of your
health and all of a sudden allyour numbers are going in the
wrong direction, they'llcascade.
You know, that's why you seesomeone who has one thing,
they'll get something else, andthen they'll have something
else.
It's because they didn'tmaintain their health um uh over
(22:24):
a period of time.
And so that's exactly whathappened in this situation.
So when it comes to yourbusiness, you can learn a lot of
valuable lessons from thissituation.
Number one is my goodness, becareful who you trust.
I mean, that's the biggest thingI could say.
(22:46):
After listening to this personkind of on the room in this
small business group, and theway that he talked and presented
himself, you would have thoughtthis guy was incredible.
Um, but then when you look atthe work, you go, wow, that's
not that incredible.
(23:07):
And um, you know, we all have,all of us agencies, we have a
desire to want to please theclient.
But if you try to shortcut itand you and you try to use
hyperbole to sell services, oryou oversell what can be done,
or you don't know what can bedone, or you try to sell
services, you don't have abusiness selling, um, all those
(23:30):
things can hurt you as the ownerof a business.
And unfortunately, even though Ilike the guy, just evaluating
this website, I have someserious question marks.
Now, um, I think um, you know,as far as you go, you that just
means you've got to be careful.
Okay, you obviously don't wantto outsource to other countries.
(23:53):
You don't want to build awebsite yourself.
We've covered that time and timeagain.
Do not do these things.
They're tempting, but do not dothem.
Um you need to hire aprofessional and someone that
you can trust and someone thatyou can sit down with and talk
to, and someone that's going togive you good answers.
(24:14):
Now, unfortunately, in his case,I believe this guy could own the
room.
I believe that he could, Ibelieve he could handle it.
And I believe that he could leadon situations a lot longer than
they need to be let on.
And so how to get around that, II don't know other than to just
say, be careful.
Um, the other thing is is keepin mind that if your data is not
(24:38):
accurate and you're not triplechecking your data or validating
or have someone validate yourdata data from uh Google Ads,
then you can run into problemswhere the data that you're
paying good money for on aregular basis is so skewed that
once someone who picks it up whoknows what they're doing,
(25:00):
they're going to tell you theydon't want to use that data
because it can't be trusted.
Or we have to make a decisionwhere we're kind of throwing
darts on a dartboard guessingwhich parts of the data we can
trust or not trust.
The other thing that's importantis you want to make sure that
you do have access to theanalytics account, you know,
(25:22):
whatever your trackingmechanisms are, you want to make
sure that you do have access toit.
And then you can kind of seethat's right or wrong.
Now, if you if you get all thatstuff in place, then you're
going to be a lot better offbecause I would have loved to
have had, you know, years ofdata to go back through to parse
(25:43):
it.
I'd love to have years of data,even if it wasn't well
maintained, but it was accurate,that would have still been
something.
But I got poorly maintained uhenvironment combined with a
poorly set up campaign with datathat's abstract and nothing is
useful.
And you don't want to findyourself in that position.
(26:06):
So you want you want to makesure that you're you are working
with people that um know whatthey're doing.
Um, fortunately, I feel reallygood about this client's
campaign.
I feel really good about her.
I'm really sorry she's she'sgone through the situation that
she's gone through.
Um now, well, I guess one morepoint.
(26:28):
Let me talk about this for asecond.
I don't like being the personbetween or the tattletale.
I don't want to be that guy.
But here was where I was in myposition.
When I was looking at the dataand I saw it was wrong, and I
told him that I had tocommunicate that to the client.
(26:48):
You could imagine that if theclient had certain belief
systems around what was beingdone and they were not true, you
can imagine how bad that wouldhurt a new relationship with
that client.
And so it left me in a positionwhere I had to be honest and
objective with the client tostate the facts as they are,
(27:10):
while at the same time beingprepared to take on this task
and being able to makeadjustments in the proposal that
I gave in order to make surethat I can do the best job
possible for this particularclient.
And so that's uh that's youknow, the hard part is getting
(27:32):
in the middle of that, because Idon't want to be in the middle
of it.
Um, but at the same time, Idon't want to adopt a program
that is out there based onmisconceptions.
So uh that's a challenge, that'sa real challenge to get in
between that.
And if you think about it, asthe owner of a business, if you
have certain people that youbelieve are telling you one
(27:55):
thing and you have somebody elsetelling you something different,
and then you've got to figureout which person's telling you
the truth.
Now, luckily, I come with data,I just come with numbers, and
that normally solves theproblem.
But sometimes you get into thesehe said, she said things, and
you may lean toward a personthat you may like more or you
(28:16):
have more history with, but theycould be absolutely um in the
wrong 100%.
And so you've got to be carefulhow you do this kind of stuff.
Okay, um, I think that's all I'mgoing to talk about today
because it's really been uhheavy on my mind this week.
And uh I just really hope thatuh you take this to heart and
(28:39):
hope that you can use this tobetter yourself, better your
business, watch out for thetrappings, watch out for the
smooth talker, watch out for thestuff that may sound good, but
it's not good, and move forwardand to the best and the most
success to you.
Until next time we talk.
SPEAKER_00 (28:57):
Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you
by Integrist Design, a fullservice design and marketing
agency out of Asheville, NorthCarolina.
Until next time.
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