We so often pass on SEO opportunities because it seems like rocket science to us, or a distraction from our core service. Phil Singleton shares his story of how he came to a point of realising that he could not grow on web builds alone, and needed to branch out. As a marketing man, he understood that the website is part of a much bigger picture called marketing strategy. There are some real gold nuggets on this one!
Website – http://kcwebdesigner.com/
Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Lee:
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies, exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson.
Lee:
Hi, and welcome to episode number 85 of the WP Innovator Podcast. 25 to go to 100. That’s 25. 25 to go to. We can do this. We’ll do it together. Anyway, on today’s show, we have Phil Singleton, the co-author of SEO for Growth. You can check that out on seoforgrowth.com. We’re going to talk about his agency. So that’s his journey into agency life. But then we’re going to talk about offering SEO as an agency. And this really fascinating is something that I keep doing. I keep passing off SEO and other services to other companies. And that does work for some businesses. It is good to focus on a certain thing and do it really well. But if you want to grow into an agency offering other services, et cetera, then this is quite an interesting episode to understand how Phil went from agency to offering SEO and also talking about what he has to offer in his book as well as his accreditation that he also does along with the guys from Duct Tape Marketing. So quite a fascinating episode. Sit back, I guess. Relax. If you’re driving, don’t sit back and relax. That would be wrong. Anyway, enjoy the ride. And remember, well, you know what I’m going to say. But if you don’t, I’ll say it anyway. Keep your arms and your legs in the vehicle at all times. Welcome. And you are joining me, Lee Jackson, and Phil Singleton for another conversation here on the WP Innovator podcast. Phil, mate, how are you doing this morning?
Phil:
Awesome. Thanks. I presume it’s morning for you.
Lee:
Yes, there is. Sure. It’s afternoon for me. I’m kind of looking at the time thinking five o’clock soon. There’s a cold beer in the fridge, et cetera, et cetera. You’re thinking, oh, I’m really hungry. I want lunch. And I’m thinking, geez, I’m looking up into a dark gray sky here at nine in the morning, hoping hailstones don’t hit my car outside.
Phil:
Oh, no. You’re in Kansas as well, aren’t you? So hopefully you’re not going to get whisked off to Oz at any point.
Lee:
Exactly. Sorry that you must hear that a lot. It’s a novelty for us.
Phil:
Kansas City is quite famous.
Lee:
It’s fair game, man. It’s the first thing most people think about.
Phil:
It is. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
Lee:
Anyway, sorry. So guys, if you don’t know Phil, Phil is from, well, the co-author of SEO for Growth. That is a book aptly titled SEO for Growth. So you probably know what that’s going to be about, but we are going to unpack that later. That is the ultimate SEO guide for marketers, web designers, and entrepreneurs. I did read that. And also an agency owner. So, mate, could you just introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about you, your favorite color, I don’t know, your favorite singer, anything. Just some interesting facts about yourself so we can just get to know you a little bit before we crack on.
Phil:
Yeah, I’d be happy to. Just kind of fire away here. Favorite color is, I guess, blue, by the way. So I think it’s a little bit boring.
Lee:
It’s quite common. A lot of the guys like blue. This is like, I’m a pink guy, you know, just to be different.
Phil:
That’s nice. I mean, I got actually one of my better local clients here in Kansas City is a plumber. And he’s got, it’s like a fuchsia red signs and trucks and cars. And he rides around. It was a great kind of marketing play that he did because people see it. They remember it. It’s not one of these other like blue home services vans that’s rolling around. So love it. We, yeah, you should try to get us out of the box sometime, the blue box sometime, blue and green box. But yeah, in terms of my background, I mean, you know, I guess right now I define myself as a web designer slash digital marketer. But that’s not how, you know, I got here. I actually went to school, got a business degree in finance, ended up getting an MBA. My first job out of school, out of grad school was with an insurance company.
Lee:
Ouch.
Phil:
Yeah. So it was just that time is kind of the best opportunity I think that I had at a school because I literally came to campus and interviewed and went to work there was a, you know, it was a good salary. I was just happy to have something out of school. But, you know, by the end of year three, I’m sitting there in a, in a beige building with beige carpet and a beige cubicle with beige pants on.
Lee:
Oh my gosh. I feel stressed. Just one of these like soul crushing cubicle jobs. I was like, sounds like The Office.
Phil:
Pretty much, I guess, you know, say not, not to, not to crush people’s, you know, no, I know, but rears that are in that. I’m sure, I’m sure insurance really does it for some people. But for me, it just wasn’t doing it. But I think what ends up happening, what was happening to me anyway at that time was, you know, you get a job out of school and if it’s a good paying job, I think sometimes you can just kind of get locked into a career path that you didn’t necessarily choose. It kind of chose you because it was the only thing that was available. And all of a sudden you start getting pulled down this destiny almost that you didn’t really see for yourself. But if you start making money and you get little bits of, you know, I wouldn’t call it golden handcuffs on, but you start doing okay in a job that you don’t particularly love, sometimes it gets harder and harder, you know, to think you can jump out and change maybe the trajectory of your career, even your life. But so that’s really kind of what I thought. I was in the third year, so I just can’t, there are guys in that company that were, had been doing it for 20, 30, 40 years. And I was like, I can’t do this. I’ve got to make a major change to do something that I really like, or I’m going to be one of these, you know, zombies that’s just doing this because they’re basically trapped. That’s probably not the fairest thing to say about everybody that’s working, you know, in a corporate job. Cause I know some people get really motivated by that. But for me, that was the fear. That’s what I saw. That’s what I wanted to change. So I actually, I’ve got the soundtrack by the way of Man in the Mirror right now in my head. What’s he talking? Sorry, carry on. I literally packed up my bags and moved to Taiwan to study Chinese.
Lee:
That is extreme.
Phil:
That was really extreme. So at that time, you know, my parents thought I kind of lost my mind. I just wanted to do something different. Cause I was like, I figured if I didn’t make a change and do something exciting, I was never going to be able to do it. I was going to marry a woman, get trapped in there, get a house and all of a sudden not be able to leave. I was like, no, I just kind of just had this big trip. And I did, I did that. I packed up my bag, moved to Asia for a variety of reasons and picked Taiwan mostly because I just figured, hey, if I studied, if I could become fluent in Mandarin Chinese, that would probably give me, help me out down the road in terms of, you know, having another useful language skill to have. So I did that. I went there, studied, got my, uh, actually ended up getting my MBA at a school here in the States and then got a job right at a school in, uh, with a venture capital firm, kind of in the dot com era.
Lee:
Right. Cool.
Phil:
Back when, um, you know, people, all these tech companies were getting all these insane valuations and money was flying around and it was great. Cause I worked for this company. I was a Chinese speaking Westerner in Taiwan, which is 99.9% Taiwanese people there as like most of a lot of the Asian countries are. There’s not a whole lot of, it’s not like a melting pot. Like it would be maybe in the UK or the US that way, which is great because if you’re a, if you’re a Westerner that can speak Chinese, it opens up a lot of doors and that. So it was a great time to be in this business where we were essentially helping North American companies get Asian investment funds. In, in my case, it was Taiwan. So it’s great. What ended up happening is that bubble burst. And I ended up trying to figure, having to figure out something else to do. So what a software company of all things kind of just fell in my lap. It happened to be one of the clients that we had been, I’d been working on, uh, for in that capacity of doing like business development while I was in Taiwan. And it was really cool because it was a software company called 321 Studios. It was the, actually happened to be out of St. Louis here in the, in the Midwest. And they had this software program called DVD X Copy, which I don’t know if you remember that or Napster back in the day.
Lee:
Yes. I remember that. Brings back memories.
Phil:
Well, then there’s the other one was DVD X Copy, which is a consumer software product that enabled you to make backup copies of DVD movies. And it was sold phenomenally well in the US while it was legal to sell it. Cause the company sold it under fair use, which was, hey, we can make backup copies of DVDs that we already own, but the Hollywood studios weren’t having it. They’ve got their own DMCA law that said you can’t copy copyrighted material. So a battle ensued. But while that two or three year battle went on, they were selling the crap out of the software. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars this company made, um, before they shut their door.
So what ended up happening is they shut them down in the States. And again, that fell in, this is how it kind of fell in my lap in Taiwan. The guys that ran it that I was doing work for, um, helping them expand that business, uh, internationally said, okay, well, it’s still legal in other parts of the country. Let’s set up shop in Taiwan since Phil’s there. And we kind of ran that business for a couple more years until Hollywood took its battle there and essentially had the same law in the US applied around the rest of the world and made that kind of software illegal everywhere. So at that time, when I had the software, you know, we were making most of our sales, this is going back more than 15 years ago. Most of our sales were coming through online affiliate channels. So these guys that had the precursors, the blogs, their own blog websites or community and forums that had these affiliate links on there, they’d click through and the big ones we’d be paying 50% of sale, right? So a $99 piece of software, you had guys that run a lot of business back to our website where people bought the software. You know, these guys would be getting 50, 60, $75,000 checks a month just in, just as one ad that was running off their website, right? And here we are, I have 25 employees, investors, product support. Our piece of that 50% that we got was whittled down to basically nothing where these guys that had these communities that might’ve been working, I don’t know, an hour a day were making bank from us and probably from lots of other people’s. Of course, this is going back when AdWords also was like, you know, a big spend on AdWords click was like 25 cents. People were like, how dare they charge that much?
Lee:
I remember that as well. Now I can’t definitely can’t afford it now.
Phil:
So that venture wrapped up. We, my wife and I decided, hey, it’s a good time to kind of move back to the States to start a family. Cause that’s kind of what we wanted to do. She’s Taiwanese by the way. And I really just moved back there. It was a nice payday for me that when we, we unloaded that company, but it wasn’t like a home run, you know, retire forever type of thing. But I did, was able to move back to Kansas City, you know, get a house, work on starting a family. And I just literally figured, I was trying to figure out what to do. I bought a sports car and I had a detail by this guy and he didn’t have a, he was just one of these kind of these, um, auto detailing folks that prepares cars for sales for, for auto detailers. And he was making like $50, $50 a car. And I said, dude, you need to get a website. You need to be able to find some way to reach consumers. So you can charge a hundred dollars or $200 a detail versus get making crumbs from the detailers who were just basically paying them nothing. So I built a little, I don’t know, this is back in 2004, 2005, right? When we did a five, probably when we moved back, I built them like the first time I ever even tried to build a website. I built one front page and it was like a one page website, but I applied all the things that I had learned, you know, from Google and search from this software venture that we had, because I just kind of forced to learn a little bit, a bit about it. And again, you have to look at me this is, I am a complete, I’ll get this a little later. I am a true imposter. You know, I didn’t, I didn’t come into this knowing any graphic design or anything about coding. I mean, I was literally like self-taught way after the fact.
Lee:
Yeah, most people, I think they’re in this business probably are interest-based and come into it a lot younger versus maybe coming in as a second part of their career.
Phil:
But so I literally just, I didn’t know anything about it. I went in and tried to make it myself. Pretty quickly though, the guy ranked, started getting all sorts of business. And he says, he told me, I remember the phone call. He told me, he’s like, dude, this website’s not only changed my business, it’s changed my life. At that moment, I was knew what I was going to do forever. Basically. I was like, this is cool. This is great. This is the way I can make money. And I can be a part of these small businesses and really make a big difference and help them grow and that kind of stuff. So it’s that little front page, you know, website started turning into a little bit more deals and started rolling and rolling into more and more projects. We started getting more, uh, you know, visibility, um, SEO results for our own business here, kind of in the Midwest. And then it’s, it went from, you know, a single website from a guy that knew basically nothing about any of this really into, you know, an agency where we’ve done hundreds and hundreds of websites and we have dozens and scores of digital retainer clients, I would call them. So that’s kind of my path, you know, really kind of a winding thing. I forced some change early on. I always look back when I talk about some of this stuff too, is today is such a great, I wish back when I was just, I’m in my forties now. So we didn’t have like this gig economy where people could go out and find all sorts of ways to like make these businesses on the weekends or after work. Right. I had to basically jump out into the world without a safety net and just hope for the best. It would have been really cool to have been, have it, have it, had a job, you know, two or three years into it out of school and trying to be like gigging and working and hustling a little bit and trying some of this stuff early on without, you know, having to just kind of go out and make a major change. You know, I’m coming from with that piece. And so to me, it’s like the coolest time ever to kind of, you know, be able to try and figure a few things out or work on a passion project. Cause it’s not a whole lot of money to, you know, to get a web presence up and test something out, but maybe you still have your foot in the cash boat, you know, as an employee.
Lee:
Yeah, the cost of entry is lowered, hasn’t it? The cost of entry, there’s so many, there’s so many things out there that can help expedite anyone into getting some sort of cycle. I think they call it the side hustle now, don’t they?
Phil:
Yeah. I’ll let hustle, side hustle, hustle. And then everybody’s not wants to F the hustle or don’t do that. But the reality is you have to hustle at some point to make the change and to get a track record after that, maybe you can find some way to hustle less, but it’s really hard to change or start something without some kind of extra hustle. And that’s just the reality. So you, so you literally went, I mean, it sounds like you’d had a payday. You accidentally built a website and the result of that was that kind of ding. Uh, yes, this is it moment for you. I feel like we’re mentioning songs from Michael Jackson a lot. We’ve said, make a change. I’ve just said, this is it. I feel like, yes, Michael Jackson is definitely featuring in this podcast. I wonder if I can…
Phil:
Show notes, there’ll be a list for the soundtrack. Brilliant. Yeah. Wow. I could put affiliate link to Amazon, couldn’t I?
Lee:
There you go. I can make some money. Make a cent to whatever it is. Nice.
Phil:
So fantastic journey. If people want to check out your business, it’s CaseyWebDesigner.com. That’s Kilo Charlie for the phonetics out there. CaseyWebDesigner.com. And mate, I really like the comic logo, uh, you know, the comic strip style logo with that font. I understand though, you’re changing or rebranding. Can you tell us a bit about that and kind of why you’re going in a different direction?
Phil:
I mean, we’ve had that one up for probably three or four years. And you know, my first strategy with that was really just to try and, I mean, trying to approach really the smaller to small to medium sized businesses. And what I found early on is if, if I think of a site looks too much like an upper end agency, I think sometimes smaller businesses might get scared and be like, oh, these guys don’t have something for me. So to make it a little more comical cartoon, a little more approachable is something that we originally tried to do now. And that being said, over the course of the last four or five years for my business, we actually have done more work for, for the medium, you know, kind of more of the agency level clients. So I got to try and find some middle ground. So one reason for the change was to always try and make it a little more, give a little bit more of an agency feel also without maybe trying to alienate, you know, some of those smaller businesses that really have helped build my agency, but really instigated the change for the, for the design was Google came out and fairly drastically changed their quality rater guidelines. So for people that aren’t familiar with that, Google employs an army of about 10,000 human quality raters that basically physically check the quality of the results for Google search results. And they’ve got this 150,000, I think it’s 157 page document that they update fairly regularly that actually serves as a guide to a quality rater to tell them what things to look for, to be able to judge the quality of a result.
Right. So one of the biggest things that had changed in this, this one that came out in February was, I think was a result of many things, but the biggest thing is whatever your feelings are about the US politics and election, all this kind of stuff. What happened was the internet became a lot less trustworthy than it already was. So we have a lot of things people were worrying about, you know, malware and hacking and all these kinds of things that are coming up, but also things like fake news and fake stuff. So really the onus began on Google is like, geez, if people are going to trust the internet less or less, we got to figure out ways to score websites more, you know, based on things that are, are trust factors. And that’s really kind of what they had done in this last version of the quality rater guidelines is they actually by, you know, called out by, by phrases, you know, words like fake news and these kinds of things. And, and really placed, I think more of an emphasis on trying to instruct the quality raters, how to look for the trust signals on a website. And they actually, one of the acronyms they use within that document is called EAT, E-A-T, education, authority, and trust. They try and hammer this down through 157 pages on trying to say, hey, when you’re looking at a website, Mr. Quality or Mrs. Quality Rater, we want you to be focusing on signals and elements that relate to education, authority, and trust. So, I mean, here you’ve got Google that’s, you know, they’re basically a monopoly to me. It’s the one common denominator in all business, right? Cause you talk to a business owner, they might be on Facebook. They might not be, they might be on Pinterest. They might not be, everybody understands Google. Everybody uses Google. So it’s the one thing that I think there’s the common denominator in all business. Plus they’re, they’re basically a monopoly. They’re a part, I think of every major, even moderate purchase decision that’s out there, at least in the US and I think in other parts, you know, the world too. So what that, the reason that inspired change on my side is like, okay, well, if this is what they’re telling the quality raters to look for, it has to parallel what they’re trying, the changes they’re trying to make and the actual algorithms that they use to calculate the scores on the website. So what we need to do as web designers and marketers is trying to mirror that as well. And I think what, the cool thing that Google’s done over the years is, you know, SEO used to be all this thing about, you know, trying to use under the hood tactics or trying to do volume based backlinking and all these things that you do in a back room. And it’s really kind of, to me, Google results have become less or equally about a total digital marketing score because they’re going out and scoring a bunch of different things out there. You know, your, your reputation management, your, your content marketing, your social media participation, all these things that end up looking like a holistic digital marketing plan. Well, they’ve actually started to kind of bake that into their quality rater guidelines, which to me then also comes back to website and web design. Cause at the end of the day, your website is your digital presence. It’s your marketing platform. It should be the referral source for everything that you do. So the, the way that it’s set up and laid out, I think, um, you should look to the quality rater guidelines. Cause again, this is what Google’s telling it’s, um, it’s raters to look for. So the things that they’re emphasizing, emphasizing are, it’s really less about, for example, people saying, here’s our product, here’s our service, here’s what we’re doing and what elements on there are they going to show users those elements of education, authority, and trust. So, you know, things like making sure that you’ve got physical, visible blog posts on their, uh, testimonials, physical address, maybe videos of, of the actual person talking where you’re showing some more of your track record and actual work that you’ve done or links to articles that you’ve written in third party publication that also have, you know, high education, authority and trust and these kinds of things. So being able to use your, your website almost in a way where you design it to be a, almost like you’re trying to prove a case in a court, you know, where the, where the consumer is like the jury, you’re trying to prove why you’re the authority and why you’re the best choice and why you have the best information. That’s what we’re trying to do with our own website. And actually this year, how we’re kind of almost kind of tweaking the designs a little bit more to make sure that they’re a platform to showcase those three elements. Because if Google is again, telling their quality raters to judge this, you know, that that’s a focus on what they’re going to do to try and adjust the ranking of the algorithms to, to rank websites accordingly. It’s got a long winded answer, but that that’s what that’s, it’s really comes down to Google’s, you know, change, Google kind of reemphasize what they’re doing, the quality rater guidelines. And we can, I think we can take what we learned in that and apply it to web design to make better, more effective, higher converting, and most importantly, better ranking websites.
Lee:
Education, authority, trust. I like it. I like to eat. So I can definitely remember this. Right. Education, authority, and trust. As you were talking as well, I was just going over the aspects of our own site relaunch we did. We’ve kind of rebranded to look more like the higher end agency so we can attract those higher end people. We’ve, we’ve started to put some of our YouTube videos on there. We’ve started to put the podcasts on there as well. We’re working on some case studies, which we’re going to put online as well to again, build up that authority. So without realizing it, we’re actually doing the right things slowly, but surely. So that’s really good to hear what you’ve been saying. When do you, when do you think your new site’s going to be launched?
Phil:
Like within the next couple of weeks, literally, it’s pretty much done. But what I’ve done, and we’re trying to do for more clients right now is I’m actually putting higher up on our new website, some testimonials from, from people that people here would trust. So I got, we did some work for like one, a local weatherman. He’s kind of a beloved guy. He’s been doing it for 20 years and people love him. So we did a website for him. He came in yesterday and gave us like a nice, you know, 30 second little plug. So what we’re going to do is on our website is showcase those in the middle where you’ve got three people. It’s one thing for you to say, we’re the best at what we do. But when you’ve got other people of trust or in the community that say these guys are really, because look, when it boils down to it now, even if you forget what Google’s quality rater guidelines are, right? In my opinion today, it really all comes down to trust and reviews. That’s how people buy everything. Here you go to Amazon, right? You’re looking at the reviews. It doesn’t matter what the old school brand was on. If somebody spends a billion dollars on their branding, if they go to Amazon and see that that person’s got 32.5 star reviews on this product, but this unknown one has 200 authentic reviews on it. You’re going to buy that if it’s around the same price. And that’s the way we buy everything. I call it the Amazon effect, but it’s really kind of the Google effect because you locally, you go that and you go to whatever you’re going to pick a plumber or a restaurant. I mean, most people are making that final decision on perhaps what they see on a website. I think more importantly, what the rest of the community is saying on that thing. So I think reviews are like probably one of the most important things that everybody should be doing anywhere. And we kind of practice what we preach on that as well.
Lee:
Well, you do because you’ve got an entire page of reviews on SEO for growth as well. That’s your website for the book that you co-authored.
Phil:
Well, yeah, look at that. Isn’t that more impressive than being like, if we just said, here’s all the book stuff and here’s some great stuff and this is the best book because it’s got this info. Well, especially got Ivan Meisner on there as well. That was quite impressive for all you BNI guys out there. That’s pretty cool, huh? Brian Dean. Dude, that’s amazing.
We really exactly we stacked it up and you know guys aren’t going to put their names. So all of a sudden it’s like that it’s that’s why you look at that page is basically what I’m saying. I mean, you kind of stack it up and it’s like if you’re interested in SEO, this might be a book for you because you basically we’ve got like 50 influencers that says, hey, there’s some good stuff in here. So that methodology doesn’t matter if it’s a book or a plumbing service or to me, a web design service. I think that’s what people are looking for more than than anything else. I mean, they’re looking for some third party that they’re looking for the choice, right? They just want the choice. If I want a web design firm, I want the best one for my money. If I want a plumber, I want the best one. If I want an SEO book, I want the best one. Show me why you are the one. And essentially, one of the best ways to do that is to showcase, you know, whatever web page you got and show what other people are saying about it.
Lee:
That’s good. Now, SEO for growth. How did this project kick off? Because this is a book and I believe a lot more as well. You can get certified as well. So just explain to us a little bit of the history. I mean, you got involved with duct tape marketing as well, which is pretty awesome. So can you just tell us kind of the story and what the end result is and where you’re heading? That’s a huge loaded question, but I’m sure you’ve got this.
Phil:
Well, yeah. So really what ended up happening, I mean, is that we were chugging along pretty good with SEO and getting good SEO results. And about four or five years ago, Google came out and started coming out with these, you know, Penguin and Panda and all these algorithmic changes that were penalizing companies for trying to, you know, do gray hat stuff or manipulate the results. Right. Because it was really getting really widespread. I mean, we cover in the book how like I think Overstock got, comm got busted and eBay got busted to some degree. So it really started to kind of drip into the mainstream. They made this huge change. And then what they really, the most important thing that happened with, with Google is they, they, they made these punitive algorithms, which changed behavior and bought a lot of the kind of the offshore black hat stuff that was happening all over the rest of the world, kind of back to the, the, the domestic countries where, you know, these services actually get done. But the, the biggest change I think that happened is Google had always been talking how content was king, but there’s a lot of SEO people that were like snickered along and said, yeah, but you’re still overweighting backlinks and things like that. We’re going to focus on that because that’s where the results are. Well, once these punitive algorithms came out four or five years ago and they’ve been amped up ever since and new, new variations and new ones have come out along the way, they said content was king and they really meant it this time.
Lee:
Yeah.
Phil:
And what ended up happening was they started to count, like we were saying earlier on the show, a lot more signals than just like the backlinks and maybe some of the under the hood type stuff. So to me, that was a big wake up call because I was like, geez, I was really had the technical SEO blinders on for so long. I saw that they really meant that they were going to start applying like the broader landscape of marketing to it. But for me being a finance guy background and starting to kind of dip my toes into just basic web design and, and technical SEO, I didn’t really have a good grasp of general marketing. So I read this book, duct tape marketing. It actually been recommended to me like four or five times by different clients and different people that I knew. I was like, I got to read this book. I ended up reading it and I was like, holy crap, what he’s saying about building a marketing system around your ideal client and then using all these digital pieces, you know, to kind of tie them all together was essentially the same way we’ve always built websites was, which is to always start with the keyword research and the ideal client search behavior and then reverse engineer websites and content around that versus building a website for design and function and then trying to do SEO on it later. Right. That’s really part of our, if there is any secret sauce to web design to me, that’s it. Right. Starting with, with the content first instead of afterwards. Yeah. That, that really makes a big difference in ROI for the client. So I read that book and I got pulled in and I realized he had a duct tape marketing certified, you know, consultant program. I went through his program. I think it really helped me get kind of more of a holistic digital marketing approach, which one ended up making me better at SEO because again, they’re counting more of this stuff.
So you kind of do have to get more into, into content marketing, all those kind of things to get the results these days, but to just to also be able to offer more to clients. And it really opened my eyes up because what I’ve seen is, you know, web designers had the keys to the kingdom in some ways, because what ends up happening with all sorts of businesses is when they need help, they usually need some kind of marketing help, but they always do. They always reach out for tactical help. They think they need, I need a new web design. I need pay-per-click help. I need social media help. But really, when it comes down to it, it’s not, that’s really that tactical pieces and what they need. They really probably, they need, you know, a marketing strategy and marketing help and then some holistic way to tie it all together. Because the other things are the tools to help rather than the actual overall approach. Like you’re going at the problem the wrong way. If you’re just going straight for the tool without the strategy. They’re trying to write a check for a certain amount and fix the problem or get it going. Because I think in the old days, it kind of worked that way. I mean, if you need to generate more leads, for example, maybe you just wrote a bigger check to the yellow pages or you bust it out into the TV commercial. You know what I mean? And it just doesn’t work that way anymore. So these, you’ve got these people that are not getting any marketing ROI or lead generation ROI, and they go out and search for things. And most often, what I found, because we run a bunch of different websites for ourselves in terms of an inbound marketing platform is, you know, the website search generates the most amount of leads. But when somebody comes to us for a web design, I mean, we’re always trying to flip them into a digital marketing account, not the one-off web design, right? Because at the end of the day, it’s like, we’re not trying to, you know, serve them up with a digital brochure because it’s not going to solve their problems. We’re trying to, you know, integrate it and make it a lead gen platform and then work our way onto the team so that we’re not just doing these one-off, you know, grind websites, but able to kind of get them onto the program and then do a variety of services. And that’s really kind of the core to what, you know, our model here is in our agency is we’re trying to get more of those retainer engagements, not just kind of the one-off website builds and get either no follow-up work or maybe just kind of some minor retainers for basic upkeep. So I ended up reading that book and I read it and I got in there and it really helped open my eyes. It helped me, one, it helped me realize that I was vastly undervaluing my services. So I think I, I think the first year I doubled my revenues just by looking at it and be like, holy crap, I’m generating hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars for some of my customers and I’m charging them peanuts. That’s got to change. So I ended up really reworking a lot. So that was a nice big thing because I went and people got it too. They were like, um, okay, I get what you’re doing. I get what you’re saying. I get what the ROI is. And then it also just has enabled me to look at that bigger picture. And again, the view myself more as kind of the digital marketing service provider with a little bit more of an SEO focus than just trying to do one of these one, you know, tactical pieces. And that’s how I got into duct tape. It really was probably, probably, I gotta say it’s besides investing in myself, that was probably the best investment that I ever made because it really made me look at my business a little bit differently and get the pricing, kind of the strategy, right. And really just kind of the approach to, to deal with small businesses.
Lee:
That’s good. Am I right in saying you’ve kind of created your own model then with, is it John? I can’t remember his name. Is it John? Yeah. This is John, isn’t it? From duct tape. You, you’ve co-authored this book together, SEO for growth. I believe, are you therefore creating something similar to that, but kind of focusing on SEO so people can invest in some sort of SEO training or certification? Can you kind of unpack that?
Phil:
Yeah. So, so what happened is that John had seen my work. He’d seen what I can do for SEO. I kind of worked my way, developed a friendship, you know, being a part of a group like that where it’s not just a course. I mean, yeah, you actually get to spend FaceTime with him. So that enabled me to really show some of my stuff. Initially did, you know, podcasts and then some guest blog posting and then kind of became a little more involved with his, his community. He’s got a really active community of 120 or so certified marketing consultants that he has. So that led into an opportunity to say, hey, I’ve got this idea for a book to, to really kind of be a platform to show people and teach people maybe how I’ve built my business here in Kansas City that I think is really pretty successful. I mean, it’s not like everybody’s got different, different views of success, I guess. But if you look at what we’ve done here in Kansas City, if you do any search related to Kansas City, SEO, SEO, Kansas City, web design, internet marketing, I mean, we stack the page and have for like a decade, right? So there’s like, we get tons of leads and phone calls anywhere from three to five, sometimes 15 a day. And of course some people aren’t, you know, you got to kind of have, you got to have a, um, once your inbound marketing system kills it, it’s kind of one of these things where it’s, it’s careful what you wish for, because if 15 people call you for a website or internet marketing leads a day, in reality, there’s usually if they’re finding you online, very few of them have, you know, budget to spend a lot of times or they, you can hear Mary passed or they’re not, they just don’t really have it. So it takes a lot. I think a lot of phone calls to get a nice $7,500, $10,000, you know, custom WordPress design, or like what we shoot for on the engagement, which is anywhere from a thousand to 5,000 a month. Those, you know, you need to get some phone calls to be able to do that. But if you’re, if you’re a small, if you’re a web designer or a smaller agency, you got to think about having to deal and talk to like five or 10 people a day for a half hour, trying to explain to them what it is that you do and why you charge what you do. I mean, that can eat up your entire day when you’ve only maybe got, you know, one or two quality phone calls in there type of thing. So anyway, the main point is what we tried to do is I showed John how my agency worked here, how it’s really not scalable the way it is. It’s not like I’m going to go open up Kansas City web design in Chicago type of thing. Right.
Lee:
Yeah.
Phil:
But what we could do is put the way I built my business and my approach to SEO, marry that with John’s approach, you know, work that as a book, kind of as almost into a platform, to show people. In fact, when we, when I do engagements here in Kansas City, I literally hand them the SEO for growth book and say, this is how we’re going to design your website. And this is how we’re going to do SEO. You can do it yourself. I mean, literally on page like 194, I think it is, it’s got, you know, the 15 or 20 actual tactics and the amount of things that we do. And I say, here’s the engagement because people ask me, what are you going to pay us with my money? What are you going to do? We’re going to do what’s in this book here. So I got together with John, we wrote that book for a lot of different reasons. One was, you know, I had personal reasons to write a book, but really what it’s been, what it’s boiled down to is we’ve created off of the book, we use it to launch what’s going to be a certification program for web designers or marketers that want to have a trusted, you know, brand, because we’re really trying to build this brand up. So that when people come to read the book, they’d kind of do what you you’ve done. And like, who’s this SEO for growth, they find it. And all of a sudden they see lots of people up there that are big players in the, in the business have endorsed at least the content in the book. And again, the programs and the licenses are based off of what we’re preaching in the book. So, and what we’ve done with John on this, which I think is kind of, is going to be interesting to some folks is we’re starting to create a network of child sites around the country here. And they’ve got one Toronto where we’re going to help web designers and marketers get more SEO leads. And I want to give an example. The first two that we started are one was in Atlanta, one was St. Louis and the very first one was St. Louis. So the guy that we work out there is a duct tape marketing consultant. He has his own marketing agency, you know, web design, digital marketing firm called Change Scape. What we did for him to get him more SEO leads is we built a, one of, we call them site lists. And we built the first one called St. Louis dot SEO for growth.com. So within three months of applying the things that we preach and show and teach in the book, we were able to get that child site to rank number one for us at St. Louis, SEO, SEO, St. Louis, and I think 20 other terms. So that when you type that in St. Louis, he’s not only coming up, number one in the maps, but he’s coming up number one organically lead start coming in all of a sudden he’s in. And one of the things with SEO is, you know, obviously there’s a lot of snake oil out there and a lot of distrust. So being able to have a book behind it and people to say things, you know, and being able to get those rankings are really important. But we’ve been able to build this kind of as an add on business so he can cut where he wouldn’t been able to maybe rank for, for that on his, you know, marketing slash web design site. He’s able to kind of have this other site, like opportunity, which is another lead flow type deal where he’s getting leads. One is getting leads directly from the website, which is great. But two, when he goes in and sells that web design package, he’s also a, cause this is where I think the biggest thing, the biggest opportunity for web designers in general is when you’re going in and talking, and this is how we get business all the time. When we’re pitching, when somebody else has come in the room, let’s say like, okay, I’m pitching a business, but maybe two or three other web designers have come in before me or after me. I mean, we’re always bringing the conversation back to return on investment and trying to keep, you know, we’d say, hey, and this is probably going to be distasteful to some folks, but my pitch, my angle, I think the reason we’re able to take business from a lot of traditional web design firms is because we always bring it back to return on investment, right? Because that’s what they understand. Like you’re going to invest in something. Let’s, you have to assume that you’re going to get really good graphic design. Cause in my opinion, great graphic design is almost a commodity now. I know that’s blasphemous to a lot of people probably in your community, but it really is.
People recognize that the cost of entry for graphic design is lowering and lowering. So you really have to change the way you operate your design agency as a result. Right? Yeah.
So it’s commoditized to some degree. I think even coding and that kind of stuff is commodity. So if you just, if you just go into a sales meeting for like a web design gig and you focus on how pretty the website is going to be or how cool the functions are going to be, you open yourself up for a guy like me that comes in with a business approach and says, hey, we’re selling you a marketing platform. Of course, you’re going to get a fund. That’s the minimum thing that you’re going to get. What you need is a, you know, but that’s an expense. You gotta, we gotta focus on the return on investment part and the lead generation. This is how we do it. We’re going to turn into a marketing hub. And in order to do that, you have to have a good understanding of SEO and bake that into the process early because that’s what’s going to guide you into getting the best, the right kind of content on the website and help you dictate the content marketing strategy that you need to get the rankings and convert people once you start to do all this kind of stuff. And that’s that message, you know, you gotta simplify it or change it for different things. That really helps. One, it enables you to, I think, get, you know, increase your pricing, but two, it really helps you just, I mean, a lot of times we go and talk to folks and again, it could be just the market that we’re in, but a lot of people either won’t pitch from that angle. They don’t want to touch the lead generation piece. They just, they want to sell it as a digital brochure because that’s easily easy, right? We’ll get the one time pop on it. We’re just selling them on the web design and the design part. And we’re going to get our, our check for that. We’re going to move on. We don’t want to be accountable for SEO. We don’t want to be accountable for, for lead generation piece, but more and more that I think, you know, business owners are getting. So we came into this program in this book to try and give people kind of an, a weapon, an angle, a brand to be able to prove to people that, you know, on top of the web design service they have, they’ve got this other, they’ve got proof basically that they can also bake in best practices, SEO, Like an accreditation.
Lee:
Right.
Phil:
Yeah. And bake that in and say, here’s, here’s what the difference is. Here’s why you want to, you hire us to do your web, web design. Cause we’re going to think about this SEO piece on it. And secondly, here’s a whole host of other things that we can do that we can be a partner for you in marketing and not just on this entry piece. So like we kind of talked early on about saying, well, I think web designers hold the keys of the kingdom. I really think that they do, because that’s where most of the, when people look for tactical help from what I can see, most small businesses, the websites, the starting point, they need to do one for the first time, or they’re once so old, or they need help on it. It’s usually, that’s what gets the most traction. So if you position your web design business as you can get in there and kind of flip them into that marketing platform mentality, it’s a great way to all of a sudden start, you know, building bigger retainer engagements and not just kind of the one-offs web design builds. And again, I’m coming to this as an imposter. So for me, I think the pure web design part, and you’re probably going to hate me for saying this is a freaking grind going through it, doing it, going through the revisions, getting the content for it. I mean, you know, it’s just tough. It’s tough to get it all together. Sometimes it takes a long time. I know some people are probably better at processes and smoother than others, but it’s really tough, I think, to build a scalable business that makes a ton of money if you just only focus on like the fixed fee web design bills and don’t try and work your way into the team to get those good, significant, you know, sizable, ongoing retainer engagements off of that initial bill. I think it’s becoming more and more clear to all of us in the industry that we, we need to kind of diversify and offer more services because obviously a website is a part of a much bigger picture. So for us to start teaching ourselves marketing, the whole purpose for me with this podcast was kind of two years ago, I recognized I can’t just keep doing the one thing I need to learn. And the only way I learn really is by chatting with people. So I’m learning right now, everything you’re saying, I’m like, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Writing down notes, I’ve got to remember this. But, you know, we do need to diversify the website or the social media campaign or the email campaign. All of these are different tools that people used to be able to just specialize back in the day and just do that one thing. But now it very much becoming a full service agency who can do a lot more or get a lot more people involved into an overall marketing plan seems to be in the best way. It probably always has been the best way. But it’s, it’s just, I think everyone’s slowly coming to this realization that it’s all part of one big master plan. And here’s probably one of my bigger, I don’t want to say tips or tricks or takeaways is when we do the mockups for any website for a company, we always tend to make them like really big and long homepages. Okay. And the reason that we do that is we include every one of the digital elements that would be part of an ongoing gig. So whether or not they get chopped down is one thing, but being able to put all those elements up where you’ve got, okay, here is a, you know, here’s your, your blog feed, right? Here’s a video that you need on. Here’s a place to put the testimony. All those things that you would need to help them get those things on an ongoing basis are built into our mockups. Our mockup basically becomes the selling platform for the services that they need to succeed. Right? We put the fit, we put a mockup of the Facebook widget in there. We put a mockup of the Twitter widget in there where you can’t have those things in there if they’re empty. So somebody has got to work on you to get those in there. And then we tell the people those are, those are important for Google to get those, you know, signals. So you’re building all, you’re building basically the digital marketing plan into the homepage. So they look long and bulky, but you get to have the conversation. So if there’s a video on there, it’s like, do we need to have a video? Well, yeah, you need to have a video videos help increase dwell time on the site. They increase the trust. Um, we can help you do the video if you need to get a video, right? Well, do we need to have testimonials? You’re dang right. You need testimonials. You need to have some kind of a review funnel review system in there where we can help you build up another place that you will work into your daily plan so that you’re collecting reviews so that you can get up into maps and you can get more phone calls. So we’re kind of building all these things in there really more to showcase and have the conversation with the client. And of course that ends up sometimes getting hacked down or hacked away, but at least we force the discussion and then they start to get it. And then we say, well, here’s, here’s the downside of taking this off, removing it from your plan. You’re not going to get the full Google points if you don’t address this issue. And then they start, you know, then you start thinking about it. So it’s a great way to kind of, again, work your way on the team, show your knowledge, but also position yourself as the one to help deliver and deploy these services versus just going after that one piece of eye candy. Oh, that looks awesome. Because let’s face it, no matter how awesome you’re a designer, you are for a small business these days, there’s like a two month honeymoon period. And then add that third month. It’s just their old website again. You know what I mean? And if it’s not generating phone calls, then it kind of becomes one of these things where, okay, we got to address another problem. So I really want you to make a swipe file now of this kind of really long homepage. I’m actually just checking out SEO for growth and everything you’ve said is pretty much covered in there, including the social media at the bottom, the video, the testimonials, bullets, et cetera. So remember that’s SEO for growth.com. Have you ever considered making a nice swipe file or is that something people get if they become a part of your, your certification?
Phil:
Well, that’s, it’s on the list now. It might be on John’s list, John and I. That’s a really great idea. So take away. Well, it’s great. You’ve got a really, not like the swipe file, you’ve got this really long. This is the sorts of things you need to include. Why? Because these will all generate all the conversations that you need with your client to be able to do more than just the website. Because you’re totally right. The website is one of those facilitators, you know, of, of the overall marketing plan, but it’s also a great conversational piece, isn’t it?
Phil:
Well, yeah, Dan, it just lets, it just, why can’t web designers do this? Why does it have to go to a marketing or digital agency?
Lee:
Exactly. They can still take that business right there. And now you’re talking about thousand, 2000, maybe a 5,000 month engagement and everybody that has a web design is probably doing some of this stuff for their own business anyway. So why can’t you do it for other people? And then we get a system in place. You can have 50, 60 clients that are paying you, you know, thousands of dollars a month. All of a sudden you’ve got a real business that’s basically getting agency level revenues. And if you’re doing it like me, I mean, I’ve got a fit, you know, a pretty small team that’s doing a decent amount of revenue. That’s when it ends, that’s when it ends up making you some really good money, right? When you were able to charge a premium because you’re, you’re delivering actual results and helping businesses grow, but you’ve also worked on a system that when you’re delivering, you’ve got some things that, you know, tools and things that you’re using to help you deploy it. It’s actually relatively low, but the profit margin is allowed to be this high because you’re still delivering an extreme amount of value to the end user. Now you’re talking about real money, right? And that’s kind of what, what really what we’re trying to help folks do in SEO for growth is to get to that point where not just, I think what does have happened with a lot of people, especially web design, web design agencies is, and we see this all the time in Kansas City. If you don’t have the inbound system down, we’re going to consistent flow. You see a lot of folks try and get to the agency model and then it’s like a feast or famine. So they end up getting like two or three really big deals and they’re just like, all right, I’m King Kong. They go out and they get office space, you know, they end up getting some really cool stuff. They hire some more people. All of a sudden it dries up and now there’s closing shop after a year or two or whatever it is. And this happens all the time here, at least in my region. I don’t know if that’s a popular thing that happened, but you get this feast or famine thing because folks aren’t, you know, basically working on their own inbound platform, making sure that they’ve got enough projects coming in to do that. And a lot of them aren’t, a lot of them are again, building the business off of revenues that are more fixed fee loaded and not trying to concentrate on building that a significant, you know, that retainer business more. And I think that’s just one thing that I’ve seen kind of all the time. We see businesses, they come in for a year, they come out, it looks like they’re killing it. And all of a sudden, you know, the door is shut and then it’s just, it’s kind of this vicious cycle.
Lee:
Amen, brother. Guys, if you want more information on this and to grab the book as well, head on over to seo4growth.com. Mate, how can people find you on the socials?
Phil:
Social, I’m probably, I’m most active on, on LinkedIn. So feel free to include that one on the, on the show notes if you can. And then we mentioned seo4growth.com, seo4growth.com. But that’s, that book’s up on Amazon. If you’re prime, it’s free. And we’ve got this cool thing. If you go to the website where we’ve got a three book bundle, one of them, the guys from Yoast gave us their popular website optimization ebook. Then we got one from Larry Kim from Wordstream gave us one of their popular ebooks as well. And then we have one of the one that we built, we wrote on our own with the, actually I did with another duct tape marketing guy called local SEO. That three bundle ebook pack comes with any, you can get the free version up on, if you’re Amazon prime or if you buy the book or whatever, you can come back to our website and redeem it right on, there’s another page on the site. You can get to the homepage and you can have those three, three ebooks as well.
Lee:
Awesome. We will be over there. Head on over to SEO for growth. The links are all there in by now. I think you’ve got the access to the Amazon links as well. I’m a prime member, so I’m going to go check that out as well. That’s awesome.
Phil:
Sweet. Mate, you’re a legend. Thanks so much for filling us in. I feel very inspired right now because I mean, we know we want to grow. I know that we can’t just keep building websites all the time. We’ve kind of diversified into consultancy, which is great where we’re doing kind of development consultancy on the larger projects, which is working really well for us. But SEO is certainly an area that I want to get into. It’s why we’ve interviewed so many different people in regards to SEO so that I can get a better understanding because I keep turning people down or just passing them on to someone else who I don’t even know if they even get SEO, to be honest, and I’m just handing people off to other people. I would love to be able to look after our clients as well and provide all those extra services. So I’m going to be checking out your book as well. Thanks so much for your time, mate.
Phil:
Matt, a blast. I really appreciate this.
Lee:
Nice one. Thank you so much.
Phil:
Well, thank you and have an awesome day.
Lee:
All right. And I hope the weather improves. All righty.
Phil:
Thanks. Thank you. Bye.
Lee:
And that wraps up episode number 85 of the WP Innovator Podcast. Remember SEO4growth.com. And also, if you want to influence the direction of the WP Innovator Podcast, then you do get the opportunity to do so via the Facebook group. In next week’s episode, we’re going to be doing a show with me and Sarah Moore. And the subject will have been set by the members of the WP Innovator community. Now, by the time you’re listening to this, I’m afraid you’ve lost your chance. We’ve probably already voted. We’ve probably already recorded the episode, but we will be doing this more and more in the future. So head on over to WP Innovator.com/group. I can tell you now, it looks like next week’s episode is going to be social media and what to do with it. But you never know. It could be just like the Eurovision when you think it’s going one way, and then it goes in a completely different direction. You know what? The Eurovision is so boring. This is a whole… I mean, I feel emotional about it. I feel like we should just be talking about the Eurovision in the Facebook group, how awful the Eurovision is, how political the voting is, and how frustrating it can be, and how we put out such good talent as the United Kingdom. And what’s Australia doing in the Eurovision? I mean, oh my gosh. I don’t know why I started this. I’m going to go. Have a wonderful day and see you next week.
