How to Turn Local SEO Into More Customers | Greg Gifford

Welcome to the Agency Founders Experience. Today I am joined by Greg Gifford, Chief Strategy Officer of SearchLab Digital. Greg, how are you doing today, my friend?

I am wonderful, my friend. How are you?

I am doing well. Thank you so much for asking, and I'm glad to hear you're doing well as well. One thing that stuck out to me from our first conversation was how you spent basically your whole career going deep into one specific corner of the market and becoming the go-to name there. I want to dig into that. And how that— what has— and what that has done to your business. And we touched on a few other things as well, but we'll go ahead and dive a little bit deeper into that today. But for Greg, anyone listening, tell us a little bit about SearchLab Digital. What do you do and who do you help?

So SearchLab Digital is a boutique local SEO and PPC agency headquartered in Chicago. We've also got an office here in Dallas where I work. We do local SEO and we do PPC. And we work primarily with car dealers because of the reason you said where I kind of niched down years and years and years ago, not really intentionally, but it was super beneficial to my career path to do so. And basically, I was working for 12 years of my career at agencies that only did SEO for car dealerships. And it's kind of like The Godfather, you know, you try to get out, but they keep pulling you back in.

Right, right.

You know, I just, I love automotive. I've been in it for about 20 years now. And, you know, when you've been around that long and spoken at so many events and released so many studies and written so many things, you kind of just, like you said, you kind of become this go-to voice of— not everybody's gonna buy from you, but everybody's at least gonna listen to what you have to say.

Love that.

So it worked out very well for us when I came to Search Lab. I started at Search Lab in December of 2019, so right before COVID locked the world down. And, uh, thank goodness we kind of already had the direction of going after car dealers because while a lot of people struggled during COVID our agency exploded. So it worked out very well.

Love that. Love that. Like you said, a lot of agencies and businesses struggled during COVID and I love to hear how you essentially exploded your business during a time while others, you know, feel— felt like they, you know, had no way out, right? No way to like survive, which a lot of people, as you saw, lost their businesses and lost their baby that they've been building for 20+ years. And it's super sad to look back on it, right? Especially where the economy is today, right? It's almost like COVID doesn't exist. Yeah. Like it wasn't a thing anymore. And it's just the craziest, you know, mindset. But one thing that really stuck out to me, Greg, on our previous conversation was how you differentiate the difference between regular SEO and local SEO and how Google runs a whole different algorithm for businesses where someone is going to buy face-to-face in their own market. Why do you think that local focus resonates so well with the businesses that you serve?

Well, I think it's just the education of the fact that it's a different way to do digital marketing because most people just assume that SEO is SEO. And unless they've talked to someone that understands the difference between regular SEO and local SEO, there's not much out there that would dissuade you from that point of view. And then once you realize, hey, look, I sell blue widgets in Denver, I don't need to show up for blue widgets in LA or New York or Miami or Chicago. I just need to show up in Denver. And you've been trying SEO for years and kind of struggling and not getting the results you think you should, then you finally talk to somebody that says, hey, look, it's a different algorithm and you need to optimize and do everything differently to correctly target this specific algorithm. And then they do it and they get amazing results. And it's like this eye-opening moment where you're like, wow, I've wasted so much time and effort and money over the years because I wasn't buying the thing I actually needed because I didn't know any better.

Absolutely.

So that's why we spend a lot of time trying to educate people about the differences in the algorithm so that they understand that, again, not everybody's gonna buy SEO from you. Like regardless of which agency you work at, you're not gonna serve the whole world or the whole city even. So we take the point of view of let's at least try to educate people about how this stuff works so that when they do decide to work with a freelancer or an agency, when they make their next call on who that's gonna be, they make a better call and they're not spending money on something that's not gonna help.

Absolutely. And I think like you said, a key word there is education, right? I think a lot of service providers who take people's money just take their money and provide a service with no clarity, right? And clarity equals trust. And right, if the business owner you're working with feels like there's a disconnect or there's no congruency or there's no like understanding, naturally they're gonna just drop off, right? I mean, there's like—

Oh yeah.

There's no sense of like momentum anywhere. It just is, there's just no, there's no connection as to what's happening, right? And so 100%, I think the biggest success stories I have heard for SEO agencies is because of the education aspect of it. Because let me ask you this from experience, right? What would you say to a business owner who has spent, let's just say, the last 24 months invested into a specific SEO company, but here they promised one thing but their results are another, and now they feel like SEO doesn't work? Now they feel like SEO isn't something that works for their specific type of So how do you, you know, for someone listening who may be in that position, how would you tell them to look at it differently? And how would you educate them to understand what has happened and what can be done to fix it?

Well, I would first ask them what they expected to get or what they were promised to get out of that relationship that they didn't get for that 24 months. Because there are very few agencies out there. In fact, I can't name a single reputable agency out there that's going to guarantee anybody results because you can't guarantee results when it comes to SEO. But that doesn't mean you can't get results. You can. It's just no way to know the scale of the results or the timeline for those results. So I would then go on to say to anyone else listening or watching, that if you thought you were gonna get something and you're a year in and you've got nothing, why are you going a whole nother year? If you were already a year in going, I'm not really getting what I thought I was buying, like, have those conversations sooner rather than later and get realigned. You know, I just talked to— I usually don't do like demo calls, uh, because we just have other people that do that and I have other things to concentrate on, but I had to do one last week because We had a team that was out at a conference and we had a potential partner that wanted to talk to us on a short timeline. So I jumped in and one of the things they mentioned was they'd been using this local agency, not local SEO, but agency local to them that just— they were paying— they paid— they had to do a year contract and 6 months in they were like, hey, what have you guys even done for us? Because they hadn't done a thing in 6 months. And it took them 6 months to go, hey, what's going on? And I think that's the big disconnect. Like, you, you're not going to see results quickly, but you should see activity quickly. You should be able to see that things are being done. Now, you may not have the, the knowledge to know whether those things are going to produce the desired outcome, but you should at least see that there is some activity there and be able to have conversations with that partner. To keep that trust that, okay, what we're doing is going to have a positive effect and here's why, instead of just sitting back and going, well, it's been 6 months and I haven't even heard a peep from these guys. Maybe I should call 'em and ask 'em what's going on.

Yeah. And I think, you know what the big disconnect is for business owners is, you know, you have these providers like on Upwork and such, all these different providers that can do SEO, But, you know, it's one of those things where the business owner gets told, oh, we just need more time, or it's gonna take a little bit more time, or you got to give it more time. And it's like the business owner gets told again and again because they don't want to lose the client. Right. And so what are these guys gonna say? Well, you got to give it more time. You know, you got a brand new site, you got this, you got that. And so What is the aha moment for a business owner watching, or even an agency owner who wants to offer SEO, who doesn't, right, and needs to find an expert to do this? Like, what is that aha moment? Like, what is that like red flag that like, if this isn't happening or this doesn't happen or this isn't like aligned with the expectation, like what is that red flag for you? to a business owner, you know, to look for, to know, okay, well, I'm 6 months in, I should somewhat see something, but I haven't. So should I cut the line here or should I keep giving it another 6 months? And you see what I mean? Like, where is that? Like, because I feel like owners also too have this level of like commitment with someone they did business with. And it's like, Greg, I love you. Right. I don't want to— like, I want to keep working with you, but like, like, I don't see anything happening. But like, can you give me some inspiration, please? Like, something. Like, and it's like, where, where do you cross that line?

So you should be able to see some sort of activity being performed, like new blog posts showing up, new pages of content showing up. Or even content on the page changing. Maybe the headings are changing, the text is changing. You should be able to see physical changes happening, either new content— sometimes it's content being deleted because it was superfluous and it didn't help you. You really shouldn't ever be in a situation where you are multiple months in and you have seen nothing change. So if you're getting past a month or 2 and you haven't seen anything change— now keep in mind, you got to be looking. Like, don't just be like, well, I haven't seen anything change, and they're like, well, we've just added 10 new blog posts in the last 3 months. Just because you didn't look doesn't mean we weren't doing work. That's different. I'm talking about you're diligent, you're paying attention to your site, you're not seeing any new content, you're not seeing anything change, and you should have had a discussion with your partner about what your business goals are and the things that you're trying to achieve. Yeah. And if you're not seeing activities that support that direction and they're not telling you why you're not, like maybe they're proactively doing other things and adding new content isn't going to matter until they fix this big technical problem that's preventing your site from getting indexed or something like that.

Right, right, right.

They would be forthcoming to tell you, hey, look, we found out that your code's totally borked and we've got to go fix your code because adding more content is not going to be effective if Google can't see it, then okay. But if it's just radio silence and nothing's changing, that's a massive red flag. If you're a year in and they're going, we'll just give it more time, okay, give it how much more time? Because at that point you should know. Now nobody's gonna guarantee results, but in general it's good to understand that when you're doing SEO to a website The activities and the things that you're doing today are influencing your visibility a couple of months in the future. So don't expect that you sign up for SEO and a month later you're going to be number one or you're going to see these huge results and your traffic's going to go way up.

Absolutely.

Especially also, it depends on the level of competition in your market. You know, if you're selling blue widgets and you live in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming and nobody else does blue widgets for 500 miles in any direction, you probably don't need SEO because you're the only person selling it and their only option to buy this product or service from. But if you're— I use a lot of car dealer examples because I live in Dallas and Dallas sells a lot of Fords and I've been doing automotive for so long, I use that as an example. Dallas is the most competitive Ford market in the world. There's 20 Ford stores in the Dallas market and they're all about 10 minutes away from each other. So it's insanely competitive. They sell more pickups in North Texas than the rest of the world combined every year. If you're a Ford dealer in Dallas, you're not going to be able to get results doing SEO with a new partner even in 6 months. Mm-hmm. It is too insanely competitive. Or like air conditioning repair, any town in Texas, any town in the South, you do AC repair, there's probably 150 to 200 businesses that do that in your market. You're not going to get results quickly. But if you're an underwater basket weaver in Chicago and you only have one other competitor, you could probably see some movement a little bit faster.

Right.

But in general, it's gonna be probably 5 or 6 months before you really start to see that upswing, and then probably 11 to 12 months before you see the big gains. That's in general. It could be a little bit faster, it could take longer. It really just depends on your market and the, the breadth of competition. And now the thing that kind of throws a wrench into that is before, I think digital marketers, we've done ourselves a disservice in telling our clients that the KPIs for success are more traffic. It's traffic and clicks are what matters. But now, because AI and AI overviews are changing the search behavior, a lot of that early-stage informational traffic that was never going to convert doesn't come to your site anymore. And businesses are freaking out because their traffic is going down. So it's not just about traffic, it's about qualified traffic. And if you're losing traffic, what's been very effective for most of our clients that we showed this to is to separate out in Google Analytics the difference between blog traffic and website traffic. And blog traffic's going down, website traffic is either the same or going up. So if overall your traffic's going down but you're looking just at the important conversion-driving traffic and that's going up, Well, that's not a loss for SEO. That's a win because all that we're losing is this informational traffic that was coming to get an early funnel question answered because that was the best way to get that question answered. They never really needed to go to your website to read a blog post to know what the difference was between blue widgets and green widgets. It was just, that was the best place to get the answer. Now they can get that answer in AI overview or from ChatGPT before they go do the search. And okay, does that suck? Sure, you lost traffic, but is it hurting your sales? No.

Love that. I mean, the, the, it's, it's really just comes down to adapting, right? The level, you know, being in the AI space now and like you said, dividing that traffic between blog and intent-based traffic basically, right? It's like, I need a plumber now, right? And it's like, boom, the website shows up versus like, what is the best toilet for this plumbing issue I got, right? Like, right, completely different intents. And the level of awareness obviously is, is night and day. And I think providing that clarity to business owners and understanding, like you said, educating them on where we are today compared to 20 years ago. Yeah. I mean, listen, times have changed dramatically. I used to rank back when I used to do SEO over like 10 years ago. I used to be able to rank in one day number one in GMB and be up, you know, appear on top of, you know, the, the top guy who's been there for 25 years with a post office, you know, with a, a fake virtual office, you know what I mean? That I would just pop on, on GMB and then— Right. And rank that bad boy. And I would get traffic in the, you know, first month. But—

Right.

Google's been extremely strict. It's regulated. They got guys like me that used to do that a long time ago to sell traffic to business owners who didn't do that the right way, right? And it was like, that was the rank and rent model. model, right? Um, and so through that, you know, a lot of things have changed. And if you're not showing up on AI, you're almost invisible nowadays when you're coming, you know, when you're looking at the awareness kind of aspect of it, right? Because like you said, when I have a question, I go into AI now. I'm not even going into Google. I mean, sometimes I go into Google. Sometimes I go into Google.

Marketers use AI a lot more than the general public. So usually in most cases, we're talking less than 5% of total site traffic is coming from AI at this point.

Yeah. You know what I've noticed?

Verticals, some verticals might be higher depending on what the vertical is. Obviously some are lower. For a lot of our car dealer clients, it's like 1% of site traffic is coming from all AI lumped together.

Mm. You know what?

Not just AI Overviews, but like AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity. ChatGPT, everything together is like maybe 1%. Then that's another thing that we've got to educate business owners on because a lot of business owners are very AI forward.

Absolutely.

Because they're using AI to help run their business and they're doing a lot of searches and they're doing all of their searches on, on ChatGPT. They're even doing local searches on ChatGPT and seeing the map. Like I help on the Google Business Profile Community Forum and I was helping on a question today where a guy was like, hey, look, when I do a search in ChatGPT, it shows the wrong review stars. Well, that's because those stars come from Yelp, not from Google. And so Google's not, it, it has nothing to do with the problem with your Google Business Profile. It has to do with how that platform works. But everyone assumes that their customers use AI as much as they do to search, and that's definitely not the case. Yeah.

So absolutely.

And I, you know, you really have to look at data to make these decisions and not make that gut check of like, well, I do this, so all my customers do it too.

Great point. And it's super valid. You know, when I look at it, you know, and I was looking at it more towards like whenever I go on Google now, I feel like I'm having a conversation. Because it's, it's doing, it's using Google conversation and then it shows me results. So it's not more, it's like less about writing keywords in it and it's now more about like natural languaging to find those things. And it's like times are changing so fast. Like me searching on Google doesn't even feel the same anymore.

Yeah. And it's so much more of because of that conversational aspect, it's so much more specific in the search result that you're eventually getting when you get to the point of All right, I've had this conversation, I've moved through all the qualifiers of what I'm looking for, and now you get your answer. Instead of before where you would search widgets near me and then blue widgets near me, okay, blue widgets near me for sale less than $50, blue widgets for sale less than $50 near me open right now, you know, and you'd have to do multiple queries where you keep adding on and clarifying, and now you're having that conversational aspect And by the time the actual website visit happens, a lot of times you're just doing a search for that brand or that URL because you already know you're going to buy from that person. You're just going to convert on their website.

Absolutely love that. And you told me that, you know, you became known in the auto dealership world as the number one guy for SEO. How did you build that reputation? Like, how did you—

Lots of conference speaking.

Become the go-to in that market? So conference speaking.

Lots and lots of conference speaking, lots of writing. I did a weekly video series for about 11 years. I've backed that off to about monthly now, like maybe once a month unless something big happens, just because, man, after almost 11 years of doing a video, I like— in 11 years, I probably only missed 3 weeks out of 11 years.

Nice.

So it's tough to write about stuff, especially if there's no updates where, okay, Here's this new update. Here's how this stuff works. And sure, there's a lot of stuff going on with AI right now. But anyway, just years of weekly videos, years of marketing our talks, years of being at these shows so that you just have this repetition of, you know, usually, gosh, probably 10, 11 years ago, the company that I worked for did some research and realized that Customers weren't signing up to work with us after seeing me speak once. Usually, it's 3.5 to 4 times on average that they see me do a talk before they then engage and go, okay, I'd like to talk to you about working with you. So, it's the repetition of that educationally focused engagement that really kind of brought me to the forefront of awareness, I think.

I love that. I mean, it just, it's really The consistency, right? I mean, I feel like it is a lot of

consistency. It's, it's great. I mean, look at the, look at the same thing of what people do now, the content creators. Like, if you are a content creator on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram or whatever, it's, it's lots of different things, you know. You've got all the adult content people. I follow a ridiculous number of tattoo guys because, like, obviously I like tattoos a little bit, so I watch a lot of different tattoo artists that I follow. I also paint miniatures, and so I follow a lot of miniature painting accounts. So all of those accounts have the same thing in common— it's repetition of content. You're posting new content on a regular basis to keep your audience engaged and to get the algorithm to show you to new people. It's the same concept, just with speaking at conferences. I was writing on Search Engine Land. I wrote for Search Engine Journal a couple of times. I wrote for industry publications. I spoke at every industry conference for years. I did my own videos. I did guest spots on webinars, guest spots on podcasts, and it's just the repetition of people seeing you over and over and over again and sharing the same educational message just gets you that notoriety, gets you that visibility so that then people are like, hey, look, I may not be buying SEO from this guy, but I know this guy knows how this stuff works, so I'm going to listen to what he has to say.

You know what? I think you couldn't put that any better. I think There's a lot of people who overthink it, right? How to become the go-to in a specific market. But the reality is it's just consistency and just having a passion for what you do. You know, I felt like before, you know, before I did consulting and such, there were certain, you know, niches or even industries or even services that I would provide that I absolutely hated to do. And when you said yes to something like that, it's almost like you look back, Like what you just did, and you're just like, uh, I just shot myself in the foot, and now I gotta fulfill this thing. And it's like, I don't really want to, you know? And it's like there's this disconnect. And so I feel like if you are in a position in your business where you're not absolutely full 100% in it to win it for whatever it is that you do— I mean, it doesn't matter, it could be SEO, it could be creative design, it could be branding, it could be Direct marketing, it could be Facebook, whatever it is.

Right.

But go all in, all in with conviction, not um, ah, eh, like stuttering. It's conviction so that energy transfers over to the person watching and sees, wow, this guy shows up every day wherever I see him, wherever he's at with the same energy, with the same story, with the Same, like, this is the guy you should, you should have a conversation with him if it relates to insert topic here that you're always talking about.

Exactly.

Right? I am the AI automations guy. Like, I'm the guy that people look at and they're like, if you need anything lead gen AI automation, go hit up that guy. He will— he does so much and he will blow your brains out with what's possible. Right?

Right.

And it's like, because I haven't been doing anything but that for this entire time, and people recognize it. It's a memorable person. It's someone that, you know, goes up in the spotlight with the exact same TED Talk message every single time, you know, in different ways, you know. And it's like, that is what you're known for. And I feel like a lot of businesses try to be the jack of all trades and can't figure out what that passion project is for them. You know, it's— What that is.

It's tough when you try to be that jack of all trades because if you're a freelancer and you've just started out on your own and you're trying to be scrappy, it's tough to turn down business, right? You want to take that business. So you might concentrate on SEO and PPC and they're like, well, can you build me a website? And you're like, yeah, cool, I can figure it out. And you go do that and then you add that on. Then somebody's like, what about email marketing? Can you do that? And you start doing all of these things. And it's like you said, do you really have the passion to do all of those things? Probably not. And you're going to get to a point very quickly where you're just going to be passable at the things that you're doing because you're spread too thin. So when you can niche down and say, I'm going to stay in my lane, and maybe that's a 2-lane road and not a single-lane road, but you got a 2 or 3-lane road, you're staying on that road. You're not going to take any exit ramps. You're not going to take the express lane to go somewhere else. You're going to say, this is what I do and I'm going to keep doing this and I'm going to make sure that I am really badass at doing these few things instead of just being good enough on a lot of different things. And I think that makes a massive difference in your potential future as well.

Absolutely. Plus, it's a scalable solution, right?

Yeah.

You know, you're able to scale and even delegate. Right? Because you can't delegate something that's completely custom every single time and it's completely different every single time. You know what I'm saying? It's just, it's not possible, you know? So, you know, if your mindset is to, you know, scale to, you know, 20 clients plus, you need something scalable. You need something that's productized, that's systemized, and that's scalable. If you're looking to do more custom work, project, high-ticket stuff, that's a different ballgame. You know, that's a different ballgame, but you got to be experienced. You can't— I don't recommend that model for just someone starting out. You need to sneeze?

No, I was going to say it also, it's helpful for the people that are listening or watching to consider the future. And I think a lot of agency owners and freelancers are thinking about the today and they're not thinking about the 5 years from now, the 10 years from now. Because a lot of people get into this game because they want to build an agency and exit and make a big payday and then maybe go build something else or maybe be like, cool, I'm handled. I don't need to work anymore. I can go retire early. Other people like our owner, no desire to sell whatsoever. They want to grow a sustainable business and grow it and make it big and provide for their family that way. And there's nothing wrong with either path. But if you decide early which of those 2 directions you're going to go, it will help you set up your agency for success. Because like you just said, if the, the one guy doing the jack-of-all-trades approach isn't scalable, and that's okay if it's not scalable, if you don't want to grow something huge and try to get an exit and you're just trying to do something of, you're like, I'm going to stay in my lanes and I'm going to do these 4 or 5 things that I'm really good at and just do those 4 or 5 things and Just work for myself forever, be my own boss, make plenty of money, and I'm good. Yeah. Right? But if you're wanting to sell your agency, you can't be the jack of all trades that does everything because someone looking to buy you, they don't want to buy something that the business crashes and burns if the agency owner is not an integral part of the day-to-day of that business.

Exactly.

They want to find a business that the owner can get hit by a bus the day after they buy the business and everything still works.

Absolutely.

And that's 2 different processes that you need to set up. And how you want the business to run. And the sooner you figure that out, the sooner you can get going in the right direction. Because if you don't want to sell, know that you don't want to sell and set up for the future that way. If you do eventually want to sell or think you might want to, make those steps earlier to get yourself out of being a necessity in the day-to-day, and you're going to get more of a multiplier when you do finally exit in the future.

Absolutely. I always say start with the end in mind, right?

Yeah.

And, and that way you're not going to have to overwork and, and, and literally do everything over again later on because you're— If you don't know what you're building. Chasing the shiny object, you know? Exactly. Yeah. You're just like literally constantly changing what you're offering and you're constantly pivoting and constantly like, it's just, listen, I tell people, look, every industry works. It's just a matter of if you're going to make it work, right? I want to, I want for everyone to hear because you are a master of car dealerships, right? I would love to hear one of your biggest wins. Walk me through a client and, you know, it could be one of your car dealerships, but where did they, what, what were they experiencing before they came to you? And then you came in, what would, what'd the outcomes look like after you were able to—

Oh man, there's, there's one that was a dealership. We actually won, uh, uh, an industry award for the work that we did for the campaign that we did for this guy. And, and the guy came in and he was like, look, I'm just struggling for local visibility. I'm not showing up well in the map pack. And we were like, all right, cool, we can help with that. Well, we came in and looked and it— his Google Business Profile was just not set up correctly at all. And he was missing a lot of the categories he should have had selected. And the categories that you select in your business profile have a massive influence on the searches that you show up for. And then there's other things that are these little idiosyncratic things that you wouldn't know if you weren't part of that industry. So think of like you have a McDonald's inside of a Walmart, right?

Yep.

And that McDonald's is allowed to have a business profile, right? Because it is a separate business that operates inside of the larger business of Walmart. And they've got their own space, they have their own permanent sign, they operate at separate hours because you might be able to go in and, and the McDonald's might be closed.

Yeah.

The Subway or whatever might be closed, but the store's open. So those are called department profiles. And certain businesses— think also like the AT&T guy at Sam's Club could probably have his own profile, right?

Okay, yep.

Certain businesses are allowed to have departments, most are not. Well, car dealers are allowed to have departments, and Google actually bends the rules about eligibility. So a car dealership can have a profile for the main dealership, which is related to sales, and then they can have a separate department profile for the parts department and a separate department profile for the service department. Even though they probably don't have permanent signage that's separate for each one of those because I don't have to go to a car dealership and buy a car. I can go to the car dealership and buy parts and never buy a car from them. Right. Or buy service and never buy parts or never buy a car. And so Google has realized this and allowed dealers to bend the rules and set these up. This guy also did not have those separate department profiles set up and a big part of that is Most— there are 10 category possible slots that you can fill. Most businesses can do maybe 1 to 3, but there are more than 10 categories that apply to sales and more than 10 that apply to service and more than 10 that apply to parts.

Holy moly.

So as a dealership, if you had a single profile, you've only got 10 slots to pick your important categories, which means you're leaving out other ones. And if you now separate it, you can put The specific category. So we set those profiles up correctly. We nested them so they're listed. So it also helps because the service department often has different hours of operation than the main dealership sales floor.

Right.

So that confuses people, results in bad reviews because you have people that are like, it's—

Oh, I thought it was open. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now it'll list the hours for each department separately if you set this other bit up correctly. So just Figuring out the things that needed to be done to properly implement everything related to his business profile made a massive difference in his visibility and traffic, and he kind of skyrocketed from there. So I think that was one— What was his—

I'm curious to know what was his reaction, because I know what's the— like, you just explained that, I'm, I'm mapping it in my brain as like, yeah, the strategy, and I'm like, holy smokes, that, that is gonna blow someone up, you know what I mean? Like, what was his reaction to this implementation? Well,

like, you know, like, again, to reiterate, usually you're gonna tell people, and most agencies do, it's probably gonna be about 6 months till you start to see some results, probably about a year before you really have everything kind of compound and get you traction and you see the big, big giant results. And so the guy, after like maybe a month and a half, called us and was like, you guys lied to me. And we're like, uh-oh. You know, you never want to have a client call that starts to flag you. Say that, right? You guys were dishonest with me. And so we're all kind of like, oh crap. And then he was like, you told me it was gonna be 6 months and we've like tripled our traffic from our Google Business Profile in like 6 weeks. And we were like, well, yeah, I mean, like obviously it would be 6 months in a normal scenario, but in this case, the agency that he'd been using was just so horrible at what they were doing and didn't know how to do things correctly that coming in and just doing some very basic blocking and tackling of like, Foundational SEO 101 stuff made a massive difference because now he was set up correctly and had the opportunity to show up for more stuff.

Wow. That is amazing. I love that story. Honestly, it's mind-blowing to me how many, you know, home service-based businesses, car dealerships, and then just all these like brick-and-mortar businesses are stuck in the Stone Age when it comes to just visibility. And, you know, the fundamentals of SEO is just doing what Google wants you to do the right way, right? It's like follow Google's rules and implement them all very, very, you know, well, and we'll drive traffic to you. We just need to make sure you're the right person, right? And so fundamentally, that's all it is. But most businesses, you know, as an example, upload a screenshot of their work. Oh yeah. To GMB. And, and I try to explain this, and I love giving aha moments the business owners. And I'm like, well, sir, would you go on Google and type in 47G5XG74_44 to go and find the newest HVAC unit for your home? No. Yeah. That's what Google— this image is what Google says this is, you know? And it's like, you know, common sense is in common, and the opportunity cost of not knowing this information

It's like the same thing, the same sort of path that we take when we talk to anybody in healthcare. And the way that I kind of simplify it is I always have to tell healthcare people that their potential patients don't use the same terminology that the healthcare provider uses when they're searching. Like plastic surgeons are the example that I always give when I do conference presentations.

Yeah.

Because plastic surgeons want to go for the surgical term and rank really well for that. So my favorite one is a blepharoplasty, which is an eyelid lift. So as you age, your, your skin starts to droop and, and it actually can physically start to like impede your vision. So there's like a medical necessity, but also it's kind of a facelift-y kind of thing of you just—

Yeah, yeah, it's like a Botox for your eyes. Yeah,

right. So these these surgeons and a lot of the providers that work with them to handle SEO will go optimize the hell out of that page for blepharoplasty. And they'll, they'll use their rank tracking tools and be like, you rank number 1 for blepharoplasty in the Dallas market or in Beverly Hills or wherever you are. And they're like, woo-hoo, we're winning. And the phone's not ringing. Hmm. Well, that's because people don't shop by the name, the medical name. They shop by symptom. They, they go, I have droopy eyelids, how can I fix it? Right?

Absolutely.

So your page should be about surgery for droopy eyelids, right? Not blepharoplasty. Now, not saying you can't say blepharoplasty on the page, but the main elements, the title tag, the H1 heading, the alt text, the content that people are reading, the content that the AI is also scanning, needs to talk about the terminology that your potential patients, or for other businesses, potential clients, Are gonna use. If you get too heavy into the jargon, you understand the jargon, your agency partner probably understands the jargon, but do your customers understand the jargon? That's the question.

Right. I ask them, do you really think the patient that doesn't know what the heck is happening with their eyes is typing specifically whatever word you just said? I can't even repeat. It's like, I don't even know how to spell that. You know, little do I, you know, so like you, you, you said so much gold. In what you just said right now. It doesn't matter the industry that you're in, if you're not applying what you just said to your website. You know, what you just said is such an aha moment to so many people. Attorneys is a big one too, because attorneys are very technical, very, you know, their terminology is so, you know, it's called like law. There's like a language that they call it and they make fun of it and all this stuff. But the point is, is that like, if you're using that jargon, Yeah. You're only going to attract like other attorneys, you know what I'm saying? You're not going to attract the, the people who have cases that you can help them with, you know? So— Exactly. I love that you brought that to the surface because I think that is something that is so overlooked. But not only that, but service providers don't even talk about it, educate people on, and don't even give these business owners these aha moments like, wow, you are so freaking right, man. Like, Just like me just thinking about it, it's like that totally makes a lot of sense. And now you have won the business, you've got their attention, and now they want to work with you because it's like, this is the guy, Greg, he's the guy who's been able to give me the aha moments that no one else has been able to give me.

Yeah, you've built that trust right off the bat because the other guys are just like, yeah, cool, man, I can do SEO, let me take your money.

Exactly.

And they pull out their— they pull out their checklist And they run the same checklist for you that they run for a plumber, that they run for a car dealer, that they run for a dry cleaner. There is no differentiation and they're just running and they don't even ask you what your business goals are. So then when you come in and you're like, well, hey, why are you actually doing this? Like, what's the actual goal you want to complete? And oh, also, by the way, here's how this stuff works to align with your business goal. And this is why you need to not use jargon and do this. So like, that's when they go, nobody's ever told me that before. Like, Holy crap, I would much rather work with you because then they actually understand what's going on and they're not just getting these reports with a bunch of numbers that say, hey, SEO's winning. And they're like, but my phone's not ringing. It's not. And the partner's like, but SEO's winning. And no, SEO's not winning if their business goals aren't being met.

Absolutely. I love that you said that. I mean, it's so true and it's so, I mean, this is a masterclass in itself. Literally what you're saying, because it's, it's one of those things that, like you said, it's the natural languaging of the customers, right? And if you're not optimizing for the people who actually need you, like, you know, you can't sit here and assume what people are searching for. You got to go find what they're searching for and optimize around that, you know, go, go, go find the stream and, you know, jump into it. Don't create your own, you know, flow, you know. And so that's super, super You know, I love that you brought that up. For you in this space of car dealerships, what's your vision for the agency in the next 12 and 24 months? Where do you guys see you guys taking the agency, especially with AI now involved? How are you, you know, using AI and where do you see your agency going in the next 12 to 24 months?

Yeah, I mean, we want to expand and, and not be quite as dependent on auto. Well, not dependent, but not so concentrated in automotive. 'Cause we can do local SEO for any vertical and, you know, it's just exciting to, to add some new things in and, and expand. But for sure, we'll keep growing in automotive. Um, the, the easier question would be, how are we not using AI in today's world?

Okay. You'd be surprised.

I, I mean, I got Claude running in the background over here waiting for me to come in and click, yes, you have permission to go do this one thing that it's not allowed to do on its own. Um, yeah, I mean, we're, we're building our own tools, we're building our own reporting. We're building interfaces. I literally just shipped a thing on Friday that when we do a demo with a potential new client, most agencies just have the same slides and they give it to everybody and they might change the price out at the end for whatever the scope of work might be, but it's the same default presentation. And we actually do an audit of the website before we do the demo and actually show Real things from their website customized in that presentation. So we're not just giving the default, here's what we do for SEO, but it's, here's what we do for SEO based on your needs and the things that are going to matter to you, Mr. Business Owner. So it's a better conversation. The problem with that is doing the audit takes about 30 minutes, and then customizing the slides for the presentation takes about another 30 minutes. So About an hour for a product expert to prep that presentation. So I'm, I'm still working on the automation of the audit bit because I want it to be exactly the same answers as what I would do or the other guy would do that do most of these audits. Right. And it's not quite there yet. It's 70% there, but that's not good enough. I'm not gonna ship that one until it's answering exactly as I would, but for the Creation of the deck side of things, what used to take 30 to 45 minutes, now you enter 5 URLs into a form. Uh, not really a form. It's, it's like an interface in the tool, but you, you have 5 URLs that you enter and you click a button and it does all the screen captures and customizations for you and updates everything. And you have a fully customized deck in about 2 minutes of time.

Bam.

So we're trying to find ways like that to, we're not trying to have AI replace humans yet. It's more. Let's have AI make our humans more efficient so that we don't have to spend time and effort on the things that we can now automate or mostly automate. And now that gives us more time to use the human brain strategy side to achieve even better results for the clients we work with.

Love that. That's exactly, you know, why, you know, I'll, I'll never say humans are gonna be fully replaced because I don't think that time To create, you know, to get an output of a great result, you need the input of humans, right? I mean, you know, unless you're trying to impress robots. So, you know, for you to say that you're able— you're trying to build out tools that, you know, take your brain and the years of experience to be more efficient, that's exactly how we build our AI tools. I call it the human hybrid approach because it's— there's nothing— there's not going to be a good output without a proper input. And every single tool I've built inside my own agency has been built from the 10 years of experience that I have built up here that I used to have to teach other people how to do. I've built out complete tools to solve that problem in a, you know, blink of an eye. And so, you know, I love the world that we live in today. I'm super excited, uh, going into the future with all this AI and all the developments. But I do like to cross that, you know, I, I love painting that line to let people know it's like AI isn't going to take your jobs. AI is going to help you perform and become more efficient at your jobs when used properly. And so if you're feeling scared about where AI is going, or if you're feeling like AI is going to take your job, change the perspective. Change your perspective on how AI is being used. It helps you research faster. It helps you, you know, get ideas quicker. It helps you get frameworks and just so many amazing things that it could be done. And, and allows you to perform. Like you said, I use AI very, you know, very similarly, like you said, Greg, to personalize, right? Because instead of a cookie-cutter approach, how much better does it feel if you feel like that person took time to perf— you know, to, to do something personalized to you where you're now not long— no longer a number to them, you're a human.

Or, you know, I mean, you did SEO back in the day. How much time did it used to take to do competitive research and to go dig through a couple years of analytics and Search Console data and AdWords data and all this stuff and keyword research tools. Not even that.

Audience, just, just building one page. Just one page. Like

hours and hours of research time that now you can go spin up an agent to go do that research in parallel to the other work that you're doing. And 20 minutes later, it's done 9 hours of human-level research.

It's a game changer.

That's a real win. I think, you know, when ChatGPT first came out, everybody was like, oh, it's coming for our jobs. We're not gonna have jobs. And I I think there's still a significant amount of people out there that are still worried about that. I don't think that's the case. Maybe for some industries, there are some jobs that AI will take away or robotics or—

White collar, I would say, like data entry and things like that.

But for like SEO and marketing, the models are not intelligent. They cannot make strategic decisions. At the point that they can make strategic decisions, then sure, they're gonna replace our job. But at the point that we get to where AI can make strategic decisions on stuff, probably none of us are gonna have to work anymore anyway. So don't worry about that. Worry about right now.

Exactly. Right now. Absolutely.

Right now you're not gonna lose your job, but right now, if you don't know how to use AI to fool around and make yourself more efficient, you should probably start screwing around with it and learn that stuff.

100%. I cannot agree more, even though I try not to get too much into the weeds with AI. 'Cause it is a shiny object, like, you know, you can go down a shiny object, like, you go down 10 pages deep into YouTube and you found, now you're building a logo automator or something, you know, or—

Right.

So it's kind of hard to not go into the weeds, but, you know, I think if you use it for the right purposes, for the things you're already doing and figuring, okay, it's like, what things do I do today that I have to physically, like, manually do, or like, what things am I having to, like, grab something from over here, do something over here. Like, what am I doing that can be either created into a system, an automation, or delegation so that I can essentially basically provide a better experience to my customers? Even, you know, reduce cost so you can provide even a better amount of value for the same price. Yeah. And now you're like, holy smokes, I can't go anywhere. Greg is giving me all this value. If I go anywhere else, I'm going to go broke. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. When they compare apples to apples. So I've really enjoyed this conversation, man. We could sit here for hours talking about all this stuff. For those listening, Greg, and really just got— even myself, and I've been doing SEO for a while, and I wouldn't say actively because I don't have an SEO agency. I've consulted on, and if I were to talk to someone, I'd be like, hey, go hit up Greg. Greg, right? But the point is, is that for anyone watching that had gotten multiple aha moments on, on your strategy, on how they should be looking at SEO and just expectations in general, where can someone find you to learn more about you, to learn more about your business, your strategy, to see if, if working with you might be a fit for them? Where can they learn more about your business?

Yep. Just our website's the best spot. It's just searchlabdigital.com. Super easy to go there, learn all about us, watch all our videos, check out our blog posts, all that sort of stuff. Also, if you want to more specifically just kind of follow me, follow me on LinkedIn. It's just linkedin.com/in/GregGifford or just do a search on LinkedIn for Greg Gifford. I'll probably show up pretty high if you're in marketing because you'll have mutual connections which will bump me higher in the list and just look for, you know, The beard's pretty easy to spot.

Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. And also, I don't think there's anybody else that I've spoken to with such a cool background. I thought my background was cool, but I was like, all right, you got me beat. I need to go back to work.

If I'm gonna be in here every day, I at least need to make it a cool spot. And you know, like my lightsaber, I was super excited when I built it at Disney to come home and be like, yeah, I'm gonna have a cool lightsaber glowing in the background for every call. Not realizing that it turns off after 5 minutes. So that was a bit disappointing.

Oh man. But I think it still looks great. I love the background. I love your personality behind it. I love that it like just really like puts you front and center, but it also gives, you know, that personality behind who you are as a person. And I feel like nowadays that's what's missing. I think it's, there's a disconnect between the people running the businesses and the people actually paying for the services.

Yeah.

And I feel like if you can gravitate more towards the founders and towards the leaders of the companies that you're working towards, and you're more aligned with them and their vision and just like everything about them, you feel so much more confident about doing business and you just feel good about doing it. You feel good about referring people to you. Like it's a completely different dynamic than just going on Upwork and paying some guy fricking $2K a month or whatever. And he just sends you reporting. through their dashboard and it's like,

yeah,

SEO's done nice next month, you know? And it's like,

yeah,

you know, this is the world we live in today, trust-based economy. And I think this is the reason why we created this show, to showcase sharp individuals like yourself and to show people what you're all about and to really just, you know, show people that you're a real human that cares about people who has real expertise and can actually change someone's, you know, business if they're willing to trust the process.

Yeah.

So Greg, I appreciate you for jumping on. Thank you so much. And I appreciate you for everything you shared today on this call.

Uh, thanks for having me. It was a fun convo.

Awesome, Greg. Thank you.