Biggest SEO losers of 2023, Why you're wasting time on SEO, and more

All right, so we are going to talk about the biggest SEO losers from last year. This study was done by Lily Rae, who I follow, and she puts out some really good stuff on, on SEO. I'm just going to read off a couple things, and we're going to have this on the, on the YouTube so you can see the, the stats as we go down, down the, down the list. But get this: travel directories and blogs, -50% in 2023. That's on 67 domains. Hobbies and collectibles, -50%. I'll maybe go through the top 5. Home and furniture, -49%. Advocacy and nonprofit, -48%. E-commerce, -47%. Fashion and apparel, -47%, right? Adult content, -47%. Business and finance, -42%. So basically what is it saying?

It's saying that your traffic's going to go down. That's what she's pretty much saying.

I think just most people are losing when it comes to SEO.

But how many domains were analyzed in this?

So let's see, she— that's a good question.

Because there's always someone else who's going to pick up the traffic.

Yep.

And also one other thing to point out is some of it is controlled by things like the economy. For example, interest rates are high in most countries. People aren't buying homes like they used to buy. They don't have as much of a demand for furniture. The search volume for furniture is just going to go down. Maybe she's talking about the positioning. I don't know if she's talking about traffic specifically, but search volume is down drastically in a lot of those categories.

Yeah. So here, I'll just read it. The categories With the greatest average percentage losses in visibility, plus number of domains classified in that category shown below. I would say the average per category here, like travel or hobbies or home, the averages are probably around 30 to 40 domains per category. So it's not a super high sample size.

And she's saying visibility, she's not necessarily saying traffic, because I doubt that some of those categories— it's still a good research piece. But I doubt a lot of those categories are seeing a 30, 40, 50% decrease in traffic. That's too high. I would have seen that data, like in our system.

Yep. So what are the overall— like, we should give some takeaways here. What are the overall takeaways here? I mean, search traffic's continuing to decrease, but that doesn't mean like the traffic has to go somewhere else. People are still searching for stuff, right? SEO's not just going to die.

Sure, search traffic isn't necessarily decreasing.

It's going up.

Yeah, it's increasing.

Yeah.

If you look at what Danny Sullivan from Google has said, Google has consistently driven more traffic each and every single year to websites than they have the previous year.

So what I'm saying is, this is really more so for those that are losing their traffic. What should you do?

Well, what you should do, and funny enough, I have a tweet about this and I labeled it, you're wasting your time on SEO because do you know how many Google searches are happening a day?

Something billions?

Yeah, 8.5 billion.

Yeah.

Right? But over the last 30 days in our Ubersuggest database, we saw that 94.29% of web pages indexed in Google got no search traffic and most people believe that SEO is dead. It doesn't mean that SEO is dead, what it just means is You're doing SEO the old school way, being like, oh, let me do keyword research, crank out a lot of me-too content that is regurgitated and everyone else has already talked about this stuff, put it out on the web, build some links, and boom, I'm off to the races and I'm ranking.

And we just said in the last episode, people are producing a lot of crap content.

Yes, and that doesn't work. If you want to do well in SEO these days, you got to continually update your content. It's why Wikipedia still dominates the rankings because their content's fresh. No one wants to read 3-year-old pieces of content when you can read 3-day-old pieces of content. The other thing that you got to do is talk about new stuff. Forget AI-written articles. I'm not saying AI is bad. AI can help you with a lot of things like research and making your content better, but people want to hear new stuff. Dude, every time you and I post stuff on social media, do you know what the number one factor other than a hook that causes our views to go through the roof?

It's usually a trending thing.

Or we're talking about something that's new, right? Which a lot of times is trending. News, something that's new that no one else is really talking about. Right? So if you create new content, you end up updating your content, you focus on building your authority in the space, so the double E-A-T, you focus on optimizing your click-through rates because that's not just SEO, it's marketing, making your content more appealing so people want to click through. You used to have a tool on this that jacks up your rankings really fast.

Yep.

You got to do other things as well, like figure out more creative ways to build links than just saying, hey, I'm going to go manually reach out to 500 people. And I'm not saying you should buy links, that's bad too. But, you know, you and I have done both the tool playbook. I've done it with Answer the Public, Ubersuggest. You give away free tools, you build more links from that than any form of content that you'll ever post out there.

Remember I told you when you bought Ubersuggest, it was for $250,000, right?

$120,000.

Okay, even better. So, I think I did the math on it and it basically equated to you're paying like $30 per link if you looked at it from that perspective. And maybe now that the price was half of that, maybe you're paying paying $15 per link. Plus you have brand equity behind it too. Yeah.

And that's the other thing. If you want to do well in SEO these days, if you look at a trend over the past few years, what's really dominated search results is brands. And if you leverage the rule of 7 in marketing where you go on all the social profiles that you create, because the average social user is on 6.6 social networks according to DemandSage. But if you leverage more social networks, if you do SEO, you do email marketing, you do text message marketing, You pretty much do podcasting, all the other channels out there. Yes, it's a lot of work. You'll build a brand over time because people will see you.

I mean, look, at the end of the day, if you're going to create content, don't half-ass it. Go full-ass, right? Like we're full-ass on this podcast right now, right? We're full-ass on the other stuff that we like. You know the collab that we did with Perpetual Traffic? We posted the first video in that series and that one got— has like a 7.5% CTR, which is a lot higher than what we usually have because ours is like B2B content, right?

Are you talking about on YouTube?

On YouTube, yeah. And then the average view duration is a lot higher too. Obviously, I mean, that video is 25 minutes or so, but it just goes to show like you have— it's not just you and me talking about new things, but we brought in new people as well and we made it a little longer. And like, you just, you got to play the game. Like, not only do you have to go full ass, but you have to play the game for each channel. Like, there's a game for each one. It's like YouTube, it's thumbnails, it's your average view duration, right? It's all those things. SEO is a little different now too. You can't just do the same playbook. Just to wrap up on the Citrix one over here. So this was a con— This is a collaboration with Lily Ray and Citrix, which is like SEO tool, I believe. Do you remember Citrix? Not Citrix, the the Sistrix.

Oh, I thought you were talking about Citrix.

The no, not the webinar.

Yeah, yeah.

But so they analyzed 2,500 domains. They deduped it. As a reminder here, Sistrix measures rankings of over 100 million domains and 100 million keywords on Google. So this is the methodology. I just recommend everyone just go read this later. Just type in Sistrix. So that's S I S T R I X. Lily Rae, you should be able to find it because it's a collaboration. That's another idea. People should do collaborations with these other companies because they're starved for good content as well and they like hearing from influencers. They're always down to collab with influencers. People are always down to do webinars with you. They're down to do webinars with me. There's a reason.

So I think collaborations are one of the best ways to generate traffic and more brand awareness because you're leveraging someone else's audience combined with yours.

Speaking of collaboration, we're doing a— so we're doing a thing for agency owners. called the Agency Owners Association. And I told you who came up with that name, right?

No.

Syed came up with that name. So when we were hanging out last week, he's like, oh, I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, Neil and I were talking about doing a thing. He's like, yeah, you should call it Agency Owners Association, AOA, right? So I— we've, we've tried iterations of this in the past, but there's a little— it's different now. So our thinking behind this is that we want to help agency owners, right? And, um, we want to build a community. And then for people at a certain level, we also want to meet with them in person too, right? So, um, I'm happy to shed more light, but you can go add in as well.

Yeah, so funny enough, Eric and I were talking and we were just like, dude, it would be really cool if a ton of us agency owners got together and we focus on growth specifically related to our industry. Because what works in a lot of other industries doesn't necessarily work for B2B. And it varies even in B2B if you're doing enterprise versus SMB or mid-market. And we thought it'd be really good to share all of our learnings and then other people sharing their learnings as well to break down how you can grow in a bad economy, good economy. Because you and I have seen a lot of agencies. For example, I just met up with one of our mutual friends, Nick, who has an agency in Orange County. Even in a bad economy, he's growing. It's like, good for him.

Yep.

And I remember when I first met him at your Austin event. Did you meet him? Yeah, I met him in Austin event. And you know, I had a long conversation with him. He was much smaller, and I'm like, the dude in a terrible economy has been growing. I'm like, good for you.

Yep. Yeah, I think there's a lot of learnings at the end of the day, and agency owners they need community. And we're we're in different groups. There's also like different people we hang out with. But do you sometimes it makes sense to have a mastermind for something that's very specific? And that's what we wanted to put it together.

But how how do people go to it?

Yeah, they just go to marketing school dot io slash agency. We're still trying to get dot com marketing school dot io slash agency, and. And then they can go there and apply. And then there's— just go there and apply and you'll learn more.

So on a side note, going back to the agency topic.

Yes.

In the last 3, 4 years, COVID has changed a lot. But if you look at it, it's somewhat normalized because we saw— everyone saw a big spike during COVID and then their growth slowed down. What's your top 3 things that you've done to try to grow Single Grain in a bad economy? Let's see, in a bad economy, or just what did you do in the last few years to grow? What do you think had the biggest impact?

I think long-term, the biggest impact is still probably doing acquisitions. That's one, that's one thing.

Okay.

But that's inorganic growth. You're talking about organic growth.

No, it could be both because you did how many acquisitions? 2?

We did 2. Yeah.

Yeah?

Yeah. I would say what's worked out well for us is also just figuring out how can you super serve, right? In an economy where people are looking for more and more. And so, there's a lot more pressure especially on like SaaS companies, right? There was a SaaS recession for the last couple of years. How do you deliver more where it's like, hey, in a down environment, you had their back, they're going to remember you for that, right? And that's how the contracts end up growing more long term. So those are 2 things that come to mind immediately. I have some more, but you should go.

So if I had to pick the top 3 things that's really helped us grow over the last few years, one would be hiring really amazing people who come from the industry. Companies want to keep working with amazing talent. So if you can keep recruiting them in a good economy or a bad economy, Clients follow over time. I'm not saying they're poaching clients. I'm just saying naturally, people are like, oh yeah, I worked with you 3 years ago. I'm at a different company now. I want to work with you again.

Where are you?

Oh, I'm at NP Digital. Oh, cool. Well, let's talk and let's see if we can work together because you did amazing work for us in the past. So that's been one huge one. Another big thing that's helped us that I've learned through private equity Is churn in our industry goes down drastically if you can sell more service line items per customer. And when private equity shared this data in the past with me, you know, we really change how we compensate our salespeople. Yes, commissions still, but we try to get them to sell multiple service lines to a client. And we don't just say, hey, push whatever you can. A salesperson actually can't just go and convince someone that, hey, you need to buy all this stuff. We do analysis on the business and we figure out what they need. And then based on that, we pitch those service items. But what a lot of salespeople would try to do is they would say, oh, you have X budget, let me just sell you on this one thing. We'll look at a holistic strategy and what's going to give the client the best ROI. But when they start paying for 3 or 4 service line items, we found that churn goes down drastically.

Yeah.

So that's been another big one. And the third one for us is acquisitions, which I know is inorganic growth. But if you talk to Nick, he'll tell you how to do it on, for, you know, pennies on the dollar. And you also know how to do it for pennies on the dollar as well. Acquisitions don't have to be expensive. There's things like seller-based financing and stuff like that. When you look at acquisitions is if someone has one business unit, and I'll make— I'll give you a prime example of this. We acquired a company called Rebel House. Rebel House is a creative shop that does things like TV commercials. They have like TV commercials with Snoop Dogg and Jennifer Lopez, and the list goes on and on. If they're selling these big brands that they work with, like Marriott or some big pharmaceutical companies, you can end up, or even car companies, you can take those brands like, hey, you keep coming back paying us for creative, let's run the ad dollars for that. Oh cool. Get them good results. Well, now let us run your SEO. Let us run your organic social. So when you buy these companies, You're not just looking at their revenue, you're looking at how many of their customers can you sell on your service and how many of your customers can you sell on their service.

That's a good clip. But also Rebel House, is that United States or international?

They do English speaking.

Got it. But, and I would say you've also grown a lot through international expansion as well. Correct.

Rebel House was Canadian, but they do work for both Canadian and US. We'll expand it now to more English speaking, then we'll work on Doing it in different languages.

I think another important thing too to keep in mind is that if you're looking to grow, at least correct me if I'm wrong here, but Nick, your primary— or sorry, your primary salespeople are practitioners for the most part, correct?

Yeah, our salespeople aren't really salespeople. They're all SEOs or paid advertising people or account managers.

And why is that important?

Because then they sell based on what's going to be helpful to a client versus just selling to earn a commission.

And plus, like, it's when you go to a doctor, like, they have to know what they're talking about, right? If it seems like they're just trying to sell you something, like, oh, you go into a doctor's office, like, oh, you should buy this candy over here. It's like they're not trying to figure out or understand your problems. They're not trying to diagnose you. But when it feels like they're talking to a practitioner, the trust goes up way higher. You can sell a lot more and the conversion rates go up a lot higher too.

Yep.

Yep. And you— are you doing the— your people are doing the proposal for free, right? For people. And I know some people charge for proposals too.

No, I didn't know that people charge for proposals. Yeah, we do analysis on the business proposal. Proposals, all that kind of stuff, break down what you should do to grow. And you can either sign it or not. At the end of the day, you'll walk away with something that'll help you grow.

It's the cost of doing business.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't think you should ever charge people for giving them advice or like a proposal, right?

It just sounds insane. Some do. Some do. Some people take the waitlist approach and say, hey, we're going to charge you for the proposal. We can move you up or not. And then like it actually works for them.

And you know what? They're small agencies.

Yeah. Well, true. True.

They don't make that much money. They take your boutique approach.

Yeah.

You're not making that much money. You're better off taking the normal approach and scaling up and trying to become a Yep.

The other thing I'll add here, this will be the final thing, is what I mentioned with the takeaways from the, the founders retreat that I just did. Right. And so both for you and me, you guys, you guys actually do this well. We don't do this well, but fulfilling the middle 60% of leads that come through. So again, everyone, if 100 leads come through, 20 people are probably ready to buy immediately. 20 will never buy. The middle 60%, that's where a lot of the money is. And John Maxwell likes to share that his quote is, The fortune is in the follow-up.

Yeah.

And a lot of agencies suck at follow-up. And we're still working on getting better at that. I think you guys, just to reiterate again, how do you guys follow up? I think you guys are doing like 6 phone calls in like 4 weeks and a bunch of other stuff.

It's more than that. But we do emails, text messages, phone calls. We try to see people in person that have become old leads. Dude, in Malaysia right now, we're talking to a lead that we got 2 and a half years ago, 2 years ago, somewhere around there, and following up, we're not doing a pitch. Like, we keep following up, even if a lead is a year old.

Yeah.

And we do it in a— we try to do it in a non-annoying way. And the key is you add value if you have reasons to follow up and you can help them. So instead of just saying like, hey, you ready to talk for you to pay us? That doesn't work. But if you're like, hey, we're, you know, I know you reached out to us a while ago and you're busy, or even if you never got ahold of them, you're like, I was browsing your site. There's 6 things that I just noticed. There's a lot more that you could do to fix, but here's 3 of them. And if you do this, you know, you should get ROI. Here's some case studies where we implemented this and look at the results. If you want to discuss the other 3, let me know when you're free and let's get on the phone. So you're not giving them everything, but you're giving them value. And they're like, oh cool, I got a lot of value from this. There's no reason why I shouldn't do another call. I shouldn't do a call with them.

This goes back to like, you have to full-ass your content, right? It's the same thing again. The quality of your content's got to be good. You can't just say, Just following up, just following up, just following up. That's lazy. That just shows that like you don't want to put the effort to get the results that you want.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. So that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe. Also, you can go apply, marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. Goodbye.