Closing More Leads, Losing Google Traffic, and Calling Out SEO’s Biggest Lie | Ep. 3021

We're starting to see some signs of agency businesses pick up. And I'll read this from a text I got from someone on my team. So this is just some stats and data. This is for our SMB division where the sales cycles are smaller. So weeks 7/08 and 7/15. So this is weeks of July 8th and July 15th. Close rates inside 2 weeks, Rates rose by 40% versus 23% in late June. So we're continually seeing the close rates from a lead coming in to them willing to sign to continually increase. June increased at 23%, July increased another 40%.

On top of the base number from the previous?

Not from June, but from the base number on whatever it was before June. But June picked up over the previous months and then July Picked up again over June. They didn't share data from the last 2 weeks of July. Maybe they don't have it yet. Indicates acceleration began before August bookings, suggesting pipeline quality lifted mid-July. Oh, week 722. I didn't actually read all the text. Oh, there's more here. Week 722, 100% of the wins came in less than 2 weeks. Week 7, 29, same 100% of the wins came in less than 2 weeks.

Hmm.

So things are picking up here. So fastest turnaround all year, even in small, small numbers. That's what I'm— they're using like tech language, like small n, capital N. I'm assuming that's numbers.

Yeah.

It's a clear step change versus early June.

That's interesting because August is usually— July, August are usually slower and it's picking up.

There are slow months.

The summer months are slowest for enterprise, which is interesting for us because it's been— it's been— I would say it's been better than average. And then it does feel like it's picking up even though it's August right now, because right now we're still— even though our main sales head is out on vacation, we still close. I think we closed like 1 or 2 this week.

How'd that work? You took a sales head from a competitor. We won't name the competitor, but how'd that work out?

Really good.

So they understand sales better. It's working. Yeah. The pitch is tighter.

Pitch is tighter and things are moving along. And then it's always in my mind, it's always been like, you know, we get this, these leads, this gold, right? And it's like, but how come we're not closing more? And so I would say that it's been, it's been good. And now I'm like, okay, how do we get more?

So the sales rep that you took from a competitor, I know this for a fact. They get a lot of their leads from, I believe it's Clutch. Clutch is the site that ranks agencies. I'm pretty sure it's Clutch.

I think it's, their SEO is really good.

I'm telling you, they get a lot of leads from Clutch as well.

Yeah.

Uh, the last time we talked to a Clutch sales rep, they claimed that they were the largest spender on Clutch.

Wow. That company.

That company.

Wow. I didn't know that.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. Clutch is expensive. Clutch is great. It's expensive though. Yeah. Um, I, I like the whole, you know, get emails and webinars.

Yeah, I look at it just you do everything and somehow they end up coming in.

Yeah. Do you, you don't pay for Clutch, do you?

I don't know if we pay for Clutch, but I'm going to guess with no, because they require too long of a contract and we weren't willing to run it that long. We spend a decent amount on Meta. Meta does well for us.

For collecting emails or webinars?

No, for getting customers.

Oh, really? Straight up? Yeah, you do run ads. That's right. I ran that little cursor thing and it was just straight up retargeting or straight up cold.

Yeah, we do cold and we do remarketing, but we spend majority of the money on cold.

That's funny that that actually works. But I—

We don't spend a lot though.

Yeah.

It depends what you consider a lot. We only spend, if I had to guess, I think we're spending around 50 grand a month.

For your size, it's like, it's not a lot, it's not a little, so.

Well, we only spend the money for our SMB division, so it's not a ton of money. It's—

But your SMB is other people's enterprise.

No, not really. Okay.

What are the minimums per month? All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

Uh, I don't know what the minimums are.

Would you— okay. So is it okay for me to say? Yeah.

You would know more than me.

So you told me before it was around $15 a month, right? Which is for smaller agencies, that's like a lot because smaller agencies don't charge a lot.

No, that's not, that's not our enterprise. I'm saying we don't do the—

I'm talking about for your SMB division, you're charging $15 a month.

No.

That's what you told me before.

No, I said we skipped the $15s. When you asked me a comparison because you're comparing for Single Grain, I'm saying we don't have that. You consider that—

Oh, you don't, you don't have—

We don't have that. We have some clients. Now you're talking about average, right? We have some clients—

Average for NPXL.

It has to be way lower.

Really?

If I had a guess, yeah, my guess is going to be around like $5,000.

So I misunderstood then.

But what I'm getting at with SMB is we don't have that middle tier. So we have NPD, that's enterprise. We're like, we'll work with like the DHLs of the world. And then we have the SMB divisions that'll work with smaller budgets. And what I'm getting at is We're helping mom and pops for like $5,000 a month. All right. I'm averaging it out. My numbers could be off, but I know it can't be that far off.

Yeah.

And we do have customers at our SMB division that are paying $15,000, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a month, but that's not the majority. If you look at the average, it has to be closer than $5,000. When I say I'm guessing, I know I'm probably within a 90th percentile of my estimate because I've seen the numbers because we get monthly updates. Right. I just, Don't know every single month, but it's pretty steady because we've had our SMB division for a while. Our enterprise though, we have a lot of accounts paying us millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. So there's a big gap in between. So when you were talking about your agency or Power Digital, yeah, or a lot of the other agencies that focus on that middle market or like Mute6, there's another Mute6 alternative that I forgot the name. They're based somewhere in SoCal. They do like D2C. I think they sold to private equity maybe.

Common Thread?

Common Thread is another one.

Yeah.

They have what I would consider more of that middle market where they're selling their ideal customers paying like $15,000, $20,000 a month. We don't have a ton of those. We have lower end. We do have some middle, but if you look at our percentage of revenue, at least in the United States, international, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head and it, you can't look at it that way because of the currency exchange.

Yeah.

So their version of like, we have clients in LATAM that are paying us $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a month. But that is enterprise in Latin America for like in Mexico because of currency exchange, right? So, but yeah, we don't have that middle market like you or Power Digital has.

Yes, that makes sense. I misunderstood it previously. By the way, I want to go back to something. Talk about getting, getting lucky, right? So I remember I told you I was doing— I started doing these AI dinners a couple of weeks ago. And so that AI dinner has now led to an AI lunch that I'm going to. And that AI lunch has actually— there's a couple of— there's like 2 or 3 billionaires there, right? And then you have a bunch of— and it's like sponsored by a sovereign fund, that lunch, right? And there's like 10 10, 15 people there or whatever. But my point of saying this is if some of you are asking, well, how do you actually get luckier? This is one of those ways you host these things. You don't know what's going to happen. My only— I was thinking about it this morning. I was like, I have no expectations when I host these. I was like, yes, I do. I absolutely have an expectation. My expectation is that I end up creating more luck and that good things will happen in the long term. And that just happened every single time, right? So I think what you're hosting lunches or dinners, that's how you create more luck and that's how you become wealthier in the long term. Because— and even this, like, it's not like I want customers or whatever, but— Even like I got that invite yesterday and then actually the person hosting is like, oh, by the way, you should talk to this person over here, did an intro. It's like, oh, they actually need marketing help, right? You just, by the way, I had no intention. Hey guys, come buy my shit. Nope, didn't do any of that.

So yeah. Yeah. No, it's a lot of people just don't put themselves out there so they feel that they're not lucky. It's that they're just not trying. Yeah.

You're actually an extroverted person. Remember the personality test? I'm actually very introverted, right?

I'm introverted.

No, on the personality test it said you're extroverted.

Or let me rephrase, forget personality. I don't do much stuff that's extroverted where I actually talk to other people or go out.

But when you go somewhere, you're very extroverted. You bring a lot of energy.

Yes, but my problem is I don't go anywhere.

Yeah, well, like, okay, so for example, when we go to lunch or Novocoff, you talk to the waiter like you're very engaging, right? Yeah. Whereas like if I'm hosting something, yes, I'm— it's very high. People think I'm extroverted. But compared to you, when we go out and eat, when we order or whatever, like I don't try to talk.

So Yeah, but a lot of my conversations are really awkward and my wife tells me you can't ask people these kind of questions. It's like they think I'm trying to rob them or something like that. I'm like, I'm just trying to find out how much you've got. No, it's just more so, it's just like, I'm not trying to be rude, but it's just like, how many people come here through lunch? Which days are busier? How many people for dinner? What do most people order? Because I just wanted to understand how much—

Wait, why can't you ask those questions?

Because they're rude.

Well, how are those rude?

I don't know. That's what I was told. I like asking those questions.

I think those are fine.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. Anyway. All right.

Uh, we both have a similar topic in here. Google claims search traffic isn't declining. I don't know if you saw their press release or blog post. I saw that.

Yeah, you go, go.

Um, but Google just put out a vague statement that search is up, more people are using search, and, uh, they said they're not necessarily seeing people see a decline in search traffic. They're seeing some people also get gains. Um, They did not give specific numbers, and I bet you they did. They did it on purpose.

I think Google's VP of Search is lying about how Google is actually doing because they said, oh, total organic click volume from search to websites has been relatively stable year on year, and it's sending slightly more quality clicks than a year ago. I don't know about your traffic. I see the alligator, the open jaw. I'm just like, what? Like, definitely we're losing clicks.

I think we've more so lost clicks and it's stabilized, and I don't think we're losing a ton more right now. We've seen some customers get good wins. We've seen some customers of course get losses. We've seen the alligator as well. But we've seen a lot of companies make up the losses in traffic, not necessarily getting more traffic, but getting higher conversions from AI traffic. So we're not seeing AI drive anywhere nearly the volume of organic traditional Google search or Bing search, but we're seeing ChatGPT and Perplexity driving a very, very, you know, fraction of a percent in traffic, but the conversions are through the roof and that's making up some of the losses from organic search. And as you and I both know, a lot of the factors are pretty much the same. There's some nuances, but—

So look, I, I just think they have to protect what they need to protect. Like they always, they always never completely tell the truth for the most part, like more often than not, even when you had the search liaison, all these people, and it's okay, right?

Right?

You like, you take what they say with a grain of salt and you try to interpret it with your own data. So that's how I look at it.

We have a similar topic here. Ours is a little bit— titles are a little bit different, but go with it when you're talking about a female model. Actually, before you go into that, let's talk about Reddit losing traffic from Google and then we can get into the female model.

Where's that one?

Reddit is starting to lose Google traffic.

Did I have that one? Oh, there we go.

Yeah. Okay.

So this is from Glenn Gabe on X. And so Glenn, by the way, So he's an SEO consultant. And so he said that Reddit CEO said traffic from Google varies from week to week, but overall it was a headwind in Q2. Headwind meaning that it's kind of going against them, right? Tailwind is when you're getting carried by it. So regarding headwind, quote unquote, check out international visibility trending for Reddit. I'm seeing that across tools, not great for them. That can change and jump back up, but I'm seeing a drop across several countries outside the US. I wonder if these AI translations are causing problems now that Google has seen that in place over time. Maybe another reason they are pushing forward with becoming a search engine. Germany France and Italy are below. So you can see what's happening is you can see it going up and then it kind of just drops and it's slightly rising again. This one was, this is Reddit daily updates. I don't know what it is, but yeah, you can see it's, it's, it's not doing well. I think these are quality of the—

They were showcasing Reddit so much in their search results on page 1 and the quality of the results were not relevant for a lot of keywords, but they were just pushing it.

Yeah, they had to dial it back at some point. Like, it's like whenever Google gives in the past, if you're an SEO, you know that they're going to take it away at some point. That's just how it is.

Well, when they're giving that much, they were giving a lot. Yeah. The only one that I would say has been pretty steady over the years, they may have seen some ups and downs, is Wikipedia.

Yeah.

But Wikipedia does not monetize.

Yeah.

So I think it's a little bit of a different story with Wikipedia.

And it doesn't even matter that Reddit has a deal with Google or whatever. They're going to do what they need to do.

So yeah, well, they're paying them for the data. So then, you know, yep, they can do whatever they want.

Anyway, that's it for today, guys. Bye.