What Ranking #1 on Google REALLY Means (The Unseen Benefits of SEO)

What it really means to rank number 1 on Google. Eric and I have been doing SEO for a long time, so I wanted to share some things that I've experienced over the years from ranking number 1. Now, for some keywords, I rank on page 1, some not even on page 1, some at the top of page 1. And everyone knows that you're going to get traffic if you just rank on page 1 or at the top, but there's other benefits that no one really talks about.

So one, branding.

Over the years, a lot of the people that have met me or emailed me mentioned how they once saw me on Google and now they're becoming customers for my ad agency, NP Digital, years later.

Another big benefit is high ROI. Look, paid ads are great, but the moment you stop paying for them, your traffic declines. And yes, SEO, you're paying an agency or you're doing it in-house and you're hiring some people, but the ROI is much higher than paid ads. And after you stop doing things like SEO, yeah, your traffic may not be as high, it may go down, But you're still getting something from it. The other big one is every time I've looked at press, I don't know about you, Eric, but when I've got coverage from like CNBC or CNN or Forbes or BBC, most reporters almost every single time haven't found me through a PR agency, even though we've paid quite a few. It's been through reporters doing Google searches, finding me, and then they add us in the press articles. Have you experienced a similar thing? With press?

Similar, yes. I've seen that in the past.

Yeah. And then speaking gigs, ranking all over has allowed us to get tons of speaking gigs. I know Eric has experienced the same thing. For me, when I used to speak way more, I have kids now, so I've slowed it down. I used to generate at least $1 million a year in paid speaking gigs, and they would also pay for travel, like flights, first class, as well as hotels. And it was pretty much pure profit. Another one was competitive advantage. SEO is something that's easier for the little guy to leverage. It takes time, but it still works. And it's how Eric and I have competed with the bigger competitors. It's how we started to compete with people who are doing billions of dollars a year in profit when we didn't have all that, you know, all the resources that they had. And with my ad agency, NP Digital, we first grew through SEO. And we were ranked 3 years in a row by Adweek as one of the fastest growing large ad agencies. And we're competing against bigger holding companies that have $10 billion in revenue, but we were able to do a lot of this because of SEO. Look, there's a lot of reasons to do SEO, but those were some of the main ones that, you know, we ended up seeing from SEO and it's worked wonders for us.

Yeah, I'll add on there. So basically, the other thing that most people aren't considering when we talk to people at my ad agency, Single Grain, it's— they haven't considered the fact that when you're able to drive a lot of SEO traffic, that's more emails that you can collect, that's more retargeting that you can do. These are more lookalike audiences that you can make as well. And if you're layering on the identity layering piece where you're deanonymizing the IP addresses visiting your website, That's also more, if you get more traffic, that means you're going to collect more emails because if you can enrich 20% to 30% of your emails, that's more money in the bank for you because you're tying a value to each email as well. And so, it's a compounding effect. And the good thing about SEO is it's still a black box even in 2024. People are like, oh, I'm just going to keep doing paid because it's very black and white. You put in X, you get Y, which is great. But to Neil's point, you stop the faucet, that traffic's gone, right? The thing about SEO is once it's working, you can keep compounding on it. It's like building a business. It takes a little while to get going, but once you got it, it's like you have— it's almost like a power boost for your marketing. And that's why I like— and here's the other thing. We've talked about the AI-assisted content stuff, the programmatic SEO stuff. I think there's this nice honeymoon period for the next year or 2 where this stuff will really take off for people that are taking advantage of it. And then I think we're going to continue to see You know, SEO evolved, but SEO will never go away as long as search or people are searching for things.

Yeah.

By the way, on a random note, here's a quick question for you.

When your marketing isn't working out, what question do you ask yourself? There's one question that people should ask themselves, but when your marketing's not working out, what do you ask yourself?

What do I ask myself when my marketing isn't working?

I'll give you—

I mean, I try to bring it down to first principles. So—

Well, you typically look at your competition when your marketing's not working out. I already know this. You always look at competition and what are they doing?

That's part of it. Yes.

Yes.

And it's so funny because I was talking to some people over the other day and they were just like, man, my marketing's not working out. And I was telling 'em like, dude, you know, I don't know why marketers aren't asking themselves enough, what is my competition doing? Because when someone doesn't buy from your website, they're buying from someone else, assuming they actually need that product. When you lose your Google ranking, someone else, your competitor, took that spot from you.

You know what's interesting? That is a first principle thing because whatever your competitor's doing and that they're actively running these ads, that means it's working. So that is a first principle thing. It's like, what's actually working? Do that.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like, Oh, or Facebook ads aren't working for us. Well, Facebook's making more revenue this quarter than they did last quarter. So you know what? Your competition has figured out how to make Facebook ads work and you haven't figured it out anymore where your old tactics aren't working anymore. But yeah, it's just like the big thing that I think people mess up with in marketing is like, man, Google screwed me over.

I lost my rankings.

Well, someone else is taking those rankings. Someone else is taking those buyers. Someone else is taking that social traffic. You got to look at your competition and do competitive analysis. It's underrated in marketing. I don't know why, you know, there's not enough people that talk about it or focus on competitive analysis. There's just so many opportunities with it.

You know, when we do these proposal calls with prospects, right? Oftentimes, and I'm sure you guys do this at your agency as well, it's, hey, how do you stack up with your competitors from an organic traffic standpoint, the number of keywords you rank for, the number of top 10 keywords or your domain rating? And then on the paid side, how many ads are your competitors running versus how many are you running?

Yeah.

And like 90+% of the time, they're shocked by it. And it goes to reinforce what you're saying around most people just don't look at this stuff. And it goes all the way back. Elon Musk likes to talk about first principles. This is a first principles thing. It's like, okay, it's not working, but where is it working for other people? Why is it working? And how do you do better than that? And you can strip it down all the way to that. You don't need to overcomplicate it with saying, Hey, we need to try all the newest tactics and trends and strategies that Neil and Eric are talking about.

No, dude, you're spot on. And it's just funny. It's just like, I don't know why people aren't just going back to the basics and looking at stuff and then going from there and figuring out. But we do the same thing that you guys do at our agency, in which when we're doing pitches, we're looking at the competition, showing companies that we're pitching what their competition's doing, what they're doing right, you guys aren't doing. We'll even try to do traffic estimations, conversion estimations, potential revenue, and then break down, hey, back of the napkin math, here's what you're missing out on that your competitors are gobbling up. But on top of that, here's how much potential traffic and sales you can be getting from all these channels. And here's your true potential of, you know, what could happen if all the marketing went well and according to plan. For some companies, we'll do estimations and budgets. You know, aggressive, medium, conservative. And it gives you a lot of ideas, not just on potential, but what you need to change in your own marketing to make it better.

You know what's funny? You guys are probably doing this. So when you say like the base case, aggressive, and super aggressive case, it's like, okay, base case is like, you might double your traffic. You know, aggressive case is like maybe you'll triple it. And a super aggressive is maybe you'll 10x your traffic. But then we break down like, hey, like this is based on like capturing more share. And the math actually works out at the end of the day. So sometimes people just need you to break it out. And they're so in, like for example, if you're a business owner listening to this right now, you might just be so in your business right now that you need to disconnect. And sometimes it's helpful to have another set of eyes, whether you go talk to like a consultant or another friend that's good at marketing or go talk to an agency. That is something that will help you kind of take your eyes out of the weeds.

What's funny though is with the bigger RFPs, like the larger corporations, You know, you don't even have to do any of the traffic estimations or any of that. They already know their competition is doing better than them in certain areas. More so what they come to you is like, here's our problem, what is your solution and how much is it going to cost?

Yeah, it's very direct.

It's very direct. By the way, there's another 8 agencies and there's going to be 2 rounds and on the 3rd round we'll decide who we're going to end up choosing. And by the way, you know, Once you submit your proposal, we like you, but we have an issue with your price. And then they just try to beat you down.

Yep. Yep. That makes sense. That's, that's the game.

I have a question for you. Why do they put eggs and milk at the back of the grocery store?

I saw you tweet this. I didn't read the rest because the hook didn't get me. Okay.

Well, why, why do you think so?

Wait, why did they put eggs at the back of the grocery store?

Eggs and milk.

Yeah, couldn't tell you.

All right, so check this out. I thought this was fun marketing lesson for all you guys. All right, so it doesn't make sense because it's one of the worst locations. And most people don't know this, but at least 78% of the shoppers buy milk or eggs, and 48.2% buy bread. But if you look at any grocery store, typically the milk and the eggs aren't next to each other, or, you know, you have to walk a little bit.

And you need to buy more stuff.

And yeah, you got it right. And bread is not next to the milk. But here's some interesting stats, right?

So if they put them all next to each other, like the eggs, the milk, the bread at the front of the store, people will just buy what they need and then leave. The margins on some of these products also are not the highest. On the flip side, by them putting them throughout the store in random locations, People now have to walk by chips and cookies and all these other random food. A whopping 62% of supermarket sales are from impulse shopping, according to ScienceDirect.

That's why they end up doing it.

In essence, they're making you walk around. When they make you walk around and check out all these other products, they end up making more money.

But the key marketing lesson that people need to learn from supermarkets are, Yes, people may be coming to your store, your website, to buy something.

What else can you upsell them and convince them to buy while they're there? What else do you think will pique their interest? You got to add in the upsells and downsells. That is how you make marketing work in today's world. Ads keep going up in cost, margins are decreasing. The only way to make things work is to get your average order values to increase, your lifetime value of your customers to increase. In other words, you got to get people to spend more and come back more often. That's the way to win in marketing in the long run. So it's not just about buying traffic and optimizing for that conversion. It's about the whole lifecycle of the user and getting them to keep coming back and buying more each time they come back.

You know, it's— so you talk about the average order value. Like literally when you go to a grocery shop, it's the cart value, right? Which is the same thing at the end of the day.

Yeah.

Also, think about it. When you're leaving, when you're checking out like a Whole Foods or Erewhon or whatever you're checking, wherever you shop, right? There's a— that whole aisle is upsells. They're trying to get you with all these upsells, cross-sells, like the little chocolate bars, little candy for the kids and all that stuff.

Yes.

That increases the cart value because we're going into a world where things are just getting more expensive. Now, look, people are saying 2024 is going to be deflationary. That remains to be seen. But we're just talking about right now.

And do you know why they have the candy on the—

For the kids?

Yes, for the kids. Because a lot of people take their children with them to the grocery stores. And when you have kids like I do, oh, it is hard to tell them no. I tell them no because I don't want them to have all the sweets. Um, I typically tell my kids when we go into a grocery store, you're able to pick one thing and only one thing. And at the beginning, my kids would be like, I want bread.

I'm like, yeah, no problem.

And then they quickly learned, wait, you're gonna buy bread anyways. You know, as I grew older, let me pick something that tastes good.

Dude, you know what's practical? I mean, just go look at what Amazon does, right? When I buy on Amazon Fresh, it's like, oh, by the way, you forgot these things, or you usually get these things, or customers that bought this also bought this. And it's just like really easy to add. And still, I think in today's day and age, a lot of shops aren't doing that. And so how can you Amazonify your website to get more, a higher cart value?

Damn straight.

All right, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Check out this next video over here. And in the next episode, we're going to talk about the lessons that we learned this year. It's going to be a good one. And yeah, we'll see you in that episode. Bye.