Jeff For Local Marketing advises business owners to check website analytics before spending on a new site. He recounts a client meeting where many small-business sites get little traffic (he cites an average of about 300 views/month), so a costly redesign often isn't justified without a content strategy. He emphasizes creating fresh, helpful content (weekly blog posts and videos plus social posts that drive back to the site) so Google treats the site as an active authority. He uses a freeway/billboard analogy to show the value of owning the traffic on your site and notes that in one example ~92% of a client's traffic was organic. He contrasts this with high ad spending (about $20k–$24k/year) and describes how content marketing grew a client's monthly visitors from ~330 upward.
Questions this video answers
About 300 views per month.
About 92% organic.
About $20,000–$24,000 per year.
About 330 visitors per month.
Chapters
Have you ever thought, hey, I need a new website, or maybe someone has told you, hey, you need a new website because it may be outdated. Well, I had a situation this morning where I met with a potential client and we talked about this and there were a couple things that I want to point out. And it's 100% only beneficial. It's not to say anything negative about this client. I think it's more of a common misperception. I'll give you an example. The website.
Which is I guess, built and hosted by another company. First of all, it surprised me how much they were paying for this. And so we were able to do something much better and for a lot less expensive, but give them a lot better results. But here's the thing that I asked the customer and I want you to ask yourself, hey, do you know how much traffic you're actually getting to your website?
And she said, well, I don't really know that she said they sometimes, these people will sometimes send a report, but you know, this is not, she's busy doing what she's doing. So why is that important? Well, I don't think any of us want to waste our time or money on areas that are not producing revenue for our business. I mean, sometimes, hey, we have to take care of payroll and we have to take care of HR and you know, order things, things like that that may not be directly generating revenue. But sometimes if we were to jump in and say, let's put a brand new website up there, which can be pricey, you know, some people are spending 2 to 10 or $20,000 for website and yet if they looked at their analytics, hey, how much traffic is actually coming to my website? It really doesn't justify it. You know, I looked this up several years ago and it hasn't changed much. The average local business website gets about 300 views a month. Now, have to ask you, if you had a storefront and you had 300 people a month walk through your door, is that enough for you to be successful? Well, the answer is it depends. But what I want you to think about is this. Why isn't that website getting traffic? Well, we dug in a little further and again, this is not uncommon because it's something that, you know, I've been teaching and harping on for 14 years is how important content is. And yes, we were talking about some things we were going to change on the website and put some fresh pictures and you know, update the theme and things like that, which all are great. But I asked her, I said, hey, I Said, have you ever driven down the freeway and seen a billboard? She says, well, yes, of course. And I said, what if you had that same situation on your website and you owned the, the freeway and the traffic and then when people came there you could actually put an offer in front of them. That's absolutely perfect. See the difference is, well, first of all, she said, yes, but here's the difference. If you're driving down the freeway, are there billboards only, well, not as of today that are only geared towards your likes and interest? Of course not. I mean you can, you can see anything from pest control to solar to, you name it, it's up there. Right, but what if, what if the traffic that came to your website was like the freeway except you owned it and then when somebody came to that freeway.
It only had information that was beneficial to them. Now let me give you a more specific example. Let's imagine, let's keep it with my company. It's digital marketing. So I put up there something about how do I get more customers and to click onto my website. And that's an article that I've created, that's a video I've created. And what this does is designed to help those people out there searching online to say, hey, I'm not getting much traffic on website. How can I get more traffic on my website? And Google is one big matchmaker. It says, here's somebody who needs a problem solved and here's sorry about that. And here's a company that has an article or a video that'll do that. Let's put them together. Now they come to my website. It's no longer on this public domain of Google. It's on my private freeway. And on that, on that article on my website, we'll call it a blog.
It has information that will benefit them just like this video. It'll have information that will benefit them, to help them understand, oh, this is how I do this. I have to write articles. I have to create videos that help my ideal customer solve problems they need answered along their journey of making a decision to buy my service or my product. And so now when they come to my article, is my article salesy? Absolutely not. My article is one thing, it's helpful. It's helping them get really good ideas that we have proven over 14 years or longer than that really work. Now here's the difference. But what I'll have is possibly on the side. I'll have a banner, I'll have a pop up, I'll have a call to action near the bottom or in different places on the article that are doing what. Now I'm offering my service or my product. Again, freeway, blog post, banner, billboard. Except I control that. And now I can customize that. Because if somebody's coming to, coming to my website and they're looking how to get more traffic to the website and they have an article on there, I know I don't need to show them how they can get 20% off of Zappos tennis shoes. It makes no difference. There's a total disconnect. So going back to this customer, I said, hey, the first thing we want to do is, as I looked at their video or their website, is they don't have a blog. And most companies don't. A lot of small businesses don't. Because what does a blog take? It takes time and creativity to create it and to maintain it. You see, Google loves fresh, unique and relevant content. And so when we put it out consistently, then what will happen is Google sees this as an active authority in the marketplace on that topic. But a website that just says, hey, I'm building a website. It has all my stuff on there, all my great things about how great I am and the product and service I have, eventually, not eventually, in a very short period of time, Google will say, you're not adding anything new to your website. And it's more of like just a static brochure. It's not changing. It becomes irrelevant. Because things are changing so fast. A blogger lets you update that. Now, here's the other thing. Blogs are full of what words? What are those words? They are the ideal keywords that are associated with that particular blog, that particular business. In other words, if somebody's asking about digital marketing for online and small business and local businesses, do you think I'm going to have some of those words in there? Of course I am. In natural language, I'm not stuffing words in there. I, I'm just giving them some information that is beneficial to them. But all those words, Google sees and says, oh, we're just matching them up. You know, it's like matching the signs. You do this, this and this. This is what's going on. We're going to give you this. Well, that's what a blog is. So my, my suggestion was, hey, let's redo the website. But I should say, and let's make sure you put a content marketing strategy behind that of creating a video once a week, writing a blog once a week, putting out some social media posts that drive everybody where not to the next to it, not to another Social media post, but back to your website. That's where you control the traffic. And then with Google Analytics, which takes us full circle now with Google Analytics, I can see is this effective and also I can see exactly what page this traffic is going to. Now in this situation, I opened up my, my, my analytics app and I was showing her one of my clients and showing them how this works. And the beautiful thing about this, and I hadn't planned this, but I just opened it up. And because we're organic content marketers, in other words, you're not, we're not trying to get you to pay for. Pay for ads. About 92% of all their traffic that I showed the example of was organic. Very little was what we called direct. In other words, hey, I knew the name, people knew the name of my business and they just said, I'm going to Google. Swingpoint Media.com takes me right to their. The right to my website. No, no, I was looking for digital marketing or how to get more customers for my service. This is called organic. And in other words, I, the business owner, you, the business owner did not have to pay for that traffic. The more you can do this, the more traffic you get. Now, I'm going to give you one example, and then I'm out of here. We started with a company about five years ago that was 100% based on advertising. And I'll be honest with you, it was getting very, very expensive. They were spending like 20,000, $24,000 a year for a video that they had created, plus all the advertising dollars they were spending. It was, it was crazy. We came in and said, hey, let's try something different. Let's just do a content marketing strategy. And again, by this time, we've been doing it almost a decade. So it wasn't this, it wasn't this test. It wasn't a trial and error. We knew what we were doing. Well, it turned out when we first analyzed their traffic, they had about 300, I think it was 330 people a month coming to their website, not very much. And they'd been in business about eight years at that point. Well, in a pretty short period of time, we started seeing that number grow.
As of last year, I think it was around April of last year, I sent them a report that their number was now 10,000, 10,000amonth. Their business had grown exponentially. And here's the coolest part, we could drill down and say, oh, there's this one article that almost from day one, because it was like the first article we wrote is getting 1700 views a month. Where do you think we're putting that billboard? That's right. We're putting it on that particular article. And do you think we're changing that billboard every now and then? Absolutely. Do you think we're putting some, if we decided to do some target advertising, we're putting a pixel on that page so we can then retarget those people. Absolutely. So before you rush out and say, hey, I'm going to spend it doesn't matter a dollar or 10,000 or $50,000 on a new website, I want you to ask yourself, are you going to nurture it with content? Are you going to write content that is searched for by your ideal customer? I want you to think about that today. My name is Jeff Harrison. Thanks for letting me share this behind the scenes moment while it was fresh on my mind. And you have a great day. If you have any questions, I recommend you put them in the comments. Let me answer them. And let's make sure you get some traffic on your freeway so you can start putting up billboards you own. Have a great day.
