MBA2109 Why Should Invest in Your SEO Now

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Hey, welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show where smart business builders come to learn just like you every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn why you should invest in SEO. Right now, search engine optimization is more critical than ever for you to invest in because of the increase of paid advertising costs. A report published in the second half of 2021 reported that the CPM cost for Google and YouTube went up 108% just in one year. Facebook ad costs have gone up 89%, TikTok CPM went up 92% and Snapchat 64%. This data is published by Business Insider and Media Post. And it's to impress upon you how it's getting really expensive to drive traffic to your website via paid ads. Most of us are not growing at the same rate of these increases and it's like a hamster wheel that you just can't get out of. The more you spend, the more you're going to have to spend to drive traffic. So what am I saying? All paid ads are garbage. No, what I'm saying is you need an alternative traffic stream, one that's reliable, one that will get you traffic based on the needs of your actual ideal customer. And that's where search engine optimization comes in. If you haven't invested in building your SEO on your website, on your articles, to get organic traffic to your site already, you need to do it now. Or if you haven't done it in a while, this is the time to do it. I'm going to show you how to invest in your SEO. What are the ideal ways to get traffic to your site without having to compete with ads on Google, as well as why it's so important to take action like today so that you can get some results as soon as possible. So let's get into it. Because this is such an important topic, let's get down to business.

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Over half of all the sales we make on our software webinar Ninja come from search engine optimization. This is why I'm so bullish on SEO. But SEO is something you need to work on and continue to work on and to monitor because Google algorithms change, new rules come across, and you need to make sure that you're doing the right thing constantly. This is going to require some help, and I'm going to show you how to get some help if you're not an SEO expert. But first of all, we got to talk about the elephant in the room. Why do you need SEO? Well, without traffic, you have no business. If you don't have people coming to your website and checking out what you do, then you're just not getting enough people, enough chances for you to make a sale. If you've ever had a surge of traffic because you got mentioned in an article or somebody recommended you on social, you can really testify how much traffic can make a difference. Now, what I want to do for you or I want to encourage you to do for yourself is to get that done constantly, to have this traffic coming in, helping you make more sales organically. Now, the thing I love about SEO is that it's not any kind of traffic. It's the right kind of traffic. Why? Because when somebody comes to your site because they search for Something. This is somebody who's interested in what you have to offer, interested in what you have on your site, information or your product or what you're all about. This is somebody who's hungry, okay? They are requesting this information. Compare that to somebody seeing an ad on Facebook or on Twitter or on a YouTube video. They didn't necessarily ask to see that ad, right? No, in fact, they didn't ask to see the ad. You're just hoping that they're going to be interested, that they're the right profile. But when somebody types something on Google or in a search engine, they're actually asking for results about that ad keyword or that phrase. This is what's called pull marketing versus push marketing. Push marketing is always harder to convert because you're just trying to push your message over and over. And it's good for awareness and getting your brand out there, but it's not great for conversions or building trust. This is where pull marketing comes in and this is where SEO comes in. Now the mistake a lot of people do when it comes to SEO is that they try to optimize for the actual product they're selling. Like they try to optimize their site and their pages for making a sale. Like let's say I sell iPhone cases, right? Cases for your iPhone. Most people will say, hey, I want to optimize. So I can Rank on page one or page two for best iPhone cases. The problem is, is that that's a very high searched keyword and it's super competitive. And you're probably gonna see half of page one is all ads. It's gonna be taken up by ads that people are paying for on Google Ads to get in front of people. The second half of page one is probably gonna be other large, have some sort of list. They're saying like the top 10 iPhone cases you can buy. These are often affiliates. So your site that sells one kind of iPhone case or your one brand, obviously, because you want to compete with other brands, is going to have a hard time ranking for that. So instead of trying to rank for your actual product, you got to do something a little bit less obvious, right? Something that's a little bit backdoor. And what that is is content. Content really does well on SEO because it's not as competitive when it comes to ads. Any kind of how to article like how to take care of your leather iPhone case or how to install a iPhone screen protector. These posts can be topics that you write about on your website. You can optimize the SEO for it and make sure that you rank. Now. Back when I got started in blogging over two decades ago, it was just so simple. You could just write a great article on a topic, match the keyword with the title of your blog post, make sure you have great content in that it fulfills the need of the reader and you're good to go. Usually you ranked pretty high, even page one. Now, there's a whole lot more to it. There's metadata, there's optimization of headlines, there's what go in, you know, an H1 tag versus H2 tags. And if I'm talking and it's going over your head, don't worry, I understand you're going to need some help and you can get some help for some pretty good prices. And I'll talk about that in a moment. But what I want to drill in today's episode is the importance of this. You got to do this now because search engine optimization takes a while to kind of see its results, to get indexed, to actually get Google to understand you've got some value that you want to share with the world and should be shared. So you need to take out some time this week even to start optimizing all your blog posts and all your pages on your site. We talked about if you're on WordPress to use the Yoast plugin, this is kind of the beginner way to do this. And you could start with that and I'd definitely go premium because it's definitely worth it because it's going to help you along the way. They also have an academy to help you navigate your way around how to do good optimization on your pages. But you could hire out for this and for a few hundred dollars on Upwork or Even fiverr or freelancer.com you can get somebody to do some on page auditing and improve your SEO. They can help you come up with the best keywords to rank for, have some goals for what to rank for, and then from there do all the SEO work on your pages, on the page itself, metad, all that kind of stuff to optimize those pages to rank. Well, I find that you can kind of get this done starting around $500 to up to $2,000. It's an investment. Okay, you're going to put, let's say $1,000 into this and depending on how much you charge your customers, you're probably going to make it back pretty quickly through organic sales. It's a one time fee that you're going to do to kind of make sure that your pages are Optimized. The second thing that I would want you to invest in is to get this person that's working on your sign your SEO to give game plan to give you basically a to do list on every time you publish a new post, how to optimize it so that every time you create a post you can do all the work and make sure that you don't have to do this over and over every few months. Now, depending on how much your price point is, let's say you sell a coaching package that's $10,000 a year or you sell a software that's $500 a year. There's all these different price ranges and the more money you charge, the more research that your customer is going to do, the more googling they're going to do, the comparison they're going to do with other competitors, the more your SEO matters because you need to show up over and over and over in the research. Now even if you sell a product that's $10, your SEO still matters and can get you some organic free traffic and sales. But I'm telling you, if you have a high priced product, this is a non negotiable, you got to do this right now. So if the total lifetime value of your customer is more than I would say $300, then this is definitely something you need to do immediately. Because $300 is known as the price where people start doing research or they start not just making a whim purchase or just give it a shot. This is why you will notice that a lot of SaaS, companies, a lot of software or subscription services, their monthly plan is $29. The yearly plan would be $290. Why? Because it's under $300 and it's one of those purchases you could just make without thinking about it too much. Now one of the things SEO helps your business with other than just organic traffic and sales on autopilot, it increases the itself. So if one day you decide to hang them up and retire and sell your business, your SEO traffic is a huge asset because people are going to be buying that. They're getting people to come to your site even if they don't sell your product anymore, if they divert that traffic or they use that traffic to promote their own products, the buyer is going to want that traffic because that's hard traffic to earn, right? Hard traffic to build over the years where you're ranking so well on different search engines. So it's a huge value add to your actual business value. Now the title of today's Lesson is why you should invest in SEO now. Well, the price of traffic is getting more and more expensive. Even from those statistics I talked about earlier in the episode, you might have noticed that you're seeing a lot more ads on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter. And social media networks like Facebook have admitted that they're actually showing more ads, they're actually serving more ads. Up to 20% more ads in the last six months. This means that it's going to be hyper competitive for you to stand out amongst all these ads. And what happens when there's too many ads? If you're old enough like me, if you're watching a movie on TV and you saw a bunch of ads every 15 minutes when they took a break, it just seems like so many ads. So you just tune them all out, you walk away, you move on. So the more ads there are, the less impactful they are. So therefore your money is being wasted at a higher rate. So what I'm trying to drive home here is that if you're not going to get traffic through SEO, how else will you get people there yet? You can have referral marketing and affiliate marketing, but that relies on other people to be motivated other than your site. Your content being the driver. Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter? Right.

And the best part, they accept Discover.

Except Discover in a little place like this? I don't think so, Jennifer.

Oh, yeah, huh? Discover's accepted where I like to shop. Come on, baby, get with the times.

Right? So we shouldn't get the parachute pants.

These are making a comeback, I think.

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. So here is your action plan. You have a website, you got blog posts, you got pages on this website. All these pages need to be optimized. You need to make sure that these pages are seen and heard by search engines and that they're being ranked favorably. This means you're going to have to optimize the content itself, the metadata, maybe even make those pages faster, minimize the sizes of the images on pages, optimize for a keyword and know where those keywords should fit in your headlines. A whole lot of stuff. You can learn this yourself or you can just hire somebody to do it for you and maybe revisit it every six months to a year. Personally, I like to go down the freelance route. I go to Upwork. There's a few people I work with. I basically just find the highest ranking person that has done a lot of gigs on upwork on specifically what I'm trying to do optimize my pages for SEO. If you could find somebody in your niche or in your market, like for me it would be software and if they've had experience in that niche, they would love to work on your project and they'd really be able to pull off some really good results because they have experience. Tell them your site, tell them how pages you have, any blog posts you have, what your trying to kind of rank for or who your competitors are and tell them your budget. Even if your budget is something modest like $500, you can get started. They can say, hey, I could work on your most latest blog post. I can work on your oldest blog post. This is what I could do for you. Don't go for the cheapest person. Go for the person that has the most experience, the best ratings. They're going to get you better results. Even if they don't get the whole job done. You can piecemeal it, get some results, get some traffic, get some sales and do it again a couple months down the road. Try to go back to the same person. They have experience with your site and know exactly how to get in, get out and do the work. They're going to have to give them access to your site, so it probably requires you giving them some sort of level of access, whether it's being a contributor or writer. They don't necessarily need admin access and once their work is done you can remove their access for security reasons. I found that I get way more traffic, way more sales for way longer with the money I spend on SEO by hiring somebody than through ads. 5, $500 gets spent like nothing running ads and sometimes you don't even get any conversions because it takes a while for the ad to kind of learn and optimize. Spending 500 or $1,000 on somebody to optimize your site for SEO is going to be a long term investment you won't regret. And the thing is that it's going to be even more valuable every day because it's getting more expensive to drive traffic with ads. That wraps up today's lesson. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 on VA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app we every single app. If you want to return the favor. If you love the show and you want to kind of give thanks, share the show on social media, Let people know about the $100 NBA show, just go to 1-000NBA net. That's where they can subscribe. Just pop the link 100 NBA net it's so simple. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There are millions upon millions of websites out there. You have lots of competitors. You have lots of people that are in your space. Somebody who is looking for what you offer is not very sophisticated as a searcher or learner, so they might think you have more competitors than you actually do. Winning the SEO games makes you stand out, gets you in front of them, keeps you from being ignored. This is why it's so important to invest now. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday where I answer the question am I paying myself enough? A fellow business owner asking the question if they're paying themselves enough money as a salary, we get into that in tomorrow's lesson. So I'll see you then. Take care.

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