The POMCAST
A digital marketing podcast focused on local lead generation strategies and insights. Your search for in depth discussions, tips and tactics has led you to the right place.
The POMCAST
Mastering Digital Marketing in 2025: Optimizing Budgets and Unlocking Organic Growth
Get ready to master your digital marketing budget with insights from Mike Shaug, founder and CEO of Premier Online Marketing. Learn how to reverse engineer your traffic needs from lead generation goals and why too much traffic is never a problem. From understanding your sales targets to dissecting competitors' spending through Google Ads' auction insights, Mike provides a treasure trove of strategies to ensure informed budgeting decisions that drive growth and stability in an ever-competitive landscape.
Explore the untapped potential of organic traffic as we uncover why it's often more rewarding than paid options. Frequent Google algorithm changes might be daunting, but staying updated is crucial to maintaining those high conversion rates and avoiding revenue fluctuations. With new players like Gemini and ChatGPT entering the arena, flexibility in your digital marketing strategy is no longer optional. Learn how to leverage SEO and content updates to maintain a steady stream of organic traffic, while also preparing for when paid media needs to take the spotlight.
The digital landscape is shifting, and so should your approach. Discover the importance of diversifying beyond Google, with platforms like Bing and Microsoft gaining prominence. Learn how to mitigate risks associated with website migrations during mergers and acquisitions, and understand why a first-mover advantage on emerging platforms could be your secret weapon. Mike also shares why video marketing should be on your radar and how businesses can utilize it effectively without competing for viral fame. This episode is your guide to staying ahead in the dynamic world of digital marketing.
Premier Online Marketing helps businesses grow through smart SEO, content, and search strategies. Learn more at www.premieronlinemarketing.com
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Hello and welcome back to the Palmcast Yep. This is your favorite digital marketing podcast, focused solely on local lead generation insights and strategies. Well, you know it. Your search for the current digital marketing tips and tactics the best place for that? Well, you've already found it, so your search is over. Thanks for tuning in. I want to get to it right now. As always, almost always, I have the founder and CEO of Premier Online Marketing, mike Schaug. Mike, how are you today? I'm good, sean. How are you doing? Good to be here? I'm good, I'm good.
Speaker 1:We are getting into that holiday season when we're recording this episode, and it's just that time of year where I think half of the people out there are just they love this time of year and half of the people just don't love this time of year, for whatever reason. I happen to love it, it's a great time of year. I think it's a really good time for conversations like the one we're going to have today, where, if you are thinking about how your budgets should look for optimizing digital spend going into the new year, because we're getting close to a brand new year, 2025. Well, this is a great episode to tune into. So I don't really want to spend too much time beating around the bush. I really want to start by asking you. The first thing is what are some of the things that you would say a business should be maybe asking themselves as they consider what budgets should be looking like?
Speaker 2:Perhaps it's a compare and contrast, but as they go into a new year, Absolutely yeah, and I had the idea for this podcast theme because I just got through budgeting season for all of our customers. So, unfortunately, this information for the next year and essentially it becomes kind of an exercise of determining what are the needs of the business from a traffic or lead standpoint and you try to work backwards from the lead. Obviously, we're a lead generation company so we can drive traffic and leads. We can't close them for the customer. So you want to reverse engineer your traffic needs from that lead to close rate and basically the number of leads that you're going to need. You should base it on what you got basically year to date or over the last 12 months, and I never hear from most of my clients that they're getting too much traffic or too many weeks. I literally have actually never heard that once in my life.
Speaker 2:So when you're thinking about budgets for the next year, especially as it relates to digital marketing, you need to look at SEO, ppc, social, paid organic efforts, content planning. I need to kind of evaluate what is the level of traffic that I need relative to where I'm at right now, if you budget for 2025 with the same budget that you have in 2024, and you're hoping that things are going to get cheaper or you're going to get smarter or more efficient with your budget. You're probably not going to have the results that you want. So the first question is is your business stabilized, basically on track for hitting goal? Like, how far away are you from business stability? Are you 15% of? If you got 15% more traffic, would you be there? Or more sales, would you be there? And then you can reverse engineer from there. Um, yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:I think that's a really important point because I mean, you and I have seen this actually before where a business doesn't really even understand what their current sales targets are and if the traffic necessary to support that is doing its job.
Speaker 1:And so when you talk about stabilizing, I think it's really critical for businesses to consider the fact that if you just throw numbers out there, hoping that it's going to work, without saying, well, our targets right now have been at X and our traffic that has supported that has been Y, you then can actually start to make some decisions around what it might look like to increase that traffic and what might need to be done to increase that traffic to see those sales targets actually grow the way you want. But you got to have a baseline. So I think that's really really smart. The way you want, but you got to have a baseline, so I think that's really really smart, Very, very smart. Curious to know your thoughts on if impression share is important, especially relative to maybe the other businesses in your market. Like, do you have thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:For PPC. It's definitely a very important metric in the mix. Ultimately, the number one metric is how far is the gap between the sales that I want to have and where I want to be, or where I am and where my competitors are. So let's say you have insight into how a competing dealership or business is doing and they're selling, say, 30% more cars than you is doing and they're selling, say, 30% more cars than you. That's a really interesting thing to look into. I would 100% recommend doing a SWOT analysis on the SEO side to see how many keywords are they ranking for relative to us, and that'll let you know a little bit about what you need to do on the content and SEO side.
Speaker 2:But on the PPC side, Google will just tell you what your impression share is relative to specific competitors in your market.
Speaker 2:And if you have an impression share that is, let's say, you know, 10% or less, and your competitor is taking 25% of the impression share market, then that is, that's telling you that they're basically spending, you know, probably 2.5 X your budget.
Speaker 2:So if you're hoping to, so basically, if you're planning specifically with specific competitors in mind and trying to beat specific competitors, the best place to go look is your auction insights reports within Google ads and it'll tell you what keywords. Uh, or well, it'll tell you what your overlap rate is, what the top of page rate is on the keywords that you have in your account, or well, it'll tell you what your overlap rate is, what the top of page rate is on the keywords that you have in your account. So, um, it's only going to talk about the keywords that you have in your account. If they have other keywords, that are, you know they have more expansive keyword lists than you. You're not going to get any data on that, so just know that you're getting. You're only seeing a piece of the puzzle when you look at that report, but it's really really telling when, if there's a big discrepancy between your top of page rate and your competitors, that means that they're spending substantially more than you, and you need to evaluate that in your paid media strategy.
Speaker 1:That's an excellent tip. Excellent tip, as if I should be surprised. That's all you do, is you? Just, you step up to the plate and you always, always, always deliver like that. That's such a great tip. Okay, well, we, in pre-conversation leading up to the episode, you had mentioned something that I really am not familiar with. These terms flighted versus flat budgets. And I know the audience will definitely love to hear your thoughts on flighted versus flat budgets. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:A flat budget is pretty straightforward. It's let's say, I have $15,000 a month to spend. It's going to be flat throughout the year. A flighted budget is basically increases and decreases, with your customers looking for you. So, let's say, a great example would be the automotive industry, and power automotive and apartment industry actually have very similar seasonality. It starts to peak up right around tax season, really increases over summer and then crashes down in the fall. For both industries, october, november and February are the worst months.
Speaker 2:So, with that in mind, do you want to just take your budget and spread it evenly across all of those months?
Speaker 2:From our point of view, the answer to that is no, because if you have, let's say, 100% to 150% more people searching for what you're having to sell during some period of the year, that means that your cost per acquiring those customers is going to go lower, whereas if you have a flat budget, let's say in July and it's the same in November, your cost per lead is actually going to go up in November, and you should expect it to, because the same amount of people are in market looking for the same customers, and when there are far fewer of them, then that makes it a lot more expensive for you to acquire those customers.
Speaker 2:So if I could plan everyone's budget from now on until the end of time, I would definitely recommend substantial increasements to spend in the peak months of the year and then also decreases when you are less likely to move. You know, let's say, when you're less likely to move a customer into a you know Montana apartment or even Denver places that are cold, you know, they just tend, there tends to be less business during that time of year substantially. So you want to make sure that you're spending your customer during the time where there are more customers to go after.
Speaker 1:Uh, that's one of the most honest answers that you have thoughts as well on in times of inflation right and budgeting for inflation. I'd love for you to share about your thoughts there as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean Google generally increases CPCs by you know, eight to sometimes 25% year over year and it changes by vertical. It doesn't just move up all at the same time but in your vertical you will see CPC increases. I remember back in the day when if we saw a $1 cost per click, that was terribly moronic and wasteful. Now I would. I would be very happy to get a $1 CPC in some of the verticals that we serve.
Speaker 2:So you need to plan for budget increases and I guess this would be more for the stabilized business where you're kind of in a good spot, you are selling, kind of on track with where you want to be, for your paid media or SEO channels.
Speaker 2:But you also need to account for the fact that your channels are going to get more expensive. So if you want the exact same amount of traffic through paid channels anyway, there is going to be a little bit of an increase in CPC. So just make sure that you're planning for that, otherwise you will see less traffic year over year and you'll think you're doing something wrong. But really what's changing is the industry. More competitors are coming into the market, more people are doing it themselves and setting all their keywords to max clicks and broad match and you're competing with those people now. So there are a lot of reasons why CPCs go up year over year, but what is a fact is that they do so from a Google ads or paid media standpoint. You absolutely need to count for that in your budget planning as well.
Speaker 1:I've heard you also talk about the necessity for budget to be, I guess, something that you consider relative to algorithm updates as well, and I don't know that. I've heard a lot of people talk about that, but it makes a lot of sense. So I'd like you to share a little bit about your thoughts on budgeting regarding algorithm updates. There certainly are at least a handful that happen every year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually we just had a big one, a couple of big ones, that just went down and Google actually didn't have like recommendations. It was just like this is happening and it happened and now you have less traffic. There's nothing to fix, but this is something that changed and the reality of the situation is, if you're getting thousands of visits organically, you need to treat those like diamonds. They're so valuable. Organic traffic is more valuable than paid traffic. I hate to say that as a paid media guy. It just converts at a higher rate. If you think about your average search auction, google says that somewhere from 10% to 15% of people click on ads at any given time, meaning that 85% to 95% of the people don't trust paid media results. If you ask your parents, where do you click, a lot of my mom will say I don't click on the ads and she doesn't have a reason for doing it. She just mistrusts it. So the reality is that Google is a for-profit company and they make money when you click on ads and they don't make money when you don't. So they have a vested interest in decreasing the amount of organic traffic that you are getting year over year If you are not actively investing in your SEO. If you are not making revisions to basically every page, at least little revisions to content, if you're not comparing how your website is ranking relative to the cohort of competitors that you are evaluating in your market, then you are going to lose organic traffic, and it's not that you're doing anything wrong.
Speaker 2:There are plenty of businesses that don't change services, like dog groomers, for instance, or dentists. Their services are the same Plumbers. Why would they need to update their service offering A roofer is a roofer. They'll come and let you know what it's going to cost in person. A lot of these businesses don't list pricing anyway, but the content of their websites does need to change if they want to stay ahead of new competitors. So you just have to have an understanding that, despite even your best efforts, there will be an algo update at some point where you will lose like 15 or 20% of your traffic and you will feel that, as you know, many tens of thousands of dollars of lost revenue and it just went away, and people will discredit, they'll kindredit. It's almost like being in a recession where you just have less of quality leads than you had before.
Speaker 2:So, with that being said, especially within the automotive industry, you can definitely count on this. You should absolutely have a little bit of reserve budget or understand that you need to have some budget flexibility to account for situations where you lose some organic traffic, especially if you're not doing SEO. So SEO is really important. Insurance it's definitely something that you should have in your budgets for sure, but if you don't, you need to plan for the fluctuations that you're going to see in that area.
Speaker 2:And the other factor, too, is search engines are changing massively. Gemini has tried to do a whole bunch of stuff to change its search engine. Chatgpt just launched their search engine within the tool. You've got Perplexity. You have a lot of people that are going after this monopoly on Ted Blue links. So you absolutely need to understand that you need to have flexibility.
Speaker 2:Paid is always going to be there. That's kind of the best job security, I think. I think there will always be ads, similarly to how we have it now with search and sponsored advertising. Seo is going to change massively and it has been an incredibly reliable channel that people take for granted. But I think that very heavily in 2025, especially as AI agents and technology kind of makes it works its way through search engines and how we get information. You can account for a lot of volatility in your organic traffic and you need to absolutely plan for that. If you're not doing SEO, you should, and if you don't have the budget for it, just know that your quick lever to relieve the pain is going to be paid media, and obviously that lines up beautifully with the profit interests of Google and every search engine. But you just need to understand that at some point that could happen hopefully not during peak season, but it's very hard to predict algorithm updates. There are usually four to six fairly meaningful ones every single year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's really, really important. That's what you're sharing there, I think, is really kind of an advanced tip. There aren't a lot of people that account for algorithm updates throughout the year and what that can really mean. And, as you're talking about this from the organic side and the SEO side, I think there's a lot of people that are. You know, if you've only been in, you know, a marketing role for the last year or two, maybe five years, but really you could say this, going back to people that are um 10 years in, if if that's still the depth of your experience you you maybe don't consider the fact that when Google first came to market, um, there was no advertising platform. There are a lot of people that don't understand they they come into it in the last 10, 15 years and they think, oh well, there's two sides of the coin. Right, there's the paid side, there's the organic side. But it is so fascinating to me to think about how Google operates today and you're one of the, I think, foremost experts in understanding both sides of that coin and, as it relates to search engines, but certainly with Google having such market share that they have, it's fascinating to me that there are a lot of people that are trying to make smart marketing decisions on behalf of their companies. Or maybe they're a really small business and they don't even have a marketing team. That's just the business owner him or herself trying to figure these things out.
Speaker 1:This is why I love the type of tips and advice that you give on this podcast, because I think it's really important. There are a lot of SMBs, there are a lot of SaaS companies and big tech companies and fortune 500 companies that don't think through all of this because there's they're. They're too busy trying to chase a minuscule attribution that really doesn't matter. It's so insignificant. It's like vanity and performance related looking metrics that are like, don't look at here, because we want you to look at how all this stuff looks. So I love that you share tips like this. I think it's really important. I know that the people that consume this content are also benefiting from it greatly benefiting from it greatly. I do want to ask you also, on this topic of budgeting into the new year what about the website or the brand itself and when those things migrate? Because a lot of people don't think about some of those consequences and I know you've got thoughts there, so tell me a little bit about what you think around budgeting relative to your website brand and migrations of those.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, m&a has kind of been slowed down in all the verticals we serve for the last couple of years, with interest rates being what they are, but it's projected to go back up, which means that a lot of customers, whether they're wealth management companies or roll ups, they're going to buy dealerships, they're going to buy apartment buildings and they're going to arbitrarily change them to a new name, just so it's different than the old name, or they'll change it to roll up under a mothership brand and something that you really have to be mindful of when you're acquiring an asset or you're working with a business that has been newly acquired. They want to change the name or maybe they just want to improve the website. Same name, new website. You want to make sure that that again, because organic traffic is very precious and very hard to replace that you plan that extremely well, meaning that if you have pages that are ranking for specific keywords, you want to look at those pages and make sure that the content, the URL structure, everything is replicated on the new website, whether it's under the new name. Worse, the absolute minimum is like three or one redirects and making sure that you have a redirect strategy in place.
Speaker 2:But what I see most of the time is a buy-sell happens. The people that we're working with are newly made aware that because the NDA period has ended, hey, we're going to get this new asset. It was apartment community A and we're going to change it to apartment community B and they're leasing really well. Their projections are awesome and we already went ahead and made the name change. We bought this domain that doesn't have the geographic location in the URL, which is definitely an SEO hack that works and just you know, keep running it. It was doing really well. So they'll make all those changes. Their organic traffic will disappear and because there's not really a strong understanding of how important organic traffic is and how it is the most important traffic source and everything that you do kind of influences organic traffic, they'll lose a lot of it. And then all of a sudden they're like well, what the hell? You know the website's way better. Our website is so much nicer than the other website. Why do we have less leads but they have less traffic? Because the website migration was not handled well. Now I could go into a whole podcast for just website migrations and bring the SEO team in how to talk about how to tackle that perfectly. But even with the best team, sometimes the CMS options are not really great. I actually were working with a client right now that was doing really well on dealercom's platform, of all things. They migrated to another platform that was supposedly way better and their organic traffic dropped in half. And unfortunately unfortunately and hopefully.
Speaker 2:If you're listening to this and you have this come up, you just need to understand that to Google, legacy does matter. Just having a new website for the appearance, the aesthetic of it, without the SEO taken into consideration, could be a massive, multimillion dollar mistake, million dollar mistake. And if, no matter what, we're changing websites, we're getting off of one platform going to another, obviously you want to consider all the things that you can control to make that transition as seamless as possible, and you're also going to even need to understand that under the most perfect circumstances, you're going to lose probably 20 to 30% of that traffic, no matter what. So you're going to need to plan for 30% of that traffic, no matter what. So you're going to need to plan for that.
Speaker 2:If you have a website migration or new website, you need to plan for several months post-transition where you are going to have to increase your traffic from other sources. Obviously, paid is the easiest way to do that. You can also get ahead of it with really good SEO planning. But a new website to Google is going to have an organic setback and you're going to have an adjustment period that you're going to have to account for. We have seen website migrations where it just goes up and things are just great, but that's probably been about 10% of the time.
Speaker 2:90% of the time, even when migrating from a crappy platform to a new, better one, there's an adjustment period, usually four months or so, where traffic drops about 20% and it's from a really high converting source. So you need to offset that by more than the amount of traffic you lost, because you need to understand that organic traffic converts three times better than paid media. So if you're offsetting a 20% traffic drop with paid media, it's going to have to be more than a 20% increase to your budget. You're going to actually have to look at the amount of traffic that you were getting and probably double it to be somewhere in the same neighborhood for a little while, and then obviously you can go back down. But SEO is really important and it's people just kind of think that organic traffic is a given. It's not. It's incredibly competitive and it's the most important channel. For sure that most of our clients are not super. They're not super dialed into how important it is necessarily.
Speaker 1:Imagine, regardless of whether you're choosing a diy self-serve website platform and you're going to switch yourself you're really small business or you know you and I have a lot of experience in the automotive industry. Imagine if the automotive industry website provider, as part of their sales pitch, had to disclose yes, we're amazing, we're awesome. When you switch over, you're going to have probably a 20 to 30, if not more percent decrease for potentially at least a quarter. Yeah, by the way, it doesn't matter whether you choose us or anybody else. If you're intent on switching, you should be also doing this protection package around your investments, like you're talking about right now, whether it's going into 2025 or it could be any time during the year that you're going to make that change. That's going to be catastrophic if you don't have also this protection plan of making sure that you build up this traffic so that it accounts for the fact that you're going to have a dip before you return to greatness. That's another really great tip.
Speaker 1:I know that maybe in years past, you and I both would probably want to be able to say put all your eggs or do most of your investment in Google, obviously from a market share perspective, and there's always been, I think, really good reason to have at least some budget that you're allocating in the Microsoft ad platform, and probably there's probably a a good argument or case to be made for even paid social in a lot of examples.
Speaker 1:I want to hear your thoughts on that. Around the Microsoft ad piece, I'm not asking you to say anything that's particularly maybe negative or shade towards Google, but I really know, because we've had conversations about it before, about how this is really important to actually be thinking about these things and it's not just from a hey, don't use Google all the time. There is actually a lot of things to consider, um in making those decisions. So for for, it doesn't matter if you're a car dealer or any business. If we're thinking about 2025, how would you be telling them to consider budget as it relates to Microsoft ads versus Google, or maybe all of it to?
Speaker 2:consider budget as it relates to Microsoft ads versus Google, or maybe all of it. Yeah Well, I mean, obviously Google has had, and still continues to have, the vast majority of search volume and as long as that's the case, most of your budget should be there. However, it is totally under attack from every side and, in our opinion, google is not handling it well. To be honest with you, I think that there's real credible threats that if people continue to have better experiences in other places to find information whether it's Perplexity or ChatGPT or Bing or Edge or whatever they're going to continue to bleed traffic and most of our clients probably have under 20% of the search volume for whatever their category is in, whatever market they're in. So the fact that all of these other challenging platforms have north of 10% right now means you could never spend another dollar with Google and get the same amount of traffic on all these other channels. I will say that Google does convert better than some other channels, but we are seeing comparable performance in Microsoft and I do think that Microsoft is the really most formidable challenger right now. Obviously, they're getting a ton of data through ChatGPT. I believe that ChatGPT search is kind of powered by Bing, ads or Edge. So when it becomes addressable through that medium, you're going to want to be there, but I would really say as an agency, it doesn't benefit us to steer people to other platforms, because those are more platforms that my team have to manage, a lot more oversight for billing. There's just nothing but downsides with being multi-omni-channel for the business side and it's a headache for everyone else. However, you don't want to be the last mover or you want to be the first mover to another platform when you see it on the rise and, frankly, google has not responded well to AI at all. So I 100% am steering all of our customers to definitely Bing, but to other channels as well.
Speaker 2:If TikTok is not going to get kicked out of the country, then you should use it. I think that the fear, uncertainty and doubt that the government put around Bing sorry, not around Bing, but TikTok and them getting kicked out of the country that made millions, billions of dollars more for Google and for the other platforms that weren't going to get ousted, but that doesn't appear to be happening. So you need to look at all of the channels where you have been relying on getting business and you need to look at expanding them, because there are a lot of other places where your dollars can be well spent. The worst thing that could happen would you'd see some seismic change in Google search and the 10 blue link monopoly is shaky and, let's say, google loses 20% of their market share to these challenging platforms. That would be a massive loss of traffic, organically from a paid standpoint, and sure you can make it up by spending more.
Speaker 2:But I think the more efficient option will be to actually strategically choose a couple of other platforms to invest in. I like Google. I think Google is going to be the best place to spend most of your money for the next couple years, for sure. But I also think that being ads, or Microsoft ads with their their search network, is definitely a very important channel and you should absolutely allocate a small portion of your budget there, maybe 15% of your monthly allocation to start and then kind of go from there based on performance.
Speaker 1:I think it's great that you're so transparent about topics like this, because it's I mean, if you, if you even consider your podcast, the podcast, the content that you make here, it's it's meant to have the long form version to where people can consume it wherever they are listening to it right now, wherever if they've decided that they want to see the video version of it. But you've consciously decided that you know that this is valuable and it goes beyond just one particular channel. You can use a podcast like this to make content for your YouTube audience, for your LinkedIn audience, for if your company is going to be using TikTok, instagram, facebook, every single platform but those decisions are made based on, well, where's the target audience for your business? And so you're doing things yourself at Premier Online Marketing that you could tell any business that you also work with or would like to endeavor to work with in the future that you're doing the same things that you would tell them to be doing around the diversification and being first in places where you see the rise of new platforms that could be beneficial to your business. I think that's really, really critical.
Speaker 1:I've got a couple more things I want to ask you in this episode. One is around creative planning, and I touched on this just here in the last couple of things that I mentioned around you know kind of rise of things like video Not that it's new, it's not new but it just seems to continue to open more people's eyes and realize that is such a um, uh, it's a conversation starter. It's one of the easiest and best places to get someone's attention, um, which you have to have before you can build trust with audiences. And so I'd love to get your thoughts here, as we kind of wind down in the last couple of questions, first around your thoughts around creative planning relative to budgeting into a new year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I mean, for forever, video has been the number one medium. If you think about, you know, instagram, facebook, people taking video selfies of themselves, or or video testimonials, or like all kinds of stuff, and then obviously you have like television advertising, ott, all of that stuff, I think the biggest barrier for a lot of businesses is the ability to create, or just the frank fact that nobody has planned or budgeted for creating, quality video footage that you can use on, like YouTube ads or Hulu ads or something like that, but that is changing, and there are definitely a lot of great tools that will help you create great video with limited resources. But even that, that being said, that is an option and that's a good option. It's better than not participating in video marketing. I would say, though, that, like you should absolutely plan for especially new business ventures that don't have video, you should plan to do some quality video for your business YouTube alone, through custom intent audiences, where you can basically target people on YouTube that just searched what your top you were, your top keywords. You know, it's just such a great way to get in front of people.
Speaker 2:I always, when I think about like impression quality um, think about like the impression quality of a search ad on Google. It's like a bunch of texts. It takes your brain a lot of time to digest it. You have to choose to read it all. Most people don't. They just scroll on and go on Word of Work. Look at a banner ad that interrupts you when you're on a news site or something like that.
Speaker 2:A video is. You expect to see an advertisement if you're on TV, so it's expected, which is good. It is definitely intrusive, but you expect it. But the impression quality is awesome. You can convey so much more through a video than you can through text or an image, so it just makes a much better link with your target prospects.
Speaker 2:And video for the longest time was kind of limited by the targeting options that you had, and that's no longer the case. So you now have the ability to target people extremely precisely based on keywords. That they did, that they just searched. So that just makes video really important. And the barrier has always been creative. So businesses that choose not to invest in their creative and choose not to invest in Google are going to be missing out on a lot of great traffic and a lot of great connections that they could be making for their business, so for all businesses that we work with, we definitely are nudging them to allocate some of their media spend for video, but obviously to development of the assets. They need to take advantage of this because it's so important.
Speaker 1:I just want to piggyback on that because I think, once again, really very good insight, and I know that there are a lot of businesses this doesn't it's not exclusive, just B2B, but there are a lot of businesses that will talk themselves out of video creation because they are fixated on comparing themselves against influencers or celebrities or rock stars and, like, I'm never going to go viral and I just think it's really important. I say this a lot, especially in business, it isn't how many, that's so important, it's who, and so when you're making that content, the who becomes your driving factor. Who are you making it for? And that might be that you have 62 people that watch the video, but all 62 of them are likely people that you really wanted to see that content. So don't get hung up and certainly don't stop yourself altogether by thinking well, we're never going to have a video that has millions and millions of views.
Speaker 1:If you do, that's nothing wrong with that either. If you go viral for some reason, hey great. But the fact is is that the who that you're making your content for is far more important than how many people are seeing it. Don't fixate on that, because it oftentimes stops people dead in their tracks and they won't even do it. Well, I got one more. We were talking about this a little bit Just to know if you have some, maybe some closing thoughts around SEO or content planning, obviously part of this being video, but maybe um, kind of your your final thoughts on SEO and content planning as it would relate to budgeting for your new year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's. Uh, I think defending your whatever traffic you have gained organically should be a top priority. Um, even if your traffic doesn't increase year over year, that's better than having less traffic and it's worth every penny to defend it and invest in it. But yeah, obviously, for SEO, you want to plan for re-optimization of all of your core pages, meaning adding new text to those pages if you're not ranking in the position you want to rank for. So I think a really good exercise for all business owners to go through, regardless of industry, is to take your website and look at who you're competing with, not based on your opinion of who your competitor is. Oftentimes we'll talk to dealerships or apartment owners and they'll say, well, my product is like this other building 20 miles away, it's another luxury, high rise or whatever, but really who their competitor is is, if you're in a five mile radius of the business and you search for the keyword that matters to you, who's showing up. Those are your digital competitors and you need to evaluate from an SEO and a paid media standpoint. How are you stacking up against these guys? Are they outranking you all the time? Are they outranking you in the map pack and the search engine results or just the map pack and not the search engine results, and you need to reverse engineer both the local SEO listings or map pack and then also the search results. So typically, what we see is most of our customers or I think all customers just want to kind of think of SEO as a one and done. We set it up, we hit the pages, we have the visibility that we want and then we stop. We don't want to mess with it.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, all of your competitors are going to be developing content. A lot of them are going to be adopting new website platforms that might be better than yours or faster, and you have to evaluate what you're going to do this next year from a content and SEO perspective, and what you definitely need to invest in is beefing up, extending the word count, improving your keyword optimization on all of your core pages, and you also need to evaluate all the keywords that you want to show up for. What's really funny for us sometimes is we'll have a customer come to us and say they'll have like 300 words that they want to show up for and they have a five-page website. It's literally impossible to rank for all of those keywords when you have so few pages. So part of the content development needs to be looking at where do we want to expand into these other keywords that totally make sense for our business, but we don't show up for them anywhere not on any page of Google and you need to create those pages and create that content. So you should be looking for two different types of content projects. You should be looking at expanding into new pages that you don't currently have content for, and then you also need to look at your core pages. What are we ranking for? How do we strengthen our rankings for that?
Speaker 2:Oftentimes, content length is not long enough. Frankly and I know that length is kind of an arbitrary description for content, but it absolutely matters. If you have 50 to 150 words on the page optimized for your target user, and your competitor has 500 to 1000 words kind of work throughout their page that are supporting the keywords they want to rank for, they're going to outrank you and that will happen the vast majority of the time. There are other factors, like backlinks, but oftentimes content is not deep enough or it's not long enough. It's not well optimized. So even if you're ranking really well right now, you need to look at all of your competitors and you need to see what you can do to improve your on-page copy.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I think about with content is you want to front load it as much of it as possible.
Speaker 2:If you identify, say, five pages that you need to develop, I would recommend developing them all in January so you have something to work with a few months later. Seo is really slow, so I really like to have content done. You know a lot of it up front so we can kind of tweak, uh with based based on where you know keyword rankings land. You're always going to have to do more work to the first draft and what you don't want to do, or what's less ideal, is if you stretch out all your content projects over the year because you need to add a few months uh months after you post that content, to when you'll actually start to see the result in keyword visibility and traffic. Yeah, that's kind of my thought on SEO and budget planning. Look at what your competitors are doing, see who's ranking in positions that you don't want to and kind of understand why. Work with an SEO provider to help you understand that and then develop the resources to compete.
Speaker 1:Fantastic insights. Great. If this were a test, you'd be getting an A plus. As always, mike. This is where we'll park this episode. Ladies and gentlemen, we always appreciate your comments and questions, so feel free to share, because your feedback helps us deliver more relevant episodes. If you're not following Mike Schogg on LinkedIn, well, you're doing yourself a disservice, because he posts content there. He's a great person to be networked with, to learn far more than he just shares on his podcast, so make sure you do that. No-transcript. Thanks, sean. Thanks.