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- [00:00]
A
Anything out too, since it's still recording. Nick, what's up man? How are you?
- [00:05]
B
Good, how are you, Cody?
- [00:07]
A
I'm great man. Thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. Really looking forward to this.
- [00:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, appreciate it too.
- [00:12]
A
You have a cool background. I'm excited to share it with the audience. But also I'm just personally curious of, of your experience. You are CEO of Optics, which is digital marketing agency from specializing in SEO, Is that correct?
- [00:28]
B
Yeah, Optics in. Yeah. So we focus on SEO and we've been doing that since 2019. I've been in the SEO space since 2003. You're doing SEO. If you're touching a website, you're doing SEO, right? So I was doing SEO before I was even doing SEO, right? And like I said, we launched in 2019 and in that time frame between 2019 and today, probably year three, we started to build our own websites, own and operate websites in WordPress. And at the same time we were getting referrals from a web design company that, you know, people would build their own, they would just get these brand new websites for 7, 10, 15. I don't know how much. Yeah, I don't know how much it was. And then the request was they want SEO. And it always felt a little funny to go back to this brand new website, right. And start to pick it apart. Because that's our starting point is can this site technically support content and links? You know, if you buy a dollar's worth of content, are you going to get a dollar's worth of value or is the site going to be able only to provide 60 cents or 80%? 80 cents, you know. Right. So we always go to the website and that just felt funny to us. So we started to just go, well, why don't we just start offering work? We're already doing it for ourselves. Let's just build WordPress websites for other folks. And out of the gate we know the SEO of it, right? So we're not just building a website, we're building a search friendly SEO website with WordPress. So that's, that's, those are the 2 lanes that we're in today. Beautiful.
- [02:14]
A
And we've never had anybody, I don't believe on the podcast specifically talking about SEO as like the big category. We've talked about Etsy SEO. We talked about like Amazon SEO, which are different, I think SEO, SEO. And I'd like to, for anyone to listening to this, walk away with what is SEO? Is it, does it matter for me if I sell on Amazon and Etsy does it only matter to me if I sell on I have a website? And then how do I actually understand the opportunity? Like, okay, got it. Should I do SEO? Nick says I should. But like what does that translate to? Dollars wise or traffic? Like, what's a good, good outcome for focus on SEO?
- [02:59]
B
Yeah.
- [03:00]
A
How do I understand the why behind all this is kind of hopefully what we can take away after this conversation.
- [03:07]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for the framework. It's fantastic. So I would start with whatever's working for you today is working for you today, right? If that's assuming it's working for you, like keep on going, maximize whatever you're doing, be it Amazon, se, whatever. And here's I think where it comes down to. And unfortunately we see this every once in a while. Everything is okay. It's okay. It's okay until it's not okay. Right. So it's. And so let's just say Facebook, Instagram, any platform that's not your website, where all of a sudden like you get banned from Facebook or Instagram or it goes missing or what, like whatever, it's not your website. Right? Those are, that's your community on their, on their website. Right? So our starting point is always your website. Right? So that's what I mean when I say like if Etsy's working great, like go do all the things on Etsy, go do all the things on Amazon. But let's not ignore our own website because something can happen. Amazon can. Cheapest product wins, highest ratings wins. And you're not that. And that could be a huge dent in your bottom line. Right? So let's make sure that the website is up to snuff and can support the business.
- [04:29]
A
So stop us there for some minutes to reframe is when you are building your Etsy shop, when you're building your Amazon store, when you're building on TikTok Shop, you are building in some else's sandbox. That's right. It's great. Nothing wrong with this, but just understand that it's not yours and understand can go away as well. Now the way that we talk about this on the podcast and just in general at ever be is we look at like Etsy, Amazon, TikTok Shop, Facebook, whatever, these things, they're sales channels and all that go back to somehow you should have your own real estate that you own, which is your website. And doesn't mean you have to do it like in a specific order. But eventually you need your own website. And that's why we're building. We talked about this before, like we're building our own website builder as well. And because of this fundamental knowledge, fundamental belief of hey, you need to control your own destiny here. Yeah, SEO is interesting because it's kind of the same thing because people rely on Facebook ads or other strategies to scale their traffic and all this stuff. SEO is kind of that same type of thinking of like you kind of own your own traffic in a way, like you're investing in your traffic long term. Is that the way we should think about.
- [05:51]
B
Long term? Yes. Right. So people, part of the reason why people don't get into SEO sooner versus later is because of the long ramp up it has. Right. You start an Etsy store, you're on Etsy tomorrow. And I don't know much about Etsy, but my assumption is, correct me if I get this wrong, is that you're in the game once you build a store, especially if there's not a lot of competition or you can get a sale tomorrow if you build the store today. With SEO, that's not necessarily the case. Right. So instead of thinking about, so like I just described sort of like a direct response model or you put a dollar down, you get a dollar penny back. That's sort of, that's paid search, that's advertising on Facebook. It's, you know, it's a lot of the digital marketing out there. The benefit of SEO is that when you do the right things over time, it's sort of like a 401k. Like it's really not interesting for a long time, right? And then at some point you go oh, the dollar that I've been putting into my 401k after a year, like that's, look at that, that's sort of interesting. Right? And SEO is sort of the same thing. You put the effort in, you do the right things over time and the traffic starts to build. And once it starts to build, when you do it the right way, assuming Google's not going to be a little thing and ragged all your website, we can get to what that looks like today. But for largely for people who have good products, good services, SEO has and always will be, as far as I can tell, a valid marketing channel. If you're an affiliate, if you're a small publisher, those folks are having a hard time right now. But products and services having a really good time. Really good time.
- [07:33]
A
To break down a very practical sense of SEO, for example, if anybody's listening to this right now, if you go to Google and you type in pet parent shirts or something like this, Right. You're going to get Google, Google results. And the first one that's not sponsored is SEO. That's like perfectly executed SEO over time, Right. They are ranked number one.
- [07:56]
B
Is that correct? That's it, yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah. And there's other. Sorry, yeah, I'll just add that there's other spaces. We'll call them the serp, the search engine results page. Right. So after the sponsored ads or it says ad or whatever the label of the day may be, because that changes, you have all of these patterns, I call them patterns where there's opportunity for visibility and for clicks from the search engine results page. Sometimes back in the day, it used to be 10 blue links, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10. Right. Website description link over. Now it's three blue links. It's a local listing, it's a. People also ask. Those are all places where you can get visibility. So the challenge is, instead of chasing the algorithm, we don't want to always chase the algorithm. We want to understand it, we want to study it, we don't want to chase it. Two different things. We want to identify where our opportunities are. But we don't want to build a website for the algorithm of the day. We don't want to do that. We want to build good, sustainable websites over time and sort of like a stock going back to the 401k, like there's going to be up years, there's going to be down years. It could happen. But overall, when you take a look at your website, when you take a look at a good portfolio over time, it's going up and to the right. And the most important thing with your portfolio, we've been talking to a financial advisor, so this is all fresh in my head. The most important thing is not timing the market, AKA the algorithm. It's consistently investing in your future in the financial world and in the SEO world, I would argue it's very similar. You want a good foundation, AKA your website, good technical website. You want everything to be on your website to be found, which means the site needs to be crawlable and indexable by Google, which means there's. There's not a lot of inefficiencies, there's no blockages. And then once you have good access, now it's a matter of, well, what's on the site that's available to rank. Okay, so what do you go ahead.
- [10:04]
A
Here, but let's use the same thing, Pet parents website, and it's called pawrams.com, okay. They sell anything related to pets. And selling it to the end buyer is a passionate pet owner. Now they have a website and they said, hey, in 2025, in January, I'm going to start my SEO journey. And my goal is to get a whole bunch of organic traffic throughout 2025. What are the Almost like a checklist in your head? I'm sure you're like, oh, we just need to have this, done this, done this. Can we walk through some of those?
- [10:39]
B
Yeah, let's do it.
- [10:41]
A
Like, what would you tell them?
- [10:42]
B
Yeah, so we're going to assume you have a website, right? Let's start there. You have a website. Let's call it Fantastic. We want to get Google Search analytics on it. We want to get. And more importantly, we want to get Google Search Console. Both of these are free. So Google Search Console is sort of like your bat phone to Google. It's your direct line of communication to be the cleanest information you can get from Google about your website. People go, but can I call them? You can't call them. That's not a thing. Google Search Console is your closest thing to that phone call. And what you get in Search Console is a view of how Google feels about your website. So you'll get a bunch of information. Some of it is noise, some of it's very helpful. It sort of depends. And so this is where you need to understand the fundamentals of SEO and what something actually means. So it could be a little tricky. But the cleaner and more simple you make your website, the easier it is to interpret what is in Search Console. Minimally, you want to get it up there. You want to understand what Google's doing. Right.
- [11:52]
A
So high level giggle. Search Console. Just Google it right now and you can get it. And you'll go through the steps, assign, report, all that good stuff.
- [12:00]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's two sides when you sign up. The left hand side is like, give me, give me your IP address. Go through your host. Don't do that. Just give them the actual domain, whatever's in your browser. When you go to the homepage, pop that domain into the right hand side.
- [12:14]
A
Paul rents.com and I'll pop it in there. Got it.
- [12:17]
B
That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to make sure that you have enough pages to rank. I mean, I talked, I talked to a guy yesterday. He was a bookkeeper and he had, he had a homepage. That was it. And he had, among other things, just the one page. Right. But also he had services for small businesses. There's a lot of services for small businesses. What, what type of service? So we play the what type game frequently, which is read the copy and ask what type. The best example I have this of this is when, when I was working in esurance in the Bay Area car insurance company and I was the new SEO guy working with a team of writers in another department. And my task was to get the content to be up to stuff from an SEO perspective, get the results we're talking about. Right? So I got a page from John and John knew he was a good writer. I called John over and I said, hey John, can we talk about your page? And John was like, what are you going to tell me, SEO guy? So you start going through the page. It's well written, well formatted headers. It's a fantastic page. He's a good writer. But here's the problem is that John used insurance a lot while we worked for an insurance company. This page was about car insurance. Right? So when you say insurance, that's a category, that's not a product. So what type of insurance are we talking about here, John? Car insurance. Okay, so I need to go through my page and every place they say insurance, say car insurance maybe. I mean let's not, let's not make it sound like a third grader wrote it, but we need to say at least once, right? And then make sure it makes sense along the way. An accident, what are we talking about here? It's, it's the category again is insurance. So is this a slip and fall? Is that like what type of accident is this? Duh. Nick, it's a, it's a, it's an auto insurance page. It's obviously a car accident. It's not obvious, right? Your. Your web page on your website. Right. Let's just say is is needs to give it context in this big thing called the Internet. And if you don't tell Google what it is about, Google doesn't know what it is about.
- [14:39]
A
So the idea that we need to tell Google what this thing is about because Google has these little spiders crawlers, whatever you want to call it, and they're constantly scanning your website and if you don't tell Google what you are clearly then how could it possibly know? That's right. So let's say if we could stay on the pet parents powerance.com and let's say that I have multiple products. They have like 10, 10 products. Maybe a cup with dog picture on it and a shirt, cat pictures on it and maybe some whatever stuff. I need to have multiple pages. It sounds like how many Pages do I need to have.
- [15:20]
B
We're getting into. So let's break down the types of pages. We have core pages, we have product pages, and we have informational pages. So the core pages will be like the homepage, the about us, the contact. Right. Those. Those are skin in the game pages. Right. Informational pages could be. What's a great. What's a great present for a pet parent? I'm assuming there's some volume behind that. I don't know if there is or not. Search volume behind it. I don't know. I have no idea.
- [15:48]
A
Pet parent gifts for 2025. Right.
- [15:51]
B
So it's like people who love their cats, love their dogs, whatever it may be. Right. And then. And then you have your product pages. So I have a client who is in the cannabis space and they have. They called it 10 SKUs, we'll say. Right. But it's. It's the same product. It's like the T shirt but in 10 different colors. It's like. Well, that's. In my world. I know this is wrong. From a e commerce perspective, that's. That's the equivalent of one sku. Right. Because it's only T shirt. So it's. In this case, it's only gummies. Well, what about if you know the space? What about tinctures? What about, like, there's a whole slew of products. So when someone searches for, in this case, CBD gummies, you are. This website was competing with all the other websites because we couldn't optimize for tinctures. We couldn't optimize for balm salt. There was nothing to optimize for. Right. So how many pages? Well, how many skus. And don't say I have 100 T shirts. Right. That's really about the same thing. And just 100 different colors. That's really one page with slight variation. It's not good enough to rank. It just won't. Okay, so go ahead.
- [17:11]
A
So three. So three main pages, easy, kind of by default. The home, the what I say, the contact and about us. And let's just say I have 10 products that are actually different. So a cup and then also a shirt and also a peony and also a sweatshirt or something like that.
- [17:29]
B
Yeah.
- [17:29]
A
Do I check that box from Paige's standpoint now?
- [17:33]
B
Yeah, it's a really good starting point. And then just like any other business. I mean, think about it. Like, think about it like with Porsche. Right? So Porsche, they were about sports cars for a long time. Right. And they just kept adding sports cars to Their list of things, the products. And then they had a brand extension known as the suv. Right. And personally I was going, the Porsche is about fast cars. They're not about SUVs. They're just not. They are today. Right. So they were looking for market share. CVs were hot. So what, what in the market that's hot can you add to your, your product lines? And it could be another thing you wear, it could be another thing you drink out of. Great. Okay, so that's a, that's a line extension, right? Something very similar to what you offer today and you build more on that. But there could be a brand extension, right? Maybe you never got into cat toys. Well, now that's a brand extension. It makes sense. Right. But it's not something that the pet parent will use, will wear.
- [18:31]
A
Okay, what are some other things in this checklist that you're thinking of right now? So we have the pages. We have the, you know, we have the pages as the main thing at first. Google search, console. Console. What else is on your list?
- [18:46]
B
It's, you know, I find this more often than not and I'm surprised by it. People sort of don't, they don't fundamentally express what they do and who they do it for.
- [19:01]
A
So copy and you actually write it down specifically what they do and who they do it for.
- [19:06]
B
If you, if you can narrow down your, your one true statement about your company. We produce X for Y for a reason. Right. So Optics in works with small medium sized businesses to produce WordPress websites and optimize their SEO to get visibility online. To drive conversion.
- [19:30]
A
Right.com or pawrance.com makes aesthetically pleasing pets apparel. You're winging it here for women that love their cats and dogs.
- [19:50]
B
Perfect. Perfect. Right? And so everything we produce now needs to map to that. Right? And if it doesn't, that's okay. It's okay. But we need to be really purposeful, intentional about why we are breaking that mold. It's okay to break the mold, but we don't want to willy nilly. Now we have, we have driving gloves on your website, Cody. Like why'd you do that? Because I thought they were cool. It doesn't map to what you just said. Right? Like no one, no one, no, no one wears driving clubs. And certainly pet parents, young ladies, they don't do that.
- [20:23]
A
In my experience with, with SEO, you know, cause I've had a number, numerous companies now with lots of traffic paid and also earned and all this other stuff and own traffic. SEO has always been like this elusive thing to me that I've never really invested time to learn. And that's why this interesting to me. And you know why? For me, it's because I never understood the roi. I never really understood like in my head it's like, well, I do all this work and after I do all this work, we will, this results will happen. And for me, I don't think it's been broken down or maybe it's my fault of, okay, if you do all this work and here's the opportunity, you're going to have a million website visitors every year organically. And like here's how this is, this, this is how the math works. Like is it possible to do that with SEO?
- [21:18]
B
So let's, let's, let's break down a couple of those things you said. So there's, these things are true. The three pillars have been true for, for a very long time. How they get expressed has changed over time. Because SEOs are really good at doing this, unfortunately. They take perfectly good marketing tactics, they abuse it, and then Google has to make a change. Right? But these, but these three things that I'm about to say are what makes SEO tick? It's your technical, it's your on page, it's your off page. So the technical is, can Google crawl and access my website, yes or no? How efficiently the on page is who am I, what do I sell and how do I express that? Do I sell small business services? You don't. No one does. Do you sell small business bookkeeping? Bookkeeping services for small business? Yes, you do, right? The difference there and then the third piece is off site links from website, a.comb.com, c.com, whatever it is that link to your site and what they say about you, right? So I was just talking to a prospect yesterday. This person has a fantastic product, big brand, but doesn't rank for any of their products. And they sort of don't need to, right? They, they do other forms of marketing, but if they wanted to grow their business, SEO is without a doubt of conversation for them, right? So, so where that, where that comes into play for them is they get onto all these podcasts, they get on TV and they talk about their brand, they talk about the thing that they are known for, that they talk about in terms, in a sales pitch. But what they don't talk about is the broader category of what it is, right? And so they're missing out on how people search for this basic thing. They're just, it's not present, it's not present for them because they don't use the language. It's very similar to small business services. That's not, it's, that's really not a thing. What are these services we're talking about? Who are these small businesses?
- [23:36]
A
It's so interesting because I feel like I'm with them. Your, your potential client that you're talking about. Sometimes where it's like, I know that SEO is important because everyone says it is, but I have a hard time mapping it to the big picture of like, why I. For, for me. And tell me if you can't. Let's say I am that brand and they're already doing well, why should they invest in SEO? Like, what is the result going to be like? So is it. There's the opportunity cost, Is it costing them a million clicks a year or something like this? Like, is that how you wrote this down? Or is that way to look at it?
- [24:14]
B
Yeah. So here's the thing is when you rank at the top of the page for your products or services, when you simply rank there, people assume it's a good product service. Doesn't matter if it is or not, right? So like these folks I was just mentioning, they're nowhere to be found for what they actually sell. If you search for their brand name, they come up Ricky ticky quick and they should. That'd be a different problem if they didn't do that. But when they're not present for the product category that they sell, right? Imagine, imagine Allstate or another car insurance company. Like when you search for insurance or car insurance, like they're not found and then you see an ad on TV or whatever, or you drive by an Allstate office or whatever it may be, you're like, I never even heard of those guys. You know, when I go to search for the thing which I was doing yesterday, well, there's a disconnect, right? So it's this entire piece of integrated marketing where if you're going to use online as an avenue, SEO, especially for products and services, can be a huge, huge driving factor. So you're asking about, well, what's my. Essentially, what's my ROI on that? Right? Why should I invest time in this versus that? It's a good question. And you need to be really diligent with how you spend your time or as a small business. And so, and so don't. Whatever you do, whatever you do, don't go marketing tactic hopping. Don't, don't jump into email for a day and then jump into paid search for a day and then jump into Facebook for a day and then jump into SEO for a day. Here's what's going to happen. Absolutely nothing. Neither of those are going to work out. And then you're going to go tactic 1, 2, 3 and 4 doesn't work. They do work but we live in a world where, where get rich schemes and all these things show up and it feels like you should be getting results tomorrow. Well guess what? It doesn't work that way. It never has. It's all fake. It's all bullshit, all of it. Some people get lucky, but a lot of it is just complete 100% garbage. Don't fall for it. If you want to build a good business, pick one of those tactics correctly. Pick the one that we have the most momentum and go into it, Maximize it. Then choose another tactic. Maximize it. So going back to SEO and the roi, you need to get a search tool. You need to get a tool that shows you the volume as to what the searches are for this. Yeah. There's SpyFu is a cheap one and it's a good one going up from there. You have Semrush and you have ahrefs.
- [26:53]
A
Okay.
- [26:54]
B
And I wish I would.
- [26:56]
A
I know you worked at NP on your Patel. How about their. That tool there? Do they have one as well?
- [27:02]
B
You know I get white labeled under, under Neil Patel for some, for some work and I, I don't get into their tools. They may have some great tools. I just don't know much about them.
- [27:12]
A
Yep.
- [27:14]
B
Actually I think Neil Patel purchased Answer the Public which, which is a fantastic tool.
- [27:19]
A
Uber Suggest is when I was thinking.
- [27:21]
B
Of off top of my head haven't used it. Okay. It could be, it could be good. I mean a lot of These tools offer 37 days or whatever it is the one a lot of them pull from the same place.
- [27:35]
A
It seems like very similar. It's just a matter of how it's presented and stuff like that.
- [27:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if it's a bear to use, you're never going to use it. Right. So consider that when you get the freeing ten dollar thing versus the, the twenty dollars a month item, right. Like choose the one you're actually going to use. Don't let price sway 100 a research.
- [27:55]
A
Tool and then say I'm pet parents again or poverty dot com. Let's say I went to rank or something. What would I do? What do I do now with this tool?
- [28:06]
B
So you're gonna, you're gonna approach it from two perspectives. One is you have A list of ideas in your head and you're going to go to that tool and you're going to start typing in your ideas. Right. So for me, I would type in SEO services, SEO consulting, something like that. How many people are searching for that? I don't know. Got to figure it out. And then, so you then take that information, put it someplace safe in a folder, but then go to Google search results and start typing in those queries and start to see the sites that are showing up, grab those sites, dump them into the tool and you're going to see. And this is mind blowing because people, people don't, people don't know. Well, you can see what your competitors are ranking for. You can, you can. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. So put those competitors into these tools and you can see all the things they rank for and all the language that people use to search.
- [28:55]
A
So cool. So real quick there, that's amazing. Let's say power.com and I want to rank for Cat Lady Gifts. Or maybe that's something that's in my head and I don't want to rank for it. But like, let's just take that. I'd say search in the tool. Cat lady gifs. I get a whole bunch of results. Wait, I go into Google and type that in.
- [29:14]
B
Go into the, go into the search tool. Okay, Search tool, one of those tools.
- [29:19]
A
And then it's going to give me a list of sites that are ranking. Correct.
- [29:24]
B
Correct. If you do that in Google. Yeah, well, you'll. Well, two parts. You'll see that in Google, but you'll also see that in the tool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so choose one of those sites and then put it into the tool and see everything they rank for.
- [29:36]
A
I think what your, your point was with that is look at the volume, how many people are searching. Cat Lady.
- [29:41]
B
That's right.
- [29:42]
A
And if it's a month, let's just use a round number. You're like, oh, interesting, 10,000 people are searching for that. I should probably. I wish I would rank for that. That'd be, that'd be my first thought. Like I wish that I showed up first and searches for this.
- [29:56]
B
Yeah. Especially for something like gifts. Right. So that's a, that's a E commerce centric term versus cat. What is a Cat lady? Right. Informational. You can, you can rank for that. You can have links on that page to your, to your products. But that's an informational search. But Cat lady gifts, that's someone who has their credit card in their hand, they're looking to plunk it down.
- [30:23]
A
What do you think the click through rate is? Let's say someone on Google and types in click through rate, cat lady, gifs. What's the click click through. If it's 10,000 searches a month on that, what's ranked number one and two? Like do you have any high level numbers of this?
- [30:36]
B
So, so let's break that down into two pieces. So first we assume 10,000 searches. And so here's what I've seen with the search, with the search volume from these tools. It's all wrong. It's all wrong. And so I, about a month ago I sent a brief to a content brief to a client and at the top of the brief is keyword 1, 2 and 3 and the associated volume for one of these tools. And the first term had, I don't know, 500 queries searches a month. The second term had 250. The third term had zero. And the feedback I got back was why would we target a term that has zero searches a month? Excellent question. I'm glad you asked. How possibly could a term get into these, into these tools if it has zero searches a month? How is that even possible? It's not. So it doesn't have zero searches a month. It has at least one. And when I say at least one, I mean something that no one else is going to optimize for because they go zero. It's not zero. And I can tell you firsthand, looking at some of the pieces of data around search volume a month from the tools versus the actual websites that I work on, mind blowing. I will, I will target zero all day long if it's relevant to my business.
- [31:59]
A
So if it's relevant, doesn't really matter the volume.
- [32:01]
B
If it's 10,000, I don't care. I don't care about it. If it's relevant to my business, I'm optimizing for it because. No, because people are going to go zero and their clients are going to go zero.
- [32:12]
A
I think that incorrectly or I have been looking at this incorrectly because I think about like that volume of 10,000 and I immediately think of like I'm typing my calculator here times 5% or 5% and 500 clicks per month. And then I'm like what's my conversion rates? I 2% on my website visitors. I'm getting 10 customers from that thing. Yeah, and that's not necessarily the best approach. Not a bad approach probably.
- [32:40]
B
It's one lens to look at it. So when you have 10,000. Absolutely. Do that math. Yeah. What is, let's assume, let me, let's get to the bottom line of it. Right? So you're gonna have X number of people who click. X number of people who convert, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So what is the lifetime 20% click?
- [32:55]
A
People click on it.
- [32:56]
B
Number one is going to get more clicks than number two. Number two is going to get more clicks than Number three.
- [33:00]
A
Okay, so let's say 2,000 clicks. 10,000. And let's say my purchase rates on Those clicks are 2%.
- [33:09]
B
Sure.
- [33:10]
A
And that's 40 conversions just in that one keyword search.
- [33:14]
B
Right.
- [33:15]
A
And let's say an average value of $35. And that's $1,400 in revenue just from that one keyword.
- [33:23]
B
So let's assume that's one month. Right. Let's assume it's static through the year.
- [33:29]
A
Yep.
- [33:30]
B
And now let's assume that you can do that with five more keywords. Yeah.
- [33:33]
A
So 16, 16,800 of revenue for the one keyword. And now if I did that for five keywords, that would be $84,000 in additional revenue from SEO. That's the opportunity.
- [33:45]
B
That's right. That, that is the opportunity. Yeah. And so people go, how do I do that, Nick? How long is that going to take? Well, and here's a terrible answer. It's a great question. Here's the terrible answer. It depends, it depends on the health of your website. Depends on how long you've been online. You need to be a good citizen of the Internet, right. Google's not going to go, oh, you have a million pages all about X, Y and Z. You put it out yesterday, you're going to rank for all those terms. It's not, it's not how it works. Right. There's a build up to it. But if you're building a business, if you're not here for a paycheck tomorrow, if you're not looking at game systems, if you're not looking to flip one business into the other. Right. Like we're talking about people who want results over period of time because they're into what they're doing and they want those results, you're building a business, they're building something worth having. For those people do put the time in, put the time in for SEO, because your, your calculations, I don't know if they're correct or not, but that's the idea. Yeah.
- [34:41]
A
The idea is the most important thing, like the principles behind it. And if you just take your, your numbers like some of these assumptions. $84,000, I think I said in revenue. Let's say assume that you're a 30% profit margin company. That's $25,000 in EBITDA, you know, profit annually from the SEO initiative. So that means in theory, you can spend up to that amount and be break even if everything went perfectly and we're all completely correct. But that's the idea, the thinking behind this. I'm starting to grasp that more.
- [35:09]
B
That's right. Yeah.
- [35:12]
A
Beautiful, man. Where can people actually. Maybe I'll wrap up with the rapid fire questions 35 minutes in. What's your favorite business book?
- [35:25]
B
My what?
- [35:26]
A
Your favorite business book.
- [35:28]
B
Oh, I'm crushing on 10x is easier than 2x these days.
- [35:33]
A
I haven't heard that yet. It's on my list.
- [35:35]
B
Yeah. Fantastic. So it's basically like you can double your time and energy and you can get to double your revenue, or you can fundamentally change how you think and function and you can get to 10 times the amount of revenue.
- [35:47]
A
Amazing. What's the one thing that you wish that you knew before starting your business?
- [35:52]
B
I wish I knew that it was good to take my own advice. For four years, I've been lucky. I stepped into the business with the goal of gonna make it work. That was my entire business plan. Gonna make it work. And I stepped into 60 hours of billable hours the first three or four months. Fantastic. Don't ask me how it happened. I really don't know. I'm not sure. But that has continued for 5ish years. Right. So it was always focusing on client work. And it was only the past year that I took a look at my own website. And like, I don't, I don't rank for, for what I want to rank for. Right. It's, it's, it's a classic. Shoemaker's kids. Right. Doesn't have the shoes. And so started to focus on our properties. Not the owned and operated that I was referring to earlier, but the service optics in.com makes a world of difference. So I wish. I know, and I should have listened to my own advice five years ago. I would be in a different place today.
- [37:02]
A
What is the worst business advice that you've ever received?
- [37:07]
B
Oh, man, I can't think of one specific piece, but I can think of. I mean, I was just on LinkedIn earlier today and just like people yelling at you that you're doing wrong and here's my way of doing it. No thanks. It's everywhere. Yeah.
- [37:27]
A
If your family and your friends and customers Ought to get together and write a book about you or an article about you without you being involved at all. What are some of the things that they would say about your characteristics, both positive and negative?
- [37:43]
B
That's a good question. I think my wife would say that I don't put things back in the right place, and I do that a lot. I don't close the cabinets, that I'm a decent driver. I'm not sure I'd have to. I'd have to give you. I'd have to think about a little bit more. Those are just the things that are coming to mind right now as I hear my wife getting coffee.
- [38:12]
A
Nice. Love that. It's a good mix of positive and negative in it. Do you think that everybody should be entrepreneur or business owner?
- [38:19]
B
No, I don't. I don't think a lot of people have the stomach for it. It's. I mean, here's. Here's the lovely thing about going to school and going to that interview, and they say where you want to be in five years. Like, it's. It seems. It feels really, really safe. It feels like there's a path that you can navigate and there's, you know, like it's. It's. It's just over that hill. It's right over there. Except here's the thing. There's a bunch of switchbacks. It's not a straight line, and that hill just keeps on getting pushed out. Right. Some of it's true and some is just a lie that's been built. So. But there's a lot of safety in that lie. And so it works for enough people where the lie seems to be true. It's not always. And right now, there's a lot of people who are getting laid off. Right? The lie is falling apart a bit. Right. The lie was Covid hits. Everyone can work from home. It's okay now it's not okay. That's part of the lie too, right? It's just what it is. I subscribed to that lie for a long time, and then I didn't. But it's a different way of operating. You need to come into it and go, there is no roadmap. What I do today may or may not work tomorrow, and most likely it is not going to work in 12 or 24 months. It just won't. The world is going to change. I'm going to change. My business is going to change. My customers are going to change. Things will change. But that's the exciting part of it, all, right? Because you get to build the thing you want to build, you're in control. You're in the driver's seat. Right. It's the classic. If you don't have a dream, someone will be happy to hire you to work for theirs. Right? To build their dream. Well, choose, choose your lane. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. But choose your lane and stick to your lane. That's the most important part, I think.
- [40:10]
A
I love that. What would you wrap up here? What would you say to that entrepreneur, that business owner who maybe is working full time job and they're not sure if they're gonna have, they have what it takes, but they're listening to this and we're 40 minutes in now, wrapping up this podcast and they've listened to the whole thing. What would you say to that person who is kind of doubting themselves? They're not sure exactly if this is their head out for this.
- [40:34]
B
Yeah. I would say you have a skill to, to use and succeed or you don't. Right. And so if you do. My skill was SEO. I did it for a lot of folks as an in house SEO for a long time. So when I stepped out, I had two things going for me. I had a network of folks who have given me business over five years. So great, thanks. When someone's in the room and they go, I need an su guy, do you know someone? They go, I know a guy, his name is Nick. And then I get those referrals, right? And I had the skills. I had the skills from 20 something years. I learned on someone else's dime. I didn't learn on my dime. Learn on someone else's. Super helpful. So when I stepped into it, I could be effective and I was able to be effective because I learned what it was like to work cross, functionally, cross departmentally with folks. I learned the various skills needed for my domain to be successful. I learned to work with people. I learned the tools, I knew the things to do. It's way harder when you don't have those experiences. So if you don't have a skill, go build the skill.
- [41:40]
A
Go build one skill.
- [41:41]
B
Go build the skill. If you have a product and a skill, if you have SOAP and you know, Etsy, sell yourself on Etsy. On Etsy, right? It may not be enough, it may not be big enough for you to break out of that job, but it's a start. It's a good start, right? And there's, then there's no false hill. Like you just don't have a hill. Right. Which is super Cool. Like build your own hill. Go do it. So maybe just be the beginning of it, but you may build other products and services and build out something different. But if you, if you want to be on the path, you got to get on the path. You just got to figure out what you're starting, where you are today. Are you in a position to get on that path? If you're not, it's okay. Go work for someone else. Go. Go learn the things you need to learn. Go in the direction you want to go in.
- [42:24]
A
Beautiful. Nick. Where can people find you, work with you, learn from you, talk to you more? Where can we find you?
- [42:31]
B
Yeah, I'm@Opticsin.com online. You can find me on LinkedIn. And here's one thing we didn't talk about that I do every once in a while. So I work with folks on their personal operating system. I use a tool called the Harrison Assessment. And what it does is it breaks down your personal operating system over 175 characteristics. It shows you what you prefer to do, what you least prefer to do, and that's how you typically go about your day. What really jazzes me up? What do I avoid? Right. And so, and where do you find yourself under stress? So you, the way you, the way you operate when it's a good day may not be the same way you operate when it's a bad day and it calls it out. It's fascinating. It shows your operating system black and white and you can see where's your risk tolerance? I wasn't. When I first took this assessment, I had a 10 out of a score from 2 to 10. I was a 10 in stable career. I wanted to work for someone. My risk score was a two. Well, that was 2017. In that timeframe, I started to work for myself. So my risk has gone up, my stable career has gone down. Right. And so that's what, like you asked, should people work for themselves? Maybe, like, let's see what your, what your tolerance is. How's that going to feel when a client says, I'm pulling the plug? How's it going to feel when you don't have a client to work on today? Like, let's understand what that's what that stress level looks like. Those risk scores look like. It's a great place to start to understand yourself a little bit, to see if this is a good place to go for you.
- [43:59]
A
Awesome. Nick, by the way, if you're listening to this or watching this right now, depending on where you are consuming it, you will have all these links to Nick's website and his LinkedIn. All that good stuff in the show notes or the description below if you're watching on YouTube. Nick, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate you coming on.
- [44:16]
B
Thanks, Cody.
- [44:17]
A
Awesome. Talk to you soon.