← Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
MASTERING SEARCH ADS & PPC! Navah Hopkins on Strategies for Small Business Growth
00:17:58
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- [00:00]
Jay Schwedelson
Just want to jump in here real quick and let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Thrive. Thrive is an amazing tool that small businesses, thousands of small businesses leverage to run their business in so many ways. And they have this incredible thing called Marketing Center. Now, if you're not familiar with Marketing center from Thrive, great news. For the start of the year, they're doing a special offer right here of a 25% off discount of their Thrive Marketing Center. This thing allows you to run all your ads, boost your online presence, understand all of your customer interactions, and if you want to check this out and get this discount, it is super easy. All you got to do is go to thrive.com that's t h r y v dot com wins. That's thrive th r y v dot com slash wins. And I'm telling you, your marketing is at the center of your business. It what, it's what drives your business. So check out Marketing center from Thrive today@thrive.com wins. Welcome to Small Business Quick Wins, presented by Thrive. This podcast is exclusively designed for small business leaders like you. Prepare to get invaluable insights from every episode, equipped with actionable tips made for immediate implementation in your business. Tune in as we feature firsthand lessons from fellow small business owners and thought leaders. I'm your host, Jay Schwedelson. Over the last 25 years, I've grown multiple small businesses that have generated over $300 million in revenue. Along the way, I've learned pitfalls to avoid and quick wins that can transform your business immediately. I'm excited to share it all. So if you're ready to win on Main street, let's dig into this episode. We are back for Small Business Quick Wins, presented by Thrive. And I'm excited because today we're going to be talking about pay per click. We're going to be talking about search ads, and we have somebody who really knows what they're talking about, unlike me. Who do we got? We got Nava Hopkins. Now, who's Nava? She is. She's one of the most interesting people that you're ever going to meet. She is not only knows all things about search ads and pay per click and she's an expert on this, but she is an evangelist for Optimizer. Okay. She is a rescue dog mom. She's a metalhead. She's a gamer. She is an internationally known speaker and instructor on all things marketing. Nava, welcome to the show.
- [02:39]
Nava Hopkins
Oh, my goodness. Well, first off, I need to dispel the rumor that I'm interesting I am absolutely not interesting. I get highly interested in a lot of things. So it's that, that is, that is why I seem to have a whole bunch of interest. It's just that I get. I'm easily intrigued. But thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to share some. Some thoughts.
- [03:03]
Jay Schwedelson
Amazing. I love that. All right, so before we get into running search ads for if you're a small business owner, how to do it, how not to screw it up. How did Nava become Nava?
- [03:13]
Nava Hopkins
So, funny story. Up until my first year in college, I was confident I was going to be an English teacher. I was confident from the third grade to the first semester in college, maybe even into the second one, I was confident it was what I was going to do. And then I realized I would be both poor and ineffectual because the current education system is just very, very broken. And so I kind of fell into marketing. It was one of my first jobs out of college. Um, and in falling into marketing, I fell into SEO. Did some great work. But for anyone that is a little bit knowledgeable about retention optimization, this was during the Panda Penguin era where everything came crashing down and I had some real ethical questions of am I doing the right thing? So I stopped doing that, took the money I made from SEO, started a nonprofit called Angeled. It was a failed nonprofit. I consider it my MBA because I never actually got one. I kind of self taught myself that second part. But that failed nonprofit gave me a lot of really meaningful connections with universities, with teachers, with investors. And along that, that nonprofit, I was managing Google Ads because effectively you could pay to get certified. Figure it out, help people. I then hit my really big what I call my public speaking break or my knob of the brand break, which is working for Wordstream. I went there for about five years and then after that spent a bunch of time working for different software companies, worked for an agency. You've done some work in house. And so what you just basically need to know about me, the tldr. I love software as a service because it's the most scalable way to take what I know and help the most amount of people without holding hostage large ad spends. So what I'm really excited to talk about with you is what are some things you can do regardless of what size your budget is, to really win on not just Google Ads, but all aspects of ppc.
- [05:23]
Jay Schwedelson
Okay, this is amazing. So let me position it this way. I. Let's say I own an air conditioning company and I'm doing 400 different things. And I go on, one day I go on Google and I see my competitors, I Google my own name of my company and all of a sudden my competitors ads are coming up and I Google air conditioning in the Miami area and all these other people are coming up and I'm like, oh my goodness, I need to do something. And I don't even know where to begin. So what do you tell me in that scenario? This is what you got to do first.
- [05:57]
Nava Hopkins
So this is going to feel really frustrating, but the first thing I'm going to tell you is what not to do, which is to Google your own name. And here is why. When you Google your own name, you are creating impressions that aren't leading to clicks. And when you create impressions that don't lead to clicks, that's telling Google that you, the wonderful brand that you are, are not actually a good answer to that question. So I 100% support people doing research, kind of check to see what, what's going on in the market. But do it in ad preview diagnosis and do it in incognito mode so that you're not tying your profile to that query and to those series of responses because you might get some false positives and false negatives. And what will actually happen is if an ad continues to serve, it might actually lose some of its rank. So you might have to pay more to even get that spot because you're being viewed as not as useful of an answer. So that's the first thing is don't constantly Google your name. Don't stress that out.
- [07:02]
Jay Schwedelson
Goodness, I just learned something. That's crazy. Okay, what else should I do or not?
- [07:07]
Nava Hopkins
So the, the second thing is, what is something to do is to consider what are my actual goals when I'm looking to get started with ppc? Am I looking to get customers? Am I looking to help people know who I am? Am I looking to protect my brand, protect my investment? Because what your goal is is going to really influence what sort of budget you set, what sort of creative you set, things like that. So if your goal is to get customers, I'm actually going to tell you, Mr. A.C. repairman, Mr. Locksmith, whatever, ignore Google search ads the traditional way. Look at local service ads and here's why. Local service ads are a type of Google Ad. They will serve in the map pack so you get the value of your beautiful Google business profile in that map pack. And you only are going to pay per phone call or per message. So from a profitability standpoint, it's a lot easier to get value out of your investment when you're doing local service ads instead of that pay per click driving people to a website. So that's thing number two. Thing number three is if your competitor is bidding on your term. Oh, no, this is scary. You may decide that you want to actively combat that and bid on branded terms. You may also want to do that so you get the halo effect of the high conversion rates, low cost per acquisition, which is the cost that you're totally spending against how many conversions or valuable actions you've taken that you've told Google to track. So cost per acquisition, cost per conversion. You may want to have that nice halo effect going on in your account so you have a branded campaign to combat competitors bidding on your terms. You may also decide, my competitors don't even realize they're doing it because the way keywords work now, I could bid on. I'm gonna give a shout out to one of my favorite local brands, Koruk 9 near and dear friend. Friend of mine. Love her. I love them. I could be searching for dog walking or not dog walking, searching for dog training. And they'd come up just by the rules of close variant. So your competitors may not even know that they're bidding on you. The final thing I'll say, and then I know we need to move on because we're now getting super into the weeds. And this is. This is like, ah, great, great. There is a really useful report in Google Ads that will tell you how often your competitors are serving for certain terms compared to you and what your overlap rate is. And with that, you can make really reasonable decisions. It's called Auction Insights. Whether you want to actively combat your competitors or whether you don't. And there's a separate report that I'll send you a screenshot you can include with this as a resource that will actually tell you the overlap rate of your organic content. So when you talk to an SEO professional, the work that they help you do, how often that work is working compared to your paid. So you might realize, hey, I don't even need to really go aggressive into paid because my SEO is working great or, oh, man, I really need to find a budget. So I'm going to suggest the next thing we talk about is how we find the budget, but we can definitely take this wherever you like.
- [10:45]
Jay Schwedelson
I have a question. You brought up SEO, Search engine optimization.
- [10:47]
Nava Hopkins
Yeah.
- [10:48]
Jay Schwedelson
Versus paid ads. And if I'm running around doing my business and I only have so much time in the day and I only have limited budget, this is A loaded question. Am I better off saying, okay, I'm going to spend 5,000 bucks and get an SEO person to come in and do everything I need to do, get my website optimized, or I'm going to spend $5,000 and run continual, you know, search ads. What do you think is going to be more productive and a better use of my money and time?
- [11:14]
Nava Hopkins
It's actually a super loaded question because the SEO budget will be $5,000 continual just as much as the 5,000 PPC would. You don't pay $5,000 once and you're done with SEO. So the nature just for the audience's sake Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the art and the science of helping Google or Bing understand what your site is and making sure that you rank for queries that are relevant to you and your business. It also is the art and the science of making sure that your site is easy to navigate and easy to process that information. Pay per click is the art and the science. They're both art and sciences of appearing exactly and paying for the privilege, paying exactly when a user searching for you and your services and being able to exactly control the creative now there's a little bit of a fly in the ointment. There's a campaign type called Performance Max or PMAX for short. And Performance Max takes away a lot of the control, but it also takes away a lot of the bias. And there are many brands who will use their hard earned, hard won SEO efforts to fuel and to support their Performance Max campaigns or what are called dynamic search ads campaigns where Google will crawl the site and come up with those answers. So the short answer to your question with all of that disclaimer out of the way is I don't actually consider it a question of $5,000. Equally, it's a question of what is the current operations of the business. If the business is currently getting a certain number of leads per month and that number could not grow without any operational change, SEO is 100% the answer. You do not want to put PPC dollars behind a business that isn't ready to receive the leads that it is going to drive you. If, however, you're looking at your phone, pulling out your hair, wondering how you're going to pay for the next series of employment checks or like your operations are really struggling because you're ready to go. You just you need the leads. That's where PPC can help, but it's not going to solve a broken business problem. So for example, if I have a moving company and I know that there's a certain time during the year that is my best season. I will plan to budget aggressively around that season and keep a steady lower budget. On ppc, specifically SEO, you might keep it continuously, but on ppc I'd keep a lower budget because I want to be ready operationally and lead flow wise for that busy season. So it's, it's not just about apples to apples or even apples to oranges. It's really about understanding your business and knowing if you're ready for the volume.
- [14:35]
Jay Schwedelson
That is amazing. I It's so complicated, all this search stuff, but you break it down in a super helpful and simple way. We're going to need you, have you back on the show because I want to go deep, deeper into all this. But before we wrap up, two things. First off, when you say you're a metal head, is that like Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica, or is there some other category of metal that I know nothing about?
- [15:00]
Nava Hopkins
So funny story. One of my best friends, absolute Megadeth fan. I on the classics, I'm more of a maiden girl myself. I actually got to see one of their last shows with the, with the full set. It was amazing. But I, I'm a very much a power metal fan. I like folk metal. So like Power Wolf, Blind Guardian, Brothers of Metal Tier, who else is really good? Oh, Bloody Wood. Bloody Wood is amazing if people have not so Bloody Wood, just for those that don't know, is an amazing band out of India that takes Bollywood concepts and themes but infuses it with some of the most thrashy, gorgeous, gorgeous vocals. And I need to give a plug to Melissa Bonney. Woman has clear vocals. She has her growl down. She's a belly dancer. She just, she's amazing. So if you can, if you can catch Melissa Bonney, definitely encourage you to listen to Melissa Bonney.
- [16:07]
Jay Schwedelson
Um, yeah, we covered it all in this episode. Listen, we're going to have you back but Nava, we're going to put in the show notes, all your contact info, everything. But where can everybody find you, follow you, connect with you? How can they do that for sure?
- [16:19]
Nava Hopkins
So feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn. Always happy to help. I'm also on Bluesky. Nava Hopkins at Blue Sky. I do a monthly column for Search Engine Journal. Just ask bpc. I also do a quarterly column for Search Engine Land. And then of course at Optimizer, I'm a contributor there, there. And if you're at a conference, I'm going to be on the road this year just like last year. Feel free to pull me over. Say hi. I'm also a very active member of the Women in Tech SEO group and the Paid Search association and PPC Chat Slack. So if you're on any of those slack groups, hit me up. And for any gamers out there, I do have a discord handle. I'm in if you want that. We can make it so that I'll include that in the show notes. But yeah, there's a lot of different ways to connect with me.
- [17:16]
Jay Schwedelson
I love it. I love it. Well, I appreciate you being here. I learned a lot. We're going to have you back, so we'll see you soon.
- [17:22]
Nava Hopkins
Thanks much for having me.
- [17:25]
Jay Schwedelson
Well, that was fun and great news. We got way more where that came from. Subscribe make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips from today's top small business leaders. And hook us up with a five star review if you've got at least one new idea you may consider using. Lastly, if you want to ensure you never miss a message from your customers Again, check out Thrive.comWin to get your free account with Command center today.