183 | Mastering SEO: Unveiling Best Practices and the Future of Search with Patrick Dillon, CEO of Wise Digital

🌟 Join us for an insightful episode as we delve into the captivating world of SEO, digital marketing, and best practices with our guest, Patrick Dillon, Founder and CEO of WISE marketing.

🎯 Uncover the secret ingredients to SEO success as Patrick shares the importance of understanding your audience, having accurate data, and maintaining a top-notch website to dominate search results.

🚀 Explore Patrick's expert predictions on the evolving landscape of search and the potential impact of new search chat options from industry giants like Bing and Google.

💡 Learn the value of strong content and the potential risks of using AI-generated content in your digital marketing strategy 

🛠️ Get practical tips and advice on how to adapt to the shifting landscape of search, ensuring your business stays ahead of the curve and thrives in the digital age.

🔥 Find out how a solid foundation, including a great website and accurate listings, can help you stay relevant and visible as AI engines continue to evolve.

💬 Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn for expert guidance in mastering SEO, digital marketing, and staying ahead in the rapidly changing industry.

Hi, It's Isar the host of the Business Growth Accelerator Podcast
I am passionate about growing businesses and helping CEOs, business leaders, and entrepreneurs become more successful. I am also passionate about relationship building, community creation for businesses, and value creation through content.
I would love it if you connect with me on LinkedIn. Drop me a DM, and LMK you listened to the podcast, what you think and what topics you would like me to cover 🙏

Transcript

0:00

hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Meitis, your host, and today we're going to talk about something that is basically the bloodline of most businesses, which is website traffic. And it doesn't matter whether you are a direct-to-consumer B2C kind of website or B2B SaaS company that drives traffic of potential clients and prospects into the website in order to show them what your company does, products or services. Either way, the quality and the quantity of traffic that comes to your website has a direct correlation to the revenue you're going to have. And then what you have on your website has, as far as its impact on conversion, has a direct correlation also on the outcome, the financial outcome of your business. So having a well of. Optimized website will lead to more traffic and higher conversion, or in other words, higher ROI to the resources you put into developing your website. And there are many reasons why you want to look into your web website and reevaluate how it's set up in its strategy. It could be that you're just considering a launch of a new product for a service. In a new niche that maybe you were not in before or maybe a whole new direction from a strategic perspective to your business. A lot of businesses are doing that right now because of all the AI changes that are impacting more or less any industry, or it's just reevaluating the effectiveness of your current website without changing anything, just to potentially make more money without investing ongoing resources in that. So there's many reasons why you would wanna look. Redefining and better aligning your website or recalibrating your website. The question becomes how do you do that? What are the steps you need to take in order to do this process in the most effective way? And our guest today, Patrick Dillon, is an expert. On marketing in general and specifically within that about how to optimize websites and traffic that comes to the website in order to get higher revenue. And in this episode, we're going to discuss the process that he's using with his clients in order to help them achieve these better results. Patrick himself has been in digital marketing for many years now. He's been the CEO and the founder of Wise Digital Marketing Agency for the past four years, and last year in 2022, he won Entrepreneur of the Year by the CEO Review Magazine. So he knows a lot about the topic and he has helped multiple businesses apply this. An effective way, and he's gonna walk us today through that process and hence I'm really excited to have him on the show today.

MacBook Pro Microphone: 3:37

Before we dive into the fascinating conversation with Patrick Dillon, I've got an announcement to make a very exciting announcement on April 18th. So if you're listening to this today, the podcast is coming out, it's tomorrow, but if you're listening later, then. Lucky you. It already happened. I'm launching a new podcast called Leveraging ai. If you like this podcast, you're gonna absolutely love leveraging AI because it's very similar. I'm inviting really smart people to talk about different topics, but they're all around how you can use AI in order to be more efficient, grow the business and advance your career. It's going to be very practical tips on how to take AI tools and how to develop processes around them in order to see business results. The podcast again is called Leveraging Ai. It's your favorite host, myself, ISAR Meitis, and with some really amazing guests. and you can find it right now and subscribe. Right now on the platform you're listening to all the other podcasts. I would love to have you as a listener there as well, and now to the interview with Patrick.

4:42

patrick, welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. Thank you, sir. Patrick, let's start with, when did it hit you that this is the holy grail, right? That, that the focus that a lot of businesses can get a lot of value just by optimizing their website. Yeah. You know, and it's, I don't, I don't want to say it's all website, right? There's so much more, especially today. I mean, even if you go back five or 10 years, it's, it, it, but today certainly it's not, it's not never just a website. The website's, the website's the only thing you've, you own on the internet, right? Right. You don't, don't own your Google business profile or your Yelp page or your Facebook page. Those platforms own. that They, they control the structure of those pages. What you're able to display, how many characters are you able to use, how many images you're able, the website's, the one place on the internet that you, you own, you, you, you physically own that domain that, that you URL or website address and you own anything that can go on on the site. you know, I. The, the paradigm shift for me as a business owner and I've, I've founded 10 companies. I, I, I built and sold a big software company. I built a franchise digital marketing agency that went into 12 US markets, and it had seven or 800, 800 clients before I sold it. I own two commercial janitorial companies on top of, you know, my marketing agency. But, you know, for me, the, the shift happened when, you know, I started seeing the results of our own digital marketing efforts for my own businesses beyond, you know, what we were doing for clients and the, in the digital marketing agency model, we probably helped about a thousand businesses now over the last 10 years. I saw the growth that they were having with their businesses. I started doing the same thing for our businesses. Then I started doubling down and tripling down and doubling down again. And, you know, today the majority of our, business comes from our, our own, you know, digital marketing efforts. a hundred percent of the business that that came into. And, and continues to come into my janitorial businesses come from seo o for the marketing agency. SEO is the primary driver for, you know, the majority of our business. All of our biggest accounts have come from seo. you know, we don't even need to advertise anymore really for my, my janitorial businesses or my agency because SEO brings in, certainly more than we need. we, we turn away about 80% of the prospective clientele that come to the agency. You know, not the right bit, not the right budget. They're brand new businesses. They don't know direction they're going and that kind of thing. But yeah, it's, it's something that's been evolving for me to answer your question over the years. and I'm, I'm a numbers guy. I have a, a finance and marketing background, so I, I'm, I'm. You know, incredibly diligent about tracking where leads come from. The value of closed deals, the closing cycles, and the KPIs behind what, you know, what we see coming from internet leads are so much better than what we get from referrals or friends or all that, like old school mentality type, you know? Oh, I grow through referrals. Well, yeah, so does every good business. That's not a marketing strategy. Awesome. I, I think that's very solid, advice. I really like the point you started with though, that that's the only thing you actually own and all the other platforms can change their algorithms tomorrow. And if you count on that as, I'll go back to my initial terminology or bloodline. You're fucked because that, that's it, it's gone overnight. Like literally it could change overnight. And then you don't have the same traffic. You don't have the same money, you still have the same overhead. Yeah. And you're not in a good shape. So I, I love that as a point. Take TikTok as an example, right? There's so many business owners that invested in, you know, local, direct to consumer brands that invested in TikTok s platform. That's all at risk. They don't own that. You just, you just owned a strategy. you, you owned a temporary strategy for a, a, a maybe soon to be defunct platform in the United States. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I'm with you a hundred percent. So let's dive right in. Let's dive to the process. If I wanna reevaluate or even start from scratch, but I think most of the people listening to this probably have a website. Yep. And. If I wanna reevaluate my website and my traffic and optimize it in order to get more business. And I think the situation we're in is the holy grail, right? You get more traffic than you can handle and you can pick and choose cherry pick literally the best clients that, that you can in order to maximize the efforts and the revenue that you're bringing in. So take me through it step by step. Yep. and and good point on that, I'll start with that is like a lot of times business owners come to us and we talk about what we can do and what we've done for other businesses and they're sometimes it's like, oh, I can't grow that fast. Well, it's not about taking on all that business. It's about being in control. And when you don't have a marketing strategy plan program in place for your business, you're not in control. Your clients are in control with the crappy referrals they give you. We all, ha we all, you know, ve seen that before. We've gotten a referral to somebody like, why did that guy refer me that shit? I gotta spend time, you know, and be polite to this person when they're totally wrong for my business. And that person should have known, it's not their fault. It's your fault for, for not having a, a plan in place to go and get the type of business that you want and be able to pick and choose. So I think to answer the question on. Where do we get started? It's, it's, I, I think it's always helpful for me, especially having started 10 businesses to look back at mistakes, failures, and, you know, dumb shit I did. And so I think there's two mistakes that most business owners make when they first get into digital. they, they, they don't have an established budget and they hire the wrong people. Okay, so budget is everything, right? Because the, the, the vast connected of the internet and digital world today means that you just need to play at your a game in as many, places as possible. Social search, both organic and paid or social, both organic and paid content, newsletters, blogging your website, which. is Strategy, seo, copy, design, development, analytics, all of that's tracking, all that stuff. You know, the, the way you handle leads in incoming business, you know, from e-commerce to the, the conversion metrics to traditional business, to the intake process, the crm, the follow up, the sales, all that stuff. And I, and I think, you know, the, the mistake that most business owners make when they get started is they hire, you know, somebody on Upwork or some freelancer or some website designer, right? Those. Those are bullshit solutions that, that are exist in the marketplace because there's a lot of weak players in any field. You've got bad dentists, you've got bad lawyers, you've got bad website people, and it's hard to weed through those people because you don't, in the beginning, when you first get into your, your first website, your first digital sort of experience. In a business, you know, you just, you ask all the wrong people for the wrong advice, which is typical of anything in life, right? We ask the wrong people for marriage advice. We ask the wrong people for legal advice. We ask the wrong people for accounting device. Well, it's like that in, in digital cuz like everybody has an idea of what a website is or whatever, and most of'em are wrong, 99 in my experience. You go hire a jack of all trades, master of done your, your website designer who says, yeah, I can do all that. Well, sure they can do all that because they don't want to lose the business to somebody else. They're gonna learn on your dime trying to get this stuff done. And what you're gonna end up with is a really expensive, in most cases. A really expensive pamphlet online. They design all the services onto one page, like they would a pamphlet in real life. They, they set up a three or four page website. they don't do any SEO work. They don't do any strategy. So, you know, the, you know, what you need to consider as a business owner is. Before anything is touched, before any line of code is written or design file is created or word of copy is written, you need to start with strategy. And strategy can't be done right if you don't have the right players in the room or people on the team. Right? That's why a website designer, and I use that sort of air quotes thing, cause like there's no such thing as a website. there, there's no one person on earth that can. design and code a website that would perform similar to a team of experts, because in our, you know, in our company we've got seven different departments. We've got strategy, seo, copy, design development, paid media, and like ongoing content, social media and blogging and all that stuff. All of those people, time research and energy goes into a website project. So when we start out with a client, let's say, let's say it's an average size build, like a 30 page website, which is, is kind of the, the magic mark now for Google to consider your website and your domain authoritative. you know, you're gonna have probably a 16 week build there. The first month of that is gonna be intake and strategy. So we, we sit down, we interview the business owner. What are your g goals, desires, wishes, budget, timeframe. How did you get here? How did you start your business? Where do you want it to be in one, three, and five years? What products and service make up your revenue? How do you want that to change in the future? What is the business of your dreams? Once we get all that information? Then each team, seo, copy design, you know, go into research and they come back with their, their needs from their target north. Right. So SEO needs this to happen. Copy needs this to happen. Design, ux, ui, wireframes, full cop, full design, like they need this to happen. Des development needs this, that here's what integrations are, are possible and needed analytics. Here's all the reporting dynamic call tracking and live chat. Like all this stuff has to be put into place because that's what your, that's what's gonna drive the results you're looking for and the hitting your business goals. And then once that strategy is laid out, then we can get going with the, with the stages of the process. I think there's an image that I shared with you where, you know, we go through a very structured process site map. We all agree based on the research, this is the pages, this is the structure, here's how navigation's gonna work. Everybody signs off on that. We move to the next step, which is. the, the SEO work, then wire frames, then copy, then full design, mocks, then development. And right before we get you onto staging, we're already putting together the blogging and content strategy, the social media strategy, and the paid media strategy on BA based on any budget. So I, I love what you're saying on, on several different levels and, and we'll, we're gonna dive into some of those, to some of those milestones. But the first one is that everything starts with. And you know, there's the famous quote, if you don't know where you're going, how you're gonna get there. Right? It's, it's the, it's the number one thing. And to touch on a few things you said that are very critical, sometimes you think in arguing, but like I mentioned in the beginning, you may wanna make a change or you may want your business in five years to be in a different place than it is today or maybe in a year or maybe in six months. And in order to make those changes, in many cases it. Having a slightly different audience. Yeah. And it could be a niche within your existing audience, it could be something completely different. Yeah. Which means now you have to cater to those people. Yeah. In basically everything that you do in order to build, you know, the trust to build relationships and, and to have people want to do business with you. And so really what you're saying is at the very first step, and now I'm, I'm putting aside for a second, an external business, which is obviously very helpful because then people like you, they, you know the process and you know what to do. But you're saying the very first step is internal research, is to figure out what are the goals, where are you trying to aim in whatever timeframes. Yeah. And then based on that, going through external research, which is, you mentioned a few things. What are the, what are the requirements that are driven from this new audience that you need? Right? Where are they in the world? I assume. So what things from an external research perspective do I need to look for in order to then identify the tactical steps that I will need to take? Yeah. So, let, let's take, let's take a imaginary business, new account. Gimme, gimme a business example that you want to. I'm gonna steal something from that Really made me laugh the first time I heard it. underwater basket weaving underwater. Perfect. Actually, I love it. We, we love, and I love niche space businesses do. If you have one of these, I'll take a piece of it because we can shit outta it. Okay. So, you know, fir first things first. as a niche based business, like underwater basket weaving is the fastest way to grow a business like that is to understand what people search for related to that particular business. And you wanna look at high intent and low intent based search terms, right? So like a, a high search intent search term would. How to, you know, how to do underwater basket weaving? Yeah. Or underwater basket weaving courses or underwater basket weaving, weaving training. Right. Like those are lower search volume terms and phrases than just underwater basket weaving. Right? Sure. Which is a global term. People are just trying to figure out what the hell that even means. Right. It's a joke sometimes and they're used in, you know, like a re a, a report for school. We're not interested maybe in. Searchers. We're interested in these searchers, right? Yep. Now you could of course go and research soho and find all the affinity groups and underwater basket weaving. You could go into YouTube and you can look at all the, you know, the, the quality length and content views and all that stuff of underwater basket weaving videos and YouTube. So we, we identify the universe of, you know, the per we, once we know the persona of what. Client you're going after, right? Like, are you selling a course maybe, online and it's$19, or are you selling a, a, a real, you know, intense, training on how to do this for a thousand dollars? Right? It's a very different persona. Yeah. And so, you know, we wanna, we wanna understand that first, but once we understand. Then we go out and start developing the tentacles for traffic, and so where are people gonna come from social, from search engines, from YouTube, from all these different places. Once we have that all sort of documented, then we can begin the process of developing site map, content, design, all those other stages, but. You know, coming up with strategy for traffic is always first. It's never an afterthought, right? That's why like hiring that jack of all trades, master of none is, is really challenging because like they go and build a pamphlet cuz they don't understand seo, they don't understand YouTube, they don't understand social media, they just know how to design something and, and that's not very helpful if you skip all the important shit. So let me ask you a question because you, you're saying something that's obviously very, very true and I think the bigger the company is, the more they're gonna go to the solution you're saying. And I think smaller businesses, solar entrepreneurs, new entrepreneurs are gonna go with, okay, I'm gonna hire somebody to develop a website for me off of fiber. How can you. Marry the two And what is like the budgetary line in the sand Yeah. That you need to get to, to say, okay, I'm gonna hire a professional agency because I understand all the benefits long term. Yep. How much money do I need as an entry point, right. To say, okay, to get the real deal, I need to invest X. Yep. And the the reality is, it's not a small versus big thing. It's. Because, because we have, like I remember two or three years ago, we took on one of the largest, commercial cleaning companies in the United States for high-end hotels. If you think of like the Four Seasons and the PS and all those, you know, fancy hotels. Yeah. These guys cleaned those types of businesses and they've been doing it for 37 years. How did they grow over 37 years? Referral. The hard way. Right. Time, energy, effort. Expensive salespeople. It's, it, it's like, it's more about is the, is the business owner in a place mentally where they understand there's a hell of a lot more business out there than that which they can see and touch. Yeah. This is, this goes beyond who can I have a lunch with or have a phone call with or get referred to all that nonsense. and I came from the traditional sales world. I was the number one sales rep for Cutco Cutlery, in the state of Wisconsin all through college. I mean, I know how to sell, but you know, once things opened up for me where, holy shit, there's a big world out there and a lot of businesses and industries that I don't even know about. Yeah. Now our clients of ours, our largest client is the fifth largest accounting firm in Australia. Like, how the hell would've I gotten connected with that? It's, it's a, it's a public company. It's massive. Thousands of employees like, and, and, and the cell, the, the, the c e o of that company texts me on my cell phone daily. Like that just doesn't, that doesn't happen if you're sitting around waiting to get introduced to someone or trying to outbound somebody. So, It's more about, you know, is the business owner in, in a mindset where they don't want to grow. They're like, they're not happy with growing five or 10% a year and this taking 37 years. They want to do it in five or 10. Yeah, you could do that. You just have to. Understand a, it's possible. And then go find a damn good partner to get it, get it done, execute it. So on a budget standpoint, every business is different. Every industry's different. You've got different levels of competition across industries, and you've got businesses even in those industries that are on completely different trajectories. And the foundation's really important. So we kind of start there, right? What's your domain authority? A zero to a hundred point scale on the credibility authoritative authoritativeness of like a u l domain. Right? How long have you had it? How much have been investing in it? What SEO o do you have done to it? What's linked to it? What, which of your nap data is correct? You know, do you have good reviews? All that stuff. So we, we take into account that first. Yep. Without that understanding of and swat analysis of your current situation. you, you can't answer any questions about budget, time or anything, or results, right? So once we have that sort of mapped out, that stage one, like when, when we take clients through this journey is where do you sit right now? Where are the holes? Where, where are the opportunities? What's good, what's bad, all that. Then we can start to develop a plan. you know, what we do with our clients is different. I, I wanna pause you for a second. How do identify good and bad and gaps? Because I think that, One of the biggest pitfalls that people are, you know, blinded by the day-to-day to actually know and say, Hey. Here's how I can find out what's currently not working well. Like what are the cues? What are the questions I need to ask? What tools can I use to say, okay, here are my lowest hanging fruits, because this part of my overall marketing and sales process is broken in these places. If I solve this, this is gonna create just by itself a 20, 30, 40% growth. Then I can start worrying about other. Yeah. there's, when we audit a business, we're auditing, you know, 50, 60 different data points. Some of that is, is, is related to the website, but the website, it goes way beyond the website today, right? Because you've got the website, which helps Google understand if done correctly. The pages on your website, the, the content and ideas on each of those pages, the subject matter of those. So you've got u URL structures, the, the page addresses, titles, which tell Google very quickly like what's on this page, descriptions, which help Google, and users through the snippet that shows up in an organic result knowing, okay, that's the page I want to click on. You know, headers and all this other information. Right. But then you've also. Directory listings, data, map data across a, a large number of different directories that are consistent and accurate. Your name or address, your phone number, descriptions, hours of operations, all that stuff. You've got reviews, which tell Google that you're, you know, trustworthy. You're, you're somebody, they want their users to be able to. go to and trust they'll have a good experience with your product or service. Like we have to look at all that stuff. A d a compliance, right? Websites have fallen under the public domain of, of ada a, the American With Disabilities Act in the United States for, for over 10 years now, since 2012, most small businesses don't understand it. There's a federal tax credit of$5,000 available to businesses that make their website ED compliant. It's federal law. You have to. You know, and, and Google knows that they know you're facing a demand letter or a lawsuit if you're not. So, if all these things are taken into consideration by Google, it's known data and activity. We have a rough idea of the makeup, of the algorithm. And so if we just do this stuff right, and not skip shit and try and skip on, you know, your budget, save a thousand bucks here that destroy your results over there, you know, and we just do it right. We're ahead of, you know, 99% of your competi. So the, the game is, is about being very process oriented. Yep. And very long-term results oriented. So it's a long-term ROI game versus, oh, I, this is all the budget I have. But then you're saying, okay, I'm gonna save a thousand dollars, which gonna cost me$150,000 a year from now from lost. And it's really like for, for me, you know, as a, as a finance and marketing guy, like I'm, I'm both right brain and left brain. Like I know there's a lot of art to this messaging and copy and, you know, that sort of, persuasiveness, right? Th that great design and great words and all that stuff create, but the other side. As important or more important? Certainly if it's skipped, it's, it's, it's the whole, everything's a waste of time. And so, you know what, what we do with clients is we help establish a, a, a basic budget, right? which, you know, for 2000 a month, you get this for 20,000 a month, you get this for 5,000 a month, you get this. And, and we, you know, we, we ask clients to come to us with a realistic budget, but whatever that budget is, we can work on something that's gonna drive business growth. And when you see great results, Everybody's had a bad experience with, you know, the jack of all trades. Everybody's had a bad experience with the agency. I hired four agencies for my first business. I got so sick of all of'em that I created my own digital marketing agency as a division or software company. And then I bought that from our investors when I sold the software company. And, and it's, it's because like, this shit works. Yeah. But give it proper time, attention, and educate yourself in the process when you, when you wanna, when you find a partner. You really wanna find a partner who's gonna like pull a veil a little bit and show you what the hell they're doing so that you can become more and more educated through the process. That's, I think one of the mistakes that a lot of, you know, business owners make when they're, when they're hiring an agency, is they don't immerse their self in the experience. And I was thinking about this the other day, like, you know, why do a lot of. Agency, you know, client relationships don't work out. It's because the, the, the business owner isn't willing to grow. And, and it's like, it, this is, this is difficult. It's, it's challenging. It makes you, makes you very introspective into your business, the processes you've set up, how you've gotten here, and more so where you really want to go. It's just like walking into college for the first day or a first date with that person. You're gonna marry. Like you, you're, you're gonna feel some pain. But the growth is gonna be worth it. Got it. So let's, I, I think we talked a lot about the research side. You said the next step would be site map. What are the things that you need to consider, like the top things you need to consider when you're starting to build your site map or redefine your site map? Yeah. Can I, can I share my screen? sure. Yeah. Okay. Gimme a second. No, most people are gonna listen to this, but, yeah. we can always create a video from section. Yeah, I'll walk through it real quick. So, you know, we've developed a process here, which is, you know, 15 stages or whatever. Can you see my screen? The Nest process? Yeah. Yep. So Nest is our proprietary website platform. my, my partner and I have been working on our own website platform for five years. We started building it in 2019, started launching clients in 20. you know, we're really all in on this. Zach was the solutions architect to the largest video game in the world, and then became the architect to all of e-commerce through the largest, con clothing conglomerate in the world. We, we've built on everything you could ever imagine. You know, the, the crappy platforms that are like the do it yourselfers, like Wick and Squarespace. We've had to help and manage clients on, you know, that came to us with that. We've built a zillion websites on WordPress, but it's a two decade old platform. It's really susceptible to harm. It's very slow. So, you know, nest has, a lot more advantages. It's way more modern technology. It's faster, it's lightning fast, it's more secure. But the process, again, always it starts with a site map. And the site map is, is mapping out. This is an example for a mortgage, a small mortgage company in Chicago. So when we sit down with the clients and we say, Hey, what's your team makeup? What, what types of loan products and services do you focus on? Everybody's got a different niche in in mortgage, we've. Mortgage was our number one vertical for quite a few years. and so, you know, we've got a lot of clients that have different directions. You know, one of our, one of our largest clients, all they do is focus on investment properties for short-term rentals. We've got another client, all he does is focus on VA loans. These are both. Top 1% of 1% mortgage, agents in the United States. these guys, they wanted to go more over like a general mix of like jumbo conventional, F h A and VA loans. So we want a page for every one of those because if you're in Chicago where this client is, And you want to type in, you know, jumbo loan in Chicago or VA loans, Chicago or, or just VA loans or mortgage broker for VA loans near me or any of that type of stuff. That's the page you're gonna get into cuz that's what we're gonna design Google to index and, and, and get you found by. And so, you know, a lot of times business owners. As they work with a shitty freelancer, they get a page for all their services, and then all the services are jumbled on one page. And Google's like, well, what do you actually do? I don't know what you do. Everything's all on one page. You know? Then the, the url structure, title, description, headers, images, all that stuff are too general, and Google says, all right, you're not, you're not gonna get. You're not gonna get found. Right. And then, so really, so really what you're saying is the site map is built according, at least the deeper levels of it, according to the questions that your potential clients are going to ask per Well, that we're gonna ask the clients and they're gonna answer. Yep. So it's, it's built around the business that you wanna have in the future, right. Yes. So like, so we're, we're saying the same thing. It's not your clients, it's their clients. Like what are their clients, what are the financial people, what kind of financial services? They would want to look for in order to find your company or like, okay, they're gonna ask me if, I'll use your example for jumbo loans stats. I want to be known for jumbo loans. I want to be known for, refinancing. I want to be lo known for a whatever. Whatever other things. They're like, okay, if these are the things you want people to find, you buy because these are the services or products you wanna sell. Each and every one of them becomes a page. Then you arrange the pages under whatever categories, and that's how you build a site map. So it's basically going back to. The clients, their needs, what they're actually searching for on a search platform, and then translate back from that to the structure of the website. Absolutely. And, and, and once you really start to understand this, the business owner, the, the mine, you can, you can see people's heads start to sort of swell and then explode. Like how big this can get, right. So we've got a law firm in, in the Colorado area. My brother actually was a frat brother of one of the partners, so I knew him from college too. You know, so they came to us and they, they were with the largest digital marketing agency in the world for law firms. They felt like they weren't getting, a, they weren't, they didn't have a proactive, you know, partner or approach there anymore. they were constantly bringing that firm ideas. They were pissed off, like, why don't you bring us ideas? How come you're not helping us grow our business? Every time they wanted more business. They just, that, that, that marketing agency says you gotta spend more on ads. It's a bullshit answer, you know, because it's a low ROI producing activity lower than SEO would be because SEO you're providing in fu you, you know, you're investing in future content that could last forever and traffic and so, You know, but when you start thinking about was the website set up to build the business of the future, not the business staff today, but the business they want later, you know, from a locations perspective, do they have enough office locations? Is there arbitrage opportunity in areas around the Denver area where no one's dominating for the practice areas and search terms and phrases that this business wants clients and cases for, right. So we looked at the website and the website was too small, it wasn't dissected enough into all the different practice areas. So this is a full service law firm. You've got 12 or 15 different practice areas. So maybe, you know, one of the practice areas is, is business attorneys or business law, but did it have pages set up for every area of business law that these guys specialize in? Like business dissolution, business disputes, startups, you know, that, that m and a, all that type of stuff. And so you have all these different nested pages. So the, the site map to the, to the average user looks like it's about 20 or 30 pages. It's three or 400 pages. You've got location pages, you've got, you know, nested, case law and service pages. You've got blogs, you've got all the stuff in the hetero navigation. And so every page that was, you know, strategized, seo, copy design, dev got like six to eight hours maybe on a per page basis. But what did that generate? In the first year that we launched that new website, we spent about four months building it, designing the ad programs. We spent 600 grand a year on ads for them now, all that stuff. But the website brings in, you know, 40% of the traffic, saving them over a half a million bucks a year just on ads. And it brought them 9,800 client and case leads last year and signed over 12 million in new, new case business. You know, it's, it's a 20 x. Because we worked on the site map for a fricking month, you know, and then once we were, once everybody signed off on it, then we went fast. I love it. I, I, I think, you know, it's like, just like every building, you gotta build the right foundations. And if you have the right foundations, then you can basically build whatever you want on top of it, because it'll be solid and we'll be flexible and you'll be able to do stuff with it. Yep. You touched also. Yep. Yeah. And, and you also touched. Technical side of it, the right platform that will give you the flexibility and the speed and the agility to do what you want, like you said, for a future business. I gotta ask you a tough question, that I'm sure is in the mind of anybody who's doing seo, whether as an agency like you or as a company doing it internally, what do you think are the implications of, you know, the, the AI staff with, with the chat bots coming into. Potentially replacing the traditional search that we know and what impact that's gonna have. And I know Google are probably going to fight this as hard as they can because it generates literally billions of dollars a quarter for them. Right. But assuming that they can't win this battle because I don't think they can. Yep. Where do you think, and again, I I, I know you don't have a crystal ball, but where do you see this. We can talk about this for the next two hours, two years probably. But yeah, you know, we've got a lot written on our website. We've been involved in AI related software solutions and activities for three or four years now. AI powers a lot of the chat behind a lot of our clients programs. We also have human powered chat. You know, every business is different. We, we customize everything to the business. Cuz even if you took two seemingly exact same businesses, two mortgage companies in Chicago, well, one's been around for three years and invested lots in their digital one's, been around for 10 years and invested nothing in digital. And they have different trajectories and goals, right? So you gotta have to consider all that when you're talking about some of this stuff. But, you know, on the, on the AI stuff, You know, AI has and will continue to have implications on everything that we do from coding websites. I just got a demo of a platform that codes, designs and codes websites, from ai. we're not there yet. These guys are like, oh yeah, this is great. Like, none of this is good. Nothing. You know, it, it doesn't come up. You're too early. Keep up with it. Maybe in five years you're gonna have something that's worth anything. But today it's not copy. But, so, so let me ask you specifically, because I, I'm, I'm putting aside, being able to create copy with AI and being able to call the website with AI and being able to design whatever, I'm, I'm putting that aside for a second, and by the way, you and I do not agree on how quickly this is gonna happen, but Yeah. But that's not the case. I'm specifically asking about Bing already. You know, the Bing Chat as an option, it's being adopted at a stupidly high rate. Like the amount of people that started using Bing, myself included, that have never touched Bing, not a single day of their life, right? Is now in the hundreds of millions of people that started using Bing. Google will have to follow that, and they already said, by the way, today, they announced. Going to actually launch it. Before it was kind of like more conversations. Today they've announced, so we are on, on April 6th, 2023. They said, okay, we are gonna have a chat option within our search capabilities, which means eventually, and it could happen fast, could happen slow, it will dissolve somewhat the existing way we search for things because we're not gonna search for. Potential answers. We're gonna search and get an answer, which is a very, very different scenario, which means the very foundation of SEO may go away. And even today, don't get me wrong, like today, I think search is broken. Like you open a page, there's 20 different sponsored links on top, which is ridiculous. So even if you ranked quote unquote number one, you're at the bottom of page one if you're lucky and, and. What do you think businesses should do from a preparation perspective into this new era? If you have any tips? So, absolutely. what I was getting at was, you know, it's, it's, again, it goes back to data. You, you need to be everywhere, that your business can and should be. That's different for every business industry size and type. And you need to be accurate because that data from that, that's pulled in through the AI models is coming from somewhere, right? Yeah. Like I, I think the most interesting thing from a user perspective regarding AI going online is, help with search today. It's like, help me find something with AI in the future. It's helped Teach me something. Yeah. And gimme the. It's not even gimme the answer. It's give me, give me the options. Right? Like, so maybe I want to type in the future, you know what, I have a specific need. I'm, I'm doing, I'm, I'm, I'm forming a new S corp in San Diego. What are the best law firms for me to talk to? Right? Yeah. Well, ai, the, the AI model, whatever platform it's on, right? You know, Bing is powered by chat. G p t. Google's coming out with their own whatever is gonna be next, it's might be better, right? Alta Vista and Netscape got replaced by Google. Like, there's gonna be a, maybe a better solution. You've got really great people backing chat G. You can place your bet on whatever you want, but again, the data comes from somewhere. So you, you still want to focus on having a great website. Which is your salesperson, your 24 hour salesperson, the foundation you own and control. But everything that's built into that has to be read by the AI engines, right? The listings, data, the app data, the review data, all that stuff is gonna come into play when that algorithm, which, which morphs and changes over retirement. That's the difference, you know, is looking for the solutions to answer the user's. So, so nothing really changes, you know, I, I think the, they use behavior changes, but ultimately we're still trying to do the same thing, which is convince the world, the universe, the journey that you are the right solution, right? And it's, and that still comes down to basic marketing principles. Like understand your audience and, and know how to message them. And. And that's what I think is like the name of why his digital came from. Everything's gonna change. Go with experts who actually stay on top of this shit. So like, the AI conversation is great. We've been involved in this in three or three or four years. My, my head of copy is like addicted to everything. Ai, she's just constantly reading about it and putting out great blog information on our website, on it. you know, I think what the challenge is, like how do we enter into that world of ai, again, we can talk about this for hours, but. A lot of people are starting to, play around with like writing blog copy at scale through ai, and I think there's a big danger there. Google's indicated big danger there, right? If it can identify that this is AI written content and you keep pumping it out and putting it on your website, it's not authoritative or credible, you're not a trustworthy source for it cuz you didn't come up with it and Google's gonna start dinging your domain. And we've seen this before in, in historical models like link building, right? Where you get, like, you go to a link farm and you get thousands of links coming to your website and you go in and, and investigate'em in like, half of'em are fricking, fricking porn sites and, you know, other, other sets that are completely unrelated to the business that you're in or the products and services that you offer. And then your, your SEO people later on come in to discover like, what's going on with your traffic and why is your business fallen by 50%? Like lost millions of dollars, right? Then we have to go through this process of disavowing all this crap that, you know, you got conned into buying. And, and it's, it's gonna be the same thing in ai. And I think the danger right now, For people trying to, to use AI to run their digital marketing is, is content, is is is the blogging and stuff like that. I like Dolly. I think it's, it's fun to play around with. I don't think it's there yet. You know, from, from creating, you know, original illustration and images, that stuff's gonna get there first. Like, copy's gonna get there first, then design's gonna get there, then coding's gonna get next. but again, you know, I, I don't. It's gonna be a really interesting world when AI can convince me to buy something all the way through, right? Not just the ad that's already happening, but like where do I click? Where do I go next? What's the shopping cart experience like, all of that. When that all comes together, we're just gonna have to be good at making shit. Yeah. Patrick, this was really fascinating. I think you shared a lot of great information, a lot. I, I think it will get a lot of people thinking about the process they're doing today versus the process they should probably do or at least consider doing. I really, really appreciate you taking the time, sharing from your experience and, and, giving us, from your knowledge. Thank you. Yeah, you bet. Thank you, sir. If people wanna find you, follow you, connect with you, work with you, what's, what's the best way to. Yeah. if actually the best way is just go to my website, why is digital partners.com? And from there you can, you can, you can, you know, find me on the, team page, connect with me on LinkedIn. if you have a business that you're looking to grow and you're, and you're serious about it. Book a call with me. You can do it right from the contact form. You can go right into my calendar and book something. Just, I, I just ask that, you know, if you, if you want us to take time, evaluating your business and doing an audit and coming up with a proposal and all that stuff come with a realistic expectation around timeframe and budget. for most local businesses, you know, we're kind of like between two and 5,000 bucks a month, more for, you know, global, international business. Awesome. Thank you again. This was really great. I appreciate your time. Thank you for coming. Thank you so much.

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