Effective SEO Systems and Processes For DTC Brands with Shreya Banerjee and Paul Counts

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Make Each Click Count podcast. I am your host, Andy Splakel, and today we have a dynamic duo joining us. Today's guests are Shreyade Banerjee and Paul counts. The brilliant minds behind marketing counts. Together, they've revolutioned the world of digital marketing by integrating six Sigma principles into content strategy and creating systems that don't just work, they thrive. Shreya, known as a fixer, brings a unique blend of lean manufacturing and digital marketing experience. While Paul, a season digital marketing since his teenage years has helped countless businesses grow through innovative organic content strategies. Whether you're struggling with your SEO, seeking to optimize your social media presence, or wondering how to increase your ROI, where the minimal ad spend, today's episode is packed full of insights that could change the game for your business.

Andy Splichal:

So without further ado, let's dive on in. Welcome to the show, guys.

Shreya Banerjee:

Thank you so much for having us.

Paul Counts:

Yeah, thank you. So happy to be here.

Andy Splichal:

So, Shreya and Paul, you both have had an incredible journey in digital marketing world. Can you share what initially inspired you to integrate six Sigma principles into your marketing strategies? And for those that aren't familiar, what is six sigma?

Shreya Banerjee:

Yeah, so my background actually is in manufacturing and lean. It's not marketing. I went to school for mechanical engineering of all things, but my passion or, you know, I've always had a drive to come towards marketing and the reason I came back to it was my son was born about nine years ago and wanted time, freedom. So I kind of came back to it and I had like twelve years. My background was manufacturing and lean. So lean Six Sigma is really, I call it common sense because it's principles to make a car production system. So it actually comes from the Toyota car manufacturing company and how they've laid out their manufacturing facility. It's actually called Toyota production system and that's where it kind of comes from.

Shreya Banerjee:

It helps you reduce defects. I know, that's a lot of mumbo jumbo, but we kind of applied that same principle in marketing because when Paul and I met and it was what, like six, seven years ago now? Six years ago, yeah, marketing counts. And we started getting different clients in different industries, and we kept seeing the same pattern. And every time I see pattern, I think process, because that's just how my mind works. And the patterns are always inefficiencies, waste, and jumping from trend to trend. And if that sounds like you, because that's, I think about 70% of the people in marketing, they just love to jump from trend to trend to trend, right? And it's not their fault. It's not anybody's fault. I would say it's.

Shreya Banerjee:

That's what's taught in schools. That's what's taught by all these online gurus. You jump from one trend to another and try to make the most of it. That's where the process piece came into place. Because we designed this process called our FTE process. We focus on foundation. That's what f is. T is traffic and e is engagement.

Shreya Banerjee:

And if you apply this process, we'll talk more about it as we, you know, we go through this. If you apply this FTE process, doesn't matter what industry it is, you start seeing amazing, amazing results that you don't see otherwise.

Andy Splichal:

So what do you mean by jumping from trend to trend?

Shreya Banerjee:

You remember clubhouse?

Andy Splichal:

Oh, yeah, for a few minutes.

Shreya Banerjee:

For sure.

Paul Counts:

That's a good idea.

Shreya Banerjee:

That was a trend everybody jumped into, even our clients. I remember, Paul, you remember this? They told us, I am telling you. Why am I telling you? You're our marketing CMO. Why should I tell you to jump into clubhouse? And we had a very good reason why not to jump into clubhouse.

Paul Counts:

Yeah, it just creates massive distractions. And that was just one example. But there's so many new trends that people jump on and they forget the stuff. That's always worked. The principle based marketing that's always worked for the test of time clear back 20 years ago. And my background has been in this since I was 13 years old going on 26 years now. And when I started actually selling t shirts online, I had the same process. I would write up sales copy that.

Paul Counts:

I would then email out to people. That would entice them and get them excited to purchase. Fast forward 26 years later, I'm still doing the exact same thing, and we're doing the same thing for our clients, is you're understanding who your audience is. And that's really what this process is. That Shreya brought to the table that we perfected in a way. So it allow businesses to grow without getting the distractions. And by jumping from thing to thing, there's a lot of new platforms that pop up. There's new advertising opportunities.

Paul Counts:

There's new things you should put your attention into. And those are all well and good because it is good to jump to trends at times because you can actually capitalize and make some money and make some quick wins. Wins. But before they, you know, before it goes away. But what we run into is a lot of times people do it before their foundations even set. So they're jumping to the new ad platform expecting all these results. But the reality is their foundation stinks. Their copy on their landing page doesn't sell anybody anything.

Paul Counts:

And they're wondering, well, this is just another marketing gimmick that doesn't work. And it's like, it's not that the marketing gimmick doesn't work, it's that you weren't ready for it. That's what we run into. And so that's what we mean by jumping from hoops to hoops is it's okay to be on top of the trends. We're on top of the trends. You are. You know, Andy and all of us have to be in this marketing world. But if you don't have your foundation set, your business is not going to take off.

Paul Counts:

So that's where we go with that.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, that makes sense. So, Shreya, you're known as the fixer for your ability to streamline processes. How do you approach inefficiencies and digital marketing campaigns? And what are some of the common mistakes that you see with new clients?

Shreya Banerjee:

Yeah. So we actually have a very well defined process. That one we just talked about, FTE, foundation traffic and engagement. And majority of time when you're taught marketing, if you're hiring somebody straight out of college, if you're learning it yourself by some guru online. Right, or some teacher, they teach you traffic. And many people also think marketing is just running traffic, running Facebook ads, running LinkedIn ads. Right. Marketing is a lot more than just running ads.

Shreya Banerjee:

And that's a mindset I think we all need to kind of shift. It's, we have to focus on the foundation first. And when I mean foundation, it's your customer avatar, it's your website, it's your landing page, the conversion on the pages. And it's not sexy. So no one wants to talk about it and no one wants to do it. Right. Everybody wants to just run to ads. We actually have an example of this.

Shreya Banerjee:

We had a very well known real estate person who wanted to run Facebook ads to fill up their webinar. They were trying to do, and they ran our ads, $500 worth of Facebook ads. They sent it to their page, their main website, and they said no one converted, no one signed up for their webinar. What's the problem? The problem was, when they went to their website, there was nowhere that anybody was telling them to sign up. They were not directing it to a landing page, they were not showing them how to register for this webinar. So all that $500 just wasted right now, as a normal person, if I did that, I would say, Facebook ads don't work. I just wasted that. But it was because the foundation was not set.

Shreya Banerjee:

So that's what we kind of go in and really focus on, our, your customer avatar, even though it sounds very boring to do. You have to know your product might apply to everybody, but there is a little stream, right. You could have different customer avatars. Um, I used toilet paper example, quite a bit. Like, there's so many different types of toilet papers in the market, but some, like charmin super soft, and then some are more economical, but they're, you know, like sandpaper, and, like, which one do you choose for? It applies to everybody, but they, they portray their message in a way that they're getting the right people to buy it. So you kind of have to have that toilet paper mindset in there and say, where does my product fit in? Right, customer avatar, very important. Converting, um, landing pages and website, and also good SEO. People take that for granted.

Shreya Banerjee:

Um, SEO, very able to get free.

Paul Counts:

Traffic and, you know, like, we're big believers. One of our things this is when we serve as, you know, consultants or advisors, or when we have been fractional cmo for brands. The thing they don't like about us initially is we cut their ad costs because we're going against the grain. We always go when everybody's going left, we go right, or people go right, we go left. You know, we do the opposite, because that's what ends up working. Because the reality is they believe. A lot of people are just led to believe that if you spend more money, a dollar and a dollar out, so if I spend more money, I'm going to make more money back. The reality is, it doesn't always work that way.

Paul Counts:

Ad costs fluctuate, things fluctuate, and if you don't have a solid foundation, you might as well forget all that. And so our first three months. People don't like us because we cut their ad spend and then all of a sudden they realize we're more profitable than we've ever been because they apply these processes and we dont mind dealing with their consternation for a while. Its okay. Were used to it. We tell them that straight up. And its because this process works. Weve gone in and cut ad budgets for smaller brands, $30,000, $40,000 a month.

Paul Counts:

We said, no, youre not going to spend that anymore. Were going to cut that entirely out and were going to focus on your foundation and using the assets you already have. So, for example, a lot of people are sitting on email lists that theyve never emailed because theyre just working on growing that list from ads. But they dont email that. Listen, why, why would you not email your email list? You know, and so there's a lot of brands that are sitting on assets they don't touch. And so that's kind of our philosophy is use the assets you possess, use the content you have, use the strategies, you know, to get organic traffic. You can run ads, 100% run ads, but don't do it till you're ready. You know, make sure, because if it's not going to convert to your email list, it's not going to convert to a cold ad.

Paul Counts:

So let's fix that first, then we go at it. But no, no, everybody wants to run the traffic first.

Andy Splichal:

You know, it's just so when, when you guys are cutting the ad spend, is it something where you cut it and then you work on conversion on the website and then you'll revamp it?

Paul Counts:

Exactly.

Andy Splichal:

Or was it that you're just looking for, you know, bad ad spend, I guess, where it'll never.

Paul Counts:

A couple of things, yeah, you know, you're hitting it on the head. It's a couple of things. One is, of course, bad targeting. You know, we just worked with the brand that they were constantly not profitable. I went in and looked at their targeting. They were targeting the wrong people for their offer. And so, of course, they weren't getting conversions and so they were making it way too broad and they were finding people that were in, they had a $2,000 offer and people are in the comments saying, well, I'm on fixed income and all this, and it's like they're not our target audience. And so we had to fix the targeting there.

Paul Counts:

And so it's combination of fixing the targeting, fixing the copy on the landing page, getting that conversion. We still run some ads. Maybe we're not running as much as they were. So let's say they're spending 1000 a day or 2000 a day. Again, we're talking small business numbers here, right. But they're spending 2000 a day or thousand a day. We're cutting that to 300 a day or 200 a day so we can test it first and see if it's going to convert. If it's not going to convert at $200 a day, it's certainly not going to work at 1000 a day.

Paul Counts:

And a lot of people just want to keep spending that money. And we're like, no, it doesn't work that way.

Shreya Banerjee:

Like conversion, it works for big businesses and that's what's taught to us. Right. Throw money at it, it will eventually work. Small businesses don't have that liberty. We have to protect each dollar, dollar that we have. Each marketing dollar is, you know, very important. So that's why conversion is very important. That's why foundation is very important.

Paul Counts:

Yeah, we're, we're definitely advocates for the small business owner, you know, the big business. They, they have the, you know, multi million dollar ad budgets, the billion dollar crazy ad budgets, and so they can afford to throw in. And I always use the analogy that a blind squirrel finds a nut some of the time, you know, so if, if anybody's throwing ad copy out there, you, you're going to convert at some point. If you're throwing $100,000 at a Facebook ad, it's going to convert to some. So, you know, but the problem is small business owners don't have that luxury. And so, you know, to the name of your, I smiled when I saw that we were going to be on the show because your podcast is called make each click count and. Yeah, no, very similar, very similar. Yeah, it's, it's perfect because you're, you're, you have the same philosophy we have.

Paul Counts:

So I appreciate that.

Andy Splichal:

Now let's, let's talk about your organic strategy. Because you had mentioned SEO.

Paul Counts:

Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

What do you, because that, you know, that's a whole nother world and things that have really changed in the last, you know, just few years. But what are you guys doing to help bring more organic traffic to your clients?

Paul Counts:

Yeah, a couple of things. Like one of the biggest things we focus our efforts on, it's, it's finding the right keywords that people are actually searching for. It's helping them realize that SEO is still a thing regardless of, you know, all the new technologies that are out there. That's one getting them to buy into that. But we focus a lot on finding the right keywords, fixing the title tag and the meta descriptions. We go back to the basics at all times because if you think of it, you have to tell Google what your website's about. That's the most basic level of SEO. But most brands get it wrong.

Paul Counts:

They're targeting the word home on their homepage still. They're targeting the word about on their about us page. We worked with a publicly traded brand that they worked with an SEO agency for twelve months. Their title tag was home on their homepage. It was ridiculous to even see that's the title of your page. You have to tell Google what it means, right? You have, if people, people are going to click on your result, if they're looking for something in particular and you hit them with that message. And so we focus on that first, then we focus on revising the content, making sure that people are going to stick. We focus on adding rich media to the pages that'd be videos and images, because the longer somebody stays on your website, that longer Google views it as it was quality content.

Paul Counts:

And Google knows how long people go from the time they click in a search results and then the time they hit the back button to go back, they know how much time that is a timer started. Whether you use Google Analytics or not, they still know. So there's no way around that. Google knows. And so if your score is low, meaning like they're bouncing very quick with under 510 seconds, your content stinks. And so you have to improve that. And so that's what we focus on. If we get, and then the other.

Andy Splichal:

Thing is page speed, how are you improving the content?

Paul Counts:

So that's that rich media. So we're improving it by rich media, meaning you add images, you add visuals like infographics, things of that nature to pages. And the other thing is the infographics serve really well because you can then put them up on Pinterest and put them on Instagram and platforms like that, that get you organic traffic and so you can double up your efforts with it. But the infographics are great because people have to stop and look. A lot of times when we help people revise their copy and we go in and we work with brands that work with a brand right now that is a pretty large brand and their pages right now are just straight text, bulky, chunky paragraphs that are difficult to read. And so breaking up the paragraphs to make them short and sweet and easier to read, putting in bullet points where there were no bullet points because that's easier on the eyes, adding in these infographics, adding in pictures, we can triple and quadruple that stick rate. And then that means that page now gets that much more weight within Google. And so it's little things like that that people can do to their content.

Paul Counts:

But the number one biggest thing, though, is making sure your content is on point with what it's about and it's using common sense practices. You know, if your page, if your article is about, you know, how to cure back pain or how to, how to decrease back pain, that's what the content should be about. That's what the title should be about, that's what some of the header should be about. That's what the images and the infographics should show, that's what the video should show on the page. Videos are such a huge driver of increasing that organic ranking significantly and it makes a big impact.

Andy Splichal:

What about backlinks? Do you guys work with clients to get backlinks?

Paul Counts:

We do, yeah. We work with some to get backlinks. There are, you know, there's. It's definitely not as easy as it used to be to get backlinks. There's definitely some effort that has to go in there. You know, you have to, you know, really hunt for who your backlinks are coming from. And a lot of times it's coming from strategic partners. It's in some cases it's profile backlinks on certain major websites that are out there.

Paul Counts:

Believe it or not, those still work. You still get a lot of juice from those. But the biggest one is it's that help a reporter out is one of the sources we use. We've all heard of that. We've actually done that successfully. Yeah, Harrow is a really good one. You get notifications of publication opportunities. All it takes is one or two of those and you can really see a nice uptick.

Paul Counts:

The other area is just guest blogging. It's still one of my favorite things to do. You can actually search for in Google, you can actually do a search in quotes, the term guest blog and put in your niche after it. So guest blog, health, let's say. And you'll find a whole list of blogs that are in the health niche that are looking for guest bloggers. And you can go out and submit your content idea and then get a backlink back. Like they know the game, they're looking for it. But a lot of those are higher authority sites and so you can get an in context backlink is what it's called.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, that's a great suggestion. How would somebody who's listening, who would want to implement that, how do they know that they're a higher authority site?

Paul Counts:

Yeah, definitely worth their time if it shows up. So a couple couple ways to look is to look at, you can do this kind of a nerdy thing to do or techie thing, but you can do a search called the number one thing I do is ca c h e. So pull up one of their articles and it's called the cache search, ca c h e colon. And then put in that link into the Google search bar search results. And what that's going to tell you is the last time that page was actually cached by Google. Meaning was it recent? Was it two years ago? Was it a year ago? That's like point number one because you want to know if that, if their articles are actually being indexed, because if they're not even being indexed or indexed recently, it means Google didn't value that website enough to go spider that content, you know, recently. And so that tells you that your articles, it's going to be a waste of your time. So that's number one.

Paul Counts:

That's like bare bones. The most basic. The other thing I look at would be if it shows up. The reason I like to do that guest blog search is that if it shows up in that search results, it generally is a higher authority site because Google viewed it as even for the term guest blogging, it put it up there above the other health sites. And so that's number one. So I always look at those 1st 1020, you know, to get an idea. And then the other thing you can do is there's tools like SEO, Moz, there's, there's the, the Mozbar. It's a toolbar you can get and I think it's called the Mozbar.

Paul Counts:

They may have changed the name, but there's a, it's a toolbar, you can get an extension for Chrome and if you just look up the mozbar, you'll find it. But it basically will tell you like what is the, you know, what's the domain authority, how many backlinks? And obviously the higher the authority the better. You know, usually 30 and above is going to be good for most brands, small businesses trying to get a backlink. You're not going to get a backlink if you are out there like, you know, you're not going to get a backlink from a high authority site. And you know, generally, most of the time, you know, like, so you know, don't try to go get a backlink from adobe.com dot. It's just not going to work. Right. But 30 and above is great, and bigger brands can try to get those bigger backlinks, but 30 and above is really good.

Paul Counts:

And so that's one way to vet it. And then another easy backlink strategy is just being a guest on podcasts. That's another great strategy because usually in the blog, notes and things like that, they'll link to your website. So becoming an authority in your brand is probably one of the best things you can do as a business as well.

Andy Splichal:

What about AI driven content?

Shreya Banerjee:

Be very careful. So actually, Google did two bands this year already where they've removed a lot of AI generated content that was posted, you know, late last year, early this year. It's all about having little content, but very, very quality content, not so much copy and paste AI stuff.

Paul Counts:

Yeah, they did two major updates, actually got rid of a whole, I mean, a lot of websites felt sting and they're still feeling this thing. And they even called it their spammy content update. They literally identified AI spammy content. They just flat out said it.

Shreya Banerjee:

And it's not hard, actually. It's just the eat formula, right?

Paul Counts:

Yeah, it's the eat formula that we teach people, which, which stands for experience. And so it used to just be experience, authority, trust, and they are, I'm sorry, expertise, authority, trust. And they added it in a separate e to it, which is experience. And so your content should apply this eat formula. It sounds very complex, but really it just boils down to your content should show your experience. What experiences do you have? Because AI's can't generally have realistic experiences. So what experience do you have or does your customers have with your product and service? So you can tell those case studies, tell those stories. Those are kind of things that work well.

Paul Counts:

And Google even has guidelines for this. They actually tell you can look up Google's search quality guidelines. It's all out there. Google puts it out there. It's a PDF and it's massive. And the eat formulas right in there. And they tell you you can use customer case studies, examples, things like that. So they want to know experiences.

Paul Counts:

And that was the first thing they did to combat AI. And then authority is, okay, what authority do you have to teach this? And so one of the things we've done to help clients actually improve their SEO was creating an author page. So even larger brands that we worked with, we would tell them like, you need to have your CEO, you need to have somebody, a professor, somebody that's got the degrees behind them or somebody in your brand, they're the person that wrote your articles. They don't have to write the articles themselves, but you're going to create an author page for them. And that makes such a difference because that shows authority. And so if there's anybody in your business that's written a book, perfect. Even better, you would put them as an author page. We did this for a guy in the industrial ceiling fan niche who co authored a book and it helped him tremendously.

Paul Counts:

At the bottom of every article, we put his name and we link to his author bio page and that right there establishes that authority. And it's one of the factors. The other factor is, of course, being active on social media and Google looks at all these things. So experience, authority, and then your expertise, what have you done? And then the trust factor. What other people say about your brand and your business and what kind of elements can you bring to the trust factor as far as case studies and examples and things like that? And then also scientific references. Another thing that we've done really well with from an SEO standpoint is finding health journals or online journals or gov sites or places that have good research that actually tie in with what were saying. So like if im writing about small business and I link to the SBA dot gov website, an article on there and I link out to it, that actually shows trust because im gathering, im sharing good, valuable resources with people. So linking out to good places is also a benefit and a way to really help your SEO.

Paul Counts:

But those are some of the things from a content standpoint, you really have to avoid that AI content. You can use it to get yourself started. But Google also just did a deal with Reddit and Quora. It was about $100 million, it was like 60 million to 140 to the other where they actually licensed content within the Google search results. And so if you do Google searches now, you see Quora and you see Reddit. Those are two forum type websites. And I would guess our theory is the number one biggest reason Google made that move is because they're sick of AI content being out there and they know that those platforms are more human generated ideas and concepts and they want to give their users the best experience. And so Google is battling hard against AI.

Paul Counts:

And so I wouldn't do it at all. Like it's, it's just, it's, you know, we worked one of the brands that we got hired on, they used to have great SEO and they started to decline. First thing we did was do an AI check and found out majority of their content was AI and they admitted it was and their SEO fell off the cliff. And we've been recovering it ever since. So there's no.

Andy Splichal:

So what type of clients do typically work with?

Paul Counts:

So it depends. We have a range. So we work with the small to medium business, you know, and then we also have publicly traded brands that we do on a more of an enterprise level.

Andy Splichal:

Now, are these, are these professional services? Are these e comm? What? Vertical.

Paul Counts:

So that's the interesting thing about us. So we have, we have worked in every vertical imaginable. We've never focused down to one vertical because of this process that Shreya laid out. We've worked in everything from funeral directors to the lupus industry to, and gotten amazing results to gut health to tech education. Honestly, the niche has never mattered to us. One of our clients is in the hoof trimming business for cattle. Another one's an industrial ceiling fans. So it's the same process.

Paul Counts:

We just cookie cutter it and apply it to every niche.

Andy Splichal:

So let's talk about the process. Let's. If somebody comes in and they're interested in working with you saying they're signing up right away, they heard great things.

Paul Counts:

Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

Where do you start?

Paul Counts:

Right at their foundation. I mean, the, the very first thing we do is we go back and we, we do a couple of things right out of the gate. First thing is we look at their customer avatar. We do that exercise with them, even if they already know who it is, because usually it uncovers like, oh, yeah, we're missing this target completely, or we're trying to target. And Trey gave that toilet paper example, which is a good example because there's like four different types of it, you know, and some brands are out there. You might have a product that hits four different people, but you have to speak to them all differently. And so we dial in that messaging, and then the next thing we do is we do, we call it basically an audit of your in asset audit. And so those are the simple things we look at.

Paul Counts:

How big is your email list? When was the last time you emailed it? What is your. We look at their current SEO. We look at what are they currently doing? If they're doing any SEO, what are your ads currently doing? What are you currently doing? So it's kind of just a health audit, a checkup, but it's important to get a baseline because you don't know. And the biggest thing we uncover, there are fun things like, oh, yeah, we have this old Facebook group of 20,000 people. We've never touched. We have an email list of 30,000 we haven't done anything with in two months. It's shock. I mean, happens all the time.

Paul Counts:

It's crazy to us.

Shreya Banerjee:

Or even wasted traffic. Now I call wasted traffic when they're either paying for it or even if it's free social traffic. But they're not capturing leads. You know, they're very happy with 10,000 Instagram followers or 20,000 Facebook group. That lead is not yours. It belongs to that platform. If you're not capturing that lead, then it's a waste of traffic source.

Paul Counts:

Yeah, it's, and that, that happens a lot. So those are the audits we look at and look, yeah, looking at their social media is a big one. Like where are your links going? Are your links going to a blank page or a just an informational about us page but no lead capture opportunity like Shreya pointed out. And if thats not happening, theyre missing the mark. And so we start with the audit check and then from there we take them through the strategy to determine based on the avatar what traffic sources should we focus on. Where can we cut in the ad spend and improve conversions and then the e of our FTE formulas, engagement. And that stands for thats things like email, thats social media follow ups. Those are the way you engage people.

Paul Counts:

And a lot of times people, I will say, though, not AI, but social media has become such a big platform for search right now that it's unbelievable. Like social SEO. Social search is such a big thing now that we've really, we used to teach people like do social media last. Now it's part of the front side of our strategy because of the fact that people, the Gen Z ers, the younger generation, they're going to your TikToks are going to your Instagram and they're using that as their search results, search engine of choice, not Google. And so they're looking for information. And you know, not a lot of people don't realize TikTok just expanded their character count by to 4000 characters. So when you make a post on TikTok, you can write a paragraph or two in there of meaty content, you know, for SEO optimization.

Shreya Banerjee:

Yeah, it's SEO driven and keyword driven, rather than the hashtag driven what it used to be.

Andy Splichal:

And so with your service, are you handling this all? Are you advising? How so how does your agency fit in with a company?

Paul Counts:

Yeah, so we come in more as the advisory role. So we're coaches, consultants in a sense on their business. So we call ourselves a, it's a fractional CMO, interim fractional CMO. Basically, we direct their marketing. Our ideal client has a team in place that it doesn't have to be a big team. It could be a team of two people. It could be a team of three people. It could be a team of one that's really a go getter, but they just need direction.

Paul Counts:

And we also work with brands that have a team of 50 to 100 people that we can lead. And so, you know, it's, we really need somebody that can implement in their team. But our process is advisory. We do some work. You know, we'll come in and a lot of times we teach them the process. They go out and do it, and then we critique it, edit it, modify it. We kind of got out of the business of doing it all for people, and it just didn't really serve us very well. But we're able to do the consult, the consultative type of work.

Paul Counts:

We love that aspect a lot.

Andy Splichal:

Robert, how does a company know they have a problem with their marketing? I mean, how do they, I mean, it sounds like what you guys are doing is great and looks like you're really on the right path. But how does a company know that they should be reaching out to somebody?

Paul Counts:

You know, it's the couple reasons people come to us is they're beating their heads against the wall. They're not profitable. A common thing we hear is I've hired another marketing agency and it doesn't work. We hear that one a lot.

Shreya Banerjee:

Marketing doesn't work.

Paul Counts:

Marketing doesn't work. We hear that one. If you're constantly saying that, that's probably the biggest thing. The biggest thing, too, is looking at like, how ad costs lately, this is more lately, and I would imagine this is going to continue to happen, is we have people coming to us because their ad costs are getting astronomical and they're not able to offset things. And so one of the reasons theyre coming to us is like, our ad costs are getting out of control. We need help. How do we stop the bleeding? This is crazy because we used to be this much profitable. Now were barely getting by, and ad costs fluctuate.

Paul Counts:

And so people start to notice that. And thats usually when they realize they have a problem. Another big indicator you have a problem with marketing is if your leads and traffic are coming from one source. Thats a problem because if Facebook changes, Instagram changes, even Google SEO, we love SEO. But if SEO is your only traffic source, id say no, because youre just one algorithm change away from not having a business and too many businesses are running that thin line. And so that would also be an indicator you have a marketing problem. If you have one traffic source primarily thats 90% of your business. We had one guy that 90% of his business was referrals and then he started to realize that referrals dry up over time.

Paul Counts:

It's great, but you have no control over it too. You can, it's either ride or die, you know, there's no, there's no in between if you're running the referral game.

Andy Splichal:

So how can an interested listener learn more about DTC SEO agency?

Paul Counts:

Yeah, so. Well, one of the ways they would get in touch would just be, are you talking about like get in touch with us or just. Yeah, yeah.

Andy Splichal:

They want to get ahold of you guys.

Paul Counts:

Yeah. To do like SEO, it's just marketingcounts.com. that's a great spot to get to know us a little more. We're actually currently refining our website even more so it'll speak even better. So yeah, we're the classic example of, I always joke with people with our website that the cobbler that has no shoes, that sometimes is us, we feel because we're helping everybody else, but it gets the job done. You can go to marketingcounts.com, learn about us, get to know us, and that's probably the easiest way to get in touch.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Paul Counts:

No, I think, I think we covered. I think the biggest thing is just be consistent. Be consistent. But also like think outside the box. You know, like it's okay to think outside the box in a sense of think back at what worked. We're finding right now the best things that are working for our clients and for us is stuff that used to work ten years ago. It's coming back like, you know, and I think a lot of it's, it's not that it came back, it's always been there. It's just that people jumped to the new thing and they forgot that, oh, SEO has always been here.

Paul Counts:

Like, what am I doing? Or this is always, YouTube's been here for so long and it's still not old, it's new, it's still working, it's relevant. And so people just kind of view this stuff as old when in reality it could be pushing their business forward if they just focus on it.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, thanks. And for you, Shreya, any final words?

Shreya Banerjee:

Yeah, I wanted to add that if you took anything out of this from my side would be marketing is more than just spending money on ads, you know? So change that mindset and then kind of look at your entire thing where you're, you're spending your money, but not also where you're sending, spending your resources and time. It's not. It's more than just ads.

Paul Counts:

Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

Well, great. Well, hey, thanks for joining us, guys.

Paul Counts:

Absolutely. It's great to be here. Thank you.

Andy Splichal:

For listeners. Remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcast and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information on marketing counts connecting with Shreya or Paul, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center, available at podcast dot make each clickcount.com. we have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included links in case you would like any information on any of the topics discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.