SEO VS PPC Does It Even Matter If Your Website Doesn’t Convert? With Jason Hunt

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast, this is your host Andy Splichal. And today we are happy to welcome our next guest to discuss today's topic, which is SEO vs. PPC. Does it even matter if your website does not convert? This week's guest is the Co-founder of Merged Media as well as the host of the Merged Marketing Podcast. A big welcome to Jason Hunt. Hi, Jason.

Jason Hunt 1:12

Hey there, Andy. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Andy Splichal 1:14

It's great. We're happy to have you. Now one of the reasons that I find your agency so fascinating is the fact that you not only offer social media marketing, paid ad marketing, and SEO, which is pretty standard. But you also offer web design, photography and web hosting, which is a bit unusual for a search engine marketing agency. Now as the founder of my own search engine marketing agency, I find that many times conversion is the biggest issue a client has supposed to going out and direct in the proper traffic to a website. My question is, is that why you decided to offer web design?

Jason Hunt 1:51

I love this question. To be honest, and completely transparent, I think it's important to kind of give a background on how Merged Media came to be and how we got to where we are at today. And so back in back in 2015, I was in I was in the Digital Advertising Space for years, I got into a back in 2011. But so I had a bit of a background in it selling you know, selling banners on websites like real estate for years, and then started my own social media agency back in 2015. And we got to work with a lot of clients in a short period of time, you know, hitting the ground running, literally going into restaurants and small businesses, asking them if we can manage their social media for them. Back in 2015, it was kind of cutting edge. Fast forward to 2022. And I'm the 38th person that's called a business about social media marketing in a given day. So things have changed quite quickly. And in 2019 is when I met my business partner, Todd Foster, who owned Casio, which is one of the leading social or leading SEO companies in Canada. And I say leading because if you Google SEO companies, you're going to find Casio, they're up near the top. So I made the decision to merge my company with his and put all of the subject matter experts under one roof, collaborating together on projects. And I think to answer your question there, Andy, when you talk about conversions, you can't just rely on just one source of marketing, for all the heavy lifting for your your marketing budget, and to drive those conversions, you really do need to look at a multi channel approach to see what is actually driving those conversions. And I'll stop there, because I can definitely elaborate on that. But I'll let you interject.

Andy Splichal 3:32

So you were the one that was offering the social marketing, and then your partner was offering the SEO and the web design.

Jason Hunt 3:41

That's right. So he was offering SEO as well as a portion of that was the web design, primarily SEO. But naturally, when you're doing SEO, there is an element of page designs that need to be happening in terms of formatting a certain page to facilitate the word counts and all that type of stuff. So social media, or sorry, website design became another pillar in the business. He was already doing it. But when he when we merged our companies together, we actually acquired a local web design company to take over that pillar because, you know, unbeknownst to us, web design is really a beast on its own.

Andy Splichal 4:14

Yeah, no, absolutely. Now today is 2022. And you had mentioned the fact you know, you're the 22nd company to call asking if you can take over their website, their social media marketing. So I guess my question is, in all these services you guys offer you know, you have the SEO, you have the social media marketing, the paid marketing, where is the most of your business for your agency?

Jason Hunt 4:37

Yeah, so the majority so when we merge companies, it was essentially 50/50 in terms of social and SEO. Now if I were to break it down, where the percentages I would say it's probably 60% SEO. We've got quite a strong SEO team and full of copywriters, and we've also, you know, formed some partnerships with some pretty big publications to do the SEO for them, hence why it's becoming the majority of our business right now. And I would say social is probably making up a good 30%, a lot of it is on the paid side of it, where previously there was a lot of emphasis on organic. But, you know, I do preach to a lot of clients, there is less of a benefit to posting organic to your channels now. And if you aren't going to do organic, I suggest doing it yourself and not hiring external to do that.

Andy Splichal 5:23

You know let's, let's, let's stop there for a second. Is there any benefit to posting organic anymore now that the algorithm it's almost pay to play?

Jason Hunt 5:31

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, a lot of people will probably debate me on this and die on this hill. But, you know, it's, I personally, just by seeing the slow the decrease in organic reach nowadays, and people can sniff a stock photo a mile away. You know, they're really, and that's why I do encourage clients, if you're going to spend any time doing anything digital, you know, spend the time posting yourself on your social media platforms, because, you know, the social media, organic posting is complimentary to, you know, the Google paid or the Facebook paid, that you were doing, because it's just, you're getting in front of those people that are already familiar with your brand. You're not really extending your reach past that.

Andy Splichal 6:16

Now, you had mentioned, you know, your how it's 60%, SEO and in the rest, social and paid, but do you have any specialties? I mean, is there Where's where's your bread and butter? Are you working with Ecommerce? Are you working with, you'd mentioned restaurants, where were most of your clients? What what industry?

Jason Hunt 6:39

Yeah, in 2022. This, this seems like it changes every couple of years. Obviously, the pandemic had a lot to do with a massive pivot on our business, where I'll talk previous to the pandemic, where we were working quite heavily in the restaurant space, quite heavily in dental, quite heavily in these businesses that were all hit hard by the pandemic. So we found ourselves in March 2020, having to pivot towards things like home improvement. Real Estate, businesses that were thriving, people were investing in their properties and not so much on on travel, which was another big pillar of our business prior to the pandemic. So naturally, we found ourselves working quite heavily in real estate. And it's not even by design, a lot of businesses just being attracted to us from these industries. And we're getting a lot of referrals in certain spaces. So we've partnered with one of our clients to acquire a pretty big real estate magazine here in Canada called Canadian Real Estate Wealth, and in real estate professional Canada, which are massive publications. And we ended up doing a entire redesigned and doubled their traffic in a year. And we have all the copywriters for these publications in house and which is awesome. We get to see we get to see the the growth of those publications firsthand. So right now I'd say to answer your question, Andy, I'd say it's very heavy into real estate, property management and home improvement, predominantly, probably making up a good 60 to 70% of our business.

Andy Splichal 8:05

Are you exclusively exclusively professional service center? Do you have any Ecommerce clients?

Jason Hunt 8:10

Oh, yes, yeah, so we definitely work with Ecommerce as well. Naturally, a lot of those businesses have been with us for quite a while. And a lot of businesses we used to work with, before the pandemic were those little tiny, you know, they were these little ecommerce products, but even Ecommerce at the time, just tradeshow businesses, they go along the trade shows, you know, like carnies at a carnival and selling little booths and things like that, whether it be you know, organic soaps, or, or microfiber towels. And so when the pandemic hit these kinds of businesses needed to pivot, they needed that digital transformation. So we're able to help them facilitate that by building them an ecommerce website, showing them the steps that they need to do to drive online traffic to their stores, as opposed to just relying on the brick and mortar.

Andy Splichal 8:54

Now, one service that I did notice you are missing speaking of Ecommerce clients, was Amazon Ads. Hmm. So have you thought about getting into management of Amazon? Or is that a purposeful omission?

Jason Hunt 9:07

You know, having you on our, one of our previous episodes, and the of the merge Marketing Podcast definitely opened up your eyes to Google Shopping and Amazon Ads. But for for us, it has not been a focal point for us. Now the attention is there. So you know, I'm not denying that. But you know, we also don't want to spread ourselves too thin either. We have pillars in our business that we we stand by and we want to stay strong and what we're good at.

Andy Splichal 9:31

Now, let's go back to SEO because you had said 60% or so of your business's SEO right now. And that seems to be a industry that is prone to con artist and, you know, I like to hear some stories. It might be my inner self you always slow down and look at the car wreck. But do you have any stories about clients that have come to you after previously being burned with working with a shoddy SEO company?

Jason Hunt 9:58

Yeah. 100% And I'm glad you brought up the question. We're a white hat, SEO company, there's a lot of black hat companies out there, but the black hat, a lot of that black hat stuff is going to hurt you in the long run. And, and keep in mind, I'm a creative guy. I'm a social media guy. But I've learned a lot over since we merged with an SEO company about the space and my business partner, Todd Foster is very deep in this space. He's a well known SEO and and is in charge of a lot of these have an SEO group specifically with 3000 people. So he's he understands the business and the Blackhat side of it, and the repercussions that can happen to businesses, when they do black hat tactics, or outdated tactics. And, and that's something that Google is just getting better at better at sniffing out. So it's important to play by the rules and and be the good guy in the SEO space, a lot of benefit to that. But yes, we have had a lot of clients come to us, will will go in there and see that there's a lot of spammy links being sent to the website by some company that promises the world and, and that's going to happen. So you know, for anybody out there listening, I strongly suggest understanding really what that SEO company is doing for you and not just go for the cheapest one you can find that's something you definitely don't don't want to do with SEO is find the cheapest, you might be able to get away with that with social media management. But it doesn't really work on SEO. For us, we don't do cookie cutter SEO packages, the way we price it is we look at what your competition is doing, and the resources we need to allocate towards your campaign in order to compete. If I were to give you a cookie cutter package, and I know you're a dentist in downtown Toronto or downtown San Francisco, you know, there's, it's gonna be hard to try to compete with the competitors with a cookie cutter package for $500 a month. You know what I mean? So that's where that's where we'll look at your you look at your business, look at the competitors and and let you know exactly what we're going to be doing. Because a lot of it with SEO, a lot of business owners don't have the the tolerance or patience to understand what SEO is they'll just throw money at it and be like, Okay, go and write me first page for dental in San Francisco. But I really suggest that you go into it and understand get a fundamental understanding of exactly what your SEO company is doing for you.

Now, what about content? Are you advising clients? On what kind of content to create? Are you creating the content? Are you offering guidance in the structure the content for the SEO? How does it How does that work?

Yeah, so our copywriters are in house, we use a platform or not a platform, a tool called surfer SEO, which is a very handy tool for our copywriters, they'll make sure that when they're writing that content, they're including those keywords that are in line with those people that are competing for those keywords that you're trying to rank for. And, and for content, typically what we'll do is we'll do our keyword research upfront, and we'll talk to our clients will practically provide them with a list of those keywords in the search volumes associated with those keywords. And let us know which keywords you actually want to go for. And from there, we will create the content based off of that, we do a lot of keyword clusters and where we'll do pillar pages and things like that to try to drive all the bases. I don't know if you want to get into the weeds of what a pillar pages but we basically are doing a thorough content plan in terms and in terms of what those keywords are they want to rank for, and have those all link back to a pillar page where we'll be kind of like that master page that gets a lot of the attention and traction.

Now you can get all the relevant traffic, whether it's organic traffic or paid traffic. But if it doesn't convert, it doesn't really matter. Do you have some tips from your web design side that you can share that your team may use when they're designing a website that could help a listener improve their conversion rates?

Yeah, totally. So I mean, a lot of people and we always tell our clients, you don't need to go out there and spend 1000s and 1000s on a website. It's not, in my opinion, it's not necessary. You know, people nowadays, there's just a lot of noise out there. And people don't have time to sift through a five to 10 page website. Really, they're looking for a solution to their problem. And if you can, first of all, get a contact form above the fold on a website. That's right, when you load up a screen, that contact form is sitting right there. That's a good start because people just want the answer to their problem. And if you can, the easier you can provide that the better conversion you're going to get. So ensuring that a it's a simple, it's a simple site doesn't need to be too complex. There are elements and pages that you'll need to ensure it's SEO optimized, it's tough to SEO, optimize a one page website you should have, you need to have an About Us section, blog section, blog, roll, all that type of stuff. But one thing that's important to talk about conversions is and I'm going to flip it and talk about one of the benefits of having an agency that that controls everything is ensuring that you have that Facebook pixel on that website. Because that Facebook pixel is gonna allow you an opportunity to retarget that traffic that spending time on your website that spending time on a pick a particular page, learning about a particular service that you offer. It's it's you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you don't take that opportunity to get a very specific ad in front of that. user the next time they're scrolling through Instagram or Facebook. And and just a question for you, Andy. Well, kind of just a thought. It's like when somebody Google's something and finds a solution to the problem, typically, and correct me if I'm wrong, but they're not just looking at your one site and making a slew decision based on that they're probably surfing around a bit looking for the best deal or best offer that suits them.

No, of course, of course.

So if you're not getting in front of them 10 minutes later, with an Instagram swipe up ad, you know, encouraging or talking about some of the features or a testimonial or success story on why they should buy your product, then I think you're missing a huge opportunity.

Yeah, no, agreed. Agreed. One of the items you had mentioned a a contact form or a call to action. You didn't mention client testimonials. How important? Do you find that to be for conversion?

Yeah, I think client testimonials are very important as well as those those reviews that are on your your GMB. You know, they're very important, its credibility, right? Like if you don't if your business is not getting that business through a referral, then 100% You have to have good testimonials and success stories. And typically, what you want to do is map out that customer journey, right? Somebody Google's you know, an issue they have or problem or you know, looking for a local dentist. Well, okay, so they're looking for a local dentist, they're definitely gonna look at your reviews. But let's say you just don't have time and they're just looking through finding the one that's closest to their house. If you pop up a testimonial ad of a great experience your kid had at the dentist with an Instagram swipe up just to get them back to that website to book that appointment. I think that's it I think that's a great journey for that client. They're undecided and one of those things that you can't really address on your website is how maybe your how great customers had an experience with your business or with your your dentist for example. So having that Instagram swipe up or Facebook ad in their face to solidify that and an ease a the I don't want to say buyer's remorse but ease any objections they might have is a great customer journey.

So you guys are using obviously mentioned a few times of Facebook ads for retargeting, are you using Google retargeting or any other retargeting outside of Facebook?

Yeah, definitely. So Google retargeting obviously is a lot of power to that. Yeah, we're definitely leveraging that as well for clients that are doing Google ads with us. And and some of those clients that are doing like, you know, the SEO, where they're getting a lot of organic traffic, you definitely want to have that remarketing set up on the Google side. If it warrants it, you know what I mean? And, and obviously, if it's within budget as well, Google ads, you can get can get pricey, depending on the budget that you have. And if you have a budget, that's that's just too small to compete, then your budget might be spent a better spent elsewhere.

Now, do you have a favorite success story from one of your clients, you could share?

Favorite success story? I think one of the great success stories is a local landscape company, who we started working with back in 2019. And just a small guy, you know, he was doing some local lawn care, and then snow removal. And he was only generating two to $300,000 a year in revenue. And so when we brought him on board, he didn't have the budget to partner with us on a level of paying 1000s of dollars a month for SEO, social Google ads, all that stuff. So we gave him the option. And we saw he had a very strong drive and determination. And he was young and hungry. So we said you know what, give us some equity in your business. And so he gave us a slice of his business to do all the marketing for him. So he can focus on growing the business and the infrastructure and growing a landscape business. And it was funny, because after working with him for a period of time, the first snowfall came I think it was in the winter of 2020. And this guy's phone got 85 calls in a matter of two hours.

Wow!

And a lot of that was credit to the SEO. If you were to look up SEO companies in Guelph, Ontario, or sorry, not SEO companies, snow removal companies in Guelph, Ontario at the time, he was number one, two, and three in the Google map back. So you're getting all of those leads, we're going right to his phone. And, and that was great, because it was just from there. Now you're getting these leads, and you can't even handle that many leads. He couldn't handle that many leads. So that's okay though, because we created a nurture sequence for him through email. You know, retargeting campaigns, and all this stuff. And in the next year, he was a $1.3 million company.

Wow, that's great.

It was amazing. And it was the key point was that he's not the one trying to do all the marketing himself, right. A lot of business owners out there are wearing a lot of hats and trying to do everything but spinning tires at the same time. So he was able to take that risk and delegate that work and give a piece of his company away to a company like ours that can really take it to the next level. And as an agency, we're very invested in the success of that company. So now we're in 2020 2022. We've hired a franchise consultant that's helping us franchise that business now across Canada.

Now I guess that that's not normal and taking a piece of the business.

There's not enough hours in a day, right? So you got to be very selective with the businesses that we choose to have those type of partnerships, partnerships with. Obviously, in his case there, you know, growing a company from 200 to 1.3, we were able to use the resources we have it to do that. But since then, we have partnered with other companies like a real estate magazine partner with one of our clients to acquire that mentioned that where we have the copywriters and we're doing the SEO, it's all done in house, as as, but those two are the two big partnerships that we're doing right now. But most of the time, you know, 90% of our clients are paying us a monthly retainer.

Now, are there any challenges that you find you struggle with, in any your services providing results for your clients?

You know what, to be completely honest, I think the biggest challenge in that regard, is website management. I think that I would say website management can get challenging, because it's one of those things in our business, when we're so focused on performance and results. You know, when a client wants to update a picture on their website, or something like that, it's it's a part of our business, but it's definitely it's time consuming and labor intensive. And there's not, you know, from a, from a business standpoint, there's not a whole lot of reward in that, especially when you're performance based. But web management can get tricky, because there is a lot of touchpoints involved a lot of communication involved with that. And you know, running a full service agency, I would say web management side of it is the side that that that is the biggest hurdle in terms of maintaining strong relationships. But fortunately we've we've there's a tool that we use called WP Runner, which helps WordPress sites out and, and that to us proven to be very, very helpful in terms of doing the the execution on that web management stuff.

Is WordPress, your preferred platform?

Yeah, Wordpress, I would say about 80% of our websites are WordPress and the rest are Shopify.

Now personally, are there any business books out there that you can attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

I love this question. I'm not a huge reader. But the books that I have read have had a huge impact on on my entrepreneurial journey and The One thing there's a book called The One Thing which is by the owner of Keller Williams' Real Estate, I really want to get the author of this.

It's Keller.

Keller, yes, it's, of course, one thing One Direction is the first thing that comes up in a Google search. Yeah, that's right. Is it Henry Keller?

I think it's Gary Keller.

Gary Keller. That's it. That's it. Gary Keller, that book, there is one of the books I've completed from front to back. And I live by that every day. Every day, I pull up my checklist, and I squint my eyes and what really matters on this checklist here to get me to the goal, you know, and that and that's and I live by that every day, that would probably be my personal Bible.

Now your bio says, you used to live in Japan, and you were the frontman for a rock and roll band. How did you go from that to running a search engine marketing agency?

That's, that's, that's a good story. That's a good one. So when I finished university, I didn't want to settle down yet I wanted to travel and the best way to do that is get paid and teach English abroad. So I looked at the map and I chose Japan. And the company sent me to Osaka, Japan, actually a little town outside of Osaka called Nara. And from there I started, I loved music, I always had been a fan of music, and I was a roommate with an Italian beatboxer. And I was, you know, in a previous life, I was a rapper. So I would I would rap to my roommate that did the beat box. And then we wanted to add a couple more instruments aboard. So we got a couple of guitarists that were students of ours. And then we formed a band and I was a very mediocre singer at best, but through the marketing of that band, using the likes of MySpace at the time, and SoundClick. And Facebook was just emerging, it was 2007 I was able to manufacture a tour of Japan, which was pretty cool. And and that was one of the best times in my life, to be honest. But I had an epiphany during those years. And I realized I loved performing and I love making the music, but I liked marketing the music even more. And it was at that point where I realized that marketing was the journey I wanted to go down and fast forward a decade and that's where I'm starting my own marketing agency and doing what I love to do.

So what do you think that most companies get wrong when looking to hire an agency like yours?

I think the thing that they that they do wrong is not doing their due diligence. You know, they might see a flashy ad that looks really good. Looks cool. Okay, I want that agency to work for me. But you know, really uncovering the layers of the onion to understand that business at its core. Now keep in mind, back in 2015 I was the first agent see that a lot of these businesses talk to. Now nowadays, and, you know, every business I talked to us has worked with probably three or four agencies in the past, and they just haven't been happy. So knowing that, it's understanding, you know, not just how great the agency is, but how that agency fits with them. You know, I'm not gonna say every client that comes aboard the merge media is a perfect fit. They're not, you know what I mean, and every not every agency is the same. Some agencies are very hands on with you. And hands on with the creative process, hands on with the journey, a lot of touch points, that some agencies are like that we are like that with some clients. And then you have agencies that they're working with the business owner, and they like to be in their silo, and they work hands off, and they're autonomous. So I think what a business owner needs to do and what they do wrong is not doing enough research into themselves to find out what they actually need, aside from just get me leads and get me results. I think that's overlooked a lot of the time. So people need to do a deep dive, and how is this digital agency going to be that piece to our puzzle, to make everything run smoothly, and avoid any hiccups or issues with that whole transitional process? You know, and obviously, managing those expectations.

Now, what problems do you believe that you're solving for your clients? And how are? Or is your agency standing apart from the competition?

Yeah, so I like to call it I like to use ourselves as kind of the outsource CMO. And so because we are that one stop shop, we can offer everything in house, you know, our SEO team and SEO team, SEO, team, social, Google Ads, web design are all collaborating under one roof at one table. So we have that point person, that's the outsourced cmo for clients that can give suggestions and directions on where they should deploy that marketing budget. So if a client comes to us and say, Go, or if a client or somebody comes to us and says, Hey, I want leads, well, I'm not just gonna go to them, like I wouldn't 2016 and be like, Hey, you got to be doing Facebook ads, social media is the way to go. Because I have a plethora of other services behind me that I can look at their business, from a holistic point of view and be like, Okay, well, you know, what, Facebook isn't the play right now, your target audience is searching for this keyword in Google. And there's a lot of high intent there. So why don't we Why don't we do Google ads, let's do Google ads for three months, let's generate some ROI for your business. And then let's transition into an SEO campaign in in quarter two, once you have more capital to invest into the marketing, these are kind of conversations we can have with our clients.

Now your agency is located in Canada?

A Yes, it is a!

I'm fluent in Canadian.

Obviously.

Now you serve the clients, though, in US and Canada, all over the world. Where most of your clients?

Most of our clients, I would say, I would say 75% are in Canada, 25% in the US, and we have a couple over in Europe as well. And in that breakdown, you know, a lot of it comes from a lot of local businesses, communities that were a part of, we do get a lot of business from that were part of the BNI. But also, we're also branching out into some international groups as well. And we're starting to see a lot of business come from those avenues. But naturally, because we are situated in Canada, and we're partnered with a couple big Canadian publications, we do get a lot of business coming to us from Canada.

Now what makes the perfect client for your agency?

I think the perfect client in just to go back to what I said a second ago is that client that has the understanding of exactly what they want, and exactly what they need. And they have, they're able to deploy the patience, a client that's not good for us is a client that's looking at the numbers in the first 30 days and expecting the world. Even within the first three months, the best clients for us are the ones that can deploy patience. Naturally, you know, when a client starts with us, obviously in the first couple months, there's there's an element of being hands on until the agency like us understands the brand, and gets the brand voice correct. And once that's all mapped out, and there's full confidence on both ends, that we've got this, then they typically can go back and focus on doing what they do best, which is growing your own business while we focus on the digital. So it's almost like not rather than hiring an employee in house to the marketing, they can pay us at a fraction of the cost and include the ad spend in it as well, at the same cost as you would hiring an internal employee. And that is really the sweet spot for us is being that one stop shop that you that that takes care of the marketing while they focus on growing their business.

Now how can an interested listener perfect or not learn more about working with you?

Absolutely. Thanks for asking Andy appreciate that. If anybody has any questions or wants to reach out they can go to merged.ca. Also, I've got a marketing podcast as well. If you want to check that out. Andy was featured there a few weeks back, it's at merged.ca/podcast.

It's been great. Is there anything else you would like before we wrap it up today?

I mean, if, you know, I appreciate the time, and you give me this opportunity to speak on your platform, Andy, you know, I think it's it's a great opportunity to really, you know, reach a network of people that's outside of your existing network. So I really do appreciate that. And if anybody wants to have a discovery call with me, I'd be more than happy to hop on, hop on a discovery call, free discovery call just to understand your business and maybe see if we're that missing puzzle piece.

Alright, well, this has been great. Thank you for joining us Jason.

Thanks, Andy. Appreciate it.

Well, that's it for today. Remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding connecting with Jason or merged marketing medium, you will find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our all new Podcasts Resource Center available at www.makeeachclickcount.com. We've compiled all our different past guests by show topic included each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any services that have discussed during previous episodes. Well that's it remember to stay safe keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.