Marketing CLARITY Podcast
Marketing CLARITY Podcast
Beginner’s Guide to SEO + SEM For Small Businesses (with Jyll Saskin Gales)
When it comes to getting your business on Google, should you invest in Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing (or both)? In this episode, I welcome SEM smarty pants Jyll Saskin Gales as my co-host as we discuss the differences, similarities, and strategies related to SEO and SEM.
Want to learn more about Google Ads? Visit Jyll.ca to become a Google Ads Insider + use coupon code TRIPOD for $5 off your first month.
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Did you enjoy this podcast? Please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really helps the show get discovered by other people looking for marketing help. Plus, I love reading reviews!
For show notes and to listen online: https://www.marketingclaritypodcast.com
➕ Join my FREE Marketing CLARITY Community full of tips, strategies, and how-to’s related to marketing, content creation, sales, and social media.
➕ Are you wandering around in a marketing fog? My Marketing CLARITY Guide can help! Learn more at http://getmarketingclarity.com/
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Oh my god, it's been way too long. I know I've neglected you guys, my faithful tripod listening audience. I'm here. It's a beautiful spring day as I record this, I just watched Judge Judy, you guys know like, that's my jam. If anything's gonna get me really ready for a show. It's watching Judge Judy. She's my power animal ate lunch. So I'm already like, I'm raring to go for this episode. And I am so excited to talk about what I'm going to talk about today. Well, what is that? Well, I am going to talk about one thing that I really love SEO, and I brought a guest in to talk about something that she really loves and knows a lot about, which is S E. M. Now you may be saying yourself, I don't understand SEO and SEM, you're gonna understand. By the end of this episode, you're listening to tripod, a podcast produced by tricycle creative to help safely navigate creative business owners through the worlds of digital marketing, strategic content creation and business growth. Post Ross Herosian is a marketing coach, content creator and entrepreneur who brings you helpful tips, social media updates, inspiring interviews, and his own unique perspective on how to tell your story and grow your business. So if you're interested in being a better marketer, business owner or creator, sit back, relax, and let's get peddling. Show my guest today. And really, I think probably most maybe more appropriately even receive a co host, because we're going to be shouldering equally shouldering the weight here is Jill Sasken. Gales, Jill. Hello,
Jyll Saskin Gales:hello. Thank you for having me today.
Ross Herosian:Yeah, I'm super excited. I've been looking forward to this week, I always joke that really, most of my podcasts are like the least produced show ever. But we have put in a good amount of planning to really outline what we're going to talk about today. And that is, I think it's kind of like the Venn diagram of SEO and SEM. Right? Like, where they're different. And where they are the same? Absolutely. And, and I think where it makes sense for the solopreneur Small Business marketer. And I think also, there's a lot of things when it comes to S E. M, that I say, and it was so I'll say reassuring, when we talked to hear a lot of the same things that I've been saying it like they like it's like, okay, great from from an expert. So this made me feel really, really good. Do you want to start with just talking a little bit about maybe your background?
Jyll Saskin Gales:Absolutely. So I am a proud Canadian live in Toronto, and I run my own digital marketing consultancy. And the reason I'm able to do that is because I worked at Google for six years, left Google in, oh, gosh, almost a year ago, April 2021, to start my own business, because I really saw you know, a Google I got to work with the world's largest and most sophisticated advertisers, the kind of businesses that spend millions of dollars a year if not a million dollars a day on Google ads. And that's great and wonderful and loved what I got to do there, but I saw this big gap where all the small business owners and entrepreneurs out there just couldn't get a foothold. And not because Google Ads isn't designed for them. It absolutely is. But because there just wasn't a lot of information help out there. For the people who have maybe 20 or $30 a day to spend on Google ads. That's I really focused my business. I'm the Google Pro on tick tock and Instagram. And I just love sharing tips on how to get the most out of Google ads, of course, and also free Google tools. And the number one thing I say to people as someone who makes a living from SEM is start with SEO first. So really excited to dive into this conversation today with an SEO expert like yourself
Ross Herosian:as an SEO person that made me so happy when we talked about that I was like, oh God not just because it reaffirms what I've been saying but because I truly think that that is the right order of operations. I'm really keyed in on particularly with a lot of my clients, they come to me and it's a lot of they don't know what they don't know when it comes to digital marketing. And so I'm really big on kind of, you know, even digital order of operations like this, you should do this and then this and then this and then this because if you do it in this order, you'll save money but also these things. They you get compounding interest, yes. Right. If you do your branding first and then your website and then you're like, like having done those exercises in a particular order. gives you tremendous benefit. Now, that's a side tangent. Let's put that on the shelf for now. So let's I'm going to start with the most obvious statement, maybe I'll say in this show, but it is. If you're listening, you should want to be and need to be on Google. And what does that mean? Well, we're going to be talking about that, because how you get on Google is two different ways SEO, and SEM. And I pulled up some quick stats, right? I know a lot of you even Gil when we were talking when we were planning to people really need to understand like that they need to be on Google. And I'm just gonna say, let's just do this real quick, because I want to hammer it home, that it is something of importance. In fact, I actually argue, we're doing work to get on Google is better than doing work on social media. But again, side tangent, whatever. Okay, Google controls. Here's some quick, quick, quick facts. Google controls over 91% of the global search engine market. 91%. It's actually 91.8. Let's round up 92%. So, yes, there are competitors entering the space. But Google still has a 90 percentile ownership over the global search engine market. nearly 35% of product searches in the world start on Google. Right. It's the place that when you're looking for a product, third of them, go to Google first. And Google, on surprisingly, is the most visited website in December 2021, Google was visited 89 point 3 billion times. That's a lot of visits. Second only to my MySpace page, which is still really doing well for you guys. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. I'm really working I love the marching ants, I find is what brings people into my account. And really always, you can always change up your top eight, this is just a wait, this isn't on my list, but forget that. Alright. So let's talk a little bit. I think the first place to start is difference between SEO and SEM. All start with SEO. And then you can talk about sem just at a real high level, right? SEO is organic. And what that means is, it's a non paid or non advertising, it's not that you obviously you may need to pay people to do it. But just to understand this is a non advertising method to increase the overall traffic from we're going to say, Google for the sake of this conversation from Google, and the key there is that you not only increase the quantity, but that you increase the quality, right? Relevancy is incredibly important. I say this with my clients, where if you just want to increase the volume, you know, and you're a website that sells roller skates, and you're driving a lot of people to your website who want to buy ice cream. That's not a useful improvement. Right. So So relevancy and volume are incredibly important when it comes to SEO. So now I'm going to hand the baton to Jill. Jill, how is she just got it? How is sem different.
Jyll Saskin Gales:So sem search engine marketing is when you pay to show your business and your website on Google. And that can often be conflated with PPC, another term that gets thrown around. So PPC means pay per click. And that's any kind of digital advertising where you're paying for a click something like Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads or tick tock ads or Google ads, whatever it might be. And then SEM is a specific kind of PPC that's focused on search engines, like Google or Bing or others like Baidu if you're in China, and focusing on using money as a shortcut to get your business to the top of search results. So the first thing I say, where people often get confused, right is thinking that like, oh, well, if I paid Google for ads, that's going to help my SEO. And so I just want to say from a former Googler, that is absolutely not true. What actually happens at Google is behind the scenes, the system that operates all the SEO and organic rankings is a totally separate system from an organises Google ads and all of that to us as end users. It's just one page and we think well, of course, one influences the other, but they're actually totally separate systems behind the scenes. The reason that often people who have a really great and strong SEO presence will also have a great strong sem presence is because a lot of the same principles lead to success with both like you were mentioning Ross relevance having highly relevant ads to what people are searching for will help you SEO and your SEM. But no, you cannot pay Google to have better SEO, you can pay an SEO expert to help you with your SEO, you can pay Google with Google ads to have great SEM. But they are independently operated systems. So I just want to get that out of the way. First thing.
Ross Herosian:And that's another piece that I talk with my SEO clients about, so that they understand that. And, yes, well, Google falls under the alphabet, umbrella, corporate umbrella, if you will, those two, I'll say, machines or even platforms of organic and paid, I would imagine, they are incredibly different. Right? And that they don't see each other because people do come in like, Well, maybe if I do again, just like you said, if I do pay, that's going to help my SEO. And so I think that's a really great myth bust first myth bust that we did. Now the second thing I want to hit on just right off the top is another misconception around sem that Google ads are just placed. Because someone pays the most, they can just go to the highest bidder. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jyll Saskin Gales:Yeah, that would also is absolutely not true. And that's really the beauty of Google and why Google became this multi billion dollar company is the concept of ad rank. So historically, the way advertising had worked was like an auction, whoever pays the most wins, great. But the way the Google ads actually worked is based on a concept called ad rank, and Ad Rank, where your ad shows on the page depends on two things, your bid how much you're willing to pay, but also your quality, both are taken into account for ad rank. And what's so cool about that is, the higher your quality, the less you have to pay to show an ad. So the person who gets the first ad result doesn't necessarily have to pay more than person to they may be paying more, but they may not be. And so Google Ads really is are can be this great equalizer because you don't have to have a multi million dollar budget in order to show your business at the top of the paid search results. One of the reasons I think it's so powerful.
Ross Herosian:So quality score, I think is one of those things that's a little bit shrouded in some mystery, right. And understandably, it's a it's a secret sauce to some extent. But I think there are things that we do know about it, are there some high level things that we know, impact quality score?
Jyll Saskin Gales:Yes, there are. So the full algorithmic workings of quality score are blackbox, just the way the full algorithmic workings of SEO are a blackbox,
Ross Herosian:or the full algorithmic workings of Facebook's algorithm or Instagram and so forth. Yeah, that's their secret sauce. It's their 11 herbs and spices that they keep in a vault somewhere.
Jyll Saskin Gales:But Well, Google does tell us are three key components of quality score. And actually, when you run Google ads, Google search ads, specifically, you can actually see how you're doing on each of these three components. So the most important is expected click through rate, click through rate, meaning of all the times your ad shows how often do people click on it? And that's kind of the best barometer of quality Google's like we're gonna show your ad to people are they actually going to click on it? Because of course, Google only makes money if people click on ads. So Google wants people to click on ads. And then you as a business only get website traffic, if people click on your ads, which is what you want. And then even users as much as well behind click on ads, I don't like ads, like, of course, we want ads that are more relevant to us, and not ones that are irrelevant to us.
Ross Herosian:And this is what's interesting. Everyone out there listening, when you understand that this is not just about you're getting served this ad because someone paid the most that this is actually being delivered to you. Yes, because someone is paying but also because it is highly relevant. I think you'll become more apt and open to clicking on ads and thinking that oh, this is just junk, right? Like, it was transformative for me when I learned years ago, a little bit more about how Google Ads work to be like, Okay, I don't need to be ashamed or scared or whatever, to jump over those top three ad results, or the top five or whatever. Because a lot of times, they are incredibly relevant to my search,
Jyll Saskin Gales:right. And if they're incredibly relevant, you're going to click on them. And so that's why that's the most important component of quality score is expected click through rate. So that's number one. Number two is something called ad relevance. And so that just means is the thing the person searching for related to your ad, like if they're searching for ice cream, does your ad mention ice cream? And then there's your landing page mentioned ice cream, because of course, Google is the one who has these, you know, 89 billion visits in the month of December 2021. When you're placing ads, you're really saying Google, take your customers and give them to me. And so before Google is going to hand off that precious traffic to you, it wants to know, are they going to have a relevant experience? Or are they going to land on your website say this is actually a website for roller skates, and then come back to Google again and go look for another result which a user does not want to do that You want to just find what they're looking for.
Ross Herosian:And that's a bad user experience. And Google does not want to create an environment where their users have a bad experience, because then what happens, they leave. So Google is incentivized to make ads incredibly relevant to your search, not just give them to the highest bidder.
Jyll Saskin Gales:I said, that's, and that's exactly why quality score is so important to why it's not just bid. And I'll mention just click the third piece. So click through rate, add relevance. And the third component of quality score is landing page experience. So part of your ad rank has to actually do with how fast your website loads, if it's mobile optimized, if it has original content, or if it's just been some AI generated garbage. So like that your landing page itself, nothing to do with your keyword, your ad, that's actually a component of your quality score and affects how much you will need to pay per click in order to get people to click on your ads.
Ross Herosian:The flip side of all of this right is about the return on investment, if you will, that I as a someone running Google ads would get so I think the third and final, just very common misconception I want to talk about is that ads are, you know the easy shortcut to revenue. I
Jyll Saskin Gales:wish that it were true.
Ross Herosian:Yeah, right, we all do so. So again, just one in your experience, you know, particularly thinking about the small business owner who may be listening to this and want to run Google ads, you know. And we'll do more of this throughout the entirety of the episode but expectation setting when it comes to revenue, and how that relates to a return on investment and how that relates to Google ads.
Jyll Saskin Gales:Ads are an easy shortcut to traffic. And as mentioned earlier, traffic does not mean revenue. Now, if you're getting the right kind of traffic, you know, you have great targeting the right keywords, right audiences, then you are going to bring in traffic that is more likely to convert, but it's still your websites job to take that traffic and turn it into customers, you know, garbage in, garbage out. And so that's why I always say page should follow organic, whether we're talking about Facebook ads, or Google ads, it's like if the people who come to your website from SEO organically from Google aren't converting, then people who come when you pay money aren't going to magically start converting. That's why you need to make sure you have a well converting website, you want to look at your conversion rate from direct traffic and from Google organic traffic. And generally, you know, general rule of thumb, I would say you want a conversion rate of at least like bare bare bare minimum 1%. Ideally, more like two to 5% before you even consider spending money on ads, because ads are not a shortcut to revenue, they're a shortcut to traffic, your website has to convert traffic to revenue. Now, can your ads work and try to optimize towards conversions like sure, you'll then feed that data back to Google ads to say, who converted and who didn't. But at the end of the day, Google can learn from that and change the kind of traffic it sends your way. But it's still just sending you traffic, it's not sending you revenue.
Ross Herosian:I always, you know, I think this is one very important way of framing. I think a lot of ads. And it's always that like the gray space between marketing and sales or marketing, even in conversion is that marketing creates opportunity. And sales creates revenue. And we were talking about that as it relates to ads. You know, it's not a client that I've ever ended up working with. Not shockingly, but I've had many who come to me and they have a god awful website. And instead of wanting to invest in SEO, or invest in a new website, they want to do Google ads. And it's just the garbage in garbage out is sorry, guys, but you need to hear it. If your website is bad, and your copy is not relevant to your target audiences. And you don't have, you know, again, relevant pages that you're driving traffic to with consistent messaging. No amount of ads are going to fix that. I mean, maybe unless it is boner pills, or Aha, got um,
Jyll Saskin Gales:but it's actually not Boehner pills. But what you were just saying before that it's actually a lesson I learned the hard way. When I first left Google and started my business. I was so idealistic, you know, I'm here to help small business owners get up and running with Google ads. And the first two clients I worked with both females solo entrepreneurs, great small businesses, rang Google ads for them, ROI negative on both. And I'm admitting that here and it hurt my heart and I was so upset and doubting myself. And it's like, I forgot This cardinal rule because when I work with these giant corporations, they have this figured out already. But when I looked at it, I saw Oh, it's not that the Google Ads didn't work for these two small business owners. It's that their websites aren't working. And so all I did by running Google ads for them was drive more people into a broken website. And I felt really terribly about it. And so I ended up helping both of them try to improve their website a bit, but still said, you know, what, come back to me when your conversion rate is 2%. And to this day, for both of those businesses, it's still not there. And so neither of them are running ads. And I have learned from that, and as a result, have said no to so many business owners, please don't run ads, don't hire me.
Ross Herosian:Yet, guys, this is important, a huge piece of what I do and the guests I bring on this show and the things I talked to you about are so that you have the necessary accurate information to make decisions. And and so this is important for you to hear, again, that there really is no silver bullet that applies to all businesses, right. And, and I think a lot of people look at ads that way, and even to some extent, maybe other aspects of digital marketing, and every case is going to be very different. And, you know, marketing. I had a fellow agency owner colleague, once say to me, like, marketing, doesn't answer questions, it illuminates them. And I think it's very true. And that's the thing. That's what always drew me towards digital marketing, and even content creation was the constant analysis. And here's how we can improve. Here's what worked, here's what didn't work. Now, here's what we need to do, right? Like, it's it's a constantly evolving type thing. And with that, I think it's a good time for maybe us to talk about the actual how the strategies work a little bit more, you've, you've already done a great job of talking about, we're going to pull the curtain back a little bit more, I'm going to talk about how SEO works at a really high level, we're gonna talk about SEM, how it works. And we'll be back right after this. understanding who your customers are, their FFPs, fears, frustrations and problems, and why they shouldn't work with you, or just some of the questions that I answered inside of my marketing clarity coaching program. But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's what a recent graduate of the program, I just say,
Craig Dacy:the marketing clarity program was by far the best investment I made my business this year, if not in just the life of my business. When I hired Ross, I had no idea who my ideal client was. I tried those exercises before when you figure out your customer avatar, and it just never worked. But Ross helped me do was figure out who I should be marketing to how to figure out what their pain points and frustrations are and how I can best serve them. He also helped me figure out my voice, how to bring my voice and how to bring my personality into my messaging and into my content, which is something I lacked for a very long time, weekly in our calls, the exercises we went through were invaluable. They were easy, but also powerful. He made it feel super simple. And also just gave me the ability to take everything we learned and put into this toolbox that I can refer to anytime I'm making content, or I'm about to send an email or post to my website. In fact, one of the weeks when we were working together, I immediately jumped off our call and sent out an email taking what he had taught me. And right away I signed a new client just from that one little tip. This has been one of the best experiences of my life and I highly recommend the marketing clarity program for you and your business.
Ross Herosian:That's Craig Dacey, a financial coach who helps service based business owners struggling to pay themselves with their worth by providing systems and guidance for better money management. That leads to the ideal work life balance. He's a friend of trade school creative and you can find him over at Craig daisey.com It's da si why Craig Dacey calm. He's just one of the dozens of solopreneurs and small business marketers that have had their marketing and their businesses transformed by my marketing clarity coaching program. So if you're walking around in a marketing fog, let's book some time see if I can help go to tricycle dash creative comm slash clarity. Again, that's tricycle, dash creative comm slash clarity, I'll put the link in this episode description and it's always over on our show notes, page tripod, podcast calm and let's book your 15 Minute clarity call Alright guys, we're back. And now what I wanted to do is again, talk about the two strategies that are kind of a high level. You know, we talked about SEO, the way I approach SEO is that it is both a blend of content and technical, right. I think particularly now since even the Google algorithm AI has become so much smarter in the past six to nine months, as we sit here recording this in March 2022, it's become so much smarter to understand context and relationships and language that SEO is no longer just about, I'm just going to put this keyword on this page 20 times, and that's gonna get me to the it's like, run, don't walk away from any SEO person that recommends that that is not good. doesn't work anymore. Google smarter than that. Okay. I think, you know, Seo was really about creating relevant, informative, valuable content related to your business, you know, and what your business does. There's a big there's kind of a tenet inside of SEO that talks about creating content that establishes the Eat EA, T, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. You know, there is a technical side, though, with technical, it's about metadata. You met Jill mentioned before a site speed, that is a factor on both. So if your site is loading, slow, so you're probably asking what's slow, Joe? Would you say slow is definitely longer than two seconds. Yeah. What do you what's your bet? Is that is that a kind of a good general benchmark?
Jyll Saskin Gales:When I first started Google in 2015, I would have said five seconds, like 2018, I would have said, three seconds. And now I would say like one and a half to two seconds. Anything longer is slow.
Ross Herosian:Yeah, what's called that like the first content coming in, you know, in that in that within that first second? So they're not looking at a blank page, maybe something's coming in, and all the element other elements kind of fall into place. But yeah, I think two seconds, because, you know, fast is a subjective term, I think it's important that we say, if it's your site's loading in over two seconds, particularly on mobile, right, but I think in both situations, you need to look into getting that fixed. And that's a that's a conversation for another day. And even now, the evolution of Google getting smarter with what's called core web vitals, weirdly enough, design can now even play a part in SEO. And it's how design actually impacts functionality. That's really where this this thing that's called core red vitals comes in. And, and with SEO, the thing is, you, you it's an ongoing thing, I don't take on any clients for less than six months at all right? It's just ridiculous to do SEO for shorter than that. I usually recommend a year that someone worked it for a year. It's a, I look at it, like much of marketing, but as an investment, and you get what I call compounding interest. So when you do SEO, you start to see your rankings improve, you start to see your site go up, you start to see your site traffic go up, you start to see the signals that SEO was working impressions on search, so on and so forth. You can continue to get those if you do stop doing SEO, not forever, mind you. But if you keep working it, you get again, this compounding interest concept where you get added benefit over time. So that's SEO. Jill, let's talk about that flip side, or have you talked about that flip side with SEM? Yeah, to
Jyll Saskin Gales:build on your compounding interest analogy there. I say SEO is like being a homeowner. And SEM is like being a renter. Oh, I love that. Seo. You like buy the house, and it's a fixer upper. Because that's all you can afford. And overtime, you renovate and build and work it up. And then you have this wonderful house to live in. And if you don't maintain it, it could fall into disrepair. But like you have that equity, you're a homeowner FCM you just like slap down security deposit, like boom, you're in and as long as you pay your rent every month, you have somewhere to live, but the moment you stop paying get evicted. There's no long term benefit there. I love it. Yeah, so that's how I think about it as a homeowner or a renter. I'm gonna
Ross Herosian:borrow that skill that because it's so good.
Jyll Saskin Gales:Yeah, so SEM, as we talked about earlier, the thing that matters the most is your ad rank. And so what you're willing to pay does matter. You know, clicks don't cost a cent anymore, they cost $2 to $5 can be as high as $20. Even higher than that, depending on your industry. But the better your quality. The more relevant your ads are to what a user searching for the less you have to pay. And the basic structure of search engine marketing is really like any other kind of digital marketing. You can have various campaigns. And within those campaigns, you have keywords and ads, or actually with machine learning. You don't always have to have keywords nowadays but for simplicity saying you have keywords, which are specific terms that are relevant to your business that you want to advertise on. And then billions of people come to Google search every day around the world, they type their query into that search bar. And if there's a match between their query and your keyword, you're eligible to show your ad. So are hundreds of other advertisers. So you have to win that auction by having a high enough ad rank. But if you do, you're eligible to show them an ad. And then hopefully, they click on it. And that's how surgent it's like really complicated and really simple, all at the same time. And when we talk about Google ads, we often think of search engine marketing. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Google ads is not just SEM. There's also display and discovery and video and app campaigns and the new performance Max campaigns, which combines everything into one. So search is like the foundation and in most use cases where I suggest people start with Google ads. But then there are lots of other ways to expand your reach or improve your efficiency or both. With formats beyond search ads within Google ads.
Ross Herosian:I have a question for you, as a pro, as an expert, someone who lives inside of Google ads, right? What is your take? On the the move? It seems for a lot of Google Ads moving towards automation? Ai? I think it's tricky, because to the layman's person who just comes in the small business owner, like, oh, great, you know, oh, okay, I get I have to click less, I have to no less, I have to do less. And I kind of just leave it up to Google's, you know, AI and the machine learning. But I read some things that that actually is very difficult because AI requires so much more data to actually deliver results. So do you have a take as someone who lives in there as versus like, kind of like the more I'll say, curated or handmade Google Ads versus the automation,
Jyll Saskin Gales:I do actually, that was the topic of a monthly meet I just hosted a few days ago, I have my own learning platform called inside Google ads for small business owners who want to learn about Google ads. And part of that is a monthly meet to monthly Google meet, of course. And the topic this month was this is automation, your friend or foe. And this is a place where as someone who worked at Google, my perspective is very different than most other PPC experts out there. This is where I get the vitriol on Twitter, because I fundamentally believe in the power of automation, and that Google intends its automation to do good things for business. But understandably, those who haven't worked at Google are don't share that same blind optimism around Google as I do see a more sinister cash grab, Google's just trying to push us towards automation to make more money for Google. So I will say when you think about automation, kind of the way I broke it down earlier this week, there are three main ways to leverage automation within Google ads. There's automating your bidding. So rather than choosing I want to pay this much for this click and this much for that click letting Google take care of bidding for the most part. I'm a huge proponent of that I think it saves time, I think it's great. There's automation of your targeting, which I alluded to earlier, do you pick your own keywords? Or does Google pick them for you? Do you pick your own audiences? Or does Google pick them for you? And that's where small business owners can be at a disadvantage, because to your point, Ross, the systems need more data on what kind of targeting works in order for them to work well. So something like Dynamic Search Ads, which is where you don't pick your keywords, instead, Google ads just looks at your website, figures out the right queries for you. And does it for you interesting that only works if your website is already optimized to do well, in an SEO environment. Sure, if your website doesn't do well, with SEO, it's not going to do well with Dynamic Search Ads in SEM, and that for audience data. So that's things like, Do you have a large customer list of data that you can share with Google? If so it's going to be able to go out and find more customers better for you. But if you don't have a large enough list, you're not eligible for that feature. Sure. So with targeting, in theory, it absolutely works better than manual every time if you have enough data, which many small business owners don't. And so for small business owners, my advice is to test and see and that's
Ross Herosian:true guys out there. That's true of any ads. I don't care where you're running it. Television, the newspaper, Facebook, Instagram, Google guy on the sidewalk, spin in a sign. You need to test see what works. Maybe that sign spinners getting more people talk to him during lunch hour. Okay? Don't have them out there. In the early parts of the morning write like everything related to ads. And even by extension, most aspects of digital marketing, which is the beauty of digital marketing that you least get data I recognize it could be drinking from a firehose, but you have data to make informed decisions. And I want to say this you, you brought up, I think, a very common thing, not only in marketing, and not only in ads, and not only Isn't life that it needs to be either or that the truth or or the outcome, can't maybe that both are true. And for me, it sounds like it is very conceivable that two things can be true. increased automation, can be better for the person running the ads, and make Google more money.
Jyll Saskin Gales:Yes, those don't need to like they the incentives are aligned, as we saw earlier with the way Ad Rank works. And the way quality score works, like the incentives of business owners and Google like, are more aligned than they are not I'm not gonna sit here and say it's perfect and hunky dory all the time. But they are more aligned than unlined, more in common than not in common. And, and I've seen, you know, the way automation can just make a Google Ads account print money, just the money printing machine. And the key though with automation, that doesn't mean that humans don't have a job anymore. You know, automation does exactly what you tell it to do. Nothing more, nothing less. So it really changes our jobs, whether you're a marketer or a business owner, we're kind of a hybrid of the two, you need to understand how the automation works and what it's doing and what new directions you can try to push it in. It's really what we call higher value work. I think it's more interesting work. And it allows all this creativity to come in to what's normally a very quantitative space. So I'd say automated bidding, for the most part, excellent. Automated targeting can be great, but can have drawbacks. The third piece of automation, which is where I most skeptical, ad creative,
Ross Herosian:yeah.
Jyll Saskin Gales:Responsive ads, I'm a full fan of I know, most PPC experts out there hate them, I love them. I think it's great, great and responsive. That just means rather than designing an ad to exist, exactly the same for every single user, you give Google as a few different headlines, a few different descriptions, a few different images. And it plays Tetris kind of mixing and matching to the best combination,
Ross Herosian:you kind of give it the ingredients, you give it the ingredients. And then it can make different recipes, if you will,
Jyll Saskin Gales:depending on the user. So that's absolutely great. But that still requires you a thinking human to create the text to come up with the images to create the videos. Now there's more and more automation coming in to take that off your hands. Sometimes results good, sometimes not as good. So that's the place where I am. Automation does the least right now. But like the direction we're going, and it's going to take care of that. And so the one piece of advice I'll give you to keep in mind is when you are creating your ads, again, whether it's for Google or something else, what you think is the best line of copy is not necessarily going to be the same copy that drives the best results. So when you run these tests, Google ads will tell you exactly which headlines and descriptions are working and which aren't. Don't try to tell Google you're wrong. That can't be low performing. Best one, like you're only looking at one or people
Ross Herosian:tried on their show.
Jyll Saskin Gales:Yeah, yeah. So. So the feedback you get from the automation is great. But for now, humans still have to be the ones to write the text, design the images, etc. So those are kind of the three. That's how I look at it, at least the three pillars of automation, all are useful. All are taking over more and more and more. And I see that as a good thing. Work with the automation to figure out how to make it work for you. Don't just bury your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist, because there will come a point where there is no manual option. We're seeing that happening more and more each year. So guys,
Ross Herosian:you just learned a ton about how these actual strategies work. So to wrap up this episode, we're gonna take a quick break, we're gonna come back, and we're gonna talk about which one is right. For your business. It's tripod, the tricycle creative podcast.
Aaron Hodges:Hey, Steve. Oh, hey, David,
Unknown:what are you up to?
Aaron Hodges:I just got back from the doctor,
Unknown:and you're excited. Well, you
Aaron Hodges:know how recently I've been confused about my marketing. Yeah, well, I've been unable to conduct simple marketing tasks. Plus, I have this persistent anxiety about posting on social media. I told this to the doctor and he said, I have map map. What's that? Marketing, analysis paralysis. It affects most creative business owners and in some cases can even lead to business failure.
Unknown:Oh man, but it seems like you're not worried about that happening to you. Yeah, the doctor gave me this pan. Flynn, marketing clarity coaching program by tricycle creative?
Aaron Hodges:Yep, they have this 10 week intensive coaching program where they can help me better define my customers build my brand identity. And when it's over, I'll have hundreds of content ideas and opportunities. So obviously you're gonna do it right. Yeah, I've been putting this off for too long. I'm gonna head over to get marketing clarity calm right now and book my 15 minute call,
Unknown:get marketing, clarity, calm. I think I'll head over there to
Ross Herosian:man. Have we learned a lot? I've learned a lot. Jill, thank you so much for being here. You know? I? I don't know, I think as someone who's a marketing coach, and again, you're a teacher, you know, I I'm voraciously curious. So this is why having subject matter experts, like you on this show are so incredibly helpful. Because, you know, I'm honest with my clients, like, I know a lot about a lot, but I am, I don't live inside of all these platforms all the time. I mean, I pretty much have cut Facebook out of my life. Like I don't use it personally. But I can still train and coach and I'm in there enough so that I'm not, you know, teaching this antiquated guidance. But, you know, Google ads or something that years ago, it was a service I was offering. But as a business owner, myself, I wanted to start to gravitate towards the things I think that I did best and that I love doing. And that really tied into marketing strategy and marketing coaching. So I just want to say, as we come up and talk about this last session, just how thankful I am, that you're here. And thank you so much for sharing your your
Jyll Saskin Gales:expertise for having me, I feel the same way. You know, when I worked at Google, I thought I knew it all. And then when I left Google, I realized how much I still had to learn and how much I've learned over the last year. And my business has also really evolved to coaching and teaching is what I do most now, because there's so many misconceptions out there about Google. And I'm not here to be a Google shill to help Google Google does not need my help. I'm here to help small business owners and entrepreneurs who only ever see the side of digital marketing experts that say, here's the hack to Google doesn't want you to know. And here's the trick. And here's how he was trying to cheat. I hate it. And I find that so toxic and productive. Like if I'm a business owner, and I think Google's trying to cheat me. What What use is that to me, you know, and so I just I enjoy bringing this different perspective of showing like, here's how to make it work for your business. Because shocker, Google only succeeds if the business owners who use Google succeed, also not for nothing.
Ross Herosian:I mean, listen, there are hacks and whatnot, which I you'll never see me ever put out a hack or anything like that. I talk about tips and strategies, right? But you're probably not going to totally trick Google. I'm going to get a million dollars out of Google. And they're not going to know like, it's just just relax, guys like it. That's probably no offense. You're not probably not. That's right. I'm not you're not, it's okay. We're all special in our own ways. But that ain't it. So, SEO, SEM, which one is right? For your business? Right. And, you know, of course, as I said before, there is no silver bullet per se, but I think that we can speak very broadly. And in our own experiences, generally about what's kind of a good path to at least consider if you're out there listening and thinking about these two strategies. You said it already. I'm going to double down on it. Your recommendation as mine, is that anyone that's looking to kind of get involved in go all rewind all the way back to get on Google, more or better, is to start with SEO. Organic? Yes, absolutely. I was talking about that's kind of it builds the foundation, it's a playground, I use this with Facebook and Google, it's like we, we need to get your kind of playground in order, right? So that we can have people come in, or your park or whatever it may be, we need to get this piece of land in order. Because if people come into your playground and you have broken glass on the slides, and drug dealers hanging out on like, it's just not an optimal place. And just like you said, you're not going to want to send one person to it, you're gonna want to send 50 people to it, right? So we need to get that kind of that, that in good foundational, like foreigner working order, everything is functioning properly. We're, you know, you again, are creating and have created relevant content that speaks to your current and prospective audiences, your customers, that kind of thing. You know, typically, it's a page should follow organic across the board. Right. And I think when we're talking about cost and expectations, you know, I talked about this already SEO, you should Be prepared to at least invest or go in for about six months. strategy should oftentimes include an initial site optimization, monitoring, content creation, and backlinking. Those are kind of big tenets of SEO. And for me, and this is just me, right. But, you know, my cost for this, what I call the done for you SEO service is you're looking at around $2,000 a month, like, that's mine. I'm not gonna say that other people out there, don't do it cheaper. I'm not gonna say other people out there don't offer some variations. That is the cost to do all of that stuff in a way that makes an impact. Right. So, again, I think it's very important. I actually had someone inside of my marketing clarity community this past week. Praise how transparent I am. So I'm going to walk that line right now and just put it out there. So you understand the costs. And going into this. Now, do you want to talk a little bit about like expectations when it comes to costs? For SEM, Joe
Jyll Saskin Gales:and SEM side the when someone decides, Okay, I'm ready to spend money on ads? Well, how much do I need to spend? So let's say the bare bare bare bare minimum, is $20 a day for at least 30 days. So a$600 investment? Now that $20 a day for 30 days is if you are a local business with very specific narrow keywords then okay, $20 a day for 30 days. If you are trying to sell towels across the whole us, that ain't gonna cut it.
Ross Herosian:For insurance
Jyll Saskin Gales:or insurance Exactly. Flex can be $80 are no definitely not. But just bare minimum smallest a small businesses $20 a day, likely more if you're not sure, you can actually create a Google Ads account without spending a dime. And within Google ads, there's a tool called Keyword Planner. And so Keyword Planner is really useful to look at, even if you don't know what keywords you want to use, you can just put your website in, it'll suggest some keywords. That's how you know if your SEO is good. By the way, if those keywords that come back are relevant, good SEO, if they're not so relevant, go work on your SEO before you buy ads. Anyway, look at those keywords, and then pick the geographic area you want to target whether it's US state to city, whatever, it'll tell you the average cost per click for one click so you can figure out from there, you're probably gonna want to drive what at least 10 clicks per day from an ad, you're gonna want to release 30 days, that'll give you a ballpark of how much you need to spend. And then you want to know, can your business support running ads? Are you ready to run ads. And so the really simple equation, I tell any business to figure out, ballpark finger in the air or you ready to run ads is looking at your conversion rate, and your average order value. So let's say your conversion rate on your website is I don't know 2%. And your average order value is $100. Let's say multiply those two numbers together, that would be $2. In our example, here, and that gives you your revenue per session, meaning on average, every time someone lands on your website, how much money do you make, given your downstream conversion rates. And that initial number, if you're going to run search ads, you want that initial revenue per session number to be at least$2. Like the cheapest clicks you can reasonably expect would be to dollar cost per click. So if it cost you $2, to bring someone to your website, you want to know that you're making at least$2 Whenever someone lands on your website, ideally more than that, so you have some profit. But again, just as a ballpark, any business can do an exercise, look at your conversion rate, and your average order value, multiply them together, and you want that to be at least $2. If you're going to run ads, if you're not in the E commerce space, and you're more like services, how do I do that, then just look at your conversion rate to someone filling out your form or contacting you. And then from there, how many of those convert into customers. And then from there, how much you make on average per customer a few extra steps of math for you. But you can do the same exercise that way. If that number is like $2 or less, you're not running to run ads yet you need to work on improving your conversion rate, or your average order value or both. First.
Ross Herosian:This has been I hope you guys have really got a lot out of this. So obviously, I am biased to say if you are in the market for SEO, you should hit me up. Now. There'll be in our show notes. We're gonna have all this information. We have all kinds of stuff tripod podcast.com to grab the show notes, and I'll include in there obviously a link out to my SEO done for you services. I also offer an SEO bootcamp. So for those of you out there that maybe you know can't afford that monthly done for you service. I have a six week SEO bootcamp amp that can really help you kind of get the train on the tracks with very clear actionable instructions of what you can do yourself. Write monthly tasks, things that you can do. There. Okay, so I'll be linking all that in the show notes again, tripod podcast calm. Conversely, if someone is ready, or wants to learn more about SEM, Gil, how can they connect with you? Or what services do you offer?
Jyll Saskin Gales:Yes, so if you want to learn about SEM, if you found this conversation really exciting, and you're thinking I want to do that for my business, then I would suggest you check out my course platform inside Google ads, you can access it via my website, gil.ca. That's JY ll.ca. And it's just $29 a month subscription On Demand Learning everything you want to know about Google ads, with actual in platform, here's how you do it. So that's the best way to learn about Google ads with me. And then if you did want some more personalized one on one support, I do offer Google ads and Google Analytics coaching sessions. And again, you can learn about all of that at my website, jyll.ca. And I will say as a special treat for all of you here today. And thank you for having me. You can use the coupon code tripod to get $5 off your first month of inside Google ads. So when you go there, just type in coupon code tripod at checkout. And you'll get $5 off your first month of Google Ads learning with
Ross Herosian:me. Guys, all this will be the shownotes tripod podcast calm Jill, thank you so much for being here. I learned so much. This is also why as a very side note or or closing remark. I I think I told you when we first gen like I hate the word expert. I don't use it in anything. Because I I feel like I'm a lifelong learner. And I'm going to tell you digital marketing, like obviously, I think many things but digital marketing is something that is constantly evolving. And there is space enough in here for all of us a most maybe not all some for most of us marketing coaches to thrive and help people in a lot of different ways. So I was super stoked to have you really enjoyed our conversation. Again, links to everything we talked about. You can find it tripod podcast, calm, Gil, any closing remarks. That's it. Thank
Jyll Saskin Gales:you so much for having me. It was great to be here to talk all things SEO SEM, and hope to speak to you again soon.
Ross Herosian:Thanks for listening to tripod. Be sure to subscribe and rate the show on Apple podcast, Google podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher or wherever you listen. For show notes and past episodes go to tripod podcast.com Connect with tricycle creative on social media at Hello tricycle and learn more about how we can help you with your marketing at tricycle dash creative.com
